Chapter 11

W e were late for Christmas Breakfast.

It was my fault. Probably. When I woke up, I swallowed because I had little tiny fuzzy socks on each of my teeth. (Royce was a big pusher of brushing and flossing—bah, enough about him.)

I had been planning on getting up and brushing my teeth (ah, minty fresh!) but when I rolled over, there was only a blank spot beside me.

Blinking, scrubbing at my eyes, I looked around, only to see Alex pushing a cart from the doorway, this one smaller than the one from the night before. It carried a silver coffee urn, two thin china cups (and saucers, would you believe), a silver pitcher of milk, and a silver bowl of sugar cubes. That was it.

My attention was torn between the coffee offering and Alex. He’d been up, had already showered and shaved, and doused himself with whatever cologne he was wearing. (I planned to find out later what brand of cologne, so I could soak a piece of paper with it and stick it under my pillow.)

He was wearing sharply ironed gray slacks, and this time he had a Christmas sweater on, complete with a reindeer with bows on its antlers. He was even wearing shiny loafers with tassels on them as he brought me my coffee. All in all, he was like a commercial for clean living.

“No food?” I asked, sitting up, cramming those zillion pillows behind me. Instantly, I regretted the remark, but boorish, boorish Bad Boy Beck always thought of his own needs first. “I mean?—”

“We’ll get plenty to eat at Christmas Breakfast,” Alex said.

He sat on the edge of the bed, so yummy smelling, I barely wanted the cup of coffee he gave to me.

Man, that coffee was delicious. I drank it, but I never stopped looking at Alex.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“After what?” I asked, though I knew what he meant.

Part of me, old me, wanted to pretend the conversation from the night before had never happened. New me, though, figured I needed to own up.

Alex seemed like such a straightforward kind of guy. He wasn’t likely to appreciate any attempts to suddenly have pretend amnesia. Still, I didn’t quite know what to say.

“I guess I kind of spilled my guts,” I said, then I buried my nose in my cup and tried to look elsewhere, rather than at his understanding blue eyes.

“You did,” Alex said. “That all sounds like it was hard to deal with, you and Jonah being so close for so long.”

“He was a part of me.” I clamped my mouth shut rather than complain any more. “Kind of like you and your boyfriend, I guess.”

That was a pure guess on my part, because I had no idea who’d he’d been stepping out with. More, I had no fucking clue why anyone who had been with Alex would ever let him go.

“His name was Charles,” said Alex, as if I’d asked him outright to tell me the story. “I wanted to call him Chuck, but he never would let me.”

“All of your people have shortened names,” I said.

“Say what, now?”

“Nathan is Nate, Charlotte is Lottie, and so on,” I said. “And I guess Baby Ginny is Geneva? The only person who doesn’t have a short name is your mom. It’s always the full thing. Jasmine. It’s a power move. Like your mom needs any more power than she already has.”

I guess I thought I was in luck because Beck was a shortened name. Go me!

Alex looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I guess I knew that, but I didn’t really know it.”

“There you go,” I said with a shrug, which just about spilled hot coffee on me, but I made a save just in time. “Why did he leave?”

“I found out—” Alex paused and shook his head. “Sometimes it happens. They only want your money.”

“Yeah,” I said, handing my now-empty coffee cup over to him. “I guess so.” I’d never had money, so not having it (which was the norm) was no hardship.

“You don’t seem to care that we’re filthy rich,” Alex said, and it seemed, by his expression, that he’d been thinking this way for a while.

Old me would have left Alex by the roadside and made off with his wallet and whatever else could be quickly carted away. New me had rescued him. Alex knew all my truths, so maybe it was time for more of that.

“If you’d asked me a year ago, yeah, I would have been impressed,” I said, watching his eyebrows go up. “I also would have picked your pocket, made off with that nice Rolex you’re wearing, and maybe beat you up, just for fun.”

“And now?” he asked with a laugh that told me half of him was horrified to hear all this, and the other half was amused.

“Now I’m new me,” I said, thinking I might have to explain that a bit more, but he just nodded, so I went on. “Doing things differently, like stopping to help some poor schlub who rented the wrong car for mountain driving in the snow.”

“That was me, huh,” he said, laughing, showing all of his lovely white teeth.

“Yeah,” I said, then laughed as he took my hand and held it. “I really think it was those assholes as they raced past you, going too fast. You probably would have made it all the way to Steamboat, if not for them.”

