Merry Oblivion Read online

  Merry Oblivion

  Cari Quinn

  Taryn Elliott

  Rainbow Rage Publishing

  Contents

  Grouchy St. Nick

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Horny St. Deacon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Lost in Oblivion Series

  Also by Cari & Taryn

  About the Authors

  Copyright © 2016 by Cari Quinn & Taryn Elliott

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For all those readers who can’t get enough of the Oblivion family. We hear you and we totally agree. Damn, we love these guys!

  * * *

  Merry Christmas,

  Cari & Taryn

  Grouchy St. Nick

  Nick & Lila

  Chapter 1

  “So what are your plans for Christmas?”

  Barely listening to her best friend Margo Kagan on the other end of the phone, Lila Crandall stared into her bathroom mirror. Her smoky eye makeup was currently taking all her focus.

  Too smoky?

  Not enough smoky?

  Like clockwork, muffled squeals came from down the hall. The kind that meant one of the twins was poking at her sister, trying to lure her into mischief.

  Charlotte couldn’t already be up from her nap, could she? Lila could almost time her eighteen-month-old’s naps to the second, and they seemed to be getting shorter by the day.

  Charlie’s twin, Avery, on the other hand, was a perfect napper. She rarely fussed and always slept for precisely forty-five minutes.

  Lila supposed she couldn’t complain, and she usually didn’t. Her girls were mostly well-behaved. Other than that crayon up the nose incident last week—which had also been Charlie’s fault—they rarely troubled her much, all things considered.

  Except today. Today, she was freaking out, because she was only now realizing she had absolutely no idea how to do makeup that shouted “Screw me!” rather than “Yes, I can have that report to you by noon, no problem.”

  Or lately, makeup that said, “Yes, Avery, you can have more juice in your sippy cup,” and “Spot, no, I am not changing your litter box again.”

  Lila was a minor-league expert at professional makeup meant for a business atmosphere or a relaxed day at home. Case in point, she’d had a nice soft glow going on to pair with the soft leggings and casual top she’d shed in the bedroom before trying on her latest acquisitions.

  Makeup that demanded sex, however? Then delivered on the demand with a glossy-lipped pout? Not so much.

  Her smoky makeup made her look as if she’d gone on a bender and wound up with a mascara wand in her eye. Her pout resembled Charlie’s when she was cranky from no sleep.

  Lila sighed and shifted the phone to her other ear. Her best friend had gone silent for too long. Probably because Lila hadn’t yet answered her question. What was the question anyway?

  “I’m sorry,” Lila said. “Are you still there? I was having an issue.”

  “Baby connected to the feeding station, perhaps?”

  “No. They’re both asleep.” It didn’t count as lying to yourself if you refused to acknowledge the truth. “I’m not breastfeeding them anymore. They’re solely bottle fed now and have been for a while.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, right? No more sore nipples or whatever.”

  Lila grinned at Margo’s shudder. Just because she couldn’t see her bestie shudder across the phone line didn’t mean she didn’t know it was occurring.

  “Or whatever,” Lila agreed. “I finally put my piercing back in.”

  “Hey, now that’s gotta be a good sign.”

  “Theoretically.” Lila poked at her baby fine hair. She was going to have to pray she could get it to hold a curl for more than a nanosecond.

  Today’s attempt at that feat had failed. Her hair was sort of wavy, if she tilted her head and squinted. The makeup was a wash too, so why bother trying to do a hairstyle that was sure to fall flatter than a flapjack?

  Because you need to show you’re making an effort.

  Almost immediately, another voice in her head answered the first.

  I have a more than full-time job and twins approaching the terrible twos. What more effort can I show?

  “Why theoretically?” Margo asked. “Happy breasts lead to happy sex and happy sex leads to happy Lila.”

  Lila bit her lip. She’d called her friend to ask her for advice. Now she couldn’t say the words. Couldn’t actually voice the question without feeling ridiculous.

  Margo had probably never had to deal with a similar problem. She was married to Simon, lead singer of Oblivion and sex maniac extraordinaire. Margo and Simon’s sex life was the stuff of legends.

  If Lila had ever doubted it, the fact Margo had sounded breathless when she answered the phone laid Lila’s questions to rest. And Margo had not been doing yoga, although it was possible the downward dog position had been involved.

  “True.” There. That was a nice, noncommittal answer.

  Happy breasts would lead to happy sex if she was having any. And that was just the problem.

  She wasn’t.

  Oh, she couldn’t say she wasn’t having any at all. That would’ve been a complete exaggeration. Still, going from doing it twice a night to once a week was a rather drastic change.

  Drastic and unwelcome since her libido had started coming back hardcore after she’d disconnected the twins from her milk-makers.

  But it wasn’t as if she knew how to bring the subject up to her husband. Nick was an extremely sexual guy, much like his best friend, Simon. Asking Nick why he didn’t seem to care about fucking anymore was akin to asking the sun why it didn’t feel like shining. The fact that she even had to ask the question meant something was up.

