The Christmas Surprise

by R. R. Banks

  “I thought Noah said that you were some kind of organizational wonder,” she muttered, more under her breath than to me.

  “What?” I said.

  She looked at me as if surprised either that I had heard her, or that I was actually going to call her out for it.

  “Hmmm?” she said with mock innocence.

  “Did you say something about Noah?” I asked.

  She stumbled and stuttered for a few moments and then nodded.

  “Yes,” she said shortly. “It’s just that he has told me that you work for him at the advertising agency and that you are really good at your job.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “He told you that?” I asked, the comment striking me as strange. “I didn’t realize that you kept in touch that closely. How often do you talk to him?”

  Eleanor’s eyes widened slightly.

  “Pretty often,” she said with another slow nod. “I guess that you never get over being someone’s guidance counselor.”

  “Third grade teacher,” I corrected, tilting my head at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Third grade teacher,” I repeated. “I thought that you said that you were Noah’s third grade teacher.”

  “Yes,” she said again, the voice almost exploding out of her. “Third grade teacher. Guidance counselor. Mid-term soccer coach and spring jubilee coordinator and costume designer. That was a tight year for the school budget. We all kind of chipped in and did our best.”

  "We need to find Gavin," I said, trying to give myself time to process what she had said. That was a lot. "He's been gone for too long. He could have gotten hurt in the storm."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gavin

  I nearly sobbed in relief when I felt the bottom of the tiny raft hit something nearly solid beneath me and realized that it was sand. The last few hours had been nothing short of terrifying and I was done with being in the water. In fact, I was at the point when I was drafting the insurance claim for my boat in my head and was planning a move to somewhere fully landlocked so that I never had to see a body of water bigger than a mudpuddle ever again.

  Not even a fucking swimming pool. I might even tear all of the bathtubs out of my house.

  I was done with water. Fully and completely done. The fact that I had just washed up on the beach of what looked like an even smaller and more desolate island than the one that I had left, though, didn’t bode well for my decision to impose a life-long ban on any large quantities of water. Heading out in the raft hadn’t been something that I had thought through very extensively. With Hunter unconscious and Eleanor reaching what seemed like a mental breaking point, I had been the one that was left to try to keep gathering supplies and ensuring that we were going to actually get through this Gilligan’s Island shit as unscathed as possible. I was prowling around in what was left of the boat looking for anything else that I could salvage from its pathetic skeleton when I found the emergency raft still stuffed in its lockbox on the side. I felt like an absolute, unequivocal idiot when I pulled it out, examining it to confirm that there were no tears or other issues in the material that would compromise its seaworthiness, as it were. How could I have possibly forgotten that this thing was in the boat? With all of the flailing and Eleanor’s MacGyver-ing of a vessel to get her across the tidal pool, I never once thought about the equipment that was actually put on the boat to get me through situations like this.

  As soon as I saw the raft, though, I knew that I had to leave. Something about the shriveled green raft made the fog disappear from my mind and I was able to look at the situation clearly. I had let my instincts and training take over far too much during our days on the island. I had been hired for a specific job, and when the Universe seemed to be giving me a gift of making that job far easier than it might have otherwise been, I decided not to accept it and instead go completely against it. I wasn’t necessarily supposed to kill Eleanor. That hadn’t been in my job description. By the wording of the description and the objectives, however, I couldn’t imagine that my client would have frowned too hard when discovering that Eleanor had been tumbled around in the spin cycle from hell and spat out on an island to wither away. In fact, if I could convince them that the ocean had teamed up with me to do the kidnapping and that eliminating my client’s need to handle the unpleasant dirty work that often came after such a kidnapping personally, I might even be able to secure myself a bonus. That would go toward the acres of very dry, very high land that I intended on finding and never leaving.

  I was aggravated at myself for even allowing the situation to get to me the way that it had. It was like the time that I was forced to take away from my work had somehow melted the portion of my brain that ensured I made the right decisions and handled each job properly. I was suddenly soft and sympathetic, and those were not descriptions that were useful in my line of work. As soon as I had realized that the sopping, terrified woman that had clawed her way aboard my boat during the storm was Eleanor, I should have pitched Hunter’s ass back out into the waves, tossed her into storage below deck, and hightailed it to the mainland so that I could collect my paycheck and go about my life. Instead I had not only gotten them through the storm, but I had actually helped them survive on the island.

  I was feeling far too much camaraderie with these people and that had to stop. I didn’t know what she had done or why she was so much of a problem, but there was a stack of cash waiting for me when I brought Eleanor in, and that was all that needed to matter to me right then. Finding the raft had been an omen. It was time to dislodge myself from what was happening on the island and let the situation unfold however it was going to. When I found a way to communicate with the outside world, I would get in touch with my client, let them know what happened, and do my best to direct them to the island. What happened to Eleanor and Hunter from there was their issue. They could use their skulls as accent points for the turrets of sandcastles for all I cared. By the time they got the moat dug, I would be paid and well on my way to the anonymity I got to enjoy after finishing a job.

