Elf Against the Wall: A Holiday Romantic Comedy (The Wynter Brothers Book 2)

“Psst! Got your dildo out of the trash can.”

“Gran!” I slapped the hand she was using to prod me with the ceramic dildo. “I don’t need that. I threw that away for a reason.”

“You put on a big show so Surly Shirley would get her granny panties untwisted.”

I turned back to the window. I was trying to piece Plexiglas from my dwindling craft supplies over the hole. After Anderson had left me clothes askew, panties soaked, and with a potential public indecency charge, I’d tacked up a garbage sack on the broken window.

As soon as I’d woken up hung over and horny, my father had pointedly reminded me that I needed to fix the window. Today.

“Don’t get cocky.” Granny Doyle waved the dildo at me. “You can’t bank on Anderson being there when you need him. Besides.” She poked me in the side with the tip of the dildo. “If he knows he’s got some competition, he won’t get complacent.”

“I don’t even have anywhere to live. I don’t have room for a custom ceramic dildo. Get rid of that before Mom sees and freaks out.” I grabbed it from her and threw it into the street, expecting it to shatter.

It didn’t. Because of course it didn’t.

Instead, it bounced, sailed… and crashed through the passenger-side window of a big black pickup truck.

“Dammit.”

The pickup truck rolled to a stop in front of the house.

Anderson got out into the snowy street to regard the broken window, his hand clasped over his mouth. He rubbed the back of his head as he approached me. “Gingersnap…”

“I’m sorry!” I blurted out. “I don’t know why I don’t have better decision-making skills.”

“At this point, I don’t think it’s bad decision-making skills. I think it’s bad luck.” Anderson grabbed the front of my jacket, pulling me to him for a deep kiss. When he broke it, he was smirking. “If you show me your tits, I’ll fix that window for you.”

“Well, that is an easy trade.” I grabbed the hem of my sweater and gave Anderson a nice, long view of the girls.

His mouth dropped open, then his head tipped back, and he roared in laugher, collapsing against one of the ornate porch columns, slapping his leg.

“Look, man…”

He gasped in laughter from the porch.

“I called around for some quotes.” I pulled my sweater back down. “That’s like a fifteen-hundred-dollar fix. I owe a lot of people money, and I’m at the point in my life where I’m A-okay with trading mild sexual favors for cash.”

“Damn right.” Granny Doyle fist-bumped me. “You gotta use those things for currency while you still can. It’s like having your own personal ATM.”

“Damn, it’s cold enough to freeze your tits off.” I rubbed my arms.

“I’ll warm you up.” Anderson wrapped me in his strong arms, spinning us slowly and kissing me long and slowly.

I melted against his soft mouth. “Yeah, I could get used to this.”

He laughed against my mouth. “You’re fucking one of a kind.”

“Evie!” My mom was shrill.

I jumped away from Anderson guiltily.

My mother, in chic brown calfskin boots, stepped out onto the porch.

“I just had a very long conversation on the phone with Mrs. Charleston down the street.”

“That nosy old shut-in.” Granny Doyle made a rude noise.

“She said that she saw you out here last night, with him.” Mom pointed at an unapologetic Anderson. “Engaged in intercourse.”

“I wasn’t railing her, ma’am, just feeling her up.”

“You’re probably going to get another call from her because Evie just flashed half the neighborhood,” Granny Doyle said proudly.

My mother closed her eyes and gave a shuddering sigh.

“In my defense,” I said with a grimace, “Dad told me I had to get the window fixed. Anderson isn’t working for free anymore.”

“That is a man who knows his self-worth. We love a king who practices self-care.” Granny Doyle gave a little bow.

“You need to make extra Christmas cakes to take Mrs. Charleston to apologize,” my mom instructed me.

I saluted her. “Cake duty starts at eleven hundred.”

“Ian, let’s go,” my dad called from inside the house then joined Mom on the porch.

