Holly Dreams Read online

  Holly

  Adam glowers at me as he’s climbing into the pickup, but his voice is pleasant when he tells us that he’ll take us to our tree and cut it for us. I know it would be too much for that glower to actually be a sexy smolder in my direction.

  “I don’t suppose you’d come back to my house and set it up for us, would you?” Sandy asks. If you didn’t know her, you’d think she was acting helpless and demure. I do know her, so I know that by now she’s clocked my interest in Hot Lumberjack.

  “Well, if we did it for you, we’d have to do it for everybody. And then we’d go out of business.” All of a sudden, he sounds gloomy.

  “How is business?” I ask. I really want to know if it’s as dismal as the state of the buildings would indicate.

  “Um—well, we’re solvent.” He shifts his shoulders near me, and I about die of delight, pressed in between Hot Lumberjack and my sister. His bicep feels hard as rock near my shoulder.

  Solvent, but not thriving. I guessed as much. “Have you thought about expanding?” I warm to the subject. “Very few businesses survive sixty years without adapting. You might want to consider offering those things I was talking about: kids’ area. Seasonal decor and music. That’s just to start.”

  “Oh, look. We’re here,” he says, deadpan, and stops the truck at the tree Dakota had marked with a red ribbon. He gets out, leaving my side cold, and Sandy elbows me. I elbow back.

  He turns back to the truck and catches this, and then the corners of his very delicious mouth turn up. “You can get out and help. Everybody else, please stay in the truck. Kids especially.” He reaches a big capable hand toward me. “Want a hand?”

  Do I want his hand on me? Hell yeah I do.

  He takes my hand and pulls me out, so that I nearly slide all the way down his body. His hands wind up on my waist, and I shiver again, thinking of those mighty thighs. We stare at each other for a second. “What’s your name?” He says it so only I can hear.

  “I’m Holly. Holly Farris.”

  “Adam Sledd. You’re beautiful, Holly,” he says, doing that glower/smolder thing, and then abruptly turns to get the ax out of the truck bed.

  Is he serious? He looks serious.

  Watching Hot Christmas Tree Lumberjack heft that ax is certainly worth the extra price of the we-cut service. He can swing it, too: with just a few carefully-judged strokes, the big 7-foot Fraser fir is on the ground. Adam takes off his jacket, showing a thin white tank undershirt damp with sweat, and hacks a few straggling branches off the bottom of the trunk. “That oughtta do it,” he says, and gives me a sideways glance that tells me that he’s noticed me ogling his broad chest and strong arms. “Can you take the top of the tree? Just grab it near the trunk. I’m gonna get it up on the bed from the heavy end, and you just help a little.”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks, Holly,” he says, and for the first time, he gives me a smile so big and warm that I feel a ball of heat forming in my belly. What would it be like to slide all over Adam Sledd in a bed?

  Or in the bed of a pickup truck? Gah, I’ll never find out. Guys like Adam never go for girls like me, even if they flirt once in a while.

  But a girl can dream.

  The drive back to the barn where the Sledd boys conduct business is too short. Dakota is gone. The guys haul our tree out and begin tying it to the top of Sandy’s SUV, while Sandy pays the smiling older lady in the shed. Their credit card machine looks stuck in 2003, much the same as the way the farm buildings look stuck in 1957.

  “You don’t use that app where you can take credit cards through your phone?” I ask the woman.

  She chuckles. “Ha! It’d be nice have the cell phone coverage out here to use it.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I turn around to see Adam’s shirt come untucked as he shakes out coils of rope, exposing the bare skin of his lower back, and his jeans starting to slide down his perfect butt. I make myself close my mouth, so I don’t drool down my shirt. I turn back to where Sandy is signing the receipt.

  The lady leans forward on the counter. “Hey, I’m Nancy. I’m sort of a surrogate mother to the Sledd boys, now that their grandparents have passed. What’s your name?”

  “Holly.”

  “Nice to meet you. Listen, I gotta ask: are you single?”

  “Um,” I say, stalling. “I’m … not seeing anybody right now.”

  She grins and leans over further to speak softly. “Good. Because Adam is clearly interested in you. He keeps staring at you when you’re not looking.”