  Of course, that meant that I was going to have to figure out where the hell I was and how I was going to get in touch with anyone. The distance between the islands had taken far longer than I would have wanted it to, but the reality was that it likely wasn’t very far. I had wrestled the tiny-ass float across the waves as much as I had ridden it, and I was well beyond the point of believing that it would get me anywhere else. Unless I had somehow done exactly as we had hoped when finding the first island and stumbled on a cruise line stopping point, I was going to have to figure out my own way to get rescued. Since I didn’t hear any tinkling steel drum music or see any half-naked women limbo dancing their way toward me with tropical drinks, I was pretty well certain that the first option was out. That meant that I was either going to have to find my way to another island, or hope to get rescued.

  Fan-fucking-tastic.

  ****

  Snow

  “What cruise line did you say that your Aunt Eleanor chose for the bridal party?” I asked, drying my hair as I walked into the lounge area of the hotel room.

  I was staring down at my phone in my hand and when I looked up I saw that Noah was sitting in a white lounge chair beside the open door to the balcony, his naked body bathed in the morning sunlight streaming into the room. I couldn’t help the smile that came to my lips. My husband was gorgeous.

  My husband.

  That thought was still surprising to me and I had to remind myself that it was true every time that it almost came out of my mouth. Of course, the massive ring that still felt heavy on my hand helped make it as real, but it was the sight of this beautiful man, the man who I loved more than I ever could have even begun to imagine that I would love somebody, smiling back at me, that made me really feel like a wife.

  “I thought that we agreed that we weren’t going to use our phones during our honeymoon,” he said with a mild hint of chastising in his voice.

&n
bsp; “I know,” I said, “but going totally off-grid for three weeks doesn’t seem realistic when you have a company to run.”

  “There are people who are doing all of that for me,” Noah said, swinging his legs down from where they were draped over the side of the chair so that he could stand up. “Remember? Mr. Royal said that he would be happy to take over for me for the next couple of months so that we could just enjoy our marriage.”

  “Do you think that’s weird?” I asked, my shoulders sagging slightly under the thought that we might be taking advantage of the darling, trusting elderly man who had given me my career and then almost destroyed it forever by marrying the blast from the past bitch who had made it her life’s goal to ruin me throughout our youth. “I mean, you took over his company. Like straight took it out from under him. He went from owning the company and running it on his own to being an occasional contributor to the newsletter.”

  “It wasn’t like it was a hostile takeover that involved months in court and a military coup,” Noah said, walking toward me. I could feel my mouth watering as my eyes traveled over his body. “He had been planning on selling the company to my father for a long time. Mr. Royal was ready to retire. All the nastiness with Lucille was just a hiccup.”

  “That was one hell of a hiccup,” I said, shuddering just to hear the woman’s name. “I still get a little twitchy when I smell smoke.”

  Noah nodded and reached out to wrap his arms around my waist, pulling me closer to him.

  “I know,” he said. “It makes it a lot more difficult to create a romantic honeymoon suite when I’m not allowed to light candles. Those little battery-operated things just don’t have the same effect.”

  “But they have a realistic glow and flicker,” I said, bringing my arms up to loop around his neck.

  Noah grinned as he shook his head and leaned forward to kiss me. I sighed into the taste of his mouth and the feeling of his lips on mine. I was never going to get tired of that kiss.

  “So, the future safety of the advertising industry and our company in it aside, what’s so important on your phone?”

  The question brought me slightly out of the joyful stupor that I generally went into when he touched me and I stepped back away from him so that I could bring my phone back in front of me and read the screen again. It had gone dark and I poked at it with my finger, muttering at it as the article that I had been reading jumped in response to my touch and I lost my place. When I found it again, I turned it toward Noah.

  “This says that two people went missing off of a cruise. It doesn’t say who they are, but the ship was about where I thought that their cruise would be.”

  “When was this?” Noah asked.

  “They noticed that they were missing about three days ago, but they think that they could have been missing for longer than that.”

  “Don’t you think that if my aunt went missing on the cruise that she bought for our friends as a wedding gift to us, that someone would have thought that it would be important that they get in touch with me? Just a little heads up?”

  I knew he was right. I was just being overly worried. I had never been one to trust cruise ships after the string of “people who went missing on cruise ships and never showed back up because they are probably abstract sculptures gradually becoming coral at the bottom of the ocean” specials shown during Shark Week. The fact that three of the biggest and supposedly most popular ships that sailed the big blue sea had experienced massive power failures that resulted in days of being giant floating tins full of seasick people with no reliable food refrigeration or bathroom facilities in the last year hadn’t given me much more reassurance. It was that particular dis-ease with cruises that had convinced Noah to let us bow out of the wedding celebration cruise and just head directly to our honeymoon villa. Part of me had felt like rejecting the offer from Noah’s favorite relative hadn’t exactly been a fantastic way to get started in my life as part of his family, but now that I was seeing that more passengers had just vaporized from the decks of a ship, I was feeling better about my decision.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sure that I would have heard from Robin by now, if for no other reason than to gossip about what all of our friends are doing on the ship.”

  “Does being on a ship make a difference to their behavior?”