“Evie,” he said, glaring when he noticed Anderson hulking in black against the cheery Christmas decorations on the house. “Remember, you are supposed to—”

“Already have it covered, Dad!” I chirped, jerking my thumb at Anderson, who was using a knife to prod at the window frame.

“He’s handsome and handy.” Gran gave my dad a pointed look.

“Ian!” my dad yelled again.

The door slammed.

“Someone doesn’t sound excited for mandatory quality time,” Ian whispered out of the side of his mouth as he passed me and Granny Doyle. My brother had his jacket draped over his shoulders like a cape just to make our dad mad. “You’re going to leave Evie here by herself with that baby-making machine?”

“If Evie wants to make life-ending choices, she’s an adult, and that’s on her.” My dad plopped his hat onto his head.

“Between the two of us, I’m the only one who seems to have figured out how to use a condom,” Anderson drawled, flipping the knife in his hand and doing some fancy maneuver to make it spin in the opposite direction, where he caught it.

“Eight days until Christmas,” my dad announced loudly as he, my mom, and Ian headed to the car.

“Yeah, eight days until Christmas.” I sighed.

“I found a drainpipe in the woods you can stay in,” Gran said conspiratorially. “I’ll help you chase out the hobo.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Your loss.”

“So, can you fix it?” I asked Anderson.

“No problem,” he assured me. “This is historic single-pane glass. I brought some glazing to cut down. Just give me a couple of hours. Do you know the paint color of the window frame?”

“We have some extra cans in the back garage. I’ll grab it.”

“And then I might need another top-up.” He tugged the neckline of my sweater.

Gran piped up, ruining the moment. “You think I can nab that dildo out of your truck, Hot Stuff, since Evie here isn’t using it?”

Anderson squinted. “My brother’s going to kill me.”

Anderson had set up a makeshift shop on the back of the pickup bed, and the saw whirred as I started the Christmas cakes.

I loved Christmas cookies, pastries, and all kinds of desserts. Christmas cakes, though, were my favorite. They were a Murphy family tradition. When I was a kid, I had practiced with an icing piper and shaving cream to create perfect, intricate designs for the miniature cakes.

The sheets of cake—a recipe from Grandma Shirley’s grandmother—were baking in the oven. The house smelled like Christmas.

Several cousins had shown up to help with the cakes. However, they’d all promptly gone back outside to gawk at Anderson.

I flipped one of the thin sheet cakes over onto a cooling rack, put the next set of cakes in the oven, then wiped my hands.

Outside, Anderson was carefully filling in putty around the brand-spankin’-new pane of glass.

“Don’t wreck this one,” he was saying to Snowball while my female cousins swooned.

“That just needs to dry, then I can paint it,” Anderson said, standing up when I poked my head out of the front door.

“Do you want a snack while you wait?”

“You offering?” A slow smile spread across his handsome face, earning him catcalls from my cousins.

A car pulled up, and Grandma Shirley was helped up the porch steps by Felicity and her mom.

“I’m not sure why I expected a wholesome afternoon of Christmas-cake decorating at Melissa’s house,” my grandmother said tartly.

“We should have had the party at my house,” Aunt Lisa simpered.

“Then Felicity would try to bake the cakes, and that would have been a disaster,” Lauren said while sending someone the photos she had taken of Anderson.

“I moved all the leftovers to the cooler,” I told Anderson as he followed me to the kitchen. “Help yourself. I have to get the cake assembly line moving.”

Anderson fished out a cold slice of roast beef and rolled it up then ate it in two large bites. “What do you have on deck?” The water ran at the sink.

“Christmas cakes, four inches,” I said, slipping into the easy rhythm of cooking, where you could just turn off your brain, focus on baking two hundred miniature cakes, and not have to worry about evictions or blackmail or the mad crush you had on the guy your family absolutely hated.

“Christmas cakes? You mean fruitcakes?” He looked over his shoulder.

