Chapter
THREE
“You forgot this.” Warren set Julia’s wineglass on the coffee table in the great room.
“I never forget wine.” She was standing on a stepladder, positioning a fresh wreath over the fireplace. Her raised arms elongated her body and caused her breasts to round the front of her T-shirt.
Not the first time Warren had noticed them. Or imagined what they looked like naked. What she looked like naked. Slim, pale curves, long legs, breasts that would fit just right in his hands. Despite his reluctance to date, he hadn’t been a monk the past thirteen years, but his affairs had never stopped him from thinking about Julia.
He didn’t feel guilty about it either—she was a beautiful woman, and he was a man with a strong sex drive, and one plus one still equaled two. His curiosity about her had become as familiar as their relationship. But he knew—had always known—he’d never discover the reality of what Julia Bennett concealed beneath her flawless appearance.
“I’ll help you with that,” he said.
“No, I’ve got it. Stand over there and tell me if it’s straight.”
“It’s a wreath.” He moved away from the fireplace. “Any way you hang a circle, it’s going to be straight.”
“Do you see this bow?” She tapped the red velvet bow. “This needs to be centered at the top.”
He cocked his head. “It’s centered.”
“You’re not looking at it.”
“How do you know?”
“I can feel you looking at my ass.”
“Which is right at my eye level, so who could blame me?”
Julia threw him a derisive scowl over her shoulder. “This is going to take forever unless you cooperate.”
“The wreath is straight,” he assured her. “And your ass is perfect.”
Her eyes narrowed, even as a faint blush rose to her cheeks. Warren winked at her and headed over to open one of the boxes.
“Where did you pick this wreath up?” Julia climbed off the stepladder. “It’s nice and fresh.”
“From the guy near the place in Santa Cruz where we went that time.”
“Oh, the café with the eggs benedict. We should go there again with Hailey.”
“Tell me when you want to go, and I’ll clear my schedule.” Warren held up several glass snowmen from one of the boxes. “Where do you want these?”
“Over there.” She waved a hand, and he brought them to an end table in the vicinity of her wave.
They put out Julia’s frosted vases, snowflake table linens, and a lighted Dickens’ village. On Sunday, as usual, they’d trek into the Santa Cruz Mountains to pick out the tree—an event that would generate a lot of good-natured bickering and end with hot chocolate and a tree-decorating party.
Just one other Stone family tradition that had taken root only because of Julia. Though she could be abrasive and fiercely overprotective where the Stone siblings were concerned, Warren’s respect and gratitude toward her knew no bounds. He would never be able to thank her for keeping his family together when they’d all been on the verge of falling apart.
She pulled the stepladder over to the doorway and climbed up to pin a ribbon of mistletoe to the frame. Again he let his gaze skim over her body, lingering on the pale seam of skin exposed at her midriff where her T-shirt rode up slightly.
“I’m thinking one sprig of mistletoe is enough this year,” she remarked. “Or Tyler will catch Kate in every doorway just so he can plant one on her.”
She tossed Warren a smile and climbed off the ladder.
“She’s the best thing that ever happened to him,” he said.
“Like Polly is to Luke. And Hannah to Evan.”
And you to me.
Julia was unquestionably the best thing that had happened to Warren in the past thirteen years.
She studied the mistletoe hanging right over her head. “Is it centered?”
“Looks great.” He was suddenly seized with the desire to close the distance and plant one on her. The mistletoe was a great excuse.
He smothered the urge, unsurprised by the strength of it. Knowing she’d been hurt had all his jealous, protective instincts clawing to the surface. Where Julia was concerned, those instincts were always there, but usually Warren kept them somewhat contained.
The mention of her ex-husband Sam had also pushed Warren’s thoughts in a direction he never let them go—to a Christmas Eve night when he’d had a sudden, shocking taste of Julia Bennett and discovered that she was wild honeysuckle and ripe cherries.
He clamped down on that memory, pushing it back into the box where it needed to stay. Seeking a distraction, he tilted his head toward the kitchen.
“Come on, let’s make mulled wine.”
“What for?”
“To see what it’s like. I’ll help you.”
Julia gave him a wry smile. “You mean you’ll make it while I watch.”
“I’m good with you watching.”
She raised an eyebrow but picked up her wineglass and followed him into the kitchen. Warren searched on his phone for an “authentic” recipe, then went to the wine cellar to retrieve a few good bottles of cabernet.