  I nodded.

  “Of course,” I said. “International waters. No drinking age. No jurisdiction. Nobody needs to know.”

  “That’s a bit of a disquieting thought considering who we sent out there,” Noah said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Wait,” Noah said. “Didn’t you make Robin swear that he wasn’t going to bother you during our honeymoon?”

  “No,” I said. “ You made Robin swear that he wasn’t going to bother me during our honeymoon. I only went along with it for the sake of marital harmony.”

  “So, he wouldn’t have gotten in touch with you.”

  “I have a feeling that people disappearing from the cruise that he’s on, especially if it just happened to be your aunt and one of our closest friends, would take any promises of communication restraint off the table.”

  “So, we’re good?” Noah said. “No worries?”

  “No worries,” I said.

  “Good,” Noah said, taking the phone from my hand and tossing it to the chair that he had recently vacated. “Then I think that you are wearing just a bit too much clothing.”

  I looked down at the robe that I had thrown on after my shower and back up at him.

  “Oh, really?” I asked.

  He nodded, biting his bottom lip as he untied the belt at my waist and let it fall away, then pushed the sides of the robe open. I felt the soft warm breeze from outside touching my skin and a tingle of arousal rushed through my body, settling between my legs where I felt my core starting to get hot and wet. Noah’s fingertips brushed over my nipples, causing them to harden beneath the gentle stimulation, and I moaned lightly. In one movement, he pushed the robe the rest of the way off so that I was as naked as he was, and tightened his arm around my waist again, yanking me up against him so that I could feel the hard pressure of his growing erection against my belly.

  We hadn’t spent much time out of our honeymoon suite since arriving here two days after our wedding, but I really didn’t care. An island was an island. There wasn’t anything out there that I couldn’t see in the water globe that Robin had brought back for me after his vacation to Hawaii, though I’m sure that view would lack the fine black ash that settled over the tiny little tiki village when the globe was turned over and that I had always found just a touch distasteful. Alright, so there probably was a lot beyond the grounds of the resort that I would really enjoy seeing, but nothing had caught my attention nearly as much as my naked, ever-ready husband and the massive bed in our suite.

  And the shower. And the floor. And the bar.

  I wrapped my hand around his thick, hard shaft and gave it a few encouraging strokes. He tipped his head back and groaned, and I leaned forward to run my tongue along the side of his neck. In an instant, he had me in his arms and was carrying me toward the glass doors to the balcony. The sun felt warmer on my skin as he carried me out onto the balcony and then settled me to my feet beside the railing.

  “Noah!” I gasped. “There are people—”

  He silenced me with another deep, intense kiss and ran his hand down my body to tuck it in between my thighs. His fingers found my clit and the sensation rocked through me. I parted my legs a little more to make it easier for him to touch me and kissed him with the same growing intensity of the feelings he was creating within me. I reached down and ran my fingers up his cock again and felt him rest his hand to my shoulder to ease me down to my knees. I felt the railing on my back as I knelt in front of him and wrapped my hand around the base of his shaft to hold it in place. Cupping my other hand around Noah’s balls so I could feel them hanging and swirling in my palm, I opened my mouth and guided his thick, delicio
us erection in. My lips closed around it and I felt Noah’s hand come to the back of my head, gently guiding me into the rhythm and depth that would give him the pleasure that he sought.

  After a few moments, I opened my eyes and looked up at him. I noticed that he was staring off of the side of the balcony, seeming to enhance the experience that I was giving him by taking in the beauty that surrounded us. Suddenly he lifted his hand and gave a wave, a wide smile on his face. I withdrew him from my mouth.

  “Did you just wave at someone?” I hissed.

  He looked down at me and nodded.

  “Our very friendly neighbors,” he said. “Come see.”

  Before I could protest, Noah reached down and grabbed me by my upper arms and pulled me to my feet. He whipped me around so that I faced away from him, my breasts crushing to the railing so that my nipples were just covered. I gasped as I felt him pull my hips back slightly so that he could push into me. His mouth came to the side of my neck and he nibbled at my skin before whispering into my ear.

  “Wave hello to our neighbors,” he said.

  I looked down and saw a few people scattered across the sand. Two of them glanced over their shoulders at us and I smiled, waving down at them. Though I knew that they couldn’t see anything through the intricate scrolling of the railing, the thought that they were looking at me standing on the balcony, Noah’s cock deep inside me, sent a thrill through by body and sent my arousal spiraling even higher. I wrapped one hand around the top of the railing and brought the other down between my thighs, letting my fingertips play across my tight, wet clit as Noah’s thrusting grew harder and more intense. It was all too much for me. I threw my head back against Noah’s shoulder and bit my lip against the scream that tried to come out as my body crashed into an orgasm that made my knees weak and my head swim.

  The powerful contractions of my walls around him pushed Noah to the edge and I felt him push me forward so that he could grab onto my hips and pound into me at an almost furious pace. My breasts bounced against the railing and I felt sweat trickling between our bodies before Noah leaned down and bit into my back to muffle the growl that came from his chest as his cock hardened and I felt him pour into me.