Rekindling Christmas (5 page)

Almost back to his group, someone
caught his gaze—a woman sitting at a table with three other women. However, there
was something about the one lady that drew him. She had bangs, showcasing her
thick jet-black hair that cascaded down the sides of her face like an obsidian
river, obstructing his view. The rest of her hair was pulled up in some kind of
stylish fashion that left her neck bare, a tantalizingly long neck that gave
him images of running his tongue along it to locate a sensitive spot. His eyes
were drawn again to her face as that dark stream of hair fell forward as she
leaned in to take a bite of food from an overflowing appetizer plate before
her. How much food she had gave him slight pause; dinner had been served only a
couple of hours ago, so he was amazed she still had room to eat. However, it
wasn’t something that bothered him; he liked women who had a healthy appetite
for food…and other things.

As she talked and ate, he could make
out a small pug-shaped nose, a rounded chin, and a set of full plump lips,
accentuated by gloss. That purplish shine just made them more captivating; he
had the urge to taste them, suck them, and have them part so he could kiss
between those lips fully. Swallowing down the saliva that was pooling in his
mouth, he stifled a groan.

Damn, how could just a small glimpse
of a woman draw him in that completely, that quickly, and make him hard as
stone? Because the spike pressing along the back of his zipper was proof of
that. It shocked him. Even the other beautiful women he’d had thrust upon him,
ones that he could actually see all their charms fully, didn’t cause this
strong of a reaction. The woman beside her, African-American as well, pretty
with a medium-brown complexion, blocked his mystery woman’s body. The other
woman didn’t look as if she were going to get up anytime soon so he could take in
more of the beguiling package he wanted to see.

Leaving him with just one wish:
Come
on, finger your hair back so I can see your face.
It was a simple gesture
that women did to be coy and cute around guys. So why wasn’t this golden-brown
beauty doing it?

The woman beside her leaned back,
allowing him to see his “eye-candy’s” upper body, her full breasts contained in
a sweater that conformed to her curves like his hands were itching to do. He
could see that the sweater dropped into a vee, but the end of that long,
tortuous ebony lock flowed down the opening, concealing any view of the skin of
her breasts.

His body nudged at him to cross the
room to her, but on some level he was enjoying the teasing act, as if it was foreplay
of getting to know her, even though the golden-toned goddess didn’t know she
was playing.

Pushing her plate away, she wiped
her long, elegant fingers, burgundy polish coating her nails. Once that was
done she did something that turned him inside out and almost had him choking on
the smooth whiskey in his glass: she claimed the lock of hair at the cleavage
of her breasts and twirled the end of it around her finger. Hypnotically, the
ebony strand danced in between two fingers.

There was something about that small
act—the simplicity of the movement that was neither coy nor cute, but something
that shouted
I’m nervous
—that punched him in the gut and almost brought
him to his knees.

There was only one other black
woman, or girl at that time, he knew who did the same action when she was in a
crowd of people. Could it be…? Or was his mind now playing tricks on him? With
a purposeful step he started across the room, only to have his arm snagged in a
strong, unexpected grip.

Snapping around, he faced Phillip.

“Carson, what are you doing, man?
I’ve been calling you for ten minutes.” Phillip waved his other hand, holding a
glass of vodka on the rocks toward their small group of resort acquaintances. A
few had left and others had joined. He leaned in, giving Carson a stage
whisper. “A woman wants to meet you. She’s
Hispanic
.”

Phillip did some strange eyebrow
wiggle thing that Carson was sure had some sexual connotation behind it about
Hispanic women, but Carson didn’t feel like going through his mental arsenal of
Phillip-isms on all the sexual proclivities of different races of women. His
friend had one for each race.

“I just need a second, Phil…” Carson
glanced back over his shoulder to the woman at the table, but she was no longer
there. The other three women were, but his tease wasn’t. Before he could scan
the room to discover her whereabouts, Phillip was pulling him along.
Shit
.

