Naughty or Nice: 6 Short & Sexy Holiday Reads Read online

  Faith grasps my hand as I stand up. “Are you okay?”

  “I need to pee,” I whisper, but my lower lip trembles uncontrollably.

  Her thumb strokes the skin of my inner wrist. A wave of heat flows across my face in an unstoppable tide. I’m sure droplets of nervous sweat are popping out on my forehead. I pull away from her and her questioning stare, easing my puffy, crimson-dressed body past the tables of laughing guests to the empty hallway. The muscles in my cheeks strain tightly as I smile and wave.

  I’m fine. Everything’s fine. My mental mantra is stuck on repeat as I hurry into the ladies’ restroom and pull the door shut.

  My reflection regards me without sympathy: a pale, young woman in a garish dress, her mousy hair tormented into a stiff bouffant, the artificial loose strands around her face only emphasizing the wet streaks sliding down her cheeks.

  The door hisses open behind me. Faith stands in the doorway, watching my tears with solemn eyes.

  “Don’t cry,” she says. “You’ll smudge your mascara.”

  “It’s waterproof.” I sniff and snatch a tissue from the fancy holder on the counter, dabbing it under my nose. “I came prepared.”

  She steps into the room and shuts the door; a faint click echoes as she locks it. I turn away from her and honk wetly into the tissue. Her dress rustles against mine as she wraps her arms around my waist and rests her cheek on my back. After a moment, her hand drifts up to cup my right breast. The bolt of desire that arrows through my nipple to throb hotly in my pussy causes me to pull away and whirl to face her.

  I expect hurt indignity. Instead, Faith smiles.

  “You don’t want me anymore?” she asks, making sure I follow her gaze dropping to the rigid outline of my right nipple through the gauzy fabric.

  “Faith.”

  I inject a warning tone into my voice as she sways toward me.

  She tugs at the white lace bodice of her dress and frees one rosy-tipped breast. Her first two fingers slide scissor-like over the tightening nipple, manipulating it until it stands erect like a newly formed bud.

  Again, my mouth is void of moisture, but my tastebuds have a cellular memory of the sweet and salty taste of her skin. Shockwaves of remembered passion flood through my system. My hands grab her shoulders, intending to push her away, but they suddenly have all the strength of overcooked fettuccine. We end up with our arms around each other, our lips mashed together, our tongues dancing slowly in perfect synchronization, and our fingers fumbling under layers of white lace and crimson organza for soft, moist flesh.

  Finally, I unhook her fingers from under my panties, pulling away from where she’s nimbly circling my swollen clit.

  “Faith, we can’t,” I gasp.

  Her breath, fragrant with champagne, puffs on my flushed face.

  “Why not?” she says.

  “It’s wrong. You’re married.”

  “Shall I stop then?” she says, leaning forward to playfully nibble on my collarbone.

  I try to think of a smart quip, but words fail me.

  “You see, the secret of a lasting marriage is for each partner to have outside interests.” She continues kissing her way south. “Other hobbies, other friends, separate from their spouse.”

  Her tongue flickers over my nipple, melting my resistance and logic.

  “Rogan knows how important friends are. He knows I’d never suggest he give up his drinking buddies, and he insists I spend at least one night a week out with the girls.”

  “With the girls,” I parrot weakly.

  The air catches in my throat as Faith sinks to her knees under the voluminous folds of my dress.

  “I don’t intend to ever give up your sweet pussy.” She tugs my panties down to my ankles.

  As I moan at each soft sweep of her tongue, and before the throb of an oncoming climax fuddles my brain, I hear her pause and murmur against my thigh.

  “A girl’s gotta have friends.”

  I sink to the floor in a pool of crimson organza.

  Amen to that.

  Secret Santa

  It didn’t start in the usual way. No winks or suggestive smiles that meant trouble, not even a double entendre. It started with a question.

  “Sophie. If you cheated on your current partner,” Dean read from the small white card, “could you live with your conscience in exchange for one moment of passion?”

