Blizzards and Bastards, page 1
“Hot men and holiday metaphors.”
I did not intentionally get my butt stuck to a frozen toilet seat.
I did not mean to spray my favorite singer in the face with pepper spray.
Promise: I’m just a fangirl, not a stalker.
Pop-rock band, Inked Pages, has just rescued this failed bookshop owner from a desolate rest stop.
These four spicy rockstars plan to drop me off at home and skedaddle to their ultra-viral holiday concert.
But the blizzard, it’s a Christmas miracle in disguise.
Twelve days snowed-in with my family.
Twelve days of hate-f*cks, hot tub cuddles, and naughty cookie-making.
They say people fall in love faster during a crisis.
What will these music gods do when the storm clears and the holidays are over?
Keep me? Or chuck me like leftover figgy pudding?
BLIZZARDS AND BASTARDS is a standalone Christmas rom-com. This is a reverse harem/why choose story which means our main female character, Cyan, finds love with four amazing men. There’s plenty of spice, lots of festive cheer, and the ‘snowed-in’ trope. It’s light, fluffy, sexy, and angst-free.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Description
Stay in the Know
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
If You Don’t Love Me We Both Die Cover
Pheromone Cover
The Family Spells Cover
Stalking Links
About the Author
Blizzards and Bastards
Blizzards and Bastards (Full Length Edition) © C.M. Stunich 2024
Based on the short story ‘Blizzards and Bastards’ © C.M. Stunich 2018 previously published in the ‘Snow and Seduction ‘ anthology, and ‘Billionaires, Boarders, and Bastards’ anthology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
The For information address Sarian Royal Indie Publishing, 89365 Old Mohawk Rd, Springfield, OR 97478.
www.sarianroyal.com
Cover art and design © Amanda Carroll and Sarian Royal
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, businesses, or locales is coincidental and is not intended by the author.
Dedication
this book is dedicated to those whose names belong on both the naughty and the nice list.
you’ll never look at Christmas the same way again, I assure you.
special thanks to my repeat readers who have my back, no matter what the project is.
you guys are the literal best ever.
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Author’s Note
Happy Ho-Ho Holidays, and welcome to a slice of snowed-in holiday smut romance. I wrote this book several years ago for a reverse harem/why choose Christmas anthology. That volume is out-of-print, but I loved this story too much to leave it in some deeply buried folder on my Cloud drive.
Blizzards and Bastards has been extended from 35,000 words to 82,000 words,
Don’t take this story too seriously. It’s Netflix-Christmas-movie meets naughty-rom-com. Over-the-top holiday shit and … group sex. A very small amount of MM (male/male). A happy ending. Way too many Christmas decorations, holiday metaphors, and sexy dude descriptions to count.
May your holidays be as spicy, festive, and inappropriate as Cyan’s.
(and also happy June in case you just so happen to be reading this midsummer)
Love, Caitlin
CYAN
On the first day of Christmas … a broken toilet?
My butt is stuck to a toilet seat.
No kidding. It’s quite literally frozen to the porcelain bowl beneath me, the one I had to sit on bare cheeked because there’s very little toilet paper and absolutely no seat covers left.
“I hate my life,” I groan as I try to force myself to pee in the freezing cold restroom—the freezing cold men’s restroom. Much to my chagrin, when I pulled my little Kia Forte into the icy lot and did the full bladder dance up to the women’s restroom, I was greeted with a crudely scrawled Toilets Don’t Work sign … only the one I saw was spelled like this: Toylets Dont Werk. Seriously, no joke.
Sprinting over to the opposite side of the squat brown building, I threw myself into the one and only stall in the men’s room and plopped right down on the icy white porcelain. Now, that’s a choice I’m coming to regret.
“Come on, come on,” I whisper, rubbing my mittened hands together and watching my breath frost in the air. I still have about a three-hour drive to get to my parents’ house, and I am not leaving this spot without peeing first. I adjust the beanie on my head, brunette tendrils springing out in random directions as I finally relax enough to let nature take its course.
Obviously, my day isn’t shitty enough for the cruel forces of the universe because as the sound of, um, melting yellow snow fills the bathroom, the raucous noise of several laughing voices enters with a fresh blast of frigid air.
“It was that fucking assistant of yours that clogged the toilet,” one of the men is saying, black ankle boots squeaking along the dirty floor and pausing in front of the stall. Not knowing why I care, I lift my legs up and try to hide my feet. I’m not exactly ashamed to be in the men’s room, but for some reason sitting with my butt frozen to a toilet seat while a bunch of strangers mill around doesn’t much appeal to me.
“It wasn’t my assistant, Frost—it was you,” another voice replies, and then two distinct laughs begin to echo around the room. Meanwhile, the man with the boots tries my stall door, jiggling it a few times and then leaning down to peek underneath. Thankfully, he doesn’t bend down far enough to see me—just enough to note the fact that there’re no feet present. “Nobody in here,” he says, and I can hear his clothes rustling as he stands back up. “Maybe this one’s out of order like the other side?”
