A Dye Hard Holiday (Curl Up and Dye Mysteries #5) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Josh’s Recipes

  Other Books by Aimee Nicole Walker

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Dye Hard Holiday

  (Curl Up and Dye Mysteries, #5)

  Copyright © 2017 Aimee Nicole Walker

  [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to the actual person, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph © Wander Aguiar—www.wanderaguiar.com

  Cover art © Jay Aheer of Simply Defined Art—www.jayscoversbydesign.com

  Editing provided by Pam Ebeler of Undivided Editing—www.undividedediting.com

  Proofreading provided by Judy Zweifel of Judy’s Proofreading—www.judysproofreading.com

  Interior Design and Formatting provided by Stacey Blake of Champagne Book Design—www.champagnebookdesign.com

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original publisher only.

  This book contains sexually explicit material and is only intended for adult readers.

  Copyright and Trademark Acknowledgments

  The author acknowledges the copyrights and trademarked status and trademark owners of the following trademarks and copyrights mentioned in this work of fiction.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Josh’s Recipes

  Other Books by Aimee Nicole Walker

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Racheal Yunk,

  You’re an amazing woman and I’m so blessed to call you my friend.

  “WHOSE BRIGHT IDEA WAS it to buy such a big house?” I grumbled to myself as I hauled four massive suitcases up the grand staircase.

  “I believe this house was your idea.” Josh’s accusation followed me up the steps. It didn’t take him long to develop the fine-tuned hearing of a parent once we brought the babies home ten months earlier in January.

  I would’ve loved to argue with him, but he was right. I knew Josh was looking for a bigger space for the two of us to move into so he could expand his salon by converting the personal residence upstairs into a lush—his word, not mine—massage area. I’d fallen in love with our stately home, formerly known as Georgia’s mansion, the first time I saw it after rolling into Blissville. Of course, I was living with a different man at the time and never would’ve guessed that I would live there with Josh and our twins. Life was turning out far better than I could’ve predicted back then, which meant that I needed to stop grumbling about our parents staying with us, and be grateful our home was big enough for eight people to cohabitate for two months. Two freaking months!

  That’s right. Both sets of grandparents showed up in time for Thanksgiving and planned to stay until we celebrated Dylan and Destiny’s first birthday in January. I crazy love both sets of parents, but eight weeks of quieting down our sexy times was just too much. It felt like we just got both kids to sleep through the night and Big Daddy got to come out and play more often with Little Daddy when the Grandparent Express rolled into town the weekend before Thanksgiving. We’d mastered the art of being super quiet during sex with little people in the house, but I was certain our parents would know exactly what we were doing if we snuck off together during the kids’ naptime.

  “Why’d they have to bring so much stuff? We own a washer and dryer for crying out loud.”

  “Stop your bitching and I’ll blow you.” Josh’s hushed words startled me because I didn’t hear him come up the steps behind me. He was quiet and sneaky like a ninja, but the kind that promised sexual favors instead of killing you. “We’re going to have a fucking Norman Rockwell holiday and you’re going to behave.”

  “Or what?” I was picturing him tying me to our bed or cuffing me to a chair in his dance studio to teach me another lesson.

  “You’ll ruin your mother’s first Christmas with her grandchildren.” Damn, my husband plays dirty.

  “Damn you, Josh.”

  “That’s what you said last night when I kept edging you and wouldn’t let you come.” He sounded pleased with himself, as he damn well should, but I wasn’t about to feed into his ego.

  “Did you follow me up here to bust my balls?” I asked.

  “No, I followed you up here so that I could suck your balls.”

  I nearly tripped going up the next step, which would’ve been murder on the instant hard-on he always gave me. “Are you teasing me?”

  “Do I ever?”

  Josh never teased or offered something he wasn’t willing to give. If he said he came up to suck my balls then he did. “But our parents—”

  “Are cuddling their infant grandbabies they haven’t seen in a few months. Trust me, Captain Comes Hard, they’ll forget we exist until their stomachs start to growl at dinnertime.”

  “Is that why you had that huge lunch ready to go when they arrived?” I asked. Josh’s considerate scheming never failed to amaze me. Okay, scheming makes it sound like he is a shady character, which he isn’t, but the man always has a good plan in place for every occasion. I benefited from his craftiness more often than not.

  “You didn’t seem too upset about the open-faced roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy that I served,” Josh sassily replied right before he pinched my ass.

  “I’m not upset; I’m continually amazed by your brilliance.”

  I hastily dumped the luggage in our parents’ suites then grabbed Josh’s hand and tugged him to our room. He was right; our parents wouldn’t even notice that we were missing. I closed and locked our bedroom door before I pushed my husband against it and dropped to my knees. Josh wasn’t the only one capable of shaking things up a bit. It was my turn to knock him off kilter for once.

