TieD Up For Christmas

Ava Sinclair had never heard anyone moan and scream like that before.

It was almost as if each girl her neighbor brought tried to outperform the other.

The sound drifted through the thin wall behind her headboard. It came low at first, then deepened into a breathless cry that sent a cool shiver down Ava's spine. The kind of sound that should've come with a viewer discretion warning.

Ava froze, her legs crossed on the bed, pen hovering above her open legal file, while the feminine voice on the other side of the wall moaned again.

Jesus. Her neighbor was really at it again. But why was it always around this time? It was getting to midnight for crying out loud.

The thing about her neighbor is that she'd never heard any noise coming from him; it was only from the women who flocked in and out of his room.

Wasn't he supposed to be in college? She couldn't imagine what young boys in college did these days if her neighbor had the stamina of a horse to keep satisfying these women.

Ava shut her eyes.

It wasn't jealousy...no, she was thirty-two, a respected lawyer, a grown woman with a corner office and a salary that could buy a car every other month if she actually liked driving.

No, she wasn't jealous.

She was just annoyed and...curious.

Curious in the way someone starving might look at a bakery window.

She swallowed, adjusted her reading glasses, and tried to focus on the draft brief on her laptop. But the moans didn't stop.

Her hand tightened around her pen as another sound drifted through the wall: a breathless whimper, feminine, needy, desperate. Ava clenched her pen.

Ava squeezed her thighs together beneath her blanket.

It was ridiculous. Embarrassing. She was a lawyer, a fully functional adult human being. She did not get flustered over noises coming through a wall.

Except she absolutely did. She had to confess, she'd touched herself a few times during her neighbor's wild adventures. But she couldn't do it tonight. There was work to be done, deadlines to be met.

Her neighbor, the elusive Noah, had never said more than "hi" to her. Actually, scratch that. He'd never said anything to her. She'd said "hi" a couple of times to him, but he never responded. And why should he?

He was probably in his early twenties.

But even without speaking, she seemed to know at least one thing about him: He was a sex god.

Ava bit her lip, heat creeping into her cheeks. She should not be thinking about her neighbor like that, for Christ's sake. He was way younger than her, and she was well into her thirties.

Noah, from what she'd learned from the sounds the women made, was a man apparently built for the express purpose of making women lose coherence.

And Ava, sworn enemy of chaos, was sitting alone in her bed, listening to him give some lucky woman the kind of pleasure