Linda Miller - Christmas In Mustang Creek

Exhausted as she was, however, her brain remained busy, chewing and fretting, gnawing at a single thought.

Jaxon Locke was in Mustang Creek.

While she was in New York and he was in Idaho, she’d managed to ignore his existence. Mostly. She’d gotten on with her life, learned to live, even thrive, without him.

Mostly.

Now, all of a sudden, she was sharing a hotel room with him in a tiny Wyoming town.

Where was the logic?

And how was she supposed to survive this?

Simple question.

But no answers in sight, simple or otherwise.

She squeezed her eyes shut, determined to lose herself in sleep.

But she was still awake when Jax emerged from the bathroom long minutes later; through her lashes, she noted that he was naked, except for the towel wrapped around his lean waist. He seemed to know she was awake, although she was pretending she’d already drifted off.

“Listen to that wind,” he said. “Sounds like a pack of hungry wolves. It’s brutal out there.”

She gave up on the sleeping-beauty act. He’d always been able to read her energy in some mysterious way, and fooling him was usually too much work. “Nice of you to share the room.” There. She’d said something civil. Even cordial.

But distant, as well. She certainly didn’t want to send the wrong message.

No way was she going to sleep with him.

Not that he seemed to expect it.

The problem was that a part of her wanted to leap from her bed to his—talk about sending messages—to open her arms to him, brazen as could be, and abandon herself to his lovemaking, to him. To the singular combination of them.

Even after all this time, and all the deliberate forgetting, her body remembered.

They’d certainly never had any problems in bed. Their troubles had stemmed from other things, like his old-fashioned attitudes. He hadn’t wanted a professional woman who could go toe-to-toe with some of the most intimidating people in the advertising world. Some of the bitterness flooded back, sobering and hurtful. No, as far as she could tell, Jax had wanted a carpooling, cookie-baking wife and mother for his children, someone who loved small-town life to the exclusion of all else. Or, at any rate, to the exclusion of any other kind of place. Someone who sewed gingham curtains for the kitchen windows and taught Sunday school and fussed over her flower beds.

All right, maybe he hadn’t mentioned those things specifically, but they went with the territory, didn’t they?

To Jax’s credit, he’d never pretended to like New York City as much as she did. For him, it was a mere stopping place along the way to someplace else, third base in some metaphoric baseball game. Next stop, home plate.

Translation: wide-open spaces, pickup trucks, mixed-breed dogs.

The country.

Well, at least he’d been honest. That was more than she could say for a lot of the guys she’d dated, before and after him.

He’d been considerate, polite, intelligent...and sexy.

Very, very sexy .

Once again, Charlotte was stricken with quiet astonishment. One moment she’d been firmly planted in a reality she knew and understood. The next...

Well, the next moment Jax was here . She still didn’t quite believe it.

“Of course I’d share the room,” he said.

Charlotte was confused. Share the room?

Oh, yes. She’d thanked him earlier, and now he was responding.

Keep up , she chided herself silently.

It occurred to her then that Jax’s voice had sounded a little too gruff. Maybe he’d picked up on her thoughts. Maybe he was going to drop that towel any second now.

She flipped over onto her side, facing away from him.

“Thanks,” she murmured. For some reason, her throat seemed to swell, and her eyes burned.

“You’re welcome.” He hadn’t moved. She would’ve known it, felt it, if he had. And his voice was still low, still hoarse. “I really want you, by the way.”

There went that honesty of his, kicking in at exactly the wrong moment.

Charlotte tensed. “Not gonna happen.” Was she warning him off—or reminding herself not to let yesterday’s memories overwhelm today’s good sense?

“Your choice, of course,” Jax told her quietly.

She rolled back to face him again and said the worst thing possible. “It would be a bad idea, you know.”

Great. She’d just admitted she’d been thinking about how good it would be to lie in Jax’s arms, to let him awaken her body just one more time.

Jax grinned, and he had the single most appealing boyish smile of any man she’d ever met. “But not out of the realm of possibility?”

She might as well be honest with him, too. “Unless you happen to have a condom, yes, way out.”

She was happy—and yet somewhat disappointed—that he seemed dismayed. “Yeah, good point. I don’t.”

“Then, go to sleep.” Charlotte closed her eyes again.

She heard the whispery rustle as he pulled on whatever he was going to wear to bed. He must’ve let the towel drop to the carpet... This whole thing was entirely too intimate, too familiar. If she could just fall asleep...

“Charlie...” Jax’s voice was soft, and she wanted to scream, because she was trying so hard to distance herself. She was, wasn’t she? Despite that dumb remark about the condom. But it wasn’t working at all. “I really have missed you,” he said.

Now he wasn’t playing fair.

Charlotte wouldn’t, couldn’t, look at him. “Am I the reason you’re here in Mustang Creek?” The question tumbled right out of her mouth, going straight from her subconscious mind to the tip of her tongue and neatly bypassing her normally competent brain. “I mean, I know you had a job offer, but...” She fumbled to extricate herself.

Must have been the exhaustion, she reflected, frantic to find an explanation for herself.

“Could be,” he said.

Then he sighed, and she heard his mattress give way as he got into his own bed.

And that was it. Two seconds later he began to snore gently.

She, on the other hand, was wide-awake.

Momentarily, she considered homicide. A pillow over his face might do the trick.

It was certainly tempting.

* * *

Jax woke, blinking, confused at first, having slept like the proverbial rock, but then it all came back to him.

The long drive.

The blizzard.

And Charlotte, sharing his hotel room but not his bed.

Right.

The storm must have eased up a little; the wind was no longer buffeting the window like a whole tribe of banshees trying to get inside. Intricate patterns of frost, stars and whorls covered the glass.

Water ran in the nearby bathroom, and he pictured billows of steam rolling out when the door opened.

Charlotte was in the shower. It felt good to lie there and imagine her gloriously naked, and so close by. He had an excellent memory, and she had the kind of body that did it for him: slender, nicely proportioned breasts, not big but not small, either, long legs that looked sexy when she wore a business skirt, but in his opinion would look even better bared by some cutoff shorts and tanned by the Wyoming sun.

He was definitely a leg man.

He enjoyed the fantasy he had going. A while later the shower was turned off and then, subsequently, the hair dryer. She appeared, wearing a pair of jeans and a light blue sweater, still barefoot, her dark hair shining and brushing her shoulders. She’d never worn much makeup; she didn’t need it, in his opinion. Other than a touch of lip gloss and maybe some mascara to accentuate those green eyes, she personified the small-town girl she’d tried so hard to leave behind.

“Good morning.” He said it cheerfully because he was feeling pretty cheerful, especially when her gaze dropped briefly to his bare chest before she realized it and looked him in the eyes.