“Just piss in the urinals and let’s get out of here,” a third voice drawls, and then I hear the sound of several zippers coming down.
My plan is to wait these guys out, whoever they are, and get on my way. I still have three hours of driving to get to my parents’ place in Detroit Lakes and no time to hang out with strange men in deserted public restrooms.
I swear, it takes them a year and a day to piss. So long, in fact, that my phone ends up going off, the embarrassingly sweet sounds of the band Inked Page’s new Christmas song, A Gift of Starlight, echoing around the small tiled room.
“Fuck, we got a stalker,” one of them says, and another sighs.
Meanwhile, I’m straining to peel my ass off the ice-cold toilet seat, so I can lean forward and snatch my purse, digging frantically around inside for an old napkin or a leftover lipstick stained tissue to supplement the one-ply sheet of TP that’s left. Why is there no fucking toilet paper in this damn stall?!
“Alright, come on out of there,” one of the men says as I yank a crumbled McDonald’s receipt from the chaos strewn hellhole that is my purse, wiping frantically and flushing. I stand up and just barely manage to get my pants fastened before a guy’s face appears below the stall door.
“Hey,” he says, climbing under and rising to his full height in front of me. Which, of course, is a very impressive six-foot-something-or-other. I stand there, five-foot-three and tiny as hell, dressed in over-the-top designer Christmas wear that does not seem to impress … Aspen Carver?
This is not Aspen Carver, I tell myself. But he could be. He is. I’m looking at the lead singer for Inked Pages.
I know who this man is because I guiltily play his band’s music on repeat in my car … in my apartment … at work on my headphones … basically all the damn time. My Spotify Wrapped worships this guy. I listened to his most famous song six-hundred-and-ninety-two times.
He’s even prettier IRL than he is online. How is that possible?! He doesn’t need filters; he is a filter. Hair the color of chestnuts roasting over a bedroom fire, the eyes of someone who is definitely on the naughty list, and the presence of the holy spirit.
Aspen Carver just saw me take a piss.
Holy hark the angels, what is even happening?!
“What are you doing here?” I gasp and then, managing to pull myself together, throw on the most indignant face I can muster. A rare feat considering I’m looking up at the hottest pop rocker since, well, ever. “When is it ever okay to just crawl under a bathroom stall? I was peeing in here.”
Stand your ground, Cyan. I am. I do.
The man looks at me from cobalt eyes, two brilliant circles of
His gaze sweeps me, cutting the subzero chill of the restroom like a roaring fire with a cup of hot cocoa. Standing in front of him like this is a visceral experience, urging my inner fandom to new heights. Aspen’s intensity in person makes his online presence seem as dim as a broken Christmas light. Scrolling through shirtless photos of him on social media will never be the same again.
Stand your ground! I shake off my Stan vibes. Pop rock god he may be, but he crawled into the stall without permission. I wait for him to apologize, but he doesn’t. He smiles at me, his brunette hair tucked under a black trapper hat with candy cane charms hanging from the ties of the earflaps.
“What am I doing here?” He repeats my words back at me, a gleam in his eye that is much less holy than his presence. Unholy is what I’d call that. “If you’re asking a question like that, then you must already know who I am.”
Stupid rockstar with a voice like crushed velvet and cinnamon. It roughs past the eardrum, softens, and then flashes with a bit of warm spice. It’s low, sensual, but capable of hitting those high notes, too. There’s nobody in the music world that can sing like Aspen.
“What you just did is rude. And not just rude, but creepy, too.” I assert myself. He’s attractive and famous, sure, but he crawled into the bathroom stall with me. How is that anything but inappropriate?
“What?” Aspen asks, looking perplexed as hell, but also sexy as fuck, too. He tucks his hands into his jacket pockets, expression thoughtful. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he’s in the wrong.
My phone goes off again, lyrics swirling like snow around us as I scramble to find it in my purse and shut it off. I accidentally bump the screen and answer it instead, just after Aspen’s golden goose of a voice croons out from the speaker: “Your kiss is a gift of starlight, and your thighs are like the moon. There’s no such thing as Christmas morning if the day doesn’t start with you.”
Thighs like the moon. Don’t know what that means, but it’s hot.
“Mom,” I answer with a ridiculous amount of false holiday cheer, “I was about to call you.”
“I just wanted to tell you that your cousins stopped in, so we have an extra full house through the end of the year. You like sweet potatoes, don’t you? If you do, would you let me know, so I can have the caterer prepare a few extra trays? I know how you like to eat.”
I purse my lips as she continues talking, Aspen’s confused stare still focused on my face.