“Have some goddamn respect.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

I held out my phone with the photos of Christmas cakes past.

“Thirty raspberry almond vanilla, thirty red velvet and chocolate alternated with white, forty green Grinch cakes with cranberry-and-cream-cheese filling, fifty vanilla-and-chocolate alternated, and fifty Christmas confetti cakes. All by midnight.”

“Do you have an army to help you?”

“I have my grandmother and my mom.”

“I like Granny Doyle, but she’s been drinking a lot, and if I’m not mistaken, you need those sheet cakes cut lengthwise in half.” Anderson’s eyes narrowed. “The woman can barely walk.”

“Not her.”

Grandma Shirley took her spot at the end of the kitchen island, instructing one of her great-nephews to turn on the radio. “I want traditional Christmas music.”

“How about a vintage Spotify playlist?” the kid offered.

“No, play the new Snoop Dogg album!” his brother suggested.

I clapped my hands and addressed the gaggle of relatives in the warm kitchen. “Everyone, please stay in the station you’re assigned. If you have to leave, then tap out. Don’t just wander off and leave a cake half-iced. I’m talking to everyone, but Sawyer, I’m looking at you.”

“You’re so picky about the cake decorating. It makes my brain hurt. I needed a drink,” my cousin complained.

“But did you need three?” Nat asked.

“Anderson, this is going to be a shit show, going by last year.” I waved him away. “You might want to take your snack to the dining room.”

Anderson cracked his neck then reached for an apron from the set on the wall.

“Ooh!” My cousin Lauren licked her lips. “I might actually decorate more than one cake.”

Anderson deftly circled the apron ties around his waist then knotted them.

“You are not on the decorating station,” I warned Lauren. “Get your hands off of the icing piper.”

Anderson was neatly rolling up his sleeves when I turned back to him.

“This man is a professional.” Aunt J whistled. “He cooks. He fixes shit.”

“He’s got a dick the size of a coke bottle.” Granny Doyle raised a glass.

“But does he know how to use a knife?” I looked at him.

“Do you have a knife worth using?”

I whipped open a drawer.

Anderson selected a long serrated knife.

“Do your worst.”

“Sharp!” Anderson bellowed as one of my tween cousins tried to reach for the sprinkles.

“Sprinkles need to stay in the sprinkle station,” I reminded him.

Normally, I used wooden blocks to keep my knife perfectly level as I sliced the thin sheet cakes into slices.

The first few times Anderson had deftly sliced the cake into two perfectly even, thin sheets, I’d held my breath, waiting for the knife to slip and the cake to be ruined. But the man was a machine.

“Does he fuck like that?” Granny Doyle asked as Anderson quickly sawed through the next sheet cake.

“You are supposed to be assembling boxes,” I reminded Gran as I used a four-inch round cake cutter to cut perfect circles out of the sheet cake. My aunts layered them on parchment-paper-covered cardboard and spread the filling on the slices.

A small piece of the scrap cake went to Snowball, who was begging on the floor. The rest went to my younger cousins, who, led by the triplets, were happily making cake pops far away from my cake operation.

“That dog doesn’t need any more sugar,” Anderson warned me, still laser focused on cake slicing. “There have been two broken windows in the past twenty-four hours.”

I was more trusting of randos with my sexy photos than I was with letting people decorate the Christmas cakes. There was a very short list consisting of me, Grandma Shirley, and Mom.

The cakes were piling up at Grandma Shirley’s station, though.

Anderson had finished all the slicing ten times faster than I would have.

“Behind!” he barked, scooting past me to the other end of the island.

He grabbed an offset spatula, slid a cake onto one hand, placed it on a cake stand, and set it spinning.

“What are you doing?” I screeched as he scooped up a huge glob of Swiss buttercream frosting.

“Forty Grinch cakes,” he said, the white frosting sliding on in a smooth sheet, not a single crumb of the layer cake disturbed.

