Candy Cane Kisses {A Holiday Romance Novella and sequel to 'Hate or Fate'}

Chapter 4

Thank goodness Gray's old room had an attached Jack and Jill bathroom! I sat crisscross applesauce on the tiled floor while he perched on the edge of the bathtub so I could patch him up.

The glass shards hadn't cut deep enough to require stitches, but it wasn't going to be an easy injury to explain to his family. There was a tiny trail of blood droplets leading to the bathroom, which looked a bit the cleanup after a murder.

"Jamie and Melanie were friends when we were in high school," Gray's raspy whisper startled me. "Not best friends, but pretty close."

He hadn't said a word the whole time we'd been in the bathroom. Gray was so irate he couldn't even look at me for more than a few seconds.

I'd done that. I'd forced him to come home and relive the trauma he'd worked so hard to put behind him.

I felt sick to my stomach and so, so afraid I'd somehow pushed Gray past his breaking point that I couldn't speak.

"I think, Jamie took Mel's suicide as hard as me because she couldn't prevent it either," he drew a shaky breath before continuing. "We were both away from home and in college when we found out. Jamie was already furious at me for giving up Lucas and breaking things off with her friend. So, she didn't speak to me at all after Mel, well, you know."

I did know. Their history was as heartbreakingly short as Melanie's life. Obviously, Gray's family was still dealing with the emotional fallout of their sad past.

"Not until she had Billy," he told me. "Something changed after that, and Jamie reached out to try and mend things between us. We worked on it for a while, but my sister and I...We don't agree on a lot of things. Maybe it's because I'm her annoying little brother. Maybe it's because I made a lot of bonehead mistakes that fucked shit up real bad, but it feels like all Jamie wants is to pick a fight with me. Like they all want to keep punishing me for the past."

Gray lowered his face into his hands as his elbows fell on his kneecaps. Tiny pinpricks of blood were already seeping through the shoddy bandage that I'd fashioned around his hand.

His shoulders sagged from the unimaginable sadness he carried on a daily basis. He usually worked so hard to hide it behind the cool air of confidence he projected. 

But not with me.

With me, Gray relaxed into the sincere, and warm, and funny, and intelligent, and compassionate man that I'd fallen head over heels for. When it was just us, his severe guard slipped away to reveal the beautiful mess behind the man, and I loved him all the more for it.

He'd bared his soul to me, and I went and crushed it with one selfish request. 

"Isla," he whispered. When I finally got the courage up to look at the strong angles of Gray's face, I saw a single tear slip between the stubble on his cheek. "Baby, I'm so sorry for this. For them. For Jamie's behavior. For not protecting you from the anger she still has for me. I'm just, so sorry, Isla."

The agony in his expression and the piquant spice of his cologne mixed with my misery to unleash the dam in my chest.

Fresh tears, so hot they could have poached my eyeballs, spilled onto my cheeks. I opened and shut my mouth in a silent gulp. Like a fish out of water, I was physically unable to tell him everything.

How irrevocably he'd changed me for the better. How unconditionally I loved him. How deliriously happy he made me, or better yet, how extraordinarily safe he made me feel. And perhaps most the important thing of all, how deeply sorry I was for putting him through something so awful.

Gray fell to his knees to hold my face in his powerful hands. He was shaking again when he pressed his forehead to mine.

Trembling with the gale force of our feelings, Gray searched the depths of my eyes for the forgiveness he never needed in the first place.

"I need to apologize, Gray, not you!" I managed to blurt through the emotions clogging my throat. "I'm so sorry, baby! This is all my fault! You warned me, but I wouldn't listen. And when I asked to meet your family, you were supportive and sweet and went along with it because you bend over backward for the people you love, even at your own expense.

"You didn't want to come here for Christmas, Gray, I did! I was selfish, and I was naïve, and I hurt the man I love. The man I want to spend the rest of my life with-"

Gray's eyes widened and he swooped in to seize my lips in a feverish embrace I felt in my bones. I pushed my body flush against the solid muscle of Gray's torso to relish the urgent growl that reverberated through his chest.

I didn't get a chance to finish my speech, but, then again, I wasn't sure I needed to. Gray seemed to grasp the point.

"Isla, you are my life." He panted against my greedy lips.

Gray's amorous tone was as ragged and as fraught as his kiss. Our tongues lashed, and swirled, and swept deeper and deeper as if seeking the source of the other's pain to lap it up.

"Fuck, I love you, Isla!" Grays husky declaration damn near drenched my panties. Desire sluiced through my veins like liquid fire, collecting at my core to heat me from the inside out. "I don't how I got so lucky! Fuck this fucking sweater is hot!"

He barely yanked his lips away from our nerve-searing embrace long enough to wrench his woolen sweater over his head.

Since he hadn't caught it on his brow piercing, I slipped my fingers under the t-shirt he had on underneath to run my hands over the ridges of his washboard stomach.

Then, we tugged that off too.

Under the buzz of the bathroom spotlights, Gray's sculpted torso looked mouthwatering, like some sort of inked Adonis.

He pushed my shirt up insistently to palm one of my breasts, kneading and massaging through my cotton demicup bra to induce my strangled cry.

"Oh, my heck, Gray! What happened in here?" Jamie's shrill question was like participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge. "Did someone get their period?"  

I swear, nothing is a bigger lady-boner killer than your boyfriend's sister talking about period blood. Nothing.

Then, the bathroom door swung open, narrowly missing my hipbone because Gray pulled me out of its trajectory.

We peeled away from each other in time to watch the rest of the Meyer family come waltzing in. One by one they froze in horror at the bloody sight of me on their bathroom floor next to a half-naked Gray.