Tropical Christmas Stag Read online

  “My letter,” she cried, holding the sodden piece of paper. The ink had run, and it was stained in a rainbow of unreadable color. “The love letter you wrote me.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Conall said, gathering her up to hug her as she sobbed. “That wasn’t a letter. That was a note for housekeeping. I was asking for more towels in case you wanted to sleep in the shower again.”

  Gizelle cried harder into his shoulder and because he was touching her, he could hear Tex, behind him, saying with satisfaction, “He’ll be on the next plane out.”

  The bear was slogging out of the shallow end of the pool, where Scarlet was standing with her arms crossed, safely back from the spray of salt water as the bear shook itself.

  She didn’t look amused.

  “Good riddance,” Conall said sharply.

  Then Gizelle was pushing back from him, looking critically at the note. “Do I have to sleep in the shower?” she asked. “Your bed was very comfortable.”

  “You can sleep anywhere you please,” Conall said, still holding one of her hands.

  “Oh!” Gizelle said. “You could come sleep at my cottage!”

  Conall imagined trying to sleep in her tiny outdoor shower and cringed. “Can I convince you that my cottage is better?” he said hopefully.

  But Gizelle was already pulling away and on to her next thought. “I have to go try figgy pudding,” she remembered. “And you’re not wearing clothes. Tex is always telling me to put on clothes.”

  Then she wasn’t touching him, and whatever else she said was lost to the silence that fell.

  Conall turned to glance at Tex in time to catch him shrugging and saying, “I am.”

  The bartender had the balls to look amused by the whole thing.

  Chapter 35

  Gizelle paused inside the back kitchen door, bracing herself against the noise and bustle of Chef’s domain.

  Chef was Magnolia’s mate, and he was just as wonderfully large and gentle as Magnolia was, but the kitchen where he loved to be was full of sharp things, and always very noisy.

  Chef was singing, of course, and the kitchen was quieter than it sometimes was; the rush of breakfast was over and things were being washed.

  “How was your picnic?” Breck asked her, easing a heaping tray of dishes into the soapy water for the dishwasher.

  “Awful. It was tense and the watermelon got sandy and I don’t like the beach,” Gizelle said honestly, after pausing to remember. “But the sandwiches were good!”

  “And after...?” Breck said leadingly.

  Gizelle blinked at him. “I ran away.”

  He looked disappointed for her, but Gizelle was quick to add, “But it’s all right now. I can make him hear and he can make my whole body sing, and I beat him at backgammon.”

  Breck grinned at her. “That’s my girl.”

  “Gizelle!” Chef called from further within the kitchen. “They’re coming out of the oven now!”

  Gizelle darted past Breck down the shiny kitchen aisles and found Chef, pulling a tray from the steaming oven. A dozen more were already cooling on the counter.

  The figgy puddings did not look like the soft pudding she had expected, but like dark, dense cakes, round and ridged. They were mottled and rather unattractive, and the smell was rich and fruity and a little bit like Tex’s bar.

  “When can we eat them?” Gizelle asked eagerly.

  “Two weeks,” Chef said, to her horror. “On Christmas Eve.”

  “Two weeks?” A week was an eternity of moments to wait.

  “They have to age a bit,” Chef insisted. “Traditionally I should have given then a full four weeks, but they’ll do.”

  “Two weeks,” Gizelle moaned. “That’s a lot of anticipation.”

  “Anticipation makes them taste better,” Chef said with a booming laugh.

  “Something has to,” Breck said dryly, beside Gizelle.

  “Won’t they be stale in two weeks?” Gizelle said suspiciously, glancing between the head waiter and Chef. Was this a joke? The staff was always making jokes she didn’t understand.

  “It’s got too much booze to go stale,” Breck scoffed. “It’s basically trumped up fruitcake that you set fire to.”

  Gizelle knew they were joking then. “You’re teasing me!”

