A Very Dirty Christmas Read online

  Her eyes go wide. “You think that’s what’s happening?”

  “No. It’s not. Calm your tits down.” Still, I scroll on the phone until I hit Jo’s number. The phone rings a bunch of times before going to voicemail. I dial it again.

  I swear, if I have to go back to that party to track this fucking chick down, I will strangle someone. A female answers the phone. “Is this Jo?” I ask.

  “Yeah, who the hell is this?”

  “Jo!” Kate yells. “It’s Caulter.”

  “Oh. Caulter.” She hushes someone in the background. “Hang on, I’ll be right there, Maverick.” Maverick? Are we in New Hampshire or a fucking eighties movie?

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

  Now I’m irritated. “Are you still at the party?”

  “As if it’s any of your business, I’m hanging out with someone.”

  “So you left your friend at a party alone to go screw some guy?” Kate reaches for the phone, and I move away. “She’s trashed. What the hell did you give her?”

  “I thought she was hanging with someone,” Jo says, her mouth away from the phone as she talks to the dumbass she's there with. “What’s your friend’s name? Dan? Derek?” She pauses. “She was hanging out with Dan. She wasn’t drunk; she only had a beer.”

  I’m breathing deeply to keep my voice calm, despite the fact that I want to reach through the phone and rip Jo’s fucking head off. "What exactly did you give her?"

  "What's your problem?" She laughs. "Kate was right, you are a real asshole. She took some anxiety medication to calm down before the party. She'll be a little loopy but she'll be fine."

  "And then you gave her beer," I say. Deep breath. Calming breath. I'm practicing that yoga shit my mother is constantly doing.

  "One beer," she says. "It's not going to kill her."

  "And after that, you left her at a party with some guy whose name you don't even know," I say. "Are you fucking stupid? Do you know what could have happened to her?"

  "Calm down, cowboy," Jo says. "I think she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself."

  "You stupid bitch." I throw the phone across the room, incensed with Kate's so-called friend, before I whirl around to look at Kate, where she's lying on the bed.

  Naked.

  The red dress is in a crumpled heap on the floor, her bra and panties casually tossed on top of it. Kate is lying on her stomach, her legs kicked up, her cheek against the pillow, looking at me over her shoulder.

  I have the impulse to walk over to the bed and grab her thighs, to pull that perfect curvy ass up onto my lap and slap her flesh hard, for being so colossally stupid as to trust that friend of hers. I'm so livid I can barely breathe.

  "Come here," she says.

  I shake my head. "Not tonight, Kate."

  She pouts. "I'm naked, lying on the bed, telling you to come over here because I want to suck. your. cock." She punctuates each of the words.

  Groaning, I shake my head again. "It's not happening, Kate."

  My words come out harsher, gruffer than I intend, and she rolls over, sitting up on the bed, her tits bouncing.

  Those fucking tits. My mouth practically waters at the sight of them. They're perfect. The girls out in Malibu have fake ones, even chicks my age. It's like a joke -- get a pair of tits for your sixteenth birthday, you know? It’s the same thing in New York, except no one’s getting implants -- they’re just skin and bones, starved to the point of being so rail thin there’s nothing there, ass or tits.

  But Kate’s tits aren't like other girls’. They're perky, on the smaller side, but I like the way they fit in my hands, a handful of perfect flesh. They make the tits on the girls I usually screw look just...tacky.

  And they're right there, staring me in the face.

  Kate is giving me this look of complete and utter disappointment, like I'm rejecting her. Shit, if she knew how hard it was for me not to go over there right now and slide my cock into her warm willing pussy…

  “You’re going to turn down a perfectly good blow job?” she asks. Hearing goody-goody Kate, her hair disheveled and her words slurred, say blow job makes my cock so hard it feels like it’s going to explode.

  “You’re drunk, Kate,” I say, angry. “Sleep it off.” I need to get out of here before my resolve weakens, but I’m wondering if she’ll be okay.

  She pouts. “You called my friend a bitch.”

  Raising my eyebrows, I look at her sharply. “That girl who gave you pills and booze and left you there is not your fucking friend.”

  “You shouldn’t use that word.”

  “It was the only thing that came to mind.”

  Katherine gets on her hands and knees, crawls forward across the bed, and grips my waist, unbuckling my pants. “My father isn’t going to be home tomorrow,” she says, looking up at me with big eyes, her mascara smudged along the edges. “You can fuck me as loud and hard as you want tonight, and get up tomorrow and fuck me again.”

  I cover her hands with mine. “Cut it out, Kate.”

  She wrenches her hands away from mine and slides her palm down the front of my jeans, rubbing it along the length of my hard-on. “You’re just as ready as I am.”

  Peeling her hand from my crotch, I take my shirt off and hang it over the end of the chair by her bed, then slip out of my jeans. “Get in bed,” I order.

  She rests back against the pillow, leaning on her forearms, her back arched so her tits are high in the air. “I knew you’d see reason.”

  “I haven’t seen reason,” I tell her, flicking off the light before I slip into the bed with her. “Someone needs to make sure you don’t stop breathing tonight.”

  “But I haven’t washed my face or brushed my teeth,” she whines. "And I'm not ready to go to sleep."

  “Neither have I,” I tell her. “Deal with it. I’m not getting out of bed now, and I’m not kissing you.”

  “You’re just mean tonight.”

  “Says the girl I rescued from a predator at a party,” I say.

  “So, that’s a no then?” she asks. Her hand finds my chest, and she rests her head on it, sliding her hand lower until she finds my cock. “You’re wearing underwear?”

  “That’s right,” I say. “Now get your hands off my dick.”

  She does, and it’s not more than thirty seconds before I hear her breathing become heavy and rhythmic.

  And I'm the one lying there wide awake, wondering what the hell I’m doing, holding the hottest naked girl I’ve ever seen while I've got the biggest case of blue balls in history.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Katherine

  Yellow sunlight streams through the balcony door, and the cool morning air hits my skin. I look over to the empty space in my bed that Caulter occupied last night, then out through the open balcony door. He’s not there.

  Not that I would expect him to be after what happened last night. I’m mortified. I’m going to be too embarrassed to look him in the face, after the things I said, how I threw myself at him -- and the fact that he, the guy who sleeps with anyone, turned me down.

  I slink down the hallway, grateful to remain unnoticed. After I brush my teeth and shower, I feel considerably better. But not about the thing with Caulter. One of the unfortunate downsides of last night is that I remember the whole thing clearly.

  I’m dressed and back in my room when Caulter shows up on my side of the balcony, coffee in hand. “How are you feeling?”

  “Completely humiliated.”

  Caulter’s face is expressionless, which makes my heart skip a beat. He probably hates me. “Here,” he says, handing me the coffee. “Are you hung-over?”

  I shake my head. “No. The pill she gave me just made me pretty out of it, I guess.”

  Caulter laughs. “Fucking amateurs.”

  “Shut up. I’d never taken anything like that before.”

  He smiles. “Well, you might not want to, ever again.”