  Sandy laughs, and puts her arm around my shoulders. “Told ya.”

  “Obvious, right?” Nancy says to her, and they laugh. “Can’t keep their eyes off each other.”

  This is embarrassing. It’s also making me think about things, like first kisses and crushes and, oh hell, first times in bed. All that good muscle, working for me.

  “He’s a good boy, Adam,” Nancy tells me. “Don’t let the crankiness fool you. He cares about things. Takes good care of me and his brothers.” She pats my hand.

  Without warning, there are footsteps behind me, and Adam leans past me to take the receipt and put it in a bank bag. “Thanks, ma’am,” he says to Sandy. “Car’s all ready, and we hope you’ll enjoy your tree.” Before she can thank him, he turns to me. “And since you were so disappointed in the lack of hot chocolate, I’d like to offer you some.”

  What?

  “After we close,” he clarifies. “I’d like to take you. To get hot chocolate.” He doesn’t say please, he doesn’t ask if I’d like to go, he just stands there looking completely delicious. Completely edible, too: I’d start by unbuckling his belt. Heat flushes my face. It builds elsewhere, too, down low in my belly.

  “Oh, go, Holly!” Sandy says. “You haven’t been out with a guy since—when? Years.”

  Thank you, older sister, for ratting me out.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Adam says, and smiles like a pirate. It’s so seductive that I nearly go up in flames. “You should be appreciated.”

  I find my voice. It’s shaky and a little hoarse, but it works. “I’d love to go. Drink hot chocolate. With you. Love to.”

  “Well, good,” he says, and that piratical grin gets a little wider. “I’ll pick you up at 8. Where do you live?”

  5

  Pie at the Diner

  Adam

  She lives in town. It’s a good twenty-minute drive, but I’ll make it without complaint. Hell, I’d drive twice that long. Three, nine, forty-two times that long.

  Because this is Miss Right. I’m sure of it.

  I didn’t recognize her at first, but I kept hearing her voice in my head, saying, “This place could be so great,” and it echoed all the way down my spine, the way true things do. And I’d definitely noticed her pretty face and her lush body. But this is a girl with fire and guts, and it’s her passion that I love.

  Love?

  Wow. Yeah. I do love it.

  When I pull up at her sister’s house in Farragut, I have to take a deep breath. This is my girl. Mine. All I have to do is make her understand it. I can’t force it—she has to feel it, too. But if she is who I believe she is, she will.

  I get out and straighten my jacket. I don’t even have to get to the door before it opens, and Holly is standing in the doorway in jeans that hug her in all the right places, and a soft red sweater that clings to her chest in all the right ways. “Hi,” she says, smiling.

  “You look beautiful.” I hold the door open. “Don’t you need a coat?”

  She swings a fleecy jacket on over her sweater and beams at me. “Got one.” Over her shoulder, she calls, “See ya later! We’re going now.”

  “You glad to get out of there or something?” I ask on the way back to the truck.

  “My brother-in-law gave the kids candy right after dinner, so they’re running around like monkeys. It was very loud.” I hand her up into the truck, and take just a second to admire her great ass while she talks. “I mean
, I like them a lot. But they’re loud. And the kids next door are loud. And the ones across the street. Sometimes I just want to go live somewhere peaceful. You know, where you don’t bother anybody and they don’t bother you.”

  I turn on the truck lights and take a moment to get my bearings. I know we’re going to the diner, because Jenny makes the best chocolate cream pie, but I’m not sure how to get there from this part of town. “Still want that hot chocolate?”

  She smiles at me. “More than you know.”

  “So tell me about yourself, Holly Farris.”

  She talks all the way to the diner, telling me about her life: her teenage rebelliousness, her early marriage and divorce, her struggles to make a better life for herself. Her disappointment in her job search. Her delight in all things Christmas, to go along with her name. She says her birthday isn’t near Christmas, but her parents just liked the sound of her name.

  I’ve started thinking about planting some holly bushes at the farm when we pull up at Jenny’s Diner, into my usual spot. My brothers and I eat there pretty often, rather than cook every meal for ourselves. Jenny has even started memorizing our favorites.