  Or down. And down in this case was no good.

  “So I’ll go back to my original question. What are you guys doing for Christmas?” Margo asked, apparently unaware of Lila’s mental babbling. “Going to your parents’ orchard for a late holiday?”

  “What do you mean, what are we doing? Oblivion has the show Christmas Eve. That puts the kibosh on most of our plans to travel, don’t you think?”

  Hearing her own voice, Lila smothered a groan. Oh yay, she must’ve accidentally depressed the bitchy side of her vocal box when she stabbed herself with the eyebrow pencil.

  Adding color inside the lower lash line. What kind of sorcery was that?

  Margo cleared her throat. “Um, I have the same show, as Oblivion is my band too in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Lila sighed. Margo was Oblivion’s violinist, and an insanely talented one at that. She hadn’t forgotten anything, except what it was like for her husband to grab her at inappropriate times and have his way with her.

  Just once, she’d like to do it outside of bed. They used to all the time. It wasn’t that she even disliked missionary, more that she wanted to play missionary when she was in the cowgirl position, preferably on the floor or a leather couch. Somewhere fun and spontaneous.

  Non-marital, non-parental sex. Was that so much to ask?

  Evidently, yes.

  Judging from Margo’s pregnant pause, she also needed to apologize to her best friend for her snippy response. And possibly come clean.

  Ugh.


  Lila exhaled. “No, we aren’t going to the orchard. I thought maybe we should use Oblivion’s break after the concert to reconnect. Hard to do that with all your family around.”

  Though her parents kept trying to shuttle her and Nick into the baby-making room at the lodge at the orchard every time they visited. That wasn’t happening. There was a reason Lila had scheduled Nick for a vasectomy shortly before she had the twins.

  Which she had then called to cancel.

  Twice.

  Okay, three times.

  She didn’t want another pair of kids, as much as she loved her girls. And she did love them. Desperately. More than she’d ever imagined loving another human being.

  Two human beings, who had taken up every spare molecule of her body. At least that was how it had felt. Then she’d had the girls via C-section, and she’d been so in love with them that she’d called to cancel the vasectomy.

  She and Nick made beautiful, super smart, perfect babies. There was no need to be hasty.

  Especially since her stepson Michael’s wife Chloe was just about six months pregnant now and glowing. Boy, sometimes it was hard to remember all the trials of pregnancy when at the end of nine months—or a smidge over seven in Lila’s case—you ended up with a rosy-cheeked baby who smelled of powder.

  Still, she could not go through another five months of bedrest to have a second set of twins. She would lose her mind. Nick could not promise he would only deliver her a single child, due to his family’s profligate history at having multiples, so that factory was closed for business.

  She was almost sure. Probably. Good luck convincing her folks of that, however.

  Not that they were doing much to lead to pregnancy concerns anyway. Even an expert sniper had to aim at the target more often than every Sunday to achieve victory.

  Margo sighed. “Yeah, family definitely slows down the whole connection part of being a couple, that’s for sure. But why would you guys need to reconnect anyway? You see each other all the time.”

  Margo was not baiting her. She was simply asking a question out of friendly concern. Certainly, she wasn’t bragging about the fact she and Simon never needed such things, because they were still screwing morning, noon, and night.

  “We do see each other often, but not all the time. He holes up in his studio a lot with Gray if he’s not with Simon. Or he’s with the girls while I’m working on things I brought home from the office. It’s different when you have children.”

  Lila shut her eyes. Now she sounded rude. Great.

  “I just mean time-wise,” she added hastily.

  Margo didn’t deserve any misdirected snark. It wasn’t her fault that Lila was currently dwelling on whether or not Nick still found her attractive.

  It was probably the Spanx’s fault, actually. They were not holding up their part of the bargain—also known as her ass.

  “Not just time-wise. I imagine when it gets down to…reconnecting time, you’re more tired than you would be normally after chasing around toddlers all day long.”

  “Yes. So much yes.” Lila’s voice was more than a little fervent. “I have Becky’s help, of course, but—”

  “But you refuse to actually have your nanny come over every day instead of just a few hours a week. Just as you refuse to hire a cleaning service, or someone to prepare your meals, or anyone else who might make your life easier.”

  “Tell me how you really feel, Margo.”

  “I am. I’m telling you that you can’t do everything, and it’s exhausting watching you try.”

  Lila propped her hip against the counter. “My mother didn’t have help. She managed all on her own.”

  “Your mother didn’t have a demanding job like yours. She also had one child, not two. At the same time.”

  Lila had to laugh at the horror contained in Margo’s tone. “Why do you think I locked the bedroom door for a while? Sheer terror it would happen again.”

  Frowning, Lila set down her eyebrow pencil. But that had changed. At first, she’d been panicky and dealing with more than a little postpartum depression, along with the general fear that she just wouldn’t be able to deal with her life anymore. Not the way she once had.

  She liked her schedules. Her rules. Her tidy little boxes with tidy little checks.

