Free All She Wants for XXX-Mas: An Erotic Christmas Romance Story by Nathan Stratton

Chapter 1: Another Lonely Christmas?
     
    Ch ristie sighed heavily and slammed the car door shut. The window rattled loudly against the rusty, worn-out frame.
     
    Great , she thought to herself. Another thing I’ll need to fix soon. With a slight groan, she lifted her heavy purse onto her shoulder and turned towards the volunteer center.
     
    Every December, Christie spent a month at her town’s food bank, sorting cans into bags and toys into bins. Then, on Christmas Eve, the volunteers would drive around in big vans and deliver all the toys to kids in the neighborhood. Christie loved volunteering. It was such a perfect Christmas tradition, and it always put her in the holiday spirit. Volunteering was usually the one thing that could cheer her up in the lonely winter months – but this December, even that wasn’t enough.
     
    She’d been having a rough time of it lately, rougher than she’d like to admit. In the summer, she’d lost her job as a paralegal at a big firm downtown. Though her company had claimed it was just another round of layoffs, she knew – or at least she suspected – it was because she’d rejected her boss’s flirtatious advances at a company retreat.
     
    “I have a boyfriend,” she’d said , and it was true at the time. She’d been living with a guy, an artist named Steve, and she’d thought things were going great. But just two months after the layoff, Steve had ditched her for some 21-year-old floozy he’d met at a bar. Christie couldn’t understand why he’d done it, and it took a few months for her to get over him. N ow she understood, of course: Steve was an asshole, plain and simple. She was better off without him, she knew that much.
     
    But still, it was shaping up to be another lonely Christmas.
     
    Christie walked in through the door of the volunteer center, and a little bell rang above her head. “Hello!” she called out, to no one in particular, and threw her bag down on the table. “…Anyone here?”
     
    Dead quiet. The place was empty – not surprising, considering how few volunteers they had this year. As her co-worker Alice liked to say, “there’ s too many who need it, and not enough to give it out.” Christie had always chalked up this remark to just being more of Alice’s dark humor. But after the rough year she’d had, Christie knew exactly what Alice was talking about.
     
    Just then, she heard a voice coming from the back room , out by the loading dock . Not just any voice, either. Even through the heavy walls, she could tell that sexy baritone from a mile away .
     
    It was Michael, the director of the volunteer center .
     
    Christie’s heart skipped a beat , in spite of herself. Even though Michael was a good ten years older than her, and even though he was technically her boss, Christie just couldn’t resist harboring a slight crush on him – okay, maybe a bigger-than-slight crush.
     
    She couldn’t help it. They’d been working at the center together for years, and Michael never failed to make Christie laugh. He’d been there for her when she lost her job, and again when her jerk of an ex-boyfriend broke her heart. Michael was nothing like Steve. He was so kind, so selfless, so… honorable . And it didn’t hurt that all those years lifting heavy Christmas boxes had given him the body of a god.
     
    In all the previous Christmas seasons, things had never seemed anything but platonic between Michael and Christie. But this year, something was different. Christie had only been back for a few days, but already she was noticing a charge in the air that hadn’t been there before.
     
    Like the time she and Michael were going over reports together, and his hand accidentally brushed over hers. She’d found it hard to focus on the reports for ten minutes after that. Or the time she’d stumbled while stepping through the doorway, and Michael caught her arm. She’d had butterflies the rest of the day.
     
    Small things like that kept happening