  The rest of the slightly tanked players settled back into the patio’s Rattan sofas with anticipatory and slightly predatory sighs. The six of us had escaped our everyday lives and painful Christmas dinners with our families to spend a few relaxing days at the Florida beach house on Big Pine Key. Mike and Zoey’s parents owned the two-story house. They, my parents, and Amelia’s mom, were all old college friends, and they’d dragged the four of us here for Holiday Beach Week each winter since we were still in diapers.

  But, God, I loathed the board games Mike and Zoey insisted we play in the evenings—especially the adult board games. The game we currently played was based on peer pressure to convince each person to spill his or her sexual secrets. Pure voyeurism. Even after a couple of Vodka and Cranberry Blushes, did we really need to know how many minutes of foreplay Mike considered his wife and my best friend, Amelia, needed?

  “Can’t we call it quits now, Mike? We’ve been playing this game for over an hour.” I buried my nose in my cocktail glass, wasting a New Years’ wish that a tropical typhoon would miraculously appear and suck me away.

  The others twitched forward, predators with the scent of blood tickling their taste buds. All except Dean. Dean, the new-ish guy in our little group. Dean, Zoey’s boyfriend with a surfer’s ripped body but the face of a bad-boy who’d break your heart without trying. Dean, who just leaned back in his armchair and watched me with his whiskey-colored eyes that were utterly unreadable.

  Mike cracked opened another beer and said, “Come on, Soph. Jay’s taking a dump, and we promise not to tell, don’t we, guys?”

  Zoey giggled her high-pitched, little-girl trill and flicked back her long blonde hair—drawing attention to the new diamond studs in her ears, her one-year-anniversary-and-Christmas-gift from Dean that she couldn’t stop showing off. Some days, I really didn’t like my childhood frenemy, because even after all these years, I didn’t trust her not to turn and claw her perfect French manicure down my face. Though, to tell the truth and shame the devil, I’d first met Dean here with her a year ago, and I’d since developed a secret, lusty crush on him.

  “You wouldn’t cheat, would you Soph? You’re a good Catholic girl,” said Zoey, then she popped a handful of roasted peanuts into her mouth and snuggled into Dean’s side.

  In a most un-former-Catholic-schoolgirl way, I hoped she’d choke.

  Yeah, predictable, quiet, and boring Sophie would never be unfaithful. I resented my friends smug summing up of my life. In some ways, they didn’t know me at all. Not even Jayden, who I’d been dating for almost two years now, knew what went on behind the closed shutters of my mind.

  I fidgeted and stalled. That simple question stirred up others, and they wrestled in my brain like little snakes. And some of those wily serpents had sharp, sharp teeth. Would you cheat, Sophie? And if you did, who would you cheat with? Dean—delectable but taken by your childhood friend? So, answer the question loaded with a shot of poison—could you live with your conscience in exchange for one moment of passion?

  “Who’s up for a hot-tub party?” Jayden burst out onto the patio with a bottle of wine in each hand.

  “I’m in.” I practically levitated off my chair. “I’ll go get changed.”

  I didn’t wait for anyone else’s reactions, since Jay offered me the perfect opportunity to escape. Taking my time in the room we shared, I stripped off my shorts and shirt and slipped on one of the many bikinis I’d packed. My northern blood was still adjusting to spending the holidays in a swimsuit, but I liked feeling the salty breeze in my hair and the grit of sand in my toes after a year away from the Ke
ys.

  Downstairs, I found Zoe, Jayden, Amelia, and Mike already in the hot tub, passing around the first bottle.

  “There’s room on my lap, babe,” Jayden said and gave me one of his patented suggestive smiles, which used to make my pussy beg for his attention. Not so much anymore, since his attention was more often directed toward his career and work buddies. Our once satisfying sex-life had been reduced to a Saturday-night-if-there’s-nothing-better-to-do scheduled event.

  “Think I’ll go for a swim first and cool off,” I said.

  Jayden rolled his shoulders and pulled a whatever frown, holding out his hand for the wine. I followed the track behind the house that led to the beach. This time of the night, the white stretch of sand was deserted, thanks to the wealth of Mike and Zoey’s parents, who’d chosen a property a fair distance away from their nearest neighbors. Still, I strolled away from the lights of the beach house, farther along the shore to where I could be alone.

