Christmas Holiday Husband by Kris Pearson

he grunted, which could have meant anything.
    Ginny gave up the unequal battle and turned her energies toward solving twenty-seven across.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    “Oh, Cal!” Ellie groaned, surfacing into bright sunshine next morning. She’d tossed all night, and somewhere near dawn fallen headlong into leaden sleep. It was all she could do to drag her head off the luxurious down filled pillow. Cal laughed at her from beside the bed; lively, full of mischief, and achingly far away.
    All night long her body had burned and her brain had fizzed with memories of meeting Tony. It had been a warm spring day in Sydney. Her first, and only, time away from New Zealand. She and Mags had stopped a day and night with Maggie’s sister in Wellington, and then flown to Australia for a week’s bargain shopping and sightseeing. If Wellington had seemed big, Sydney was huge to a small-town girl.
    And there, by the pool at the hotel, she saw Tony, working as a labourer on a building job. Shirtless, tanned, and with skin she’d wanted to stroke from fifty feet away. He wore low-slung denim shorts and brown elastic sided builder’s boots. Thick socks were neatly cuffed around his ankles, below perfect calf muscles and spectacular long strong thighs. Ellie had put her sunglasses on so he wouldn’t catch her looking, and then she’d gazed to her heart’s content.
    Not just at the legs, which were undoubtedly worth at least eleven out of ten, but at all the rest of him, too. He was breaking up a slab of concrete with a sledgehammer—going at it like a demon—swinging the heavy tool up into the blue sky with no apparent effort and crashing it down with obvious satisfaction.
    Each time he swung, his long arms and broad shoulders tensed and thickened. The dark hair in his armpits curled with sweat. His chest gleamed. And when he turned to attack the slab from a different angle, Ellie had been captivated by the play of muscles on his back. They slid across each other, the sun dancing on their sheened surfaces.
    A corded line ran either side of his spine. She watched it tighten and relax with every blow, wondering what it would feel like to touch.
    And his thighs were magic from the new angle—long and sinewy, then bunched and hard, then long and sinewy... He was a machine— tireless, determined—smashing and pounding with furious energy.
    The last piece of concrete gave way. He whooped with triumph, grinned at one of the other men, threw down the hammer and stretched. His whole body went rigid and then relaxed. Then he bent down, yanked off his boots, stripped his socks away and took a running dive into the pool. He arrowed half a length under the water and exploded upward to the sun again, shaking his head so the drops spun off it in a glittering swarm. Ellie yelled with surprise as they scattered all over her heated skin.
    He ran a hand back through his dark hair so it stood up comically, and rested his elbows on the edge of the pool. “Are you free to come out tonight?” he asked.
    Not ‘would you like to’ or ‘do you want to’. He was sure enough of his attractions to know that she would. And she was dying to. Yes please.
    Ellie glanced across at Maggie, and he said, “I’ve got a mate.”
    Maggie had shrugged and grinned.
    “I’ll pick you up here at eight.” He vaulted out of the pool, and water cascaded all around him as he sauntered off to retrieve his boots and resume work.
    Ellie had been left breathless by his speed and sureness. None of the boys in her hometown had such confidence. To be asked out before a single word had passed between them—that was definitely different. And he was definitely different, too. A man rather than a boy. Physically superb. He might prove to be an absolute fool once she got to know him, or a bore, or so self-centred that he was a pain—but she was willing to take the risk, just for one evening anyway.
    “Told you going red was a good idea,” Maggie said. She’d persuaded Ellie to have