  I worked the buttons of his fly loose on his skinny jeans, because Josh rarely wore anything as casual as sweatpants, then pressed my nose to the bare flesh I uncovered. Josh’s head bumped back against the door and I felt the way his muscles trembled when I kissed a path from his navel to his trimmed pubic hair. I never got tired of the way my husband responded to my touch.

  “Gabe,” Josh moaned while threading his fingers through my hair. I so badly wanted to pay him back for the sensual torture he bestowed on me the night before, but I was too greedy and had no self-control when it came to wanting him. I knew it would always be that way and that there would never come a day when I didn’t need him just as much as the air I breathed.

  Regardles
s of Josh’s assurances that our folks wouldn’t notice we were missing, I wasn’t willing to take the chance. I pulled his jeans down to mid-thigh and went about blowing his mind while I pulled my dick out of my sweats and stroked it at the same pace until we both came. I rested my forehead against his thigh while we caught our breath and our pounding hearts returned to a normal rhythm once again. Josh scraped his fingernails against my scalp and my softening dick twitched like it was ready to fire back to life again.

  “Easy, killer,” I said to my favorite appendage as I rose to my feet.

  Josh smiled wickedly at me, and I was tempted to toss him onto our bed and give him another round, but we heard collective gasps followed by “awwww” coming from downstairs.

  “Oh my God! What if the babies took their first steps and we missed it?” Josh asked as he wrestled his jeans up his legs and back on his hips. “You know they’ve been on the verge lately.”

  According to our friends, parents, and the baby books we read, most babies didn’t start walking until they were a year old. Some babies took longer and a few would walk sooner. Josh and I were convinced our perfect angels fell into the latter category. Both Dylan and Destiny had started pulling themselves up on the furniture and letting go to balance on their own. Their brazen independence didn’t last long before they either fell onto their diapered butts or placed their hands back on the coffee table. We noticed that they had grown more confident and could balance longer over the past few days and were certain that their first steps were right around the corner.

  “Fuck!” I jumped to my feet and yanked my sweats back up. Josh stopped me before I could open the door. He was laughing so hard that tears pooled in his hazel eyes. “What?” He silently pointed to the front of my sweats. I looked down and saw that I had splattered cum on the front of them. “Damn it.”

  “You can use them to clean up the mess you made on the hardwood floors,” Josh added, pointing to the pool of cum between my feet.

  I stepped out of my sweats and bent over to clean the floor. Josh chose that exact moment to jerk open the door and run downstairs to make sure he got to the babies before me.

  I heard him yelling, “Daddy is coming, babies.”

  “You little…”

  I threw the soiled sweats in the hamper and pulled on a clean pair before I ran downstairs to make sure I didn’t miss our children’s first steps. “Papa is here, angels.”

  Four sets of grandparents’ eyes raked over my body from my flushed cheeks down to my changed pants. The expressions ranged from humor to pride. “I pissed myself,” I blurted without thinking. Jesus, my fake excuse was much more embarrassing than the truth. Where the fuck had that even come from?

  It was all Josh’s fault and that little brat was enjoying my misery. He smirked and pointed to my hair, which I realized was probably standing up all over from his hands messing it up. I felt my face burning with embarrassment as I raised my hands and tried to straighten it the best I could without a mirror and a comb.

  “Do you need to borrow one of my Depends?” Bertie asked me after she dried her tears from laughing so hard with the rest of them. “They make them now so that they look like underwear instead of adult diapers. Women’s underwear,” she modified.

  “Thanks, Mom, but I’m sure it was a one-time thing.” Bertie loved when I had started calling her Mom, just as my mom loved when Josh started addressing her the same way.

  “Better hope not,” my father murmured just loud enough for me to hear him. Then in a louder voice he asked, “Why did the two of you sprint down here like we were running off with your kids?”

  “We heard the oohs and aahs and figured they took their first steps without us,” Josh explained. “Did we miss it?”

  “We were just fussing over how cute it is when they say Mamaw and Papaw,” Bill said. “They’re too young to… Well, look at that!”

  We all watched as Destiny took her first tentative step without holding onto something. Her precious face scrunched up in fear as she wobbled a bit then relaxed when she didn’t fall. She gave us a big, toothy grin when she took another step and still didn’t fall. Dylan, not to be outdone by his younger sister, let go of the coffee table and stepped toward Destiny. He wasn’t quite as graceful about it as his twin, so his one step led to two more quick ones as he teetered forward. It looked like he was trying to outrun his fall, which never happened. Luckily for him, his daddy scooped him up before his face hit the floor.

  Destiny’s eyes widened in alarm as she watched her brother tumble. She looked like she’d had enough adventure for one day and dropped to her butt with a soft plop. Dylan kicked his legs in a fit of anger because his plan had been thwarted. He was such a diva like his daddy!

  “Settle down, tiger. You’ll nail it tomorrow. I just know you will,” Josh softly whispered in our son’s ear before he set him on the rug next to his sister.