  They laughed then, kindly, but Chef shook his head. “He’s basically right,” the big man admitted. “It’s more like a fruitcake with a lot of brandy than a true pudding.”

  “And you light it on fire?”

  “Only for a moment,” Chef assured her.

  “Not nearly long enough,” Breck added.

  Gizelle still wasn’t sure that they weren’t fooling her, but she accepted that she wasn’t going to be getting any figgy pudding that day.

  “Christmas cannot get here soon enough,” she sighed. Then she wandered out of the kitchen to find Conall.

  Chapter 36

  Conall considered the Christmas lights hanging around the bar.

  He hated Christmas: the gaudy decorations, the crushing pressure to buy the perfect presents, the memory of music. He had a hundred reasons to detest the whole season.

  And now he had one reason to love it.

  One wild-haired, wide-eyed woman who’d never done any of it before, whose every tentative smile made him want to move the world for her.

  His laptop was open on the bar in front of him, grinding through the sluggish connection to the Internet. A dozen priority emails from the previous few days needed his attention, each one sounding more urgent than the last. Signature needed, approval required, get back to me immediately, are you ignoring your texts?

  He grinned, imagining what kind of chaos the emails he’d just sent were going to set off. For once he had a reason to be glad he couldn’t manage phone calls. Texts and email at least gave him some buffer.

  Not that he was dealing with any of them now.

  The page he was loading finally resolved, and he scrolled down, impulsively adding anything that appealed to him to his cart.

  He was going to make sure that Gizelle had the perfect Christmas. It was going to cost a fortune in express shipping to get things here in time, but he could not imagine a better way to spend the money.

  She’s here, his elk warned, as excited for the surprise as he was.

  Conall shut the laptop as Gizelle tripped across the tiles to him.

  “How was the figgy pudding?” he asked as she sidled into his arms with a sigh and all the sounds in the world seemed to crowd into his ears. He kissed the crown of her head.

  “Two weeks,” Gizelle said in despair. “I have to wait until Christmas to taste it.”

  Conall remembered that exquisite anguish of anticipation. Though Gizelle’s voice was sad, her eyes were sparkling, and the familiar tension that hummed in her body seemed more like excitement than fear.

  “Time will fly by,” Conall promised.

  Gizelle gave him a puzzled look. “Fly? Like Bastian? Where will it go?”

  “It will pass quickly,” Conall amended. “It will be Christmas before you realize.”

  “But I realize now!” Gizelle countered.

  “You just need something else to do,” Conall suggested, tracing her bare arm with a finger.

  “Oh,” Gizelle said, then, “Oh!” as Conall bent and kissed her neck. “I can think of something,” she said slyly. “But Tex is always chasing people out of the bar for trying to do that here.”

  “Let’s not make him do that,” Conall chuckled. He gathered up his laptop and stood, offering Gizelle his hand.

  She eagerly took it, fingers sliding into his like they belonged there.

  They do belong there, his elk reminded him.

  Chapter 37

  “You have your own pool,” Gizelle observed much later, standing on Conall’s porch.

  “It’s a Jacuzzi,” Conall explained, after she had repeated herself looking at him. “Have you ever been in one?”

  Gizelle shook her head, gazing do
wn at the blue water. It smelled... different than the saltwater pool. She dipped a hand into it, but when she bent her head to taste it, Conall stopped her.

  “It won’t taste good.”

  Gizelle paused, considering the advice. It was probably good advice. She let the water trickle out through her fingers like rain... like dark rain. Dark red. No, bright red. Like blood.

  “Gizelle?”

  Gizelle bit the moment in half and was back on Conall’s porch. The water in the little pool was blue again. “Can I try it?”

  “You can,” Conall said skeptically. “But I’m serious. It’s pretty nasty tasting.”

  Gizelle laughed. “Not tasting it. Swimming in it.”

  “Swimming is an overstatement of what you can do in it,” Conall cautioned. “But we could sit if you liked.”

