Secret Billionaire Returns on Christmas novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Sugar Shack
In the cold shack Caleb tells Nina what he took, and she shows him what she thinks of that; at dawn his name is on the Christmas Eve program.
The sugar shack stood behind the church, at the end of a path nobody had shoveled.
Hazel's father had built it for boiling maple sap, and it still smelled of smoke and sweet wood.
There was a cast-iron stove, a narrow bed, and a quilt folded square at the foot.
Hazel lit the stove herself, kneeling in her good cardigan.
"Nobody comes out here in winter but me," she said. "I clean the church Tuesdays. Keep the stove low and the door shut."
She pressed a paper bag into my hands.
It held four ham sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.
Then she took Caleb's face in both palms and looked at him for a long moment.
"You got tall," she said, and cried.
"Mom."
"Go inside. It's snowing."
She left in her one-headlight truck before either of us could say thank you.
The shack warmed slowly.
I sat on the bed with the quilt around my shoulders and watched my husband feed split logs into the stove.
His back was to me.
His shoulders were rigid under the canvas coat.
"I never told you everything," Caleb said.
"You told me you took church money."
"I told you the number. I didn't tell you what it felt like."
He kept his eyes on the fire.
"It was Christmas Eve. I was eighteen."
"My father found my college letter from California."
"He said a boy who wanted to leave deserved to."
His voice went flat when he talked about boards and layoffs.
"He put me out on the porch with a coat and my boots. It was nine degrees."
"I climbed back in through his study window, because the lock was broken."
"I took the church envelope from his desk. Three thousand eight hundred dollars."
"You took what you could carry."
"I took what a bus ticket and a used laptop cost, and a month of rent."
He swallowed.
"I told myself I'd pay it back, and I never did."
"You've paid millions to a hundred charities."
"None of them was that church."
I stood up and let the quilt drop.
"Caleb."
"I'm a thief, Nina. He's not wrong."
"He's a bully who burned two hundred dollars to feel big," I said. "You were eighteen, on a porch, in nine degrees. Turn around."
He turned.
His eyes were wet.
He looked like the boy on the porch, and also like the man who owned my whole heart.
I took his face in my hands and kissed him, hard and slow.
He made a sound low in his throat and his arms came around me.
The coat hit the floor.
Mine followed it.
He lifted me by the thighs and I wrapped my legs around his waist.
The heat of the stove was on my back and the cold of the shack was everywhere else.
"Bed," I said against his mouth.
"It's about two feet wide."
"Then you'll have to be close."
He set me down on the quilt and stood over me in the orange light, undoing his shirt one button at a time.
His chest was broad and dark-haired, and I had wanted the sight of him since the car.
I pulled my sweater off over my head and unhooked my bra, and his eyes dropped to my breasts and stayed there.
"God, look at you," he said.
"Come and do something about it."
He knelt on the mattress and took one nipple in his mouth, sucking until I arched off the bed.
His hand slid down my belly, flicked open my jeans and shoved inside.
Two fingers slipped through my folds, and I was already soaking wet.
"You're drenched."
"You've been in that coat since Denver. I've been thinking about it every mile."
"About the coat?"
"About what's under it."
He laughed, then his thumb found my clit, and the laugh turned into a groan.
I shoved his jeans down his hips.
His cock sprang free, thick and hard, and I wrapped my fist around it and stroked him from root to tip.
"Nina."
"I want you inside me."
"Say it again."
"Fuck me, Caleb. Right now. I don't care who hears."
He tore my jeans off my legs and pushed my knees apart.
He lined himself up and drove inside in one long thrust.
I cried out, and the sound hit the wooden walls and came back.
He filled me completely, so deep I felt it in my teeth.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked.
He started to move, slowly at first, each stroke dragging out of me and sliding home.
The bed groaned under us.
I clutched his shoulders and wrapped my ankles around his back, pulling him deeper.
"Harder."
He gave me harder.
His hips slammed into mine, again and again, the headboard knocking against the wall.
Sweat ran down his chest, and I licked a line of it off his collarbone.
He reached between us and rubbed my clit in tight circles, and the pressure wound up inside me.
"Come for me," he said roughly. "I need to feel you."
"Caleb, I'm..."
I broke.
My whole body clenched around him as the orgasm ripped through me, and I screamed his name into his neck.
He swore, went rigid, and spilled hot and deep inside me with a long shudder.
We lay tangled and gasping on the narrow bed while the stove ticked.
"I love you," he said into my hair.
"I know. I love you too."
He laughed, and it sounded like something finally loosening.
I fell asleep with my cheek on his chest.
At first light a truck engine woke us.
Hazel stood at the door in the gray dawn with a thermos, her face pale and wet.
"Frank put your name on the Christmas Eve program," she said. "He's going to read it from the pulpit."
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