  “Did you teach him how to throw a tantrum like that?” Bertie asked her son before she looked at me. “Keep an eye on those two.” She shifted her finger back and forth between Dylan and Josh before she added, “You’re looking at the King of Temper Fits right there and you don’t need him showing the kids how it works.” Bertie went on to tell us some of Josh’s finer moments like she was narrating a highlight reel on ESPN’s Sports Center.

  While I never saw my husband throw himself down on the floor and kick his legs, I had been on the receiving end of his sexy, manipulative ways. I loved every single fucking second of it too.

  “Yeah, like I’m going to teach my kids to make me miserable,” Josh said, rolling his eyes over the ridiculousness.

  “No,” Bertie countered, “but I can see you telling them to only use their skills on Papa.”

  I narrowed my eyes because I could see him doing that too. “You better not.”

  Josh’s eyes widened in stunned disbelief. “Why, Gabriel Allen Roman-Wyatt, I would never do something like that.”

  “You wouldn’t, huh?” His Southern belle routine was a big indicator that he was up to no good. He probably already had Temper Fits 101 planned out and ready to teach.

  “Okay, not until they’re old enough to know to save it for you. I don’t want to risk that they throw themselves down in the middle of the store when they’re with me.” Conniving, but honest.

  “You would corrupt your own children to get a dig at me.”

  “You corrupted my bird!”

  “Ha! That foul-mouthed bird taught me a few words I didn’t even know,” I countered.

  “Gabriel, I cannot believe you kiss your babies and our mothers with that lying mouth.” Josh’s huffy indignation made me laugh hard enough to forget all my embarrassment over our parents knowing what we’d done upstairs.

  My mother laughed hard at my husband’s antics until tears rolled down her face and she clutched her stomach. “Oh, it hurts.”

  I could tell Josh was about to open his mouth and say something sassy like, “That’s what he said,” so I warned him with a dark look that promised some sort of retaliation he didn’t want. I wasn’t sure what the fuck I would’ve done if he hadn’t listened, because my mind didn’t work like his, so I was grateful when he let that opening pass.

  We lazed about and took things easy until our friends arrived for our weekly Sunday dinner. It amazed me how much had changed in our lives in a year’s time. It seemed like just yesterday that Josh and I were newlyweds awaiting the arrival of our children. Chaz and Kyle had just started to date, Meredith and Harley had just gotten engaged, and Emory and Jon were still pretending that they weren’t attracted to each other. Fast forward a year, we were about to celebrate the twins’ first birthday, Chaz, Kyle, Mere, and Harley all took the plunge into matrimonial happiness, and Jon and Emory were planning a spring wedding. Adrian and Sally Ann welcomed precious Avery to their family in October and Adrianna was loving her role as a big sister. The Dorchesters were the only ones who hadn’t experienced any changes, which they both seemed to appreciate. John had f
un harassing the couples with newborns while Deanna threatened to make him sleep on the couch. He must’ve loved sleeping beside his wife, or his couch was seriously uncomfortable, because he quickly shut his mouth every time she brought it up.

  “Do you want me to come over early on Thanksgiving to help with the food prep?” Deanna asked.

  “You?” John asked his wife. Okay, maybe he hadn’t learned his lesson yet.

  “I don’t want him to get a papercut when he opens up the boxes of frozen macaroni and cheese,” Deanna told her husband. “A true artist like Josh needs his hands to create magic.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the food he made from scratch, which was ninety-five percent of his cooking, or his hairstyling skills. In either case, he needed his talented hands to accomplish it. Then there was the sorcery he worked on me, but I doubted the group wanted to hear my take on that.

  My cell phone rang just as we sat down to dessert and coffee. I glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was the dispatcher from the police department, which rarely happened after I was promoted to captain. Adrian’s phone went off just as I answered the call. “Captain Roman-Wyatt,” I said into the phone. I smiled at Josh’s little shiver of awareness. He swore up and down I used a deeper tone of voice with my new title.

  “Captain, I’m sorry to call you at home on a Sunday night, but there was an incident at Santa’s Village,” Officer Parks said.

  “What?” Adrian and I asked at the same time. I glanced up and my eyes locked with my former partner’s. It was obvious that someone, most likely Officer Wen, called to tell Adrian the news.

  “The village has been vandalized and there’s an effigy of Santa hanging from the flagpole,” she replied.

  “What?” I repeated. I was cautious about what I said out loud with Adrianna and Dorchester’s kids watching me.

  “You heard me, sir. It appears that someone is waging a war on Christmas.”

  “Ho ho hoooooo,” Adrian said from across the room.

  “AH, SOMEONE’S EXCITED ABOUT Christmas,” Al said when he walked into the kitchen the next morning and caught me cooking breakfast to Christmas music. While it was true that I was looking forward to the holiday season more than any in my life, that wasn’t the reason I was jamming to “Jingle Bell Rock” while flipping pancakes.