Snow Job (14 page)

When her body and mind had recovered sufficiently to process what had just happened, Elyce felt her resentment rise to the surface again. What right had Karl to make her feel that way, to make her own body betray her best intentions? And what on earth was going on with the orders? Not to mention her own seeming eagerness to fol ow them?

“You liked that,” he said, not a question but a statement of slightly astonishing fact. She rol ed to face him, scowling.

“I like chocolate too, that doesn’t mean it’s good for me to eat it al the time. People like al kinds of stupid things. It was a cheap trick. You were taking advantage of—”

He stopped her tirade with a kiss, ignoring her effort to push him away. He final y released her in his own time with a smirk she had no trouble reading, even in the darkness.

“You liked it. And if you don’t admit it, I may have to make you admit it. Now that I know I can.”

“Yeah, right.”

It had been the wrong thing to say if Elyce wanted to avoid further attention from Karl that evening. He rol ed her beneath him too quickly for her to realize what was happening and ground his hips into hers when she tried to rol him off, scratching his back with her nails in the futile process.

“I almost wish I had something to tie you up with, you little hel cat.”

“Karl, I wil yel and wake the house if you don’t stop, I swear.”

“You wil
not
.” It wasn’t a chal enge, it was an order, and Elyce gritted her teeth in frustration at what seemed to have become her automatic response.

“Can we please just go to sleep?”

“Not until you admit you liked me ordering you around in bed. And yes, I’m ready to go another round, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

She had, in fact, noticed. The evidence was hard to miss, straining as it was against her hip as if trying to seek admittance on its own.

“Why is this so important to you?”

“How many times have you accused me of being a control freak? Do you real y need to ask why I might enjoy this?”

She knew what the outcome would be but couldn’t bring herself to say what he wanted to hear, not when she wasn’t in the heat of passion. It was too embarrassing, too out of character, too unrelated to the greater question of why they were having sex in the first place.

He kissed her again, his lips almost cruel against hers.

In the morning, she would again find reminders of the roughness and her lips would be reddened in a way she would have to explain away as windburn.

Now though, her only thought was that she wanted this, craved the feel of giving up control if only for a brief, insane period of time. She could not have refused to save her life.

Karl raised himself up on his elbows, looking down at her as if mul ing over possibilities.

“Play with your tits,” he final y said.

“Forget it.”

With a look of grim determination, Karl lunged from the bed, surprising a yelp from Elyce, and then turned to grab her around the waist. He pul ed her to her feet and then hoisted her up, avoiding her feet which were kicking uselessly and carrying her to the bathroom. Without a word he snapped on the heater, cranked the shower on ful blast and turned the vent fan up to its highest and loudest setting.

Then, stil silently, he sat down on the closed toilet, yanked her over his knees and landed a stinging swat on her rear end, al before she had realized what was going to happen.

“You are
so
dead!” she hissed when the first shock of the blow wore off. Karl was stroking his hand over her butt, where she knew a red handprint must be blooming now, even if it would be invisible in the scant il umination from the heater and the little plug-in nightlight. She made a token effort to wriggle off his lap, but he held her effortlessly and lifted his hand to spank her again several more times, harder than before.

Elyce knew, even before she felt the traitorous wetness, what her body’s answer would be to his treatment. But she stil blushed at the sensation, the unbearable tingling that spread from her bottom to her snatch, the irresistible urge to arch her back and present an even better target.

Either by accident or design, Karl’s next spanking blow fel between her cheeks, his fingertips slapping smartly against her throbbing pussy, and Elyce moaned so loudly she thought even the rattling vent might not be sufficient to mask the sound.

“Oh my God,” Karl said, pausing to run his fingers over her slit, slipping effortlessly between her over-lubricated nether lips. “If you tel me to stop, I wil .”

“Don’t

stop,” Elyce whispered without thinking, suddenly aware of his erection pressing into her side. He was brutal y hard, even after having just satisfied himself a few minutes earlier.

He smacked her again, alternating from one cheek to the other, until she was gasping and writhing beneath his hand. “Tel me you like it,” he whispered, his tone of delight at odds with their current positions.

“I like it,” Elyce said, wanting to cry. She didn’t have time to dwel on it. Karl pushed her from his lap without another word, urged her onto al fours on the fluffy blue bathmat and mounted her from behind, grunting with effort as he rammed as deeply as possible, gripping her hips for leverage as he pounded into her.

She expected him to come right away, as turned on as he clearly was, but to her surprise he slowed to a stop after a few minutes and withdrew, pul ing her up to her feet.

“Put your hands on the counter,” he ordered, and she complied, though her legs shook with the effort to stand.

She was not surprised when he stood behind her and entered her again, watching them both in the vanity mirror.

His thrusts made her breasts sway—evidently reminding him of his earlier, unheeded command.

“Play with your tits,” he ordered again. “I want to watch you.”

This time Elyce found herself obediently lifting a hand to one breast, cupping it against the tidal motion the sex was causing, pinching the nipple until it knotted tightly under her fingers. She couldn’t help but watch in fascination. Although her own reflection didn’t excite her, the mirrored sight of Karl’s hungry appreciation did. His hand, stealing down around her waist to where they were joined, aroused her further. The motion changed his angle inside her and she felt her orgasm approaching with the speed of inevitability, seconds before she came with a louder moan than she had dared in the bedroom. Karl stared at her greedily as she climaxed, the heater throwing a hel ish red glow over their reflected bodies.

Steam was starting to rise, obscuring the mirror view.

Undaunted, Karl resumed his pace, speeding up now, driving into her with a careless force. Elyce dropped her hand back down to the counter, bracing herself more firmly, and Karl used the added leverage to plunge into her more harshly stil until he paused with a shuddering moan, thrust jerkily a few more times and then ground to a stop.