“Those are actually a complicated cake.” I winced. “There is an intricate white-and-red lattice pattern surrounding green hearts over the base frosting layer…”

Cake still spinning, Anderson tossed up a frosting bag, tested the tip on the counter, then like a machine began piping frosting onto the cake.

Grandma Shirley watched in grudging admiration as Anderson deftly piped Swiss buttercream frosting in the intricate lattice pattern on the miniature cake.

“It’s not as good as my grandma did it,” she finally declared.

“Didn’t you say your grandma used to chase your dad around with a meat cleaver?” Sawyer piped up.

Grandma Shirley sniffed. “It was a different time.”

Anderson finished the cake and took it to the fridge, which was stuffed with pastry.

“You and you.” He tagged two of my younger cousins. “You’re on cake patrol.”

After watching to make sure my younger cousins were correctly ferrying the chilled cakes to Nat and Lauren, he returned to decorating. They had been banished to assembling boxes at the breakfast table, stamping the finished ones with a custom MURPHY calligraphy stamp surrounded by holly.

Anderson picked up several boxes that had already been filled to make more room.

“Corner!” Anderson shouted.

Braeden yelped then cursed as Anderson almost bowled him over.

“The man said corner, Braeden!” Nat yelled. “Felicity, get your useless fiancé out of the kitchen.”

My parents and Ian’s arrival were marked by arguing in the hallway.

“…care if you don’t think it’s a career. Dance is my passion. You’re letting Evie do whatever the hell she wants.”

“Yes, but you are my son.”

“I’m also gay, so I can go find some hot piece of ass to fuck me for a free place to stay just as well as Evie can.”

“I take it miniature ice-castle golf didn’t go well?” Sawyer asked dryly.

My mother began tying on an apron, green eyes flashing in anger.

My dad opened the fridge to grab a beer and cursed when he saw it was full of cakes in varying states of disarray.

“All the drinks are down in the rec room, Dad,” I said.

Uncle Ross poked his head out of the basement door. “Girls, are those cake pops ready? Don’t worry, Evie. I’m not asking for one of those cakes. I learned my lesson last year,” he added cheerfully.

“When’s dinner?” My younger cousins had reached their cake limit.

“We’ll order pizza.” More of my uncles trooped through the kitchen, coolers and grocery bags of snacks in tow.

“You want to come watch the game?” Uncle Hugh slapped Anderson on the shoulder.

Anderson growled low in his throat as his arm was jostled.

“Jesus, fuck.” My uncle skirted back, banging into the kitchen counter. “Evie, you can’t have a man on that short of a leash. See how wound tight he is? That’s not healthy.”

“You can go watch the game.” My mother dismissed Anderson as he finished the next cake.

“Don’t fucking drop it,” he warned my tween cousin who reached to transfer it to the fridge to set before it was packed into a box.

The boy nodded. “Yessir.”

“You clearly need my help.” Anderson didn’t look at my mother as he reached for the next cake.

“Actually,” my mother said, putting the final touch on the chocolate cake she was decorating, “I am a master at cake decorating, and we’ve managed just fine without you in years past.”

Anderson paused, cake spinning in front of him. He gave my mother’s cake a long, critical look. “Is that cake for internal use?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I glanced over. One of the little green holly icing leaves was ever so slightly smaller than all the rest.

“I prefer to do things the right way, but it’s your cake.” Anderson shrugged dismissively.

“I thought you were just a busboy. What do you know about cake decorating?” My mom’s tone was sharp.

Anderson was nonplussed. “Waiter, but the head pastry chef keeps giving people nervous breakdowns, and sometimes, I draw the short straw and have to help him. He cuts off fingers if things aren’t perfect.” Anderson inspected his own impeccable cake. “The lack of standards in people’s work product is sending this country to hell.”

“Hear! Hear! Melissa always did cut corners,” Grandma Shirley said to him with a sniff.

Mom’s sisters cackled.

My mother added more icing to the holly leaf.