  Gizelle was already stripping off her dress and climbing up on the steps next to it.

  “Do you want the bubbles on?” Conall asked, pulling off his own shirt and stepping out of his pants. He was looking too hard at her face, like he really wanted to be watching the rest of her but thought it would be rude.

  Gizelle liked bubbles, so she nodded, then leaped back with a shriek when the little pool gave a rumbling roar and erupted into a volcano of froth and foam.

  Conall was quick to slip the switch off and quicker still to come across the deck to her. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “We don’t have to have them on.”

  She was trembling, something she only realized when his arms came around her and they were solid and still. “Why would people do that?” she asked in horror.

  “It feels good,” Conall explained mysteriously. “It relaxes muscles and makes people feel better.”

  “That’s absurd,” Gizelle said flatly. She could not imagine that sitting inside a blender was relaxing.

  “They’re off now,” Conall reassured her. “We don’t have to turn them on.”

  He coaxed her back across the deck and up the steps, then let go of her hand to sink down into the water. There were still a few foamy swells of bubbles along the edge and Gizelle poked at them cautiously before she put first one, then a second foot into the tub.

  It was warm, like the saltwater pool never was. And it was swirly.

  She stepped in another step and took Conall’s offered hand, sliding down into the water to sit next to him on the submerged bench. He felt good, with the cushion of water like a tease between their skin. His hand in hers was big and safe and strong, and when she put her other hand on his chest she could feel his heart thrumming against her palm.

  He tugged her closer, and Gizelle went willingly for a kiss, squeaking against his lips when she unexpectedly floated.

  She could feel him smile beneath her kiss, and that was even better than the kiss itself.

  Chapter 38

  Gizelle was an armful of joy.

  Her kisses were the sweetest thing that Conall had ever known, but never cloying. She had a bright, fresh sweetness, wild and intoxicating. She lived more in every moment than he’d lived in a lifetime, and when she rose beneath him and cried out in pleasure, Conall thought that perishing from happiness might actually be a thing.

  He loved watching her discover things, even when it frightened her. Especially when it frightened her, because she was so brave, shaking with fear and fighting down her instinct to flee.

  Kissing her in the hot tub that she’d crawled back into after bolting away—it was a triumph on every level.

  Ours, his elk agreed in perfect harmony. Our brave, beautiful mate.

  They dried in the warm sunshine on the porch, and Conall drew Gizelle down to sit on the lounge chair in front of him.

  A hairbrush had been among the things that had appeared in his bathroom. “May I brush your hair?” he asked, stroking back the hairs that were drying, loose, around her face.

  Gizelle tipped her head back to look at him from an impossible angle. “You want to?” she said skeptically. If Conall hadn’t been touching her, he doubted he would have been able to lipread upside down.

  “I want to,” he said, and when she didn’t protest, he got up from the chair and went to retrieve the hairbrush.

  When he returned, she had pulled out the few pins that remained from Lydia’s work and was tugging counter-productively at a knot near the end of the braid, trying to untangle it.

  “Let me,” Conall said, drawing her hair into his hands as he settled back onto the chair.

  Gizelle drew her legs up, crossing them in front of her, and put tight hands on the sides of the lounge, clearly bracing for the worst.

  Holding only her hair, Conall could barely hear—everything was a distant swish of sound. Clearly whatever magic was at work did a better job skin-to-skin. He moved his leg so that it was touching her hip and it focused again, like rabbit-ears fixing the reception on an old television.

  “... might get hungry,” Gizelle was saying. “I got hungry when Lydia was brushing my hair.”

  Conall teased the knot she’d made out of the end of her braid and gently unwove it.

  “We can stop any time,” he assured her.

  But when he began to brush, she slowly relaxed.

  The braid had saved her neglected hair from being much worse; though Conall had to stop and carefully coax tangles from several places, he knew that it would have been much wilder if had been left loose.