  So we order mugs of hot chocolate, with extra whipped cream and crushed peppermint sprinkles. I reach across the booth to hold Holly’s hand. She blushes. “I hope you like pie,” I tell her. The second it comes out of my mouth, blood goes straight to my dick, because now I’m thinking of Holly’s pie. “Jenny makes the best chocolate cream pie.”

  Even sexier than that, Holly does like pie.

  She eats the generous slice with little sounds of pleasure, and the thought of hearing her make pleasure noises in bed has me rock-hard and grateful for big napkins. She’s the same way with the hot chocolate, and the thought of warm, creamy things going down her throat has me desperate to touch her.

  I can’t stop looking at her. She’s telling me all about some ideas she has for the tree farm, and she’s getting excited about it. She even waves around a map she’s drawn, and a list of things she’d like to add. Such passion.

  I’m trying to listen, but honestly? I’m watching her sexy mouth. I’m seeing her twinkly brown eyes the same deep color as the hot chocolate in our mugs. I’m looking at the way that soft sweater rises and falls over her gorgeous round tits. And I’m thinking of fucking her every way I can get her. It probably shows in my face, because her voice falters, and she licks her lips. She starts breathing fast and shallow, and she keeps losing her place in whatever she’s trying to tell me about the tree farm and the plans she drew up, and the additions she’d recommend, and then when there’s only a bite or two left on her plate, she scoops up a bite of chocolate filling on her finger.

  She doesn’t say a word. But she opens her mouth and slides the chocolate onto her tongue, and then licks her finger, all the time staring straight into my eyes.

  I gulp down what’s left of my own hot chocolate. It’s like she can tell that she just made me hard as a tree trunk inside my boxers. “Want to see the farmhouse?”

  “I’d love to.”

  So I toss too much money on the table and hurry into my jacket, then help her into hers. I can’t help touching the softness of that sweater; I bet her skin is even softer. We talk a little on the way back to my place, but I can’t stop thinking of what she’ll be like in my bed. I can’t wait to kiss her.

  We pull up in the gravel driveway, and I turn to her. “This is it.”

  She studies the house in the glow of the headlights. “Nice. Kind of old-fashioned. Do you live here by yourself?”

  “Mostly. Jackson has a little apartment, mostly because it’s closer to those UT girls he likes to date. And Dakota stays here sometimes, but mostly he’s bunking in the ranger barracks, for his job.”

  “So they’re not here tonight?” She smiles at me, and I smile back, realizing we’re on the same page now. I kill the engine and the lights.

  “Nobody here but us chickens.”

  “Good. Kiss me,” she says, and leans across the gearshift toward me. Her lips are warm, and her mouth tastes like chocolate, and suddenly I’m ravenous for her. I slide my tongue over the inside of her lower lip, and she shudders and pulls me closer. My hands go right to her hips, and I haul her over the middle into my own seat, settling her firmly on my lap so she can feel how hard I am.

  She rocks her hips back and forth, just a little, but enough to set my blood on fire. “I can’t get enough of you,” I tell her.

  “Well, can we go in now?” she asks.

  We go in. I turn on a lamp, so she won’t trip, and start kissing her again. I’m hard as rebar against her belly, and her hands are all over my chest and stomach. I can’t wait to unwrap her.

  6

  Night at the Farmhouse

  Holly

  The more he looks at me, with those intense blue eyes, the more I long for him to kiss me. The more he gives me that pirate smile, the hotter I get. Until he starts playing with my hand across the diner table, and I begin to feel dampness in my panties. Oh God. Adam Sledd, that Hot Christmas Lumberjack, wants me.

  He doesn’t even look at the map of the tree farm I’ve drawn, or the notes I took. Detailed notes, too, and you’d think he’d be interested in something that might make his life better.

  I tease him a little by licking chocolate pie off my fingers, and his eyes get more piercing, the lids half-closed with his desire. I don’t think he’s heard a word about the things I want to do to expand the tree farm; I think all he’s thinking about is him and me. Together. Naked. Willing. And I am so willing that I can even feel my wet panties slide against me. He interrupts me. “Want to see the farmhouse?”