“Not this time, my friend. Come get
your hot tamale. You’re getting pussy tonight if I have to sit her on your
face.”

Discouraged that the woman had
slipped him, Carson followed his friend. Already his mind worked on ways to get
him out of the sexual situation Phillip was trying to throw him in, even though
his body, still hard from the mystery woman, was roaring to relieve itself
anywhere.

*           *           *

“Oh, my goodness, that bar is a
madhouse. You’d swear some of these people had never seen alcohol before.”
Ryanne slipped into her seat and took a sip of her amaretto sour as she pushed
Courtney her beer across the table.

Courtney, a white woman with short
hair that she had bleached and dyed into the trendy gray fashion, thanked
Ryanne, then she took a healthy swig from the bottle.

“It’s like some welfare line up
there. Reason I’m staying away.” Sage, a medium-brown-skinned black woman with
black hair with dark gold highlights, long but cut in a fashion-forward
gradient style, raised her glass of red wine that she’d been nursing slowly
since Ryanne arrived thirty minutes ago.

Ryanne took another sip of her drink
and watched the groups of women and men pawing and flirting with each other, in
varying degrees of drunkenness. “Is each night like this?”

“I just got here yesterday, but it seems
like it to me. Even at breakfast people are chasing down a hookup over orange
juice and fresh-made omelets.” Danielle, a strikingly pretty full-figured ruby
redhead sitting next to Courtney, shook her head.

“Village Resort, where all the
singles come to let down their hair.”

“That’s what should have been on
their ad.” Sage finished off the last swallow of wine in her glass. “Well,
ladies, I’ve had enough for one night. Nice meeting you, Ryanne, see you
around.”

Ryanne and the other two women
called out good night as Sage made her way out of the room.

A loud, boisterous laugh pulled
Ryanne’s attention across the room. There she saw a mixed crowd, no different from
many others clustered around the room. Hell, she and the other women at her
small table had been shooing away drunken advances since she’d arrived. Requests
by multiple men to “join their party.” Not.

The subdued lighting in the room
made it hard for her to see clearly what all the laughter was about. However,
what she did see was a bald, mixed-race black guy burying his face deep in some
woman’s cleavage where he appeared to be licking something. When he tossed his
head back, Ryanne realized it was a drink, a shot of something.

His intoxicated sexual antics reminded
her of her senior year at a house party after the homecoming game. Shaking her
head, she looked away.

“Stay away from that one.” Danielle
nodded her head to the side, indicating the group Ryanne was just staring
toward.

“Who? The guy that just took a shot
from the woman’s chest?” Ryanne looked from the redhead to the baldheaded man
now making a production of licking droplets from the woman’s breasts.

“Yup. I made the mistake of sleeping
with him.” She shook her head and sipped her blueberry daiquiri. “Correction—getting
screwed by him in the gym at four a.m. this morning.”

Ryanne felt her mouth drop open; she
told herself to close it, but she was in shock to meet a woman who was so
random at giving up her sex.

“Why were you up so early?” Courtney
asked.

“You know I can’t sleep past three. It’s
the journalist in me. My mind won’t turn off.”

Ryanne didn’t think that was the
important matter of discussion.

“True. What’s his name?” Courtney
asked, as if they were discussing a new coworker over lunch.

“Don’t know. I didn’t ask and he
didn’t give it,” Danielle admitted.

“You had sex with a total stranger?”
Ryanne blurted out. Then slapped her hand over her mouth, not intending it to
come out so loud. Hell, most of the people around her were trying to hook up
with an unknown.

Leaning toward the center of the
table, Danielle said, “Hey, what can I say, the man can whisper things that
make your panties wet. That’s saying a lot, since I’d already been working out
for thirty minutes by the time he came in.”

“To work out?” Again, Courtney was
fixated on the wrong thing.

“Doubtful. He was sporting jeans and
a T-shirt.” Danielle finished off her frozen drink with a slurp through the
straw.