“Thanks for that,” he said, and he looked like he wanted to kiss me. I would have let him, but I needed to tell him the rest of my truth.

“Royce,” I said, making a gesture with my free hand. “He’s fucking loaded, so I kind of got used to being around rich people.”

“Loaded?” he asked.

“Not hotels, or anything like that,” I said. “Thackery Ranch is above Billings, Montana. Grandad Thackery owns a horse ranch full of painted ponies. Each one is worth thousands upon thousands. The land is worth as much, and they own many, many acres.”

“So he’s loaded,” said Alex. “You mentioned Grandad last night. That he let you work on his old model cars.”

“He pays me good,” I said. “I live in an apartment above the garage, which is nicer than my old apartment in Denver.”

“But,” said Alex. “You sounded like there was a but there.”

“I have his credit card in my wallet,” I said, rather than answer, because that would have led me to more complaining. “One of the ones tipped with gold, that has no limit?”

“You used that to pay for your vacation here,” he said. “Instead of going on the cruise with them. I would have done the same, I think.”

That simple statement did more for me than all the gold in the world, filling me with warmth and good cheer and just about wiping away my hangover.

“Do we have time?” I asked. “A little bit of time?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding as he got up, pushing the cart out of the way.

He pushed it kind of fast, so the china clattered and the cutlery bounced around, and the coffee urn was about to topple over, but he caught it.

Then he stripped down to his skin, as graceful as I could ever imagine, showing his lovely body, and amazing abs, and that delightful cock of his, pink and hard. He slid his hand up and down that cock, easing it, as if telling it soon, soon, my lovely, pleasure will come.

Pleasure that would come from me and my hands. Maybe my mouth, if I could get in there before anything else happened.

“We going to fuck?” I asked, because I still had a lot of old me inside, and old me had no manners whatsoever.

“I don’t have stuff,” he said, bending to drag off his thin socks. “And I’m not going to shove into you without stuff.”

“Maybe I’ll be doing the shoving,” I said as I hurriedly pulled off my silky pajama top and began tugging at the string on my pajama bottoms, desperate to be all naked at the same time he was all naked.

“Not without stuff,” he said.

Then he pulled me to my knees and kissed me hard and didn’t seem to mind that I had coffee breath on top of morning breath. And my, didn’t he taste amazing. His kisses were soft as honey to start with, and then he intensified as if he wanted to absorb me into himself, his arms around me, holding me close, those strong fingers in my hair.

I sighed and tipped my head back like a cartoon damsel in distress who’s just been rescued. I could have toppled over, but Alex wouldn’t let me fall.

He helped me out of my pajama bottoms and flung me to the bed. Then he ravished me in the way I’d always wanted to be ravished, but never knew until that moment.

His weight held me down, and his arms held me tight, and he kissed me breathless.

Wriggling free, I reached for his sweet, pink cock, now hard as an iron rod. Then I scooted down and took him in my mouth before he could protest. And gave him the best Christmas Morning blow job I could give him, with hearty licks and slobbery gobbling, his balls between my fingers as I swirled them around and around.

Above me he was gasping, half laughing, but not protesting. When his balls tightened, I doubled down, full throating him till I half choked. Then when he came, I swallowed and swallowed some more, kissed his sticky cock as it softened, my hands clasping his sweaty hips.

When I looked up, his hair was a mess, tousled from the sheets, his face flushed, his eyes bright, his expression a little shocked, as if he was surprised to be spun so far out into the stratosphere by my talented mouth, only to land back on earth in a rumpled bed.

“You are amazing,” he said, shaking his head slightly as he balanced himself on his arms, palms flat on the sheets.

“I am,” I said. No modesty there. I knew what I was good at.

“Let me do you,” he said, moving forward, lunging himself at me.

I pretended to shriek in terror (always funny, in my mind), and let him have at me. I’d let him have at me forever, if he wanted it.

He went down on me, full-throated me right from the start, and when I began to tighten up, he pulled back, like the monster he was. Then, with a low, evil laugh, he did that again and then one more time before my body couldn’t be backed down, and I came down his throat. Boy, he was a good swallower, going gentle and more gentle still as I came down from that amazing high.

Better yet, he sighed as he pulled me into his arms, tucked the pillow beneath our heads, and pulled the soft cotton sheet over our shoulders for a breather.

And that was why we were late for Christmas Breakfast.