  I want to see everything he’s got.

  In the truck, we start kissing, and when he pulls me across the console and seats me on his lap, I can feel the long ridge of his erect cock through his jeans and mine, pressing against my heated center. I rock on him a little, and it’s so exciting that I know if we don’t go inside, we’ll have to fuck right here in the front seat of the truck.

  I mean, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Windows steamed up with our urgent heat. Pants around his ankles, steering wheel jammed into my back. My toes pushing against the seat for leverage, his face in my breasts, my hips grinding …

  But I want to be naked together, in a bed.

  I haven’t had sex since I kicked Greg out. And this guy? Is so perfect. Too good to be true, especially for a girl as bad at romance as I am. He’s just so hot and so gorgeous, from the beautiful blue eyes to the luscious lips, the manly lumberjack biceps and abs down to those mighty thighs. I am captivated by what’s between the abs and the thighs, too, just feeling it through four layers of clothing.

  A good boy, Nancy called him. Somehow I don’t think he’ll be a good boy in bed.

  “I can’t get enough of you,” Adam says, kissing each of my breasts through my sweater. Then he takes me inside, holding my hand. I drop my purse to put my arms around his neck. We kiss in the lamplight. Without meaning to do it, I let my hands go to his chest to feel those gorgeous muscles, while my stomach flutters in anticipation. He slides his hands down my back and over my hips, cupping my butt cheeks.

  They feel so good, those big capable hands, on my body.

  “My room’s upstairs,” he says. “You coming?”

  “I hope more than once,” I say, both hands on his face, feeling the soft friction of his beard on my palms and wondering what it would feel like on my inner thighs.

  He laughs, and then his face goes serious again. “I’m only asking once. Holly, if you want to back out of fucking me, do it now.”

  “I want you,” I say, and reach for that hot, hard cock through his jeans.

  He groans in his throat, and simply picks me up over his shoulder. Fireman-carries me up the wide staircase and down the hall to his room. I barely register the colors in the room, navy and dark green, and I don’t really see any of the furniture except the bed. It’s old-fashioned, dark wood, full size, and that’s
all I catch before he tosses me on the bed. Lightly, like I weigh feathers. I don’t weigh feathers; he’s just that strong.

  Then we’re stripping clothes off each other as fast as we can go. Jackets, shirt, sweater, unbuckle the belt, shoes, socks, jeans. He takes me into his arms and unhooks my bra, pulling the cups off me delicately, but fast. “Wow,” he says. “Beautiful.” And he kisses me right between my breasts, covering them with his big hands and bouncing them. “You are the sexiest woman I have ever seen.” Something inside my chest melts at the reverence in his voice. And then his fingers caress one nipple while his lips are on the other, and I moan at the rush of need through my body. With every kiss, every lick, every touch, I want him more.

  I’m reaching for my lacy red panties when he stops me with those big hands on my hips. He leans back on his heels, and I get a good eyeful of the glorious tentpole in his boxers, framed by those mighty thighs. “What’s this?” he says, his voice dark and low and sexy. “Are you wet for me, baby? Holly, is this big wet spot on your panties from me kissing your amazing tits?”

  “From wanting you,” I confess. “All day. I saw you, and I started having naughty thoughts right then.” I’m still having naughty thoughts. I’m just enjoying them more, because they’re becoming reality.

  His hands tighten on me. “I hope you don’t like these panties,” he says, and bends down to kiss my triangle through them. “’Cause I’m rippin’ them off you right now.”

  I have a spare pair in my purse, but I wouldn’t care if these were my only underwear. He can do what he wants with them.

  There’s a tearing sound, and then my whole body is open to his gaze, open to the cool air of the room. Adam seizes a pillow and props my hips up on them, and then I realize what he wants to do. It makes me moan in anticipation. He growls, and then he’s between my thighs, gently smoothing my inner lips with his fingers, teasing them open. I can’t help it; I moan. “Mine,” he says, and growls again like some big male animal, before his head comes down and his tongue is on me, licking my clit. Up and down, up and down, and then in a tiny circle right on my clit, fast but steady, just the right kind of pressure.