“There’s a big blizzard coming in and all the news reports say it’s best to stock up for a week-long apocalypse.” She sighs dramatically and cuts me off when I try to talk. Aspen just crosses his arms and leans back against the wall of the stall, watching me with those beautiful baby blues of his. “Of course, I already called into the office and had my secretary start prepping for some work-from-home hours. I’m having her schedule all my clients for—”
“Mom, I’m a little busy right now,” I say, trying to swallow past the sweet scent of spruce that followed this gorgeous, gorgeous man into the stall. It’s weird to think how delicious he smells, standing in the middle of a bone-chilling public restroom. Before Aspen crawled under the door, all I could smell was stale urine.
So not a good start to the holiday week.
Well, until now.
This is good, right? This deliciously hunky man staring at me, arms crossed over his chest, brows raised in question.
“I’m on the toilet.” It needed to be said. Wish Aspen wasn’t staring at me while I said it.
“Learn to multitask, Cyan. Piss and chat. There aren’t enough hours in the day to move like a sloth. Shame on you.” I try my best to reply, but when I open my mouth, no words come out. Aspen reaches out a hand covered in tattoos and plucks the phone from my fingers.
“She’ll call you back,” he says, his mouth curving into a knowing smirk. “What she failed to specify was that she’s in the bathroom with me.”
He hangs up and then starts going through my phone, like he really is a god and has every right to do what he damn well pleases.
“Give that back to me,” I manage to sputter, breaking through the shock of seeing a multi-platinum recording artist in my toilet stall. I try to go for the phone, but Aspen simply lifts it out of my reach. I have no idea how tall he is, but I have big brothers at home that are six-foot-three and six-foot-four.
I know how to deal with their shit.
“Give it to me or else you’re getting a face full of Peppermint Rage,” I say, whipping out a white and red striped bottle of pepper spray. Yep, even my self-defense tools are holiday themed. What can I say? I’m a Christmas fanatic.
“Sorry, it might be your phone, but I don’t have patience for stalkers who hide in bathroom stalls and steal photos of me.” Aspen is sassy, smirk half-cocked and beautiful eyes lidded, assured of his placement at the top of the world’s pecking order.
“I wasn’t stalking you!” I snap, accidentally compressing the button on the top of the Peppermint Rage bottle. A snake of liquid spurts out, not unlike cum from a rigid cock, and hits Aspen right in the face.
“What the fuck, you crazy bitch?!” he screams, dropping my phone to the ground and covering his face with his hands. “Dude, get Donner!” he screams and because it’s so close to Christmas already, I immediately think reindeer.
But then I realize he’s probably talking about a security guard of some sort.
“I’m sorry!” I say as I pick up my phone from the floor and then start crawling under the stall door myself. “It was an accident, I swear.”
Scrambling to my feet, I find myself face-to-face with a guy sporting a headful of blonde, blue, and silver hair—like ice. A black beanie with white snowflakes is shoved over the top, crushing the tendrils down so that they drip into his beautiful golden eyes.
“Well, hello there,” he says, winking at me.
Vale Connor, the drummer for Inked Pages. I know it’s him—and not only because I’m a little too obsessed with the band—but because he offered to dye his hair with a holiday/winter theme if his fans donated enough to his favorite charity. He then matched their donations and dyed his pale blonde hair with wintery streaks of blue and silver, like Jack Frost or something.
Speaking of Frost … That’s the name of the guy that’s just stumbled up to us, desperately jerking on the zipper of his jeans and … are those Frosty the Snowman boxers? Oh yeah. His eyes are like a pair of wreaths, hung in the center of a snow-white face. Paired with a nasty scowl and an expression of self-righteous indignation, seems like somebody is channeling the Grinch in here, and it isn’t me.
Mm. Frost Manderach, another Inked Pages bandmate. Guitarist, this time.
Because it wouldn’t be Christmas if I didn’t embarrass myself in front of all my favorite musicians.
“What did you just do to Aspen, you parasocial psycho?” Frost shouts, kicking the door to the stall open dramatically and knocking Aspen ass-first into the toilet. Good thing I remembered to flush.
“Oh my God,” I shout as I meet Vale’s amused eyes and raised brows, scooting past him and toward the exit. The exterior door swings inward, hits me in the face, and makes my nose pour blood down the front of the puffy white coat my dad bought me last year. It has shadowy gold snowmen on it, their arms positioned just so, making them look like they have two giant dicks instead of arms.
I won’t be sad to see it go.
“Oh, my face,” I groan, turning around and putting my hands on the side of a grubby porcelain sink. Red drips into the bowl as the speakers in the corner of the room—which haven’t played a single damn note since I came in here—creak to life and start pouring nineties pop Christmas music into the bathroom.
“The fuck is happening in here?” a woman with a gruff voice says, stepping into the room in a hideously clichéd Christmas sweater with a … is that a gun in her hands?! How did things escalate so quickly? All I wanted was to pee and be on my way.
“Donner, we got a stage-five clinger,” Frost says, guiding a dripping and squinting Aspen toward the angry lady named after one of Santa’s reindeer.