  The water was warm and inviting, and I slipped into it, diving under the waves. Spread-eagle, I floated on my back and studied the stars, wondering which one I should wish on and what I should wish for.

  I didn’t hear Dean coming. I felt his presence, sensing the movement as the water parted around the warmth of his body. He swam alongside me and rolled over. We bobbed side by side, dwarfed by the night sky.

  “You never answered the question,” he said.

  The waves buffeted us up and down. Or maybe it was shoals of tiny fish, carrying us out to sea on their silvery backs.

  “There wasn’t an easy answer,” I replied.

  His hand drifted through the water and touched mine. A bird looking down would think we were two giant starfish adrift from the rocks.

  “Nothing is easy,” I added after a moment.

  “Some things are,” he said then pulled me to him through the water.

  I grabbed his shoulders, and his skin, as slippery as a seal’s, flexed and moved under my fingertips. The swell of the ocean swept us close together for a tantalizing moment, before sucking us apart. He kissed me, a long, drugging kiss that tasted of salt and sin. It was like waking from a long sleep.

  My body roused to the memory of that first flash-flood of lust, buried under the past year of comfortable and, okay, sometimes boring, love-making. Dean’s cock, rigid and hot, pressed briefly against my lower stomach, and the heart-racing, knee-weakening sensation flared my every pore into a supernova of awareness. I remember how the scent of a man’s sweat could send my pheromones wild. How the taste of salt-slicked skin could alter the rhythm of the heart from a steady beat to a frantic calypso. And most of all, I remembered the excitement of a man’s touch back when everything about him was new and undiscovered territory.

  We swam back to the shallows. Gritty sand churned around my feet, and a shell nicked my toe. I barely noticed. Dean kissed me again, and I tasted the sea in his mouth. Water ebbed and receded around us as we clung, belly to belly. My bikini top slurped deliciously as Dean peeled the cups away from my breasts. He stroked my pebbled nipples with the pads of his thumbs, watching my reaction in the pewter moonlight, in that quiet way of his that made me want to fuck him then and there.

  His hands gently squeezed my ass then slipped under my bikini bottom. He was like God, or the ocean’s embrace—everywhere at once. His tongue rasped over my nipples, while his fingers parted my labia the way Moses parted the Red Sea. Then he was sliding, stroking, teasing my clit until I squirmed against him and whimpered into his mouth.

  Not to be outdone, I grappled under the soaking nylon of his board shorts and wrapped my fingers around his cock. The heat of his thick, veined shaft contrasted with his cooler skin, and I took a few moments to enjoy the rumble of appreciation coming from deep in his chest as I stroked him. We kissed, and he finger-fucked me while satellites crossed the sky, and light-years away, a distant sun exploded.

  I was close, so close, but I needed his cock inside me, I needed—

  “And I said, ‘You can’t leave my hair like that; it looks like a bird’s nest!’” Amelia’s voice drifted down the beach toward us.

  Passion died like it had been shot point blank. We simultaneously cursed and pulled apart, both of us fumbling with our swimsuits. By the time Amelia and Mike arrived at our part of the beach, I was drying myself on the sand with my beach towel, and Dean was casually breast-stroking perpendicular to the shore—staying in the water a more effective means of hiding a raging erection.

  “Water not too warm?” Mike asked, dropping his towel near my feet. “Got too fucking hot in the tub.”

  Amelia hip-bumped him. “That’s why it’s called a hot tub, dumbass.” She flung down her towel and brushed her hands over her teeny-tiny bikini. “You had enough, Soph?”

  “Yeah.” I lied. I hadn’t had nearly enough…of Dean. “But I think I’ll go for a walk down to the point and back.” I forced a fake, fat smile onto my mouth. “Work off some of dinner.”

  Mike chuckled. “Don’t stay up too late—remember, Santa’s coming during the night.”

  “Yay,” I said weakly and wrapped the towel around myself, hoping they hadn’t glimpsed my perky nipples. “Can’t wait. Have fun, you two.”

  Then I turned away before either of them could spot my liar-liar face.

