Piper was softer than the down in her comforter, warmer than the oven she insisted on laboring over, sweeter than the creamer she poured in his coffee. She arched her back, lips answering his as he covered her with himself and squeezed her tighter. He could have kept her like that forever, living off of nothing but her tongue and her sighs, content, safe, finally at home.
But Kol pulled back, leaving her breathless and wide-eyed beneath him. “Did that feel like my first time?”
Piper gave her head a quick shake, gasping shallowly, gaze locked onto his.
“Because it’s not.” He pressed the wrist he kept into the pillow and dipped his face down beside hers, breathing her in. “In fact, I’m an expert at giving nosy, little creatures just like you exactly what they need.”
She shuddered when he nipped at her earlobe and inhaled a sharp breath when his arm slid out from beneath her and trailed her side, over the swell of her hip, and down to her thigh.
“Elves may not hold hands, but I’ve pinned enough wrists and hips to know what I’m doing.”
Her breath finally caught, mouth falling still, but her eyes changed, a flicker in them that wanted to ask him to show her just what he meant. And fuck did he want to rip off every stitch of her clothing and rut into her like an animal, but she wasn’t going to ask—she never asked for any of the things she needed.
So Kol let her go. “Now stop asking questions you don’t really want the answers to and go to sleep.”
12
My True Elf Said To Me
Piper lay awake all night, knowing that if she fell asleep too deeply, she would never live down the humiliation of what she feared would be losing all control in her sleep. Falling too deeply was, of course, exactly what she was meant to do, but Piper had been the one in control for so long that she couldn’t take orders from anyone else, the author included.
Kol never stirred, the asshole, but that was probably for the best—she would have been tempted to pick on him again and rile up the beast she’d unfairly only gotten the tiniest taste of, and if that didn’t work, she might have even convinced herself to flat out tell him,You know what would really shut me up for good? If you did all of that again but lower.
Groggy even after showering, she stumbled downstairs much later than normal to a kitchen already full of her family and a mess that was worsening by the minute. The milk and creamer were room temperature but were also so low they probably wouldn’t last until tomorrow anyway. No one had unloaded the dishwasher, the sink was full of newly dirty dishes, leftover containers were strewn on the counters, and the garbage was overflowing. They’d be out of bowls if someone didn’t dosomething, so something she did.
Cleaning should have been a better distraction, but as Piper put away her favorite blue mug, her mind still wandered to how Kol had stared at her, eyes no longer cold and contemptuous but hungry. Splashing dishwater barely doused the lingering heat of his grip on her wrists, and a sip of stale coffee quashed his taste on her tongue for only as long as it took her to swallow.
Was it not bad enough she’d been repressing increasingly wanton thoughts about him since being caught beneath the mistletoe together? Or that his insistence on caring for her injury almost tricked her into thinking heactuallycared? Now she had to deal with a pulsing between her legs at the very thought of his forearms tensing, and she couldn’t even vibrate it away because he was lying beside her every night!
“Ask Pippy, she knows about the outside and stuff.”
Presley and Aunt Deb’s husband entered the kitchen together, Luis holding up a pinecone. Both of their perplexed gazes shifted from the cone to Piper as she dried her hands.
“Do you know why the Christmas tree would be dropping these all of a sudden?”
Piper took the cone, shaking her head. She turned it over, examining the slight shimmer hiding between the seed scales, not at all natural, but then neither was the tree. “It was probably already on a branch and fell off, but—” A prickling climbed over Piper’s skin, and she looked back up to see Kol leaning against the kitchen archway and grinning like he’d absolutely won the lottery, and her utter embarrassment was the prize.
“No idea,” she choked out and pushed passed them all. She hurried to the living room and right up to the tree. It was true that she had no idea, but she could fucking guess. “You have got to chill,” she whispered through grit teeth and held up the pinecone as if it could see.
The tree stared back as if to say,No, you.
“What was that, honey?”
Piper peeked around the boughs to see Grams sitting near the window, her latest knitting project well on its way to being finished—at least someone was getting something productive done. “Oh, nothing. Is there anything you need from the grocery store?”
Grams assured her that, no, she didn’t, but Piper already knew they were low on Grape Nuts and the two bags left of Earl Grey would never last the next seven days.Oh, god, I have to sleep next to him for another week! I have to get out of this house and calm down. Maybe dive crotch-first into a snowdrift.But when she turned, Kol was right there yet again.
“You’re going shopping?” He was standing in front of her so casually—as if the previous night hadn’t even happened! Oh, what abastard.
“We need all three kinds of milk, and someone ate all the veggies I saved for dinner tonight. I’ll be back in a couple hours.” A shopping trip shouldn’t take that long, but she planned to draw it out, meticulously scouring every aisle for everything on her list, her own common sense included. Hopefully she might find it hiding in the dairy freezer, and it would say,Hey, remember this elf-man lied his way into your house and is, for all intents and purposes, holding you hostage under threat of evisceration by evergreen. She slipped past him and headed for the front door.
“I’ll help.” He followed right behind.
“That’s okay.” She grabbed her canvas totes from the hall closet, but Kol remained at her side. Piper groaned, pulling on her coat and checking her bag then watched him lace his boots with deft fingers that she could think of twenty better uses for—fingers and laces both. “Don’t you want to tree sit?”
“You’ve ended up in more peril than the tree, Pipsqueak.”
Her guts twisted, but there was no shaking him, and before she could come up with a better excuse, they were both sitting in her hatchback. Just as she went to start it, her stomach growled, loudly—another breakfast skipped.
