Clara
“Oh, fuck!Bastion...” I didn’t mean to moan his name as I came. I blamed it on the eggnog, but it was more than that. Bastion Weber was more than just the town’s enigma that seemed to cling to the shadows wherever I went. He’d inspired me to stand up to Hogan and helped me get away with literal murder.
His infuriatingly handsome smirk, wrapped around that candy-cane he always had in his mouth, haunted my thoughts. Iwanted him. There was something about him that called to my deepest desires. But now when I was finally free to be with him, he’d ghosted me, leaving my high and dry.
I sat up, a surge of arousal leaking from my pussy. Okay, maybe not so dry.
I sat up, my legs wobbly as I headed to the kitchen for another glass of eggnog and a cookie to drown my feelings, and another shift outside the window snagged my attention.
A chill shot down my spine as I padded to the window to find the figure of a man walking away from the cabin.
Someone’s out there.
Maybe in a normal situation, if I was any other woman alone in a cabin miles away from civilization, fear would take hold. Hogan had been a piece of shit, but if he’d given me anything for Christmas, it was the gift of never fearing men again, knowing the deadly weapon I could be when provoked.
Wrenching on my pajama pants, oversized puffer coat and boots, I flew outside into the cold snow with nothing but the empty eggnog bottle clutched in my hand like a weapon.
The man turned, that smirk I knew all too well finding me through the snow. “And what are you planning on doing with that, little beast?”
“Bastion?” My insides twisted. “What the fuck? What are you doing here?”
It was the dead of night, in the middle of a blizzard. The driveway was mostly snowed in by now, and his car was nowhere in sight. “And how in Heat-Miser’s Hell did you even get up here? The roads must be shit.”
He shrugged a shoulder with the nonchalance he might have had if I’d caught him on a casual evening stroll. “I’m German. I do well in this kind of weather.”
I gaped at him with incredulous anger that seemed to be keeping me warm despite my lack of real pants. “Bastion. How did you know I was here?”
There were a million questions flying around in my mind, yet that last question I knew the answer. He always had a knack for showing up in the same places as me. My shop. The post office. The grocery store. Even my house. But this? Showing up at a cabin I’d only just moved back into. No one but the Birkmires knew I was here. Even if he’d followed me from town, I’d been up here for hours.
“Were you watching me?”
The heated look on his face, with the twinge of shame, was the only answer I needed. I wanted to be angry, and I was…but the emotion was numbed by the surge of heat twisting through my body.
“I made a mistake,” he admitted.
Ugh.He was so handsome, standing there with his jet-black hair flecked with snowflakes and his ice blue eyes catching the glow from the Christmas tree lights shining through the living room window. Any other man who’d been standing out in the freezing cold for hours would be half-frozen, wet and miserable-looking.
But here he was, looking somehow refreshed by the cold. How was that even possible?
“A mistake. What mistake? You mean stalking me constantly?” The words wouldn’t stop pouring out of my mouth. “Then ghosting me out of nowhere, making me think you’re with someone else…only to find you lurking outside my window?”
His panty-obliterating smirk was gone in a blink, and in its place was something dark and predatory that I’d only seen brief glimpses of before.
“I watch over you, Clara,” he growled, his voice laced with vindication. “I protect you.”
“I don’t need your protection, asshole. Clara saves herself, remember? You still haven’t told me why you’re here. Because as perverted as you obviously are, I don’t think you came all the way up here to watch me flick my bean. It’s Christmas Eve. Aren’t you supposed to be on a weekend getaway or some shit?”
“I was talking about us, Clara.”
Was this guy for real? My brows furrowed into an angry V. “Oh, shoot. Sorry for not being able to read minds! You never said you were talking about me; You made it seem like you were with another woman. You let me sit here all night thinking you’d just up and ghosted me.”
“I’m sorry, I was trying to surprise you.”
“With what, a heart attack?”
The way he stared at me, with all the sadness in the world, had my heart aching. But there was something else banked in his icy eyes too—something that had me feeling like I was staring at a dangerous animal through the bars of a cage. Watching and waiting, crouched at the ready in case I was foolish enough to get too close. And it wasthatlook that had my pussy dripping all over again.
Fuck. I still wasn’t wearing underwear. I pressed my thighs together to prevent fat tears of arousal from streaking down my thighs. A phantom smile tugged at the corner of Bastion’s mouth. He seemed to know exactly what I was doing but he had enough sense not to comment on it.
