“Kent—”
“You’re not moving any of it.”
“Kent, I have so many lights in here that I’ve probably doubled our electricity bill.”
“So?”
“So, I should take some of them down and probably I don’t need five Santas in here or quite so much tinsel. Not sure why I bought every color I could find.”
“Touch any of it, baby, and you’ll find yourself over my knee.” He was joking. Maybe.
Her eyes widened. “You’re threatening to spank me if I take down some Christmas decorations when there is enough in this room to decorate five houses?”
Five large houses, he would guess.
“Yep.”
“Kent.” Her face softened. “You don’t need to feel sorry for me. I got carried away. I’ll fix it. I’ll still have an amazing Christmas without all this.” She placed the palm of her hand against his cheek. “Because I’ll be with you. And that’s what Christmas is about, right? Being with the people you love? I’ve never really had that. So that makes this Christmas incredibly special. All of this? Icing on an already well-iced cake.”
He leaned forward, lightly kissed her lips. “Baby, I was joking before about the spanking. You want to take some down we will. But if you want it up, then leave it there. I don’t like knowing that you never had a proper Christmas but now that I do know, I want you to have everything you desire.”
She looked at him, love shining in her eyes. “I already do.”
“So fucking sweet,” he murmured, his gaze caught on her lips. “All I want to do is take you to our bedroom and fuck you until you scream.”
Her breath quickened. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But there’s a few things we have to talk about first.”
“Couldn’t they wait?”
“Nope. They can’t.” He made his voice low, serious. “First, I just looked at the credit card statements. And none of this Christmas stuff or those gifts you’ve been buying are on there. You want to explain what money you’ve been using to pay for everything?”
She bit her lip, shifted around on the counter and generally looked incredibly guilty.
“Abby,” he said warningly.
Her eyes went wide. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No? Then how come you won’t tell me where the money came from?”
“It’s so hard keeping anything from you!”
Well, he didn’t like that. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I wanted to buy you some gifts that I didn’t want showing up on the bank account because I didn’t want you to know what they were. And I couldn’t use cash because I bought them online.”
Ah, he got it now. “I can understand that. But what about all this other stuff? The gifts for everyone? The Christmas decorations? Why didn’t you use our joint accounts for those?”
“Oh. . .well. . .see. . .”
“Abigail,” he said warningly.
“I don’t like spending all your money on me!”
He took a steadying breath. “First of all, little girl. It is not my money, it’s ours. Second of all, I know you. There’s no way you’d ever spend all of our money on you. That’s not who you are. Third of all, I gave you access to my accounts, I told you to use them. I expected you to. And if you had any problems with that, I thought you would talk to me. Honestly and communication, yes?”
The guilt was written all over her face. “I know. I’m sorry.”