Chapter 1
Noah
First week of December
“Another package arrived for you today,” my brother Drew tosses over his shoulder as he stalks past me to the mud room.
“Thanks. I’ll be out to help with chores as soon as I eat something.”
“There’s stew in the oven.” And with that, Drew jams his cowboy hat on his head and hunches his shoulder, bracing himself to head out into the cold, dark night on our ranch.
Before I grab my dinner, I take advantage of the moment of privacy and whisk my new delivery to my room before I open it to check out the deluxe Santa costume inside.
My brothers would destroy me if they found out what I plan on doing with it.
It’s honestly a miracle none of them have figured out what I do on Sunday nights, since we all live together and we have been all-in on the ranch business for as long as I can remember.
Drew, Zane, and myself all live in the main house. Only Trick has his own place, up on the ridge toward the back pasture. Fair enough—it was his baseball earnings that bought us the ranch in the first place almost twenty years ago, giving the Lowry boys a place to call home for the first time in our lives.
While Trick was under the bright lights, smashing home runs and securing himself a place as a future Hall of Famer, the three of us have turned Wildfire Ranch into a serious business.
And now it’s good that Trick has his own house, because he went and fell in love with his coach’s daughter right at the end of his baseball career, and now they have a baby boy. Probably the first of many kids, the way he looks at her.
There’s a note on the counter that Sinclaire, Trick’s bride, helped our housekeeper Inez make the stew.
Ah, hell. Now I feel bad that I missed the delivery of it, but this is how it is when I’m teaching at the college. Most of the time, I’m running late for dinner, and today is no exception.
For years, this was all I ever wanted in life: working the ranch with my brothers. And in my pursuit of learning how to be the best rancher I can be, I took a couple of degrees in agriculture. Now I’m a part-time instructor, teaching the next generation of Wyoming kids how to work the land, and that felt like it completed an already full life.
That was until three months ago, when I looked out my office window and saw Paisley Stevenson dancing in the parking lot. Faded blue jeans wrapped around long legs and generous hips. A faded, nondescript t-shirt over bouncing breasts. And the prettiest hair I’ve ever seen, strawberry blonde waves that float like a cloud around her shoulders.
Even before she ran into me at the bottom of the stairwell, she stole my damn heart. She looked like my future. My forever. My babies and grand babies.
And I walked away from her without asking her name because I already knew I didn’t have that right, that she was almost certainly a student.
And then she showed up in my classroom.
Not only was she a student, but she was my student.
In nine years of teaching, I have never been tempted by a student. I always assumed that was because I have a strong sense of right and wrong, and I would never cross that ethical line. It turns out that my lizard brain doesn’t give a fuck about ethical boundaries, and if it were up to him, he’d have bent Paisley over and made good use of that time before her classmates arrived. Given her my seed and planted a baby, breeding on the first try.
The good news is that the lizard brain isn’t in charge of anything. At least…not at school. I kept my depraved desires to myself and instead focused on learning whatever I could about this sweet girl. Woman, actually. She’s a mature student, almost thirty, although she still has the wide-eyed innocence of youth.
That night, though, I worked my cock over and over again, stroking myself raw. And it wasn’t enough.
Nothing worked to take the edge off my obsession with the girl who I had no doubt would become my favorite student—for her brain, and not anything else.
After that first class, I didn’t get another good glimpse at most of Paisley’s body, because the temperature dropped and she started wearing sweatshirts that knew exactly how to run interference between my lizard brain and what it craved most.
And then, in the fourth week of class, everything changed. It was one of those weird days on a college campus where suddenly everyone is talking about the same thing, a website you’ve never heard of before, but now it’s trending on the quad and it’s hard to get classes to quiet down because everyone is buzzing.
That day, it was about how Christmas had come early to the internet. Or, more specifically, how a porn star named Christmas Fever was coming on the internet, with a splashy jump from a different creator site to the whimsically horny OnlySantas.
It might have been the first few days of fall, but everyone had winter on their minds. Paisley even wore a Christmas-themed sweatshirt to class, which delighted her classmates.
The whispered conversations were pretty entertaining. Students marvelled at how long some of the creators could stay aroused and in their performance.
I smirked to myself, because while I’ve never been very sexual, when I do take care of myself, it’s always a long night of edging. I didn’t realize that was something other people might want to see.
That night, I created an OnlySantas account. Strictly out of curiosity, I told myself as I poked around. And while watching wasn’t really my thing, as I explored, a kernel of an idea formed. By the end of the night, it was a complete plan. I had discovered an outlet where I could pretend that my orgasms were being shared with the woman who inspired every one of them.