“Hot wine with spices sounds rather awful.” Julia hitched herself onto a stool at the counter. “If you take it to Sugar Rush, no one will drink it.”
“I’m not doing this for Sugar Rush,” Warren said. “I’m doing it for you.”
She blinked, her cheeks appealingly pink. Warren poured the wine into a clean pot, and added measured amounts of brandy, cinnamon, orange zest, honey, cloves, and ginger. He lowered the heat to a simmer and ladled some of the brew into her glass.
“Try it.” He set the glass in front of Julia. “It needs to simmer for a while to reach its full flavor, but this is a start.”
She took a sip and lifted her eyebrows. “Not bad. Weird and a waste of excellent wine, but not bad.”
“It’s called glögg in Nordic nations and Glühwein in Germany.”
“How do you know that?” Julia asked.
“I get around.”
“I know you do.”
A teasing warmth crackled between them. Warren took the list out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Now you can cross it off your Before Fifty list.”
“Oh.” She looked disconcerted. “I didn’t keep the list so I could finish it. I don’t even know why I didn’t just throw it away.”
He shrugged. “Then at least you know how to make mulled wine.”
“Why would I have ever thought that would be a useful skill?” She gave a humorless laugh. “I mean, thanks for doing it, but it’s not as if knowing how to make mulled wine would ever have gotten me anywhere in life.”
“You don’t always have to do something just because it will get you somewhere,” Warren said. “Sometimes it’s okay to just want it.”
“Yes, but the things I wanted at nineteen are very different from the things I want at fif—forty-nine.”
“So what do you want at forty-nine?”
She hesitated for half a second before sliding off the stool without a response.
She took the wineglass and list back to the great room. Warren turned off the stove and put the dirty pots in the sink. When he joined her, she was searching on her phone.
“I have to spend most of the week working on Deck the Halls,” she said without looking up, “but I can stop by in the evening to finish up the entryway and the other rooms.”
“You don’t need to do all of this.” He sat beside her as she checked her calendar. “Let the kids do it.”
“No, I’d like to have it done before Hailey arrives.”
Despite his belief that Julia was taking on too much this Christmas, warmth spread through Warren’s chest. He appreciated everything she’d done for his sons, but her relationship with Hailey was special. Julia hadn’t stepped into Rebecca’s maternal role, instead navigating her way between being Hailey’s aunt, advisor, and confidante. The fact that his daughter had become such a smart, well-adjusted young woman after what she’d endured was due in no small part to Julia’s influence.
“Hailey won’t mind if you scale back the decorations,” he said.
“I’ll get it done. By the way…” She gave him a narrow sideways glance, her nostrils flaring slightly. “You smell like cheap perfume.”
“Yeah?” He lifted his sleeve to his nose.
“I guess you didn’t go to Lotus after all,” Julia said dryly, placing her phone back in her bag.
“I went to the Troll’s House. Got hit on by a girl who wasn’t born when I graduated from college.”
“Nice.” Julia sniffed in contempt and reached for her wineglass. “She must have daddy issues.”
He grinned at the snide tone to her voice. “Are you jealous?”
“Of course not. I just don’t think getting hit on by a girl half your age is anything to brag about.”
“Not bragging, just stating a fact. You ever get hit on by younger men?”
She arched an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
A stab of jealousy caught him off guard. He didn’t often admit how much he disliked the idea of Julia with another man—younger, older, or her age. He’d avoided the dates she’d brought to social events over the years and never speculated about what she did with them. Because if he did, he might explode with frustration. Not that he needed to think about that either.
His jaw clenched. He grabbed the wineglass from her and took a swallow of the warm, spicy wine, deeply regretting having started this line of conversation.
“I don’t think about it,” he said. “Why would I?”
“Well, you asked,” Julia reminded him. “And the answer is yes. There’s a lot of cougar bait running around out there.”
Warren scowled. “You’re not a cougar.”
“I could be. Just like you could be a sugar daddy.”
“Christ.” He gave a disparaging snort. “The president of Sugar Rush becomes a sugar daddy. I’d be a caricature. Hey, baby. You like your sugar raw, powdered, or refined?”
Julia laughed. “Personally I like it raw, but as long as it’s sweet, I’m not fussy.”
The husky tone to her voice added fuel to his already hot blood. Against every ounce of his better judgement, he asked, “So do you take the boy toys up on their offers?”