  Another of Mike and Zoey’s traditions involved each of us being sent a random name from our group two weeks before the Holiday Beach Week, and we’d have to buy that person a Secret Santa gift. Super-fun—not.

  I power-walked along the beach, trying to burn off the sexual frustration roaring through my veins. I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the house yet. The familiar sight and smell of Jayden, and his hands seeking a spot of late-night fuckery, as he endearingly called it, would send me screaming over the cliff edge into insanity. Maybe cocks all feel much the same in the dark, but I knew in my present state the difference would be an obvious and painful reminder.

  After standing under a refreshing deluge of cool water from the beach house’s outside shower, I finally slunk into the bedroom I shared with Jay. He was in his usual position, crammed at the edge of the mattress with the pillow half over his face. I slid between the sheets and lay there with the rough caress of cotton on my naked skin. I tossed onto my other side, glaring at the back of his blond head as he let out a rumbling snore.

  Suddenly, all I wanted was for him to roll over. For him to fuck me thoroughly and without mercy. Maybe that would fill the longing ache in my cunt. Jay thrusting inside me over and over would blot out the memory of the touch of Dean’s fingers dancing over my clit and the texture of his cock as I stroked him from tip to base. Wouldn’t it? I was scared it wouldn’t, and in frustrated desperation, I masturbated silently to a shallow and unsatisfying climax.

  “Time for secret Santa!” Amelia trilled, once the breakfast dishes were cleared away the next morning.

  Her enthusiasm did little to ignite the rest of us, with some suffering the effects of too much partying and others, namely me, from the sharp spikes of guilt digging into my heart each time Jayden glanced in my direction. I’d been alone in our double bed when I woke this morning, his side of the covers, as usual, smoothed neat and flat, as if he’d slept alone. But over lumpy scrambled eggs and half-cooked toast, he’d kissed my temple and called me “babe” with the same, normal morning affection. I’d skipped the greasy bacon, unsure if my stomach could cope.

  We followed Amelia into the huge family room that overlooked the crystalline waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In the corner stood a six foot, artificial Christmas tree, the same one that used to grace the room when the Baxters hosted us all here as kids. Amelia insisted on setting it up each year as tradition, and she got such a kick decorating it, none of us had the heart to pee on her parade.

  I curled up in the armchair closest to the tree, knowing that both Jay and Dean would sit as far from it as politely possible. Maybe I was about to sprout chicken feathers, but I just couldn’t cope making direct eye conta
ct with either of them. Mike, with a cheery Santa hat on his head, distributed the six gifts under the tree.

  “Ready, everyone?” Amelia said as we held the different-sized, colorfully wrapped gifts on our laps.

  Pretty sure my smile missed the mark of I’m so happy to be here, the best I could hope for was that my strained grin didn’t resemble The Joker’s death mask. I studied the sparkly silver paper wrapped around an odd-shaped object. I tore off the paper and discovered a clear glass cookie jar stuffed with condoms—and stuck to the top with a sticky note, in a girlish script I recognized, were the words “100 little squares of fun”.

  I kept The Joker’s smile and glanced toward Zoey, who beamed at me, smug, as usual.

  Slanting my gaze sideways, I skipped over Amelia examining a boxed set of bath products, Mike wrapping a knitted scarf around his neck, and Jay flicking through a book of Sudoku puzzles, to Dean. Dean, who stared right back at me, the unwrapped, hardback copy of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, in his hands. His gaze was both warm and intense as it collided with mine.

  Beside him, Zoey finished spritzing perfume on her wrists and looked down, letting out a most unladylike snort. “A kids’ book? Someone’s having a dig at you, baby.”

  “The Grinch is a classic,” Dean said.

  His eyes met mine again, and he gave the tiniest nod of acknowledgment. Last year at the beach house, Dean told us about his favorite holiday read as a kid, and how when the basement of his parents’ home was flooded by a burst water main, the boxes containing his childhood memories were ruined. I’d listened, and I’d wanted to do something…nice.

  And now I felt kinda foolish, wishing I’d gone for the easy and less obvious route of boring chocolates or novelty socks.