“Let Anderson fix it, Melissa. Why don’t you go watch TV with the men?” Grandma Shirley said it like an insult, and my mother took it as such.

Mom hadn’t even ripped her apron off before Anderson was scraping the top of her cake clean to redo it.

“So much for a wholesome Christmas evening,” Melissa said loudly as her sisters snickered.

“Christmas is for the professionals, Anderson.” Grandma Shirley sighed. “Her mother can’t cook either.”

“Your line is amateur hour,” Anderson remarked, straightening up and twisting his torso.

The rest of my relatives had wandered off as the boxes of cakes stacked up on the breakfast table and all the cake pops had been dipped in icing.

We were in the Christmas-cake endgame.

Tongue poking out, I carefully piped snowflakes around the rim of the cake in front of me.

Anderson picked up the cake he’d just finished and took it to the fridge. “I’m going to paint that window.”

“Et tu, Brute?”

“Don’t want you to get thrown out ahead of schedule.” He kissed the back of my neck.

I was hallucinating swirls of frosting when I finally finished the last cake, using tweezers to carefully set a little edible gold ball at the center of each icing snowflake.

Sure, Anderson might give me shit about putting up with my family’s emotional abuse, but this was why. This evening had been perfect—all of us in the kitchen, making memories, spreading Christmas cheer, laughing and joking—multiple generations together.

It was the one time I truly felt like I belonged in the family.

The storage room adjacent to the kitchen had the heat off to keep the cakes cool. In the dark room, Anderson set down the paint can and wordlessly took the cake boxes from me to stack them with the others, which were each tied with a bow.

“Thanks for fixing the window,” I said in a rush, “and for baking. We’d honestly—probably just me, actually—be here past midnight trying to finish. But it’s still early. The game isn’t even in the third period.” I looked up at him.

“I guess I should tell you that was… well, that was pretty special, what you did. You’re like perfect boyfriend material,” I joked.

His mouth turned down. “I’m not that guy.”

“What guy?”

“The perfect guy, the one that every girl wants—the sweet, helpful hero hidden under the tough, blackened armor of the villain.” He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Believe me. I know bad men—been around them all my life. There’s nothing there—no secret passage in the cave leading to the key to save him. It just gets deeper and darker and more claustrophobic until you suffocate inside, trying to find the heart of gold.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“I’m not a good person.” His eyes were dark.

“I know.”

“I’m a bad man.”

“I know.”

“And I want to do very bad things to you.” He took a step up to me. The heat radiated off him.

“How bad?”

His fingers rested on my neck.

“Is that what you want, Gingersnap?” he asked, his deep voice sending shivers through me that weren’t from the winter air. “You want to choke on my cock?”

I swallowed the drool.

“Is that what you’ve been thinking about all alone when you touch yourself at night, how it would feel for you to be kneeling down in front of me in your soaking-wet panties, tears streaking down your face as I throat-fuck you?”

I mean, I hadn’t, but now I would.

I reached for the zipper on his black jeans, feeling the exhalation of his breath on my mouth right before he crushed our lips together.

He kissed me, hungry, fingers insistent at the strings of my apron, tugging it off then my sweater. He pushed my bra down, then his mouth was hot on my nipple.

I bit back a moan.

“No.” His teeth grazed the soft skin of my breast. “I want to hear you, hear how good it feels, how much you want me, how much you crave me. You’d come for me easy, wouldn’t you?”

“Only,” I gasped, “if you leave the helmet on. Give me the full villain treatment.”

“Fuck, Gingersnap, you do want me bad.” He nipped at my nipple.

I let out a moan.

“Louder,” he ordered in his deep baritone. His hand slid under my plaid skirt, up my thighs, spreading them.

I tangled my fingers in his hair.

“I need you to touch my clit.”

“You like getting fucked, don’t you? You’d spread your legs for me right here. Fucking little slut.”

