by Amanda Rose
“Mom, I'm a little busy right now,” I say, trying to swallow past the sweet scent of spruce that followed this gorgeous, gorgeous man into the stall. It's weird to think how delicious he smells, standing in the middle of an ice-cold public restroom. Before Aspen crawled under the door, all I could smell was stale urine.
So not a good start to the holiday week.
Well, until now.
This is good, right? This deliciously hunky man staring at me, arms crossed over his chest, brows raised in question.
“I'm on the toilet.”
“Learn to multitask, Cyan. Piss and chat. There aren't enough hours in the day to move like a sloth. Shame on you.” I try my best to reply, but when I open my mouth, no words come out. Aspen reaches out a hand covered in tattoos and plucks the phone from my fingers.
“She'll call you back,” he says, his mouth curving into a smile. “What she failed to specify was that she's in the bathroom with me.”
He hangs up and then starts going through my phone, like he's a god and has every right to do what he damn well pleases.
“Give that back to me,” I manage to sputter, breaking through the shock of seeing a multi-platinum recording artist in my toilet stall. I try to go for the phone, but Aspen simply lifts it out of my reach. I have no idea how tall he is, but I have big brothers at home that are six foot three and six foot four.
I know how to deal with their shit.
“Give it to me or else you're getting a face full of Peppermint Rage,” I say, whipping out a white and red striped bottle of pepper spray. Yep, even my self-defense tools are holiday themed. What can I say? I'm a Christmas fanatic.
“Sorry, it might be your phone, but I don't have patience for stalkers who hide in bathroom stalls and steal photos of me.”
“I wasn't stalking you!” I snap, accidentally compressing the button on the top of the Peppermint Rage bottle. A snake of liquid spurts out, not unlike cum from a rigid cock, and hits Aspen right in the face.
“What the fuck, you crazy bitch?!” he screams, dropping my phone to the ground and covering his face with my hands. “Dude, get Donner!” he screams and because it's so close to Christmas already, I immediately think reindeer.
But then I realize he's probably talking about a security guard of some sort.
“I'm sorry!” I say as I pick up my phone from the floor and then start crawling under the stall door myself. “It was an accident, I swear.”
Scrambling to my feet, I find myself face-to-face with a guy sporting a headful of blonde, blue, and silver hair—like ice. A black beanie with white snowflakes is shoved over the top, crushing the tendrils down so that they drip into his beautiful golden eyes.
Vale Kesselring, the drummer for pop rock group Inked Pages. I know it's him—and not only because I'm a little too obsessed with the band—but because he offered to dye his hair with a holiday/winter theme if his fans donated enough to his favorite charity. He then matched their donations and dyed his pale blonde hair with pale wintery streaks of blue and silver, like Jack Frost or something.
Speaking of Frost …
“What did you just do to Aspen, you crazy psycho?” Frost Manderach shouts, kicking the door to the stall open dramatically and knocking Aspen ass first into the toilet. Good thing I'd remembered to flush.
“Oh my god,” I shout as I meet Vale's amused eyes and raised brows, scooting past him and toward the door. The exterior door swings inward, hits me in the face, and makes my nose pour blood down the front of the puffy white coat my dad bought me last year. It has shadowy gold snowmen on it, their arms positioned just so, making them look like they have two giant dicks instead of arms.
I won't be sad to see it go.
“Oh, my face,” I groan, turning around and putting my hands on the side of a grubby ass porcelain sink. Red drips into the bowl as the speakers in the corner of the room—which haven't played a single damn note since I came in here—creak to life and start pouring nineties pop Christmas music into the bathroom.
“The fuck is happening in here?” a woman with a gruff voice says, stepping into the room in a hideously clichéd Christmas sweater with a … is that a gun in her hands?! How did things escalate so quickly?! All I wanted was to piss and be on my way!
“Donner, we got a stage five crazy,” Frost says, guiding a dripping and squinting Aspen toward the angry lady named after one of Santa's reindeer.
