by Noelle Adams
A rush of sensation and joy overwhelmed her, and she moaned against his mouth, her arms wrapping around his neck. She pressed the length of her body against his.
Matt’s mouth moved against hers, and she opened to him instinctively, wanting to feel him in every way she could.
She was just getting into the kiss when a familiar voice broke into the embrace. “Carrie? What the fuck?”
Carrie and Matt pulled away at the same time. Knowing what was coming, her face blazed with embarrassment. She tried to get her brain to work so she could come up with a reasonable excuse.
But she couldn’t think of anything as she turned to face Jenn, who was staring at them like they were aliens.
Jenn blinked. “I know I said you should try to get into the Christmas spirit more, but I didn’t mean you should make out with the first Santa you saw.”
Carrie’s cheeks burned as she opened her mouth to reply to her sister’s wry comment.
No words came out. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and her brain was a blank.
Matt had pulled away from the embrace, moving the Santa beard back up to cover the lower part of his face.
“Carrie?” Jenn prompted, taking a step closer. Her expression was torn between surprise, amusement, and something else. “Everything all right?”
Recognizing that the something else on Jenn’s face was concern, Carrie managed to find her voice. “Yeah. I’m good. Just felt a little…crazy.”
“Evidently.” Jenn’s eyes scanned Matt from his black boots to red hat, lingering on the red suit and bushy, false beard. “Honestly, I don’t see the appeal—” She cut herself off with a noticeable start. “Wait, is this your older-man, hot fling?”
Leave it to Jenn to make sense out of a senseless situation. “Uh, yeah,” Carrie admitted.
Her face relaxing, Jenn said, “Oh. Very sorry I interrupted. I’ll let you, er, get back to it. I assume I won’t be seeing you for dinner?”
“You won’t be seeing her for dinner,” Matt affirmed, before Carrie could figure out an answer.
Carrie shot him an indignant look for such high-handedness, mostly out of habit. She now had no plans but to spend the evening, night, and as much of the following day as possible with Matt.
Jenn was obviously hiding a smile. “Very good. Carry on.”
And she turned around and walked out.
Carrie let out a whoosh of air. “Well, that was embarrassing.”
“Yeah. At least she didn’t know who I am. Having one person in the world know I dressed up in this thing is more than enough.”
She snickered. “You really should have thought twice before you gave me such good ammunition.”
“Yeah. Not one of my best strategic moves.” Something changed on his expression, and he looked almost predatory.
Carrie’s breath hitched in response.
“But I’m sure it will have a few fringe benefits.”
“Fringe?” Her tone was sharp, but it was more out of principle than anything else, since she felt like she might melt into a puddle of sappy feelings. “I’ll have you know I’m nobody’s fringe. Don’t assume that just because you make this crazy, dramatic gesture everything will go your way.”
“So you’re saying you don’t want to spend the evening with me?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Okay. You think.” He hid a smile. “I’ll do something constructive in the meantime.”
Before she could figure out what he referred to, he’d grabbed her indecorously and folded her over his shoulder.
She shrieked in surprise. While she’d read books where things like that happened, she’d never imagined it would happen to her. She felt like she wasn’t small enough to be carried, although Matt was strong and he seemed to be managing it well enough.
Honestly, it wasn’t all that comfortable, with his shoulder pushing against her middle and her head hanging upside-down.
“Matt! Damn it, Matt, what the hell are you doing?”
“Doing something constructive while you think.” He was slightly breathless, but she didn’t know if it was from laughter or effort.
Evidently, his constructive use of time was carrying her down the back hall to a wing of the lodge she hadn’t yet seen.
Carrie should have put up a struggle—merely to show she wouldn’t be bulldozed—but she didn’t feel much like it.
She was dizzy from giddy excitement, surprised disorientation, and ironic amusement.
And the weirdness of being carried this way.
When Matt unlocked a room, she brilliantly deduced that he’d reserved a room here for himself.
And she managed to come up with some sort of response. “Matt, this is ridiculous. It’s one thing to be carried into a room caveman-style by a sexy man. It’s another to be carried in by Santa Claus!"
Matt chuckled as he walked into the room and eased her off his shoulder, but he didn’t set her back on her feet. Instead, he lowered her down to the bed, spreading her out beneath him on the cool coverlet. There was a fire blazing in the fireplace—a feature her little room didn’t possess. And there was champagne in a silver bucket with two crystal flutes on the table, along with a few plates under silver covers.
But all Carrie could see was Matt’s face just above her. Although her body had shifted sharply from disorientation to excitement, her deepest excitement wasn’t physical.
“I’d appreciate it if you don’t keep reminding me of the costume,” Matt said, his eyes glinting with familiar irony. “It might ruin the mood.”
Carrie made an incoherent sound of half-humor, half-sentiment. “Don’t count on that. Your dressing up as Santa was the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me, and I plan to remember it for a long time.”
Matt closed his eyes and moaned softly. “You didn’t just call me sweet, did you?”
For some reason, his dry tone and insistence that he not be associated with softer emotions made Carrie feel quite melty, as did the heat of his body above her. “It was the right word.”
