While You Were Creeping - Poppy Rhys Page 0,19

boyfriend of mine would walk around without clothes.”

Well, in public, anyway, but I wouldn’t say that to Kye. My nerves were still shot from earlier. It was silly. He’d just fiddled with the ends of my hair, but I swore I felt it all the way to the tips of my toes.

“I have pants. The bits are covered, isn’t that enough?”

Great. Now I was thinking of his bits. Thankfully, I was at his back so he couldn’t see me shake the images out of my head. “No.”

Judging by his long-suffering sigh, I thought maybe he was regretting this deal.

I circled to his front and, even though I kept my eyes on my comm, I could feel his heavy gaze follow me. That was my imagination, right? A gaze couldn’t feel weighty... yet it almost felt like a physical touch.

Like magnets, my eyes drifted upward to his. The dash pupils expanded, almost rounding and appearing less alien. The red-flecked turquoise was so ‘other’.

Even though I’d resembled a wild animal straight out of hibernation earlier, (I’d freaked myself out once I finally passed a mirror) Kye had looked at me like he wanted to do more than touch my hair.

Which... crazy. He was already pulling this boyfriend role off perfectly. Not even George had gazed at me so intensely.

“All done!” With a few keystrokes, I sent the measurements to the local tailor with a run of the mill order of some wardrobe staples. “Should only take a few hours with Riq’s new machines, then we can go pick them up.”

“Great.” Except his great sounded about as enthusiastic as someone about to get a tooth drilled. “Time to decorate.”

Instant groan.

“Can’t we ease into this? It’s been a while. Be nice with me.”

If his gaze could get any more intense, it did. “Easing into things? Not my style.”

No. No, no, no.

I walked right into it. His rumbly voice insinuated his version of ‘things’ was not my version of ‘things’.

We needed to get our ‘things’ straight or I’d be tongue-tied all damned day!

“Consider me eased into it now! So, closet.” I headed that way, followed by his taunting chuckle that rolled in his chest, but never got farther than his throat.

I pinched my eyes shut against the warm lick of fire that caressed parts I didn’t want to acknowledge.

Bursting into my storage closet—which was honestly a spare room I’d just converted—I grabbed the first tub and started yanking on it. One by one, we brought the bins out and I hated every second.

Okay, so the old me who loved Christmas was insane. How many tubs of decorations could one person have?

I stared at the bins littering my whole living room.

This... this was ridiculous.

But I wasn’t backing out of my end of the deal. This was the easier part, as hard as it was. Finding how to free Kye...? That would be harder.

It sounded overwhelming. I didn’t even know interdimensional prisons existed, yet he wanted me to jailbreak him.

Could I comm-search that?

I’d try later.

“Tree first,” Kye suggested, pulling my everlasting fir out of storage like it weighed nothing. My jaw slackened, ball ornaments dropping from my hands into my lap as I tracked him.

It always took three of my cousins to help me setup that tree, yet Kye shouldered it as if it were a small child.

“How about that corner? In front of the window?” He turned. “Holly?”

Oh, right, words. “Sure...”

“You alright?”

“Yeah, it’s just... isn’t that heavy?”

He grunted, proceeding to prop it near the window and set up the base. “Little bit.”

Little bit.

This guy wasn’t human. Literally and figuratively.

I picked up the ornaments and tucked them away, sure that I didn’t want to use the pink ones this year.

Pink.

No idea what possessed me the Christmas I used pink ornaments. Instead, I pulled out the smoky blue and shiny gold and silver ones, realizing I had shapes of every kind.

Insane, I tell you. No wonder the marketing clerk at Comet’s Christmas Collectables always sent me ‘we miss you’ spam messages. Judging from all my ornaments, I’d spent a ton of credits there.

Ugh.

I pushed the tinsel aside, keeping it out of Skully’s reach, before scratching behind his fluffy ears while we covertly watched Kye finish the base and steady the tree.

Something nagged at me and I chewed the inside of my lip.

“Why do you like Christmas decorations so much? I thought Krampus hated Christmas.”

Kye’s grunt sounded irritated. “That’s what the nikolins wanted humans to believe. And that term is considered offensive by some of my people.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Doesn’t bother