“Hi, Stella,” I said over the jingling of towel bells. “May I change rooms, please?”
Stella paused wrist-deep in faded terry cloth. “Something wrong with yours?” she asked.
Nearly ten years of visiting Christmas Notch had taught me to be careful when it came to Stella, because she was one of those people who loved her business and yet also hated doing her job, so there was a fifty-fifty chance that any request could be met with either uncomfortably intense assistance or outright hostility.
“Nothing’s wrong!” I chirped. I could hardly tell her that I was having a mental block trying to masturbate in my room, so I said instead, “I’m just hoping for a change of scenery.”
Suddenly, Stella leaned forward, making the towel stack jingle. “Say no more, sweetheart,” she said with the air of a confidante. “After my divorce, I couldn’t even stay in the same town as my ex. Moved all the way from Winooski. You deserved better than him, I don’t care what they said on Facebook about you.”
“Thank you?”
She was already turning to the pegboard with the keys on it. I wasn’t sure what she was looking for, since the keys had been out of numerical order for at least a decade, but she seized on a key with the flourish of a sommelier selecting the perfect wine and then handed it over.
“Take your time moving things over,” she said, going back to her towels now.Jingle, jinglewent their belled corners as she moved a stack to the side and began on a new one. “We’re empty except for Hope Channel staff until spring break next month, so I don’t need your room anytime soon.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it this time, and then strode toward the stairs, hoping I didn’t haveI’m going to masturbate tonightwritten all over my face. Seriously, how did other people do this? Weren’t they worried that people could... well... tell?
Maybe not. Maybe nobody could tell. It wasn’t like I believed masturbation was going to poison my ability to love or enjoy sex—a little hard to believe that when I’d never masturbated and had still had a miserable sex life with Michael—but the gulf betweennot believingandjustdoing it alreadyfelt so big.
If Addison were here, she’d give me a shot of vodka and tell me to stop pussyfooting around—literally. And I was ready to. Right now.
I went to my old room and gathered my laptop, a bottle of wine, and the Romantic Wishes candle I’d brought from home (strawberry and chocolate scented, $38 on QVC and at wishesofaddison.com). And then I left my old room, walked down the end of the hall to the Yule Log suite, and let myself inside.
New room, new me!
Except the minute the door swung all the way open, I was greeted not by a fresh array of cherry-red duvets and candy cane–shaped pillows, but by billows of steam. I stepped forward, my brain still not digesting why my new room was a sauna, and then a very tall shape moved out of the clouds.
I screamed.
The shape screamed too, jumping toward me and turning as if he’d thought I’d screamed because there was someone behindhim, and then I had the slow, breath-crushing sensation of becoming aware that the shape was Kallum Lieberman, and that Kallum Lieberman was completely, utterlynaked.
“Oh thank God, there’s no one there,” Kallum breathed, as if totally unaware of theactualterrifying moment going on, which was that he! Was! Naked! “You scared me there, Winnie Baker.”
I couldn’t seem to speak, couldn’t seem to ask why he was here in my new room or ask if all his bath towels had been stolen by a towel gremlin. All I could do was stare.
And stare.
And stare.
Kallum Lieberman looked cute in everyday jeans and a T-shirt. Kallum Lieberman looked sharply handsome in a rumpled tux in his sex tape. But naked?
Naked, Kallum Lieberman looked like he was in the business of hauling people over his shoulder and dragging them off to the nearest bed. Naked, Kallum Lieberman looked like some kind of Viking—and not a Skarsgård-esque Viking, mind you, but like arealViking, that would have plundered a misty shore and then made merry with plenty of meat and mead after. His chest was so broad and his arms were so big, and the rounded curve of his stomach was dusted in dark blond hair, and so were those thighs, and oh my God, there was his—his—
My eyes snapped up to his face, and luckily, he was looking behind me at the open door, as if trying to piece together what was going on, so he didn’t notice that I’d just been staring athis junk. That I’d just confirmed for myself that he’d been very, very right about needing a bigger pickle pouch from Luca.
He swiveled his head back to me. There were water droplets clinging to his short beard, dripping down a strong throat to his collarbone.
I swallowed.
“I, um. They were going to move my room.” I held up the key, hoping it shored up how weak my voice sounded. “Stella must have mixed up which rooms were empty.”
Kallum didn’t seem stressed at all that he was naked... or that I’d just walked in on him while he was naked, and he grinned. “Bet you got a surprise, huh?”
I rolled my lips inward and looked up at the ceiling. This room was so dang,danghot. From the steam, probably. “Yep. I—um—I guess this one is yours?”
“It is,” Kallum confirmed, finally turning back to the bathroom and reaching for a towel. I was staring at those wide shoulders like I was about to be tossed over one, and the thought made me strangely restless. I moved my eyes away from those sea-raider shoulders, and they landed on his backside as he was bending over to get a towel. His butt was rounded, plump, and I hadn’t ever thought about a man’s backside before, but maybe that was because I hadn’t seen Kallum’s?
It was squeezable,bitable, and I... I wanted it. I didn’t know what I’d do with it once I had it, but my entire body itched with the need to step forward and—I didn’t even know. Lay claim to it, maybe. Grab it and sayMine, mine, mine.