He lowered his mouth to her neckline and teased the skin with his tongue and teeth. “Definitely not the right word.”
“You are sweet.” Her voice cracked with feeling at the deprecation in his tone. “Not always, I admit. Sometimes you’re an ass. But you can be sweet.” She reached up when he lifted his head again to gaze down at her. She cupped his cheek with one hand. “You are now. You are with me.”
Matt leaned down to kiss her, and his tongue dipped into her mouth, stroking the inside of her lips, her tongue, the roof of her mouth. When he pulled away at last, he said breathlessly, “What about my hard edge?”
“It’s just softened by all the Santa padding.”
“Well, let’s just keep that between us.”
She exhaled with laughter but then met his eyes. And her mood suddenly transformed from what she saw there. “Oh, God, Matt,” she breathed. “I want you so much.”
She’d said the same thing to him before, but it meant something entirely different now.
Matt pulled his chest away from hers and studied her face intently. “Do you? You want me?” he asked hoarsely. “You want me?”
Carrie gulped. “Oh yeah. I do.” When she saw she hadn’t really answered his question, she added, “I want all of you. Hard edge and Santa padding both. Always.”
Smiling, he murmured, “Good. Because I’m not going anywhere.”
He kissed her then, and it was deep and intense and breathtaking—but it didn’t immediately turn into sex.
Finally, Carrie pulled away long enough to breathe, “Matt?”
“Yeah, baby.” He gazed down at her with naked emotion. It was impossible not to read what was blazing in his eyes. So much more than lust.
“Do you think you could maybe take off some of the Santa stuff? This is all amazing, but it would be nice to feel more of you.”
He choked on a laugh and straightened up for long enough to throw off his red jacket, padding, wig, hat, a
nd boots, so he was left in a white t-shirt, red pants, and his own dear, scarred face.
Then he moved over her again. “How’s that?”
She stroked the scar on the side of his head. “Much better.”
They kissed again, her heart and her body flooded with feeling, until he finally raised his head. “Carrie?” he asked thickly, his eyes holding hers in a deep look. “This isn’t just a sleazy affair, is it?”
She shook her head mutely, feeling inordinately touched by the question. Then managed to say, “Not for me.”
“Me either.”
Then they were kissing again. She felt that he was growing hard, but he didn’t start to undress her, didn’t grow urgent in his touch.
She pressed her pelvis up against his arousal. “I’ve loving the kissing, but we can have sex if you want, Matt,” she said, stroking the strong planes of his back beneath his damp t-shirt.
“Later. I want to say a few things first. I need you to know it’s not all about sex.” His expression was utterly sober as he gazed down on her.
She was shaking from excitement at the implications of his hoarse words. She waited breathlessly for several long moments. Then finally demanded, “Well? What did you want to say?”
He smiled at her tone, but then his expression grew serious again. “You promise I’m not going to scare you away?”
She resisted the urge to hug herself. “Nothing you say is going to scare me away.”
“What if I confess to being a serial killer? You might be a little scared then.”
“Stop stalling!” She grabbed him shoulders and tried to shake him with playful impatience. They had a little wrestling match until she relaxed beneath him again.
“Carrie, you know how I feel about you, don’t you?” he asked at last, meeting her eyes, the teasing glint entirely gone.
“I think I do now. But aren’t you going to tell me?”
His face twisted slightly as he leaned down to kiss her. She reveled in the kiss but her heart was beating wildly when he finally pulled away. She felt so much—too much—that her eyes burned with the feeling.
“I love you, Carrie,” he said thickly.
To her horror, her face contorted as the threatened tears briefly overflowed. Matt looked even more horrified than she felt until she managed to compose herself. “Sorry about that,” she told him. “One of the consequences of being a girl. I’m okay now. So how long have you…have you felt this way?”
“For a while.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He exhaled and glanced away. “It was too soon. I didn’t think you weren’t ready to hear it. I would have scared you away.”
That much was true. She would have run scared had she heard anything like this—not so long ago.
“But even the other night? I kept thinking things were changing between us, but you never said anything, so I had to assume it was just me. Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“I wanted to. I almost did—more than once. But I still didn’t know if it was too soon.”
“It wasn’t.”
He leaned down to kiss her again briefly. “I didn’t know. I’ve been crazy about you almost from the very beginning, but at first I had nothing to offer you except a broken shell.”
She started to object to the sentiment, but he talked over her, “That’s how I felt. And it just wasn’t good enough for you. So then, as I started to get it together again, I figured I only had one chance with you, so I wasn’t going to blow it by moving too soon and scaring you away.”
She felt a little like crying again, but didn’t. “I’ve always thought you moved just right.”
He almost laughed. “I do my best.”
They gazed at each other for a minute until he cleared his throat.
She suddenly realized what he was waiting for. “Well, while we’re sharing confessions, I guess I’ll admit that I love you too.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Try to restrain the pomposity. Remember, I have a lifetime’s worth of ammunition in that Santa suit.”
