“Feeling inspired, my little writer?” Wayne says, wrapping his arm around my shoulder and leaning down to plant a warm kiss on my cheek.
I shiver, leaning close to him, feeling his body all around me, his heat enveloping me. It feels so freaking right. It’s difficult to think that up until yesterday I’d never even met this man.
He was a cover in Time.
He was just another celebrity.
He was a billionaire who I never dreamed I’d actually meet, touch, kiss, taste.
“Maybe a little,” I admit. “I guess it’s just nice not to have angry customers shouting at me because their lattés are cold. And then when I go out to collect them, what do you know, they’re not cold at all? Sorry. Ranting about work is hardly sexy, is it?”
“Everything you do is sexy,” he whispers, kissing me behind the ear.
I feel my sex pulse, and my womb scream at me to drag him back inside and take everything he has to give. Last night, when his long, thick manhood was grinding between my ass cheeks, I wanted to reach back and inch it down, let him find my hole and ease it open with his blistering length.
“Yeah, sure, Romeo,” I laugh, giving him a playful shove.
He smirks at me and takes a few steps backward.
“I don’t want any trouble, Winter,” he says. “You’re clearly a very fierce lioness, aren’t you?”
“Oh, you don’t even know the half of it,” I giggle. “I’m actually a secret cage fighter. If you try any of your perverted moves again, I’ll—Hey, what the heck do you think you’re doing?”
He starts to pack snow into his gloved hands, his eyes glimmering as he packs it tighter and tighter, reaching down to add more snow to it.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what?” I giggle. “If you think you’re going to get away with throwing a snowball at me just because you’re this big, impressive billionaire, you’ve got another thing coming, okay?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he smirks. “I just wanted to show you something. Rusty.”
We turn to find Rusty running around the edge of the frozen lake, pawing at it and then leaping away. At the sound of Wayne’s voice, he turns and jogs back toward the house.
“Catch, boy,” he says.
Wayne glances at me, this hulking bear-like giant of a man, with a playfulness in his expression I’m guessing was never there before.
He looks freer than the stern man staring from the cover of Time.
He looks, how I feel, as though he’s been waiting a long time for something and it’s finally here.
“This hasn’t worked yet,” he says. “But I’m hoping your presence will give him some confidence.”
I laugh and move closer to him, looking at Rusty, feeling so much like a couple as I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Wayne and gaze down at the terrier.
“Good boy, Rusty,” I say, as his eyes go alert and his tail pricks, his entire being focused on the object in Wayne’s hand. “You can do it, boy.”
Rusty backs up and then Wayne throws.
The tightly-packed snowball sails throw the air and then – snap – Rusty leaps up and snatches at it with a quick gnashing of his teeth.
It explodes in a shower of powdery white and then he grins, teeth coated with snow, running around and around as he tries to paw at the remains of the snowball.
“Good boy,” I yell, laughing, feeling like I’m floating on air, delirious with happiness.
This is real, I assure myself. Wayne is yours. And you are his.
“See,” Wayne says, hugging me close to him again. “Even Rusty knows how important finding you is.”
I wrap my arm around him and rest my head against his lower chest, not on his shoulder, because he’s so freaking tall. But cuddling close just feels too good.
“And tonight,” Wayne whispers in my ear, “I fucking need you. I want to be a gentleman. I want to wait. But I need your sex, your womb, your everything. Will you give it to me, Winter? Will you be mine in every single way?”
Anxiety tries to get involved.
Nerves hammer a frenetic beat in my chest.
But my womb screams at me to ignore all of that, that this is my man, that this is right.
“Yes,” I whimper, my body shivering in recognition. “I want it, Wayne. I want you.”
Rusty barks at the air and then starts back down toward the lake. Wayne smooths his hand down my arm and then we interlock fingers, and even that small gesture sends shooting stars of desire up my arm and into my body. I feel my sex tingle with the motion of my footsteps, our gloved hands clasping tightly, as though we never want to let go.
I met this man yesterday.
I don’t want to be apart from him.
Ever.
Even if it makes no sense, those two sentences side by side, I don’t care, not with Wayne. With him, life isn’t about what makes sense.
Life is about the gorgeous quirk of fate that led him to me in the middle of a blizzard that opened the snowy door to the rest of our lives.
We walk through the world of glistening whiteness as the sun emerges through the clouds.
Chapter Eight
Winter
“Winter, are you coming?”
I stand just out of view at the rear of the house, my heartbeat hammering in my chest as I stare at myself in the full-length mirror. When Wayne suggested that we relax in the hot tub before dinner, I agreed readily enough, but now that I’ve caught sight of myself in the bikini second-guesses swarm my mind.
Even getting the bikini all the way out here was a minor miracle, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re as wealthy as Wayne Wakefield. He made a call and then a freaking helicopter landed on the pad on the roof and, voila, a suitcase was carried down by a man in a black suit with aviator sunglasses on. He dropped it off and then flew away, helicopter blades slashing at the icy air.
I stare at it, green fabric clinging tightly onto my breasts, my belly hanging over my bikini bottoms a little bit.
The urge to turn and run back to my bedroom is almost overpowering, my legs twitching with the need to hide myself, to stop humiliating myself and just get the heck out of here.
The room is a sort of den, with three plush faux-fur-covered couches, a bar in the corner, a giant TV the size of a pool table and a floor-to-ceiling glass door that opens onto the enclosed porch and hot tub area. The porch is surrounded by more glass, the wooden decking heated against the cold of the world beyond. But Wayne told me that the heating can also be disabled, so that the warmth of the hot tub contrasts with the cold of the winter.
Wayne thinks I’m sexy.
I try to hammer that thought into my mind as I walk to the ajar door and stand there, staring at Wayne as he reclines in the hot tub.
It’s just the two of us with Rusty napping in his own blanket-heavy nook inside the house.
Water drips down Wayne’s muscular body, his chest heaving, droplets insinuating themselves down between his abs and toward his manhood, a V shape leading to his groin that is all tensed power.
He turns at the sound of my footsteps.
Here it comes, the moment his face drops, the moment he truly sees my body in all its not-really-glory.
“Fuck,” he growls, standing up out of the hot tub.