His hand pressed against my soaking-wet panties. A high-pitched whimper escaped my mouth.

Anderson’s lips were half-parted as he watched me grind against his hand.

“You’d come just like this, wouldn’t you?”

“You don’t want me to come on your cock, bad boy?”

He leaned back in, kissing me hot and heavy, my mouth, my neck, my tits.

“Let me feel you,” I begged. “You’re a bad boy. I want you to use me like a sex doll.”

His large hand tangled in my hair, then he was kissing me again, stealing my breath as he rubbed slow circles against the silk fabric of my panties. “Any man ever made you this wet?”

“No,” I gasped out.

“You like this, don’t you? You like the thought of me claiming you, using you. I want you on your hands and knees, begging me to come all over your ass.”

I spread my legs wider, silently coaxing him to do it, to spread me wide-open and fuck me with his huge cock.

“I bet women throw away their whole lives for you,” I blurted out when he broke the kiss.

His nostrils flared. “I’m not your goddamn hero. I’m just the guy who fucks you when he feels like it.”

“Evie!” My mother’s voice was shrill from the hallway outside the door.

“Shit!” I grabbed my sweater.

Before I could pull it over my head, Anderson, hand still in my hair, half dragged me stumbling out into the kitchen. “This who you’re looking for?” he boomed over my ineffective screeching.

“Is this the line for the sex carnival ride?” Granny Doyle asked loudly over my cousins’ shrieking.

Anderson dumped me onto the floor.

I scrambled into a crouch.

“Damn, he didn’t even take off his shirt.” Nat fanned herself. “And I think I can barely walk.”

“We weren’t spying, Evie, honest. Sawyer was looking for you,” Aunt J assured me.

Anderson’s mouth twitched in a smirk.

“You can spy if you want to. I know your husbands aren’t putting out.”

That set off my cousins.

I wished Anderson would offer me his jacket, something, instead of just standing there while I tried to decide whether I wanted to turn my acne-scarred bare back to my family and run back into the storage room to put on my clothes or if I should just accept my fate and make a break for the stairs.

But what had he said? He wasn’t my hero, just the guy who fucks me?

Yeah, fucks me over.

“Felicity’s spying because she’s not getting any from Limp-Dick McGee over here.” Granny Doyle stuck her thumb at Braeden.

“I’m saving myself for marriage,” Felicity replied, nose high in the air.

“Or maybe you’re just saving yourself for me,” Anderson said, grabbing his crotch.

“Do it, Felicity!” my cousins screamed. “Braeden’s not worth it.”

“You have to have sex with a man who knows what he’s doing at least once in your life.” Granny Doyle banged the table emphatically.

“Evie’s got that covered,” Aunt J hooted.

“Don’t think you’re anything special,” my mom said derisively to Anderson, who had a cold, sharp smile on his face. “This isn’t the first time I’ve caught my daughter with a boy in there, and shamefully, it likely won’t be the last.”

“Boy?” Granny Doyle hiccupped. “That’s a full-ass grown man.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Murphy,” Anderson drawled. “I was just messing around. I didn’t even make her come.” Anderson grabbed my jaw and tilted my face up to him. “I like thinking about you walking around, your pussy aching for me.” He rubbed his thumb, which had just been on my panties, over my lower lip.

My drunken female cousins and aunts wolf whistled.

“I don’t know why,” he said to my stunned parents, “you’re so concerned. You tried so hard to mold Evie into your perfect daughter, but she’s never going to be anything more than a sex-hungry little slut. Your epic, expensive failure spreading her legs for me.”

My mother’s nostrils flared.

The smirk turned feral. “I could have her eating cum out of my hand.”

My chest was tight. I couldn’t breathe.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I choked out.

Anderson grabbed me by the neck, gave me one long, deep kiss, then let me lurch back to the floor, dizzy, mouth dry.

“Don’t act like you aren’t going to come crawling back to me, begging for my cock, no matter what your parents say.”