To her delight, he smiled at her—rather than the haughty glare she’d expected. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
The implications in his words made her want to melt, but she’d never thought of herself as a melty kind of girl before. It was probably the roaring fire and the weight of Matt’s warm body on top of her.
That was all it was. She wasn't really melty. It was just hot.
Epilogue
“Do you think you could put down the damn book?”
Matt’s question was more of a demand than an inquiry, and he glared at her impatiently.
Carrie glared back. “I have to study. I have to do well if I want to get into a good grad school.”
“You’ve been studying for that exam for an entire month. You’re going to ace it.”
“Maybe.” She was scheduled to take the GRE in early January, so the urgency of her studying had been intensifying as the date approached. “I don’t know.”
When she glanced over at Matt’s face—half-fond and half-skeptical now—she couldn’t help but give him a self-deprecating smile. “All right. So maybe I’m obsessing. I just feel like I’m so far behind.”
His expression changed, and he pulled her gently to her feet. “You took a year off from college. People do it all the time. You’re not behind in any real way.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” She felt a little sappy at the deep expression in his eyes.
He eased the book out of her hand and tossed it onto the bed. “Now hurry up, or we won’t make it to the party by midnight.”
The sappiness vanished, and Carrie frowned. “We have plenty of time.” When she glanced at the clock and saw it was already almost ten, she decided Matt might have a small point. “All right, I’ll finished getting dressed.”
She and Matt were going to a New Year’s Eve party at her aunt’s, and Carrie was actually a little nervous about it.
Being careful not to show her tension, she took off her robe and picked up from the bed the black dress she was planning to wear.
It was the same angle-hemmed dress she’d tried on in the dressing room—more than a year ago now. The dress was one of her favorites.
Her absolute favorite was the red one Matt had picked out for her on that same shopping trip.
He was already dressed in an urban-cut black suit, and he’d gone back to doodling on a sketch pad he carried with him everywhere.
As Carrie checked her hair and added a couple of sparkly hairpins, she told herself she had no reason to be nervous.
They were just going to a party at her aunt’s. It would be fun, festive, maybe a little boring, without a lot of people she knew. Except for Jenn and her boyfriend.
And her parents. And Henry’s parents, who were spending the holiday in the city.
“It’s fine if you’re nervous.”
Carrie jerked, both at the interruption of her private flow of thoughts and the way Matt had evidently read her mind.
“I’m not nerv—” she began, then saw Matt’s raised eyebrows. “Fine. I’m a little nervous. I know there’s no reason for it, but it’s like my two worlds are colliding. My old world, with Henry, and my new one.”
She loved her life now, but moving on had sometimes been difficult for her.
The year had been rough for Matt at times too. He’d started exhibiting some of his new paintings in the last six months, and not everyone liked the change in his work.
“I know,” he said. “It makes sense that it would be unsettling. I would never try to minimize what you had with Henry. I’m glad he was part of your life for so many years. I just want to be part of both of your worlds. I want to be part of all of your worlds.” He cleared his throat. “I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course, it’s all right.” Grabbing the necklace she was planning to wear, she came over and slid her arms around Matt’s neck, letting him pull her into his lap.
After she�
�d kissed him for a minute, stroking his lips with her tongue, she pulled away, one hand still caressing his head. “I’m glad you’re going to meet them. I’m a little nervous, yes, but I’m happy about it.”
“I’m going to do my best to make sure you stay happy. In every way I can. I know things haven’t always been easy with us, because of everything we’ve gone through.”
“Who ever said easy was the way to go?” She gave Matt the necklace and adjusted so he could put it on for her.
After he’d fastened the delicate mechanism, he murmured, almost indifferently, “Sometimes easy would be nice.”
Carrie turned her head to meet his eyes. “Good trumps easy any day.”
That made him smile. “Agreed.” He patted her on the ass. “Now hurry up and put your shoes on.”
She scowled, but she was actually feeling very mushy inside. “Don’t be too bossy, or I’ll regale everyone at the party with detailed descriptions of you in a Santa suit. Don’t forget, Jenn actually saw—”
She broke off with a squeal as Matt growled and lunged for her teasingly.
As she went to pull on her shoes, she glanced back and saw him palm something he’d pulled out of his pocket.
“What’s that?” she asked, her curiosity roused.
He sneered with cool arrogance. “You would do better to focus on getting ready instead of prying into my affairs.”
And Carrie suddenly knew—she knew—what he had in his pocket.
She had to duck her head to hide the flash of joy on her face.
But she managed to say, liltingly enough. “But I like your affairs.”
“You’re the last affair I’ll ever have.”
Carrie had to swallow over the lump of emotion and slowly walked over to the dresser to put on her earrings as a way to control her rush of trembling.
She hadn’t quite managed to pull herself together when she met Matt’s gaze again. She knew he could see her reaction.
In response to what she hadn’t said—what she hadn’t needed to say—Matt murmured, “Good definitely trumps easy.”
Unable to contain her feelings and giving up on even trying, she went over to hug him again.
The last year hadn’t been easy. But it had been good. So good.