This was getting worse. This woman,
who was an intelligent newspaper journalist and attractive with all her
vivacious curves and humorous personality, had allowed some nameless “passerby”
to get into her workout pants. “Unbelievable.”

“Let’s just say he is very talented.
I came
twice
in that ten-minute bang. Hell, who would have known that
the rails on a treadmill could hold up these thighs.” Danielle patted her stout
legs under the table.

“I hope you all remembered to turn
the machine off,” Courtney babbled.

Ryanne eyed the ditz. Evidently,
based on the fact that Courtney couldn’t focus on the main issue of the
problem, Ryanne wonder if the salon had used too much bleaching agent too close
to the woman’s scalp when they were giving her those gray tresses. Shaking her
head, Ryanne glanced back across the table at Danielle. “Did you all at least
make plans to see each other again?”

Danielle stared over her shoulder at
the man who was the topic of their conversation and sighed wistfully, then
faced Ryanne and Courtney again. “Nope. He said something about if we ran into
each other again, maybe there was an option for a threesome with his
roommate…but I don’t want that guy to think I’m some kind of whore, so I’m
staying far away from him.”

We wouldn’t want to give that
impression.
Ryanne
guffawed mentally. She couldn’t really judge the woman before her; Ryanne had
come to the ski resort for a little escape, fun, and the option of meeting a
guy she wouldn’t mind having sex with. The only difference was that Ryanne
hoped that she wouldn’t be so hard up to just give it to the first guy that
crossed her path. Maybe she’d meet him early on and spend the rest of the vacation
getting to know him as well as getting a little sheet action. Not treadmill
romping.

“Who’s his friend?” Eagerly,
Courtney was craning her neck trying to get a good look at all the guys.

“The only man I’ve seen him hanging
with around the resort is the dirty blond with the short hair.”

Ryanne assumed it was the white guy
with the petite Latina climbing all over him. She couldn’t really get a good
visual of him with the woman
spidering
his body with her limbs. The tall,
buff guy had a firm grip on her hips, making the muscles in his biceps and
forearms bulge out. Since she was a preteen, Ryanne had always loved to watch
the play of muscles in a man’s arms as he worked. Her next-door neighbor, a
teen stud, had given her hours of daydreams as she watched him mow his parents’
yard, or wash his blood-orange Mustang GT. This guy at the resort was working
hard, judging by the popping and shifting of those muscles. Ryanne wasn’t sure
if he was holding the Hispanic firecracker to him, or trying to hold her away
from him at a “respectable” distance.

“Damn. If that bitch in heat would
unwrap her body from around him, I could get a better look.”

Why? You planning to offer yourself
up for the threesome?
Rolling her eyes at the riotous group and Courtney, Ryanne looked at Danielle.
“Well, I think you made the best choice in keeping your distance.”

“Maybe.” Danielle shrugged, sounding
wistful. “I’m going to get something else to drink. Something a little stronger
this time.”

“I’m coming with you.” Courtney
popped up.

“Well, I’m going to follow some Sage
advice and head up to my room.”

“Already?” Danielle stopped as she
rose, slower than her companion.

“Alone?” Courtney’s eyes were wide
as the appetizer plates on the buffet.

Standing, Ryanne looked from one to
the other. “Yes, alone. I’m beat from travel today and I want to get up and hit—”

“The gym?” Courtney volunteered.

“The slopes. I plan to give them a
try. But I’ll need to do some shopping first. Catch you all around.” With a
quick wave, Ryanne turned and dashed out the door, barely avoiding a guy who
reached for her hand as she passed him.

In the late hour mix and mingle,
she’d felt so suffocated and overwhelmed by all the blatant sexual energy, she
was starting to second, third, and fourth-guess her decision to come here. Maybe
Florida wouldn’t have been so bad. She would have at least been surrounded by
familiar faces and people who loved her.