“I am not a stage five anything,” I sniffle, sounding stuffed up from my bloody nose. “The lady's room is out of order, so I came in here to pee! I just didn't feel like talking to a bunch of weird sounding men in a deserted restroom in the middle of nowhere, so sue me.”
I fling my hand for emphasis and spatter Vale with blood.
Oops.
He looks down at his white hoodie and cocks a single blonde brow.
“I'm not a stalker,” I murmur … and then my phone goes off again. It's my dad this time, and my ringtone is yet another Inked Pages' Christmas tune called A Dark and Open Heart.
“You search me out at night, stalk me in the day, but misery, enjoy the cold shoulder because this heart isn't yours to let wither, break down, or decay.”
Fuck. My. Life.
Just as I'm about to answer the phone, Donner snatches it from my fingers and starts going through my photos—totally and completely illegal, I'm sure. Paparazzi take pics of these guys without their permission all the time, right? Even if I was a stalker, I wasn't doing anything wrong, right? Except, you know, assaulting a guy. But their security guard just assaulted me, too, right?
“Whoa,” Donner says, gritting her teeth and then passing the phone back. “She's clean, guys. And now I can see why she didn't want us to see her phone …”
As I reach out, Frost snatches my phone back and … he sees it. He sees it; I know he sees it.
“Wow,” he says, blinking panty dropping-ly beautiful eyes at the screen as I grab my phone and yank it back against my chest. Why is it so much harder to be furious with a man whose eyes are the color of the evergreen trees at my favorite Christmas tree farm? And why am I comparing this cocksucking asshole to something so nice?! I should say his eyes are … the color of … of … green mold on leftover fruitcake. “A threesome? One of the guys was wearing a Santa hat, so I'm assuming this was recent?”
“My sex life is none of your damn business,” I shout, shoving past the redheaded woman and into the snow outside. The ground is so icy, I immediately lose my footing and start to slip.
“Careful there,” a sinfully slow and sexy voice says in my ear, a dripping Southern drawl that should rightfully melt all the snow in a ten foot radius. “Wouldn't want a girl as—”
The man stops when I spin around and he sees the blood all over my face.
“Holy hell, what happened to that sweet face of yours?” he asks, reaching out a thumb and brushing it over my bloody lips. He may as well have flipped a switch in my brain, too, because suddenly all I can think about is Crispin Fox—the man standing in front of me as well as the bassist for Inked Pages—fucking me into soft flannel holiday sheets with snowflakes. It's somehow all that much sexier to imagine him doing me hard and fierce and wild on such a sweet, innocuous bedding set.
“I—” I start to say, but then the door to the bathroom is swinging open and the rest of the band is piling up, their crazy security guard along with them. “I … sorry for the pepper spray … and the toilet …”
Putting a hand to my nose, I jog my way across the snowy parking lot and climb into my car, slamming the door closed and trying not to gawk at the massive pile of snow that's collected on my windshield in such a short time.
“What the fuck just happened in there,” I mumble as I turn the key in the ignition and … hear an awful sputtering sound instead of the engine turning over.
Oh no.
No. No, no, no. This is not happening, not here, not now … I'm miles from the nearest town on the snowiest day of the year, a blizzard incoming, with nowhere
to sit and wait for the tow truck except in my freezing ass car or a public men's room that reeks of stale urine.
A knock on the door startles me and I glance up to find Crispin's face in the ice and snow crusted window, the white powder stuck to the edges making it look as if the man's handsome mug is stuck in the center of one of my father's holiday themed picture frames.
“Want me to take a look?” he asks, dog tags hanging low, wearing nothing but a gray wifebeater and a denim jacket. Like, he has to be freezing his perfectly sculpted little ass off out there and yet, he's smiling at me. No, grinning is more like it.