Elyce felt their combined fluids trickling down her inner thighs even before he separated from her with a sticky pop.

Once apart, the mess was too great to ignore and, without a word, they stepped together into the already-hot shower, washing off in dazed silence. When they were both clean, Karl turned off the shower, rubbed her dry with a towel as he had done so many times in the past and led her by the hand back to the bedroom, where the sheets had grown cold in their absence.

She had planned to take him to task again for his attitude, for his arrogance. She had planned to get back up and put on clean pajamas before going to sleep. She had planned to brush her teeth. But none of these things happened.

The heat from their wel -exercised bodies soon fil ed the space under the heavy down covers, saturating them both with a delicious warmth that would have made it too hard to abandon the bed for the cold, lonely bathroom, even if either of them had remained awake long enough to consider making the trip.

Much later, Elyce would wonder if Karl had actual y offered to take Charles to the bunny slopes the next day, rather than having been talked into it as he’d led her to believe. He seemed to enjoy skiing with his seven-year-old nephew as much as or more than he enjoyed skiing with his thirty-something brother and brother-in-law.

Charles, who had just graduated to the use of ski poles this trip, was nearing the end of his restriction to the green slopes anyway. He was as natural an athlete as his father and uncle seemed to be, and it was clear that within a few years he would be skiing circles around al of them.

Except, Elyce thought, he probably wouldn’t be skiing anymore by then. He would be snowboarding—a sport the older Nashes had not embraced but one the newest family members were al clamoring to learn. The two older girls had actual y started the previous year, and were already zipping around at alarming speeds on their boards and insisting on the fashionably baggy apparel and elaborate, colorful fleece hats so in vogue with the snowboarding set.

They had skied the first day under duress, but abandoned the old-fashioned sport for their new passion once their parents al owed them to. Scott, the sole brave adult, had agreed to accompany them on their snowboarding excursions for the rest of the trip.

Happy enough to be outmoded at the relatively tender age of twenty-nine, Elyce stuck to skiing. Her admittedly biased opinion of snowboarding had convinced her that the entire thing consisted of long periods of fal ing down and sitting in cold snow banks, punctuated by sadly brief periods of actual y getting down the mountain on the board.

And baggy snowboarding clothes were not nearly as flattering as traditional ski pants and fur-trimmed parkas that nipped in at the waist.

“That’s good, Charles. Just like you’re squeezing down with those opposite toes, and you’l go right around. Don’t drag your poles though.”

Karl was grinning widely, his smile so infectious that Elyce actual y smiled back when he glanced over and saw her watching him. He waved a pole toward Charles, who was beginning to draw his skis closer together and weave a confident zigzag down the slope. Elyce and Karl snowplowed after him at a leisurely pace, and Elyce found it somewhat soothing after the previous day’s strenuous skiing. Charles’ chaperoning presence also made it impossible for Karl to raise the issue of what had happened the previous night, a subject which she also found more restful to avoid.

He did manage to slide the topic into another distinctly uncomfortable area, however, as soon as her meandering path took her close enough to him and Charles was far enough in the lead not to overhear too much of their conversation.

“This is fun, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, he’s a good kid. It was nice of you to agree to watch him.” It was more than nice, it was an essential part of the Christmas planning. With Charles and his cousins safely distracted and under the watchful eyes of Karl and Scott, the rest of the parents and grandparents could take the morning to sneak the Christmas presents into the cabin or down from the attic, to assemble what needed assembling, to make sure that fresh batteries would be available in al the many different required sizes when the children and grownups wanted to play with their new toys the next day after gifts were opened. Alice and Joan would be spending the morning, per their long tradition, making gingerbread men for eating and a gingerbread house for admiring. They had started with modest, traditional versions but lately had been venturing into riskier waters, and this year they had decided to attempt a not-quite-to-scale model of the cabin itself in gingerbread.

Karl tracked Charles closely, monitoring his form on the skis. “Remember we always said we wanted two of our own. Karl Junior and Ingrid.”

“Adam and Elizabeth, you mean.” Too late, she remembered that she shouldn’t be having this conversation.

“How do you feel about the name Bruce?”

Elyce sighed. “It doesn’t go wel with Nash. Let’s not do this, okay?”

To her relief, Karl just shrugged. They were nearing the bottom of the slope and Charles was turning to a quick stop, sending a sheet of snow flying in a low arc behind him.

“Can we go again, Uncle Karl?”

“Wel , it’s getting pretty close to lunchtime. Elyce, what do you think? One more?”

“Please, Aunt Elyce? Just one more run?” The boy’s huge brown eyes were like a spaniel’s, too adorable when pleading to resist.

“One more,” she conceded, and chuckled at Charles’

cry of “Awesome!” as he pushed himself off and headed toward the lift line.

“Alicia wil be starting soon. Just when we’re getting Charles off the bunny slopes too. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? We were stil helping change her diapers last Christmas and now she’s going to be three, and Charles is seven…”

“Would you stop?”

“Stop what?” Karl asked, a bit too innocently to be believed. Elyce just rol ed her eyes at him and set off after Charles.

* * * * *

If the morning had been taken up with the familial duty of helping with the children, Elyce and Karl’s afternoon was hardly as free as the rest of the family seemed to assume.

They teased the “couple” about spending Christmas Eve shopping in town, little suspecting that the outing represented meeting a family obligation of sorts just as the morning’s bunny-slope chaperoning had.

The day of reckoning had come, and Elyce and Karl found themselves faced with finding suitable Christmas gifts for one another within the limited time and at the limited places available.