Chapter 8
eight
. . .
Mia
“I stay.” Two words. That’s all it takes. His breath leaves him in one long, ragged exhale, like he’s been holding it since the moment I opened my mouth, and something in his face—something tight and terrified and carefully controlled—simply collapses.
He doesn’t say anything. For a long moment, he just looks at me—really looks, his ice-gray eyes searching mine like he’s checking for hesitation, for doubt, for any sign that I might change my mind.
There isn’t any. The fear is still there, nestled under my ribs like a familiar ache, but beneath it is something steadier.
Something that feels, inexplicably, like coming home.
“I want option two,” I say, and my voice is clearer now.
Firmer. “All of it. The penthouse. The ring. The baby.” I reach for his hand on the sofa cushion.
His fingers are cold. I wrap mine around them and feel him shudder.
“I’m scared, Elias. I’m still scared. But I’m more scared of a future where you’re not in it than I am of the risk. ”
A sound leaves him—half laugh, half sob, rough and unfamiliar. His free hand comes up to cradle my face, his thumb brushing my cheekbone with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
“Are you sure?” he asks. His voice is wrecked.
The cool, controlled Dr. Thorne, reduced to this—a man with shaking hands and a breaking voice, asking me if I’m sure.
“Because once you choose this, Mia, once you take my name and let me put a child in you, there is no going back. Not for me. I will never let you go. Not ever.”
“I know.” I turn my face into his palm, press a kiss to the center of it. “That’s what I want. I want the man who doesn’t let go.”
He pulls me against him. Wraps his arms around me so tightly I can barely breathe, his face buried in my hair, his big body trembling against mine.
I feel something hot and damp against my scalp—not quite tears, Elias Thorne doesn’t cry, but something close.
Something raw and honest that he would show no one but me.
We stay like that for a long time. Holding each other on a sunlit sofa in a glass penthouse, while the city spins obliviously below and the future we’ve chosen settles around us like a second skin.
That night is different.
We cook together. Pasta, something simple, his body moving around mine in the kitchen with a new ease—no desperation, no hunger driving every touch into something frantic. Just the quiet rhythm of two people who have chosen each other, moving in shared space.
We eat at the dining table instead of on the sofa.
Use actual plates. Light candles. Talk about ordinary things—a difficult patient, a movie he wants to see, the plant on the balcony that’s looking droopy.
Normal conversation. The kind people have when they’re building a life, not just stealing moments between risks.
After dinner, I climb into his lap on the living room sofa.
He’s reading a medical journal—of course he is, the man is incapable of true relaxation—and he sets it aside when I settle across his thighs, my knees on either side of his hips. His hands find my waist automatically. Habit by now. Muscle memory.
“I want to try something,” I say.
His eyebrow lifts. That sardonic, silver-fox expression that used to make me blush and now makes my nipples hard. “Do you.”
“Mmm.” I lean in, press my mouth to the hinge of his jaw. Feel his pulse jump under my lips. “I want to be on top. I want to look at you while you’re inside me. I want to tell you exactly what I’m choosing when I choose you.”
Something shifts in his eyes. Darkens. His grip on my waist tightens. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I rock against him, feeling the hard ridge of his cock through his sweatpants, and he hisses through his teeth.
“I want your baby, Elias. Not someday. Not eventually. I want it now. I want to feel you come inside me and know that it might take. That I might be carrying a piece of you while I’m standing next to you at the nurses’ station tomorrow, taking vitals and pretending I don’t know exactly how your cock feels when it pulses. ”
His breath catches. His eyes go black. “Christ, Mia.”
“I want your name.” I grind down harder, and he groans, his hips lifting to meet me.
“I want everyone in that hospital to know exactly who I belong to, not because they guessed it, but because I’m wearing your ring and there’s no doubt.
” I lean closer, my mouth at his ear. “I want to be yours in every way there is. So fuck me slow, Dr. Thorne. Look at me while you do it. And then fill me up like you mean it.”
He stands in one fluid motion, my legs wrapped around his waist, and carries me to the bedroom.
Sets me on the edge of the bed and strips me with hands that aren’t quite steady.
My shirt. My bra. My leggings. My panties.
Then his own clothes—sweatpants, t-shirt—until we’re both naked in the lamplight, and the way he looks at me—hungry, reverent, wrecked—makes something hot and liquid pool between my thighs.
He lays me back on the bed and positions himself between my legs.
But instead of pushing inside immediately, he takes his time.
His mouth on my breasts, sucking each nipple until I’m arching and whimpering.
His hand between my thighs, working me slow, his fingers circling my clit with that surgeon’s precision that knows exactly how much pressure to apply.
When he finally pushes inside, it’s with a control that nearly breaks me.
One long, slow stroke, his eyes locked on mine the entire time.
I watch his face—the way his jaw clenches, the way his pupils blow wide, the way something vulnerable and naked moves behind his eyes when he’s fully seated inside me.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “Looking at me like that. My good girl. My perfect little one.”
I wrap my legs around his waist. Roll my hips. Take him deeper. “Move,” I whisper. “Please. I need you to move.”
He does. Slow, deep strokes that have me seeing stars. His hand cradles my face, his thumb brushing my lower lip, and he watches me with an intensity that should be frightening and is instead the most intimate thing I’ve ever experienced.
“Going to come inside you,” he murmurs, his voice rough with exertion, with want. “Going to fill this pretty pussy up until it spills. Going to put a baby in you, Mia. My baby. My good girl carrying my child.”
The filth should shock me. It doesn’t. It coils through me like liquor, warm and dizzying, and I clutch at his shoulders and whimper, “Yes, please, Elias, please?—”
He drives deeper. Harder. His pace losing some of that careful control, his hips snapping, his cock hitting that spot inside me that makes my vision blur.
I come with a cry that bounces off the bedroom walls, my inner walls clenching around him, my thighs shaking, and he follows—his rhythm stuttering, his cock pulsing, and then?—
He trembles.
Not the powerful, controlled surge of his usual orgasm.
A full-body shudder, his hips driving into me once, twice, three times as he empties himself with a groan that sounds like it’s been torn from somewhere deep and ancient.
His forehead drops to mine. His breath is ragged against my lips.
His hands are shaking where they grip my hips.
“I love you,” he says, and the words are raw, unpracticed, like he’s never said them before and isn’t quite sure of the pronunciation. “God, Mia, I love you. I have loved you since the first day. I will love you until the last.”
I kiss him. Slow. Deep. My hands in his silver-streaked hair, holding him to me while his cock is still inside me, still twitching occasionally, still filling me with everything he has.
“I love you too,” I whisper against his mouth. “My Dr. Thorne. My Elias. Mine.”
We stay connected. His weight settled on me, his face buried in my neck, his heartbeat slowing gradually against my chest. The room is quiet except for our breathing, the distant hum of the city, the occasional soft sound of his lips pressing against my skin.
And something has shifted. Something fundamental.
The obsession—the hunger that has driven us from the beginning, that has been equal parts ecstasy and terror—no longer feels like something that might destroy us.
It feels like the most natural extension of what we are.
The logical conclusion of a connection that was always going to end here, in this bed, with his come inside me and his heart in my hands.
I stroke his hair. Feel him sigh against my throat.
Mine. Finally, completely, irrevocably mine.
And for the first time since I fainted in that break room and he caught me before I hit the floor, I am not afraid.