Before I can even think to respond, Crispin is yanking the door open, prying it loose from the crusted ice and flooding my senses with his smell. I can almost taste it on the back of my tongue, this musky sweetness, like amber and apples. I want to scoop it up with a spoon and eat it over ice cream.
“You know about cars?” I say skeptically, looking at the man in the holey denim pants and boots like he's full of shit. He's a freaking pop star. The fuck does he know about cars?
“A little,” he says, leaning in toward me, so close I swear for a second there that he's about to kiss me on the mouth. Swallowing hard, I meet his brown eyes, their color rich and their depths endless. Like, fucking seriously, just staring at them for a second, I can see all sorts of gradations and different colors in his irises, like God spent a little extra time with a tiny detail brush to get this man just right. “Gotta pop the hood,” he says, grabbing the small switch near my left knee and tugging on it.
He retreats from the car, taking his long sandy brown hair and perfect ass with him, and opens the hood.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Frost Manderach growls, storming over to us and staring at me with his evergreen eyes, crossing his arms over his white t-shirt and looking at me like I'm the Antichrist. “We need to go. Concert in Saint Paul, remember?”
“Eh, that's days away and this little lady's got a dead battery," Crispin says, leaning up from his position inside the hood. “So get the jumper cables from the bus and let's give her our juices.”
Our juices?
My brain—whose switch was totally flicked by Crispin, remember?—starts fantasizing about him riding me from behind, coming inside, and making me scream my favorite Christmas carols.
Okay, wow.
Clearly, staying up all night to wrap Christmas gifts was not a good idea. The lack of sleep is playing tricks on my brain and making me feel even weirder than usual. It's not like I'm a nympho or a sex addict or anything—despite what Frost Manderach might think of those threesome photos.
“Juices?” Frost asks, his dark hair tousled and beautiful against the snowy white backdrop. He hadn't done the whole dye-your-hair-for donations thing, and instead offered to take the most generous donor on a private date—you know, private except for the fact that the whole thing was televised online … “You're seriously deranged, bro.”
“Whatever, dude,” Crispin says, imitating his bandmate's distinctive West Coast accent. “Just get the jumper cables so we can get this sweet slice of cherry pie on her way now.”
“I don't know why the battery would be dead,” I choke out, climbing from the car and waddling over to Crispin in my two hundred layers of winter clothing. Dragging my purse along with me, I dig out some wet wipes and start cleaning the blood from my face.
My nose hurts and I figure it'll probably be bigger and brighter than Rudolph's by the time I get to my parents' place. Won't my sisters and brothers have a field day with this one … They've been teasing me mercilessly since the day I was born, and I have a feeling things aren't about to change. They might have families of their own now, but that doesn't stop them all from acting like pricks.
“Here, let me get that,” Crispin says, leaning over and taking the wipe from my hand before I can protest. He slides it across my lips first thing, taking that sex switch in my brain and amping it up by a hundred degrees. My nipples, already hard from the cold, pebble into peaks of diamond. Add water and I could cut granite. “Poor thing. Donner's a bitch; she owes you a serious apology.”
“No,” I say but the word is breathy and sweet and all I really want to say is yes, yes to whatever this man wants to do with me. God, am I that desperate? I tamp down on my hormones which are raging completely out of control and try to pretend like standing in front of the bassist of my favorite band isn't doing shit to my body. Like, my sex isn't swollen between my legs, and my heart isn't beating a million miles an hour inside my chest … “It was an accident. The whole situation in the bathroom was an accident …”
“Well, regardless, we'll get your car runnin' and get you on your way, okay?”
“Sure,” I say, but I'm mesmerized by Crispin's face, the strong, slightly stubbled line of his jaw, his full lips, the length of his lashes. “Thank you.”
Crispin finishes wiping the blood from my face and steps back, flicking his tongue across his lower lip and shivering briefly. So he is cold, standing out amongst all this snow with little to no clothing on. He does make a pretty sight though, so at least there's that.