She shrugged and didn’t respond—clearly a ploy to make him wait. Time stretched. While they occasionally mentioned their respective dates to each other, their sex lives had never been a topic of conversation. His simmering jealousy rose to a boil. No kid could satisfy a woman like her. No other man could either.
Warren didn’t have to wonder how he knew that. He just did. He knew her.
“Once,” Julia finally admitted. “A few years ago, a… young man was an assistant on a photo shoot I was styling.”
His neck tightened with irritation. “Young man, huh?”
“He was twenty-two.”
“You sure?”
“I asked to see his ID when we went out for drinks with the crew. I ended up going home with him. More out of curiosity than anything else.”
Warren swallowed the last of the mulled wine and refilled the glass with Syrah.
Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t fucking—
“And?” he asked.
Dickwad.
“Oh God.” She took the glass from him, bringing it to her lips. “He was so nervous and overeager, which I guess was sort of flattering, but I felt like such a teacher. It wasn’t terribly sexy. Or satisfying. Or… um, long.”
He needed a scotch, not another sip of her wine. He rubbed his hands over his face and blocked an unwanted image of Julia naked with a twenty-two-year-old.
“That surprised you?” he asked.
“I might’ve had some hopeful ideas about youth and stamina.” She rolled her eyes with amusement. “I was wrong.”
Warren grabbed the glass back from her and drained it. He was having an imaginary pissing contest with an unknown twenty-two-year-old kid. What the hell was wrong with him?
“You don’t like giving orders, huh?” He tightened his fingers on the glass.
She made a little hmm noise in the back of her throat. She’d make the same sound if she were spread out under him, her wrists trapped in his grip, her legs wrapped around his—
His dick twitched. He was usually decent enough to fantasize about her only when he was alone in his bedroom. Except this conversation, which he’d started, had fired him with more than he knew what to do with.
“I do enough of that at work,” she said, her mouth twisting.
She took the empty glass from him and set it on the table. She had fine-boned features—dark blue eyes, high cheekbones, a straight nose, full rosebud mouth. With her lovely face, long, tapered fingers, and slender figure, she looked like a princess. But she had the heart and soul of a gladiator, one who rarely let others see past her elegant ferocity.
A hard rush of protectiveness and jealousy filled him. He hated the thought of another man, no matter his age, putting his hands on Julia. He hated that she’d been hurt, that someone had blindsided her to the point that she’d cried.
And he hated even more that she felt like she’d failed, that she’d missed out on something… because even though she’d lived and worked in London, travelled extensively, built a successful company, had prestige and wealth, if Julia had missed anything in her life, it was all Warren’s damned fault.
“So?” Julia shot him a sideways glance. “That was my foray into cougardom. What about you?”
“I’ve never forayed into cougardom.”
She chuckled. “Please. Young Warren never got it on with an older woman?”
He didn’t think it necessary to tell her about the VP’s wife who’d seduced him at seventeen. “Not recently.”
She turned her head to eye him suspiciously. “And you’ve never been tempted by those twenty-year-olds in their mini-skirts and moto jackets?”
Ah, hell. She’d told him the truth.
“A few times,” he admitted. “But they had to be at least twenty-five.”
“And how was it?”
“The sex was great. The rest… not so much. They went on about music and movies I didn’t care about, and I kept wanting to advise them on their financial portfolios. Not a dynamic that worked.” He refilled the wineglass from the bottle of Syrah. “Not to mention the whole thing had a sleazy vibe I didn’t like. Not for me.”
“What… or rather, who is for you then?” Julia asked. “I mean, besides Rebecca.”
Rebecca had been “for him.” The perfect complement to his imperfection. She’d been his pillar, the reason he’d become a responsible, hard-working adult at such a young age. His father had insisted that he work outside of Sugar Rush to learn about the “real world” for several years, and after stints at gas stations and restaurants, Warren had started on the production line of Sugar Rush’s factory floor. He’d worked his way up in the company, Rebecca steadfastly at his side, her focus on raising the children. He’d never deviated from the path of work and family. Never wanted a woman who could offer him anything different.
Except…
He blocked that thought before it could go any further.
He didn’t know what he’d have been if it hadn’t been for Rebecca. She’d been a rock. Julia had been like the sea—constantly changing, shifting, moving. Until somewhere along the way, she’d stopped.
Because of him.
Shit. He frowned down at the glass. Who was for him? Not the divorcees or sugar babies. Not any of the professional women he’d encountered in his career. Not the Sugar Rush VPs or employees. Not his fellow climbers.
