He cocked his head. “Are you in danger? You running from something?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Did you get lost? There are about fifty no-trespassing signs as you come down the driveway.”
Yeah, I’d seen them. “Um, look, this was a mistake. I’ll just take my dog and go,” I told him. Now that I was here, I was embarrassed to tell him why I’d come.
My eyes darted back down to his cock, then I noticed the burns on his lower legs for the first time. His thighs and calves were as muscular as the rest of him. But his skin was disfigured from his mid-thighs down, as though the lower half of his body had survived a fire.
He saw me looking, but didn’t do anything to try to hide it from me. I mean, short of going inside and putting on some clothes, there wasn’t much he could do. The scarring was noticeable.
When I looked back up at his face, I saw pain clearly marked in his eyes. As though he thought I was disgusted by him.
Isn’t that exactly what he’d said in his letter?
I needed to convince him somehow that I hadn’t been running away because of his injuries.
On shaking legs, I got out of my car and walked over to him, holding my arms out for Cocoa.
“Look, Levi, I made a mistake. My friend talked me into following an adventure. I tend to live in books and forget to live in the real world. She was just trying to help shake up my life. Um, there was a letter sent to my town a few years ago. I live in North Pole, Minnesota—”
He snorted and cut me off. “You’re from the North Pole, lady?”
Levi obviously didn’t believe me.
I gave him a tiny smile. “It’s an actual place. If you look it up, you’ll see. Anyway, we get all the Santa letters that are addressed to the North Pole. You know how post offices are. They’re rather… literal. And my friend, Jan. Well, she’s a troublemaker for sure. She handed out all the letters sitting in the dead letter vault this year. And… I got yours.”
His brow furrowed, and that’s when I noticed how nice his eyes were, like dark pools of chocolate. And underneath his wooly beard, I could make out a strong, sexy jawline. His hair was kind of wild, like he hadn’t brushed it this morning. Or maybe not in the past few days. And I suddenly wanted to get closer and see what he smelled like. Probably like wood chips and forest.
“Wait a minute. How do you know my name?” he looked at me suspiciously.
“Like I was saying. I got your letter. It had your name on it. You’re Levi Blacthorne. And I’m Robin. Robin Merryweather. And you’re holding my dog, Hot Cocoa. But everyone calls her Cocoa.”
“RobinMerryweather. With a dog namedHot Cocoa. FromtheNorth Pole.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me.
“Not fromtheNorth Pole. But fromNorth Pole, Minnesota. If you look it up online, you’ll see that the town really exists.” I’d run into disbelievers before. Our town founders evidently had a sense of humor or a serious love for Christmas.
“Aren’t you cold?” I added when he stood there with the same unbelieving look on his face.
“Uh, no. I like the cold,” he growled out.
“I do, too. It’s pretty cold where I’m from.”
Then he shook his head and barked out a laugh. “Right. Because you’re fromthe North Pole. Did my friends set you up to do this? Have you been hanging out with Holt? Tell the truth now, hon.”
“Holt? No, I don’t know anyone named Holt.”
He rumbled, “You mean to tell me a gorgeous woman like you traveled from the North Pole with a dog named Hot Cocoa to visit me on Christmas Eve dressed like a sexy, fucking candy cane? Because this sounds like a set-up from someone who thinks he’s too funny. Holt sent you, didn’t he? Or maybe it was Ryder. Did Ryder send you? It couldn’t have been Tex. He wouldn’t do this to me.”
Levi’s eyes roamed across me now, and I realized with a shock that he was checking me out. His eyes lingered on the curve of my breasts for entirely too long.
I wasn’t used to having a man look at me like that. There was a raw hunger on his face, and I swear the bulge in his underwear got even bigger.
Normally, I wasn’t the one who got this kind of reaction from a man. I was pleasant enough to look at, If they could overlook my extra pounds. But I was usually the invisible one in a crowd.
I felt a coil of heat shift through my center, and my nipples perked up under his gaze.