“Did you find the cables?” he asks, and I glance over my shoulder to see Frost striding through the snow in black suede snow boots and black jeans. He looks irritated as fuck, and he's definitely not holding anything in his hands.
Uh-oh.
“There are no cables,” he says with a long, tired sigh. Donner says we don't have any.
“Did you ask Magda?” Crispin says, and I wonder who that might be. Some lucky girl who gets to hang out on their bus? A groupie? Oh, god, I bet she's a groupie!
“Magda says no, too, so let's call this girl a tow truck and get the fuck out of here.” Frost glares at me, hot as hell in his big puffy jacket, unzipped and showing off the tight white t-shirt underneath, his nipples as pebbled and hard as my own.
Crispin closes the hood and steps back, pulling his cell from his pocket and wiggling it at me.
“A real man never leaves a lady in distress,” he says and then winks. I find him as charming as I find Frost annoying. “Lemme make a call and we'll get this taken care of.”
Twenty minutes later … I'm climbing up the stairs to their bus.
CHAPTER TWO
I'm sitting on a couch covered in Christmas pillows and sipping a mug of hot cocoa, the awkward silence settling over me like the blizzard's settled over the landscape outside. It's cold and white, the snow endless and unbroken, a virgin landscape of nothing. Every once in a while, I catch a glimpse of a house or two, Christmas lights bright against their quiet, white yards. But for the most part, it's just us and the icy road.
“So,” I say, as all four boys from the band sit around and twiddle their thumbs, “you guys are going to the concert in Saint Paul?”
Every year, the Xcel Energy Center hosts one of the largest Christmas concerts in the country, just as big and well-known as Mariah Carey's yearly All I Want For Christmas tour. At least two dozen artists are participating this year in an over-the-top holiday performance, culminating in Inked Pages' pop/rock/hip-hop hybrid versions of all the most popular Christmas classics—Jingle Bells, O Holy Night, and O Tannenbaum.
Nobody answers right away, so I just nervously blurt out, “And what do you think of Minnesota so far?”
“It's a desolate nightmare with crazy girls hiding in bathroom stalls,” Aspen says, lying on his back on a nearby couch, a cold compress over his eyes, his ankle boots and toilet water jeans traded out for a pair of … green and red striped flannel pajama pants?
Okay then.
He looks hot, even in the ridiculous kitschy Christmas wear … and despite the fact that he clearly hates me.
“You need to calm your ass down,” Crispin says, sitting close enough to me that our thighs touch. To be fair, there aren't a lot of places to sit in this bus. The far back holds a decently sized bathroom with a shower and toilet, and then along one wall, there're bunks stacked two high. The wall opposite them has a long bench
seat with storage underneath which bleeds into a galley style kitchen. We're sitting across from the boiling tea kettle, its surface painted with smiling reindeer.
Wow, my dad would freak all the way out over this, I think as I take in the blinking multi-colored lights, timed to twinkle along with Inked Pages' newest Christmas song, Frost My Heart, Baby, the one that played on my phone when my mom called earlier.
I should really call my parents back … I know my dad's probably waiting anxiously by his cell, fretting over what that asshole Aspen Carver said to my mom.
Great.
Now they'll either think I'm a) being kidnapped, b) screwing strangers in bathroom stalls, or c) bringing a man home for the holidays.
Oddly enough, I was bringing home four of them, and I didn't even know it yet.
“Cyan's already explained that what happened in the bathroom was an accident and here you are, acting like a rabid dog on a chain. Try to act like a gentleman every once in a while. Ain't gonna kill ya.”
“No, but it sure as fuck hurts,” Aspen says, gesturing at the cold compress on his face.
“To be fair,” I say, holding my red hot chocolate with green marshmallows close—it's kind of weird looking but at least it tastes good, “you were not in any way shape or form acting like a gentleman. You climbed into my stall, took my phone, and said rude shit to my mom.”