But Julia… he’d wondered often about the possibility over the years. The thought of Rebecca hadn’t been the thing stopping him—it had been more Julia herself. The invisible wall she’d put up between them.
He set the glass down and picked up her Before Fifty list from the coffee table. A few more blue check marks indicated the items she’d already completed. Sleep under the stars. Skinny-dip. Go zip-lining. Be there for my next niece or nephew’s birth.
She’d been there when Evan was born. Next to Rebecca on the other side of the bed, holding her left hand while he held his wife’s right hand.
“She missed you,” he finally said.
Julia didn’t respond for a moment before she admitted, “I missed her. Biggest regret of my life, causing a rift between me and my sister. Well, second biggest.”
“Sam was the first, huh?”
“No.” She ducked her head, the curtain of her smooth blonde hair falling forward to conceal her profile. “You were.”
Guilt seized his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” She flipped her hair back to look at him. Despite the amount of wine they’d both consumed, her gaze was clear and sharp. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Warren. I’ve been sorry for almost thirty years. What kind of woman hits on her sister’s husband?”
The question flared and exploded between them like a long-dormant firework whose fuse had just been lit. Not until this second had either of them ever acknowledged that Christmas Eve night when she’d pressed her hot open mouth against his. His head flooded with memories of her cherry breath, the crush of her sweet, soft body, the tangle of her long hair.
His dick stiffened. He tilted his head back and swallowed the wine. Those memories had taken root deep inside him the instant they happened. Fuck if he hadn’t tried his damnedest to smother all of them, to eradicate them from his blood, his consciousness. He’d failed miserably.
“I’m sorry,” Julia repeated, her forehead furrowing. “I never stopped thinking that if I hadn’t done that, Rebecca and I could have had a much closer relationship. And you never wanted to talk to me after that, did you?”
Shame and guilt knotted in his throat, blocking a response. He stared at her mouth, her lips stained with red wine, the tempting indentation in her upper lip that looked as if it would feel as soft as a flower petal against his finger. Then he made the mistake of moving his gaze lower, over the curves of her breasts.
Christ. Her nipples were hard, poking against the front of her designer T-shirt. She was as affected by memories of their kiss as he was. What was she wearing under her shirt? His mind flashed with an image of her in a transparent black bra that showed off her dark areolae and tight nipples…
He pulled in a breath and tried to rein in his wayward thoughts. “I wanted to forget it ever happened.”
Though her expression didn’t change, unmistakable hurt flashed in her eyes. She tore her gaze from his and looked down at the floor. A thick, portentous silence filled the air. His heartbeat kicked into gear, heat flooding his veins.
“But I couldn’t,” he continued. “I couldn’t forget anything about you.”
“Same here.” Her voice was low, contrite. A pulse throbbed at the side of her slender neck. Warren couldn’t take his eyes off it, imagining pressing his mouth to the hot vibration, tasting her fine-grained skin. The scent of her wafted to him—no cheap perfume on her, only Chanel No. 5 underscored by the heady smells of red wine and cloves.
“God.” Julia pressed her hands to her flushed cheeks and closed her eyes. “You’d think I’d be over it after all these years, but I feel like it happened yesterday. I’m still so ashamed.”
He swallowed hard. “Don’t be. If there’s anything that’s changed over the last thirty years, it’s that you never need to be ashamed. Not with me. Not about anything.”
If his words were any comfort, she gave no indication.
She rose and crossed the room. He locked his gaze to the sway of her hips as she walked to the mantel and removed several family photos. She set them on the coffee table and returned to an opened cardboard box to take out a large snow globe.
“Stop,” Warren said.
Julia paused. He pushed to his feet and approached her slowly. She didn’t move, but a visible tremble rippled through her when he stopped in front of her.
He tilted his chin up, drawing her eyes to the top of the doorframe and the mistletoe dangling over her head. Her gaze darted back to his, colliding into him like a thunderbolt.
Her slender throat worked with a swallow. Her eyes were dark sapphires, the Caribbean sea, the sky before a storm. She drew back, her breasts rising and falling with the force of her breath. A crease formed between her eyebrows. Her lips parted.
The heat in his veins flared into a firestorm. Before he could think, he moved closer, sliding one hand to the back of her neck. The air thickened with tension.
“Warren?” Her voice shook.
He pulled her toward him and brought his mouth down on hers.