  “I sometimes think about where I might have come from,” Gizelle said unexpectedly, and Conall stopped brushing for a moment, holding his breath.

  “Where do you think that was?” Conall started brushing again, slowly.

  “Do you think I was made? That a man in a white coat made me in a laboratory like some sort of Frankster?”

  “Frankenstein?” Conall guessed. He did not correct the common misconception that Frankenstein was the monster rather than the scientist.

  “Frankenstein,” Gizelle agreed. “Do you think I’m all parts of different people and that’s why I’m so much in little pieces and hear too much?”

  Conall had once been good at navigating the usual girlfriend questions like ‘does this make me look fat?’ and ‘do you see wrinkles?’ but this was far outside of his realm of comfort. “I don’t think you’re a monster, Gizelle,” he said firmly.

  “But could someone have made me to be like this?” she insisted.

  “It’s possible,” Conall conceded. Then he added, “And if I had made you, I would have made you exactly like this.”

  She tipped her head back to smile at him, then sat in silence for a few moments while he gently tamed another handspan of her dark-and-light hair.

  “Sometimes I wonder about my parents,” she said abruptly. “Maybe I was born broken and they gave me to Beehag because they didn’t want me.”

  “I cannot fathom anyone in the world giving you up,” Conall said firmly. He thought about his own demanding mother and his stern father, and could not imagine even them giving up a baby. “Mothers love their children more than anything in the world.”

  Beneath his gentle strokes, her hair became soft and glossy, with little waves near the end.

  “How did you lose your hearing?” Gizelle asked next, toying with one of the locks while Conall worked another tangle loose.

  Conall made his fingers keep going. The pain that the question always woke in him felt distant and muffled, like hearing her own voice through Gizelle’s ears did.

  “I was in a car accident,” he explained. “A drunk driver ran me off the road. When paramedics found me, I was unconscious and they took me to the hospital, where I wasn’t able to shift until it was too late. I had already healed wrong; there was nothing my elk could do to make it the way it had been.”

  I tried, his elk said mournfully, full of guilt.

  It wasn’t your fault, Conall was quick to assure him.

  “No, of course it wasn’t your fault,” Gizelle agreed. “You must have tried very hard.”

  Conall and his elk both froze, as completely
as Gizelle ever had.

  “You could hear him?” Conall asked in disbelief.

  She could hear me? his elk asked in delight.

  “Of course,” Gizelle said simply. “He has a very nice voice.”

  Chapter 39

  Gizelle could never predict what would surprise people; no one seemed the slightest bit amazed when she realized she could do marvelous things like somersaults. But Conall was absolutely blown away that she could hear his elk.

  “Can you always hear him?” Conall asked, trepidatiously. “Can you hear me?”

  “Not you, but I can always hear them,” Gizelle tried to explain. “I just never understand them. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Those whispers,” Conall said in understanding. “I thought it... was the wind. Or...”

  “Or just voices in my imagination?” Gizelle nodded, and Conall’s brush tugged at her scalp through a knot. “Ow. I thought so for a while. But every so often, when I touch someone, it turns into words. You can’t do that?”

  Conall shook his head. “It only happens with shifters?” he asked.

  “I’ve only ever known shifters,” Gizelle said, and Conall paused in his brushing.

  “Are there very many people who aren’t?” she asked when he started again.

  “Aren’t shifters?”

  “It must be very lonely,” Gizelle explained. “And I wondered if there were very many of them.”

  Conall actually laughed—his surprised laugh, which was different than his delighted laugh, and much different than the giddy chuckle after sex (that was Gizelle’s favorite so far). “There are far, far more people who aren’t shifters than who are,” he explained. “It’s got to be a hundred to one. Maybe a thousand to one.”

  “How awful for them,” Gizelle said in dismay. “Why is that?”

  “I have no idea,” Conall said frankly.

  “Do they have animals sleeping inside of them like Jenny did?”