Page 44 of Holiday Home 2
A contact showed on it. Not a new one, but an updated one. Below one of the sexier images that his phone now carried read a changed name, which she informed him that he was not allowed to change.
Big Sis Avril.
Chapter Sixteen
The Eve
Like the day prior, Liam didn’t sleep in his bed. He remained a stranger to Tess’s bed, but that was hardly worth crying over. Because after he and Avril had parted, the latter escaping into the night before her professor could see the damage he’d done to her neck, he’d spent every other second of that evening indulging in time well spent one house over. Dinner, cuddling on the couch, fallingoffthe couch onto her floor, where neither of them had stood up again until they’d both received their share of climaxes. What was there to complain about?
Upon awakening the following day, Liam dragged his hand over his face, then yawned with his arms and legs stretched out in every direction. As was becoming the norm, he relived the deliriously wonderful events of the previous day as his sluggishness faded. Avril, Tess, not his bed. Liam was nothing but smiles when he exited his recently acquired second bedroom. He had no reason to stop smiling either, as he and Tess soon bumped into each other in the hallway.
“Good morning,” she said, speeding up his awakening with a radiant smile. “You’re up a bit earlier than yesterday.”
“Just excited for today,” he admitted, which was nothing but the complete truth.
While he enjoyed it when Christmas came around as much as the next person, it’d been several years since he’d found himself bouncing off the walls in excitement for the big day. Even thoughthisyear’s big day was Christmas Eve, the point still stood. Anticipation zoomed through his body, battering away lethargy as it delivered impatience directly into his bloodstream. The following six or seven hours would pass like molasses, he expected.
But first, he had somewhere he needed to be.
“The bank?” Tess said, raising an eyebrow thirty minutes later when he informed her he’d be heading out for a little bit. After their brief hallway chat, she’d headed downstairs while he’d made for a quick, steamy shower. Now, they stood in her kitchen, where baking supplies cluttered her counter space.
“Yep. I’ll be back after that. Is there anything I could pick up for you while I’m out?”
“No, I don’t think I’m lacking anything,” Tess said, looking over her supplies. “But thank you for the offer.”
“Sure, just text me if you think of anything while I’m out.”
Smiling beatifically, Tess nodded. “I will.”
However, before he could depart, she stepped away from her cooking supplies and utensils. Her deep blue eyes sparkled wondrously as the distance between them closed.
“See you soon,” Tess said moments before softly kissing him.
“Yeah,” Liam said, heart going on a rampage in his chest. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m done.”
That kiss replayed his mind for most of his drive to his bank. It’d been brief, chaste, and unmemorable compared to some of the more lascivious make-out sessions they’d shared over the past several days. Yet, it stayed with him, the rumbling in his heart urging him to dwell on it.
Around the time that he pulled up to the ATM attached to his bank, he realized why that was.
It’d been the first time he’d experienced a kiss quite like that. It was nothing all that special; millions of men and women received one just like it every single day when they kissed their partner goodbye every day. There were men and women who’d given and received such kisses thousands of times with their current spouses. It was so ordinary that it didn’t incur a second thought from those individuals.
For him,thatwas why it was special.
It was his first mundane, ordinary, pedestrian goodbye kiss from Tess. And for there to be a thousandth one of them, there had to have been this first one.
Joy burbled through Liam as he inserted his debit card and tapped away at the ATM’s touchscreen. As numerous twenty-dollar bills flooded out of its mouth, he collected them and stuffed them into his wallet. Upon checking his phone and finding it devoid of any last-minute requests, he made the trek back home—to his home.
In short enough order, he wrapped Avril’s final gift, placing it with the other two, which he’d wrapped as a single gift after she’d left his place last night. Afterward, several hours before she, Anna, and Victoria were slotted to arrive, he attempted to make his way back over to Tess’s, where he planned to make himself as useful as he could as her kitchen underling.
The sight of a few neighbors out and about on their lawns hindered his plans.
The blizzard no longer locked up their neighborhood, and it was not currently so dark that no one looking outside of their windows would fail to spot him rushing toward the home of a recently divorced professor. Even if they had, which they might have yesterday, he wouldn’t expect them to overthink it. He hardly hadthatkind of reputation; neither of them did.
Nevertheless, it gave him a bit of pause for the first time, realizing that particular trouble might come up if he was seen heading into her house—and then not coming out of it again—too often.
He paced a while as he waited for an opportunity to sneak over, only for him to realize, fool that he was, that hehadas good an excuse to head over today as he ever would. So long as he brought the appropriate items.
Presents. It wasn’t as though any distant neighbors would know that they weren’t for Tess, and since his home situation was well known in the neighborhood, why would it be odd for him to have been invited over for a Christmas Eve party by one of the kindest individuals on the block?