  There were no tidy little checks with twin babies. No tidy little checks when your husband slept through alarms and thought being morning presentable for TV interviews was grunting “hello” before glaring at his cup of coffee.

  He left clothes on the floor. Even now, she had to kick aside multiple pairs of jeans and boxers of indeterminate age as she paced around the master bathroom. She rarely used this one, instead choosing to move all her stuff into one of the guest bathrooms so he could have his mess to himself. But the nursery was right up the hall, and she’d wanted to be able to hear the girls if they woke up while she was playing Slutty Barbie.

  “You locked the bedroom door on Nick? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Well, mostly.”

  “No wonder you need to reconnect then. Jeez.”

  Lila stopped pacing. “You just said yourself that twins would freak you out.”

  “Babies period freak me out. But if I was really that scared of getting knocked up again, I’d probably get my tubes tied. I definitely wouldn’t kick my man out into the cold then wonder why he wasn’t into doing me anymore.”

  “There was no kicking,” Lila said defensively. “More nudging, really. There was definitely no cold.” Not much.

  The tubes tying thing, however, was an option. Though now probably wasn’t the best time to mention the cancelled vasectomy appointments.

  Lila pressed her fingers to her forehead. God, she was a dolt.

  She hadn’t thought about the cumulative stuff that had happened over the last eighteen months since the girls were born. She’d been more focused on the recent past. The times when she’d tried a number of things to entice Nick, only to be shut down. Nicely. So nicely that sometimes she hadn’t even realized she’d been closed out until the bedroom door shut in her face, and she heard Avery and Charlie’s giggles down the hall.

  More often than not, she was rejected in favor of their girls. Hard to be mad about that.

  And she wasn’t. She was just horny, and confused, and sad, and horny.

  Lots of horny in there.

  “That’s true,” Lila said quietly. “There are options I could look into and then it’s not a concern anymore. I adore my girls, so I’ve stopped worrying about repeats. But that wasn’t the only reason I—”

  “Or more likely, I’d realize getting knocked up with twins while on BC was just a fluke, and if I shoved my husband out of the bedroom, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting preggo again for a while. Or getting anything at all.” Margo heaved out a breath. “Just saying.”

  Lila picked up her eyebrow pencil and tossed it into the sink. The act of rebellion felt good, but she immediately swept it into her makeup bag.

  So what if she didn’t like chaos? Did that make her a bad person?

  “It wasn’t just about getting pregnant,” Lila muttered. “I was out of sorts after having the girls. Not just emotionally, but physically. You don’t want to get right back on the horse right away. You just do not.”

  Well, at least she hadn’t. Jazz probably had mounted the horse the minute her stitches had healed. But she and Jazz were very different people.

  She wasn’t jealous of Oblivion’s drummer’s ability to bounce back after every situation in two seconds flat. Not one bit. Nor was she envious of Jazz’s perky post-pregnancy breasts.

  Her huge, perky breasts.

  “Are you still out of sorts?” Margo asked.

  “No. I haven’t been for a long time. We’ve settled into a routine. It’s crazy, and it’s definitely more unpredictable than I’d like, but it’s life.” She sighed. “It’s my life. One I fought hard to have. One that I love with my whole heart.”

  Which was pretty
much it in a nutshell. She might get tired, and she might feel overwhelmed, and her shoulders might ache from trying to juggle everything. But she had two adorable, sweet baby girls, and a sexy as hell, occasionally obnoxious, lovable husband.

  She had absolutely everything.

  Margo started to speak, but Lila wasn’t quite finished.

  “And you know what? Even if we had another set of twins,” she made a quick sign of the cross and hoped the higher power understood she was just mostly making a point, “I’d love them more than anything. Just as I love Nick.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “He should. He lives in the same damn house as I do. Or he could try asking me.”

  “Would you answer if he did? If he flat out asked you if you were happy, what would your answer be?”

  “Right now? I’m exhausted, and I tried to use a curling iron that only managed to crisp up the Cheerios stuck in my hair.”

  Margo laughed, but Lila wasn’t through yet.

  “Charlie hasn’t slept through the night in I don’t know how long, and sometimes I have no choice but to drive her around to calm her down. So, of course, I’m worn out and cranky and I definitely have to work at feeling sexy.”

  “Wait, drive her? Like leave the house in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes. Nick stays here with Avery. Luckily, she doesn’t ever wake up. I swear, my babies are complete opposites. One so calm all the time, the other so full of baby malcontent.”

  “Sounds like Nick. So how come he doesn’t drive her around?”

  “Because he tells me not to. Says I should let her cry it out. But I can’t. It shreds my heart. Sometimes while we’re out I’ll get her a kiddie vanilla cone at McDonalds and she’ll giggle and it’s just the best sound.” Lila had to smile. Charlie’s giggle could make any day seem brighter. “She’s not a bad baby. She just gets overtired and can’t settle.”

  “Maybe that’s your problem? You need something to settle you down so you can get some rest?”