10. Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
Demetrius
I pretended to work all day.
I ignored phone calls, stared at emails without reading a single word and generally spent the day doing nothing I should have been doing.
All because my stupid brain refused to focus on anything other than Madison's smiling face.
Well, that's not technically true. My brain had no shortage of imagination when it came to thinking about her. And it didn't stop at a smiling face when it came down to fantasizing, either. The things my brain conjured when picturing those plump, round lips. I've dreamed them pressed against mine.
I've dreamed them wrapped around my cock more than anything, if I'm being honest.
And I know how wrong this is. I shouldn't be thinking this way. I shouldn't want her so bad my horns itch and my chest feels tight like I've just run an ultramarathon.
My laptop's screen, which turned grey a few seconds ago, turns black and I groan, then flip the top closed. What good is staring at it for another hour going to do? I have no tab open, anyway. I've been staring at my home screen since nine.
Shit. I don't even know what time it is. A full moon sits over the garden, throwing enough light that I could probably read the Windemere contract by it if I were a special kind of masochist. The entire world out there continues to exist, oblivious to my internal agony.
Get it together, man! You're the CEO of Thornwood Industries. You're a man who picks up the phone to call Prime Ministers and heads of state across the globe. You have the personal number to the President of the United States in your contacts.
Ugh. My little pep talk doesn't do me much good. It's a quarter past ten, and my stomach does a deep, angry rumble. I skipped dinner, too.
So much for not avoiding Maddie.
Well that ends now. I'm an adult. I know a kiss doesn't mean anything. So what, Maddie kissed me? It doesn't have to mean anything more than a slip of judgment on her part. Both our parts.
Only it's not really a Maddie thing, to kiss impulsively and then pretend it didn't happen, is it? It's not an old Maddie thing, anyway. But the woman who is haunting my dreams even awake is not the old Maddie. I need to remember that.
The Maddie living under my roof is a grown woman. A woman who might be able to kiss without having feelings attached to it, for all I know.
So why am I avoiding her, anyway? If she's not making a big deal out of our kiss, then neither should I.
Yes, that's what I'll do. Starting tomorrow, I won't avoid Maddie anymore.
I growl and curse to myself as I leave the study.
The hall is dark. I know the layout of Stronghold the way I know my own reflection, every turn and every draft and every place the floorboards creak.
My feet carry me toward the kitchen on the logic that she might be there, and if she's not I'll leave the envelope on the counter and avoid the entire conversation like a functional adult, which is also a perfectly valid approach for a rational man.
She is there, just like I hoped. And like I dreaded. I'm not sure which anymore.
The island light is on and she's at the counter with her back to me.
Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders and falls around to the small of her back in a silky smooth curtain that immediately twists my stomach into knots.
She wears another nightgown, this time pale blue with a lace trim around the bottom and my eyes trail down her shapely legs to her bare feet on the tile floor.
I take about half a second to understand that I made a terrible mistake. I don't know if it was just a kiss for Maddie, but I know that for me, it wasn't just a kiss.
Nothing is just when it comes to Maddie. Not for me. Not back then and certainly not now.
Thing is, I'm aware that I'm standing there like a creep, watching her as she pours boiling water into a mug.
I clear my throat.
She turns too fast and some hot water spills on her hand.
"Ow! Shit!" Maddie shouts as she puts the mug down just a little too sharply on the countertop.
She wipes her hand on a towel, then takes a second look at me, casting a long glance up and down my body with an expression that makes me want to crawl back upstairs.
"You're not in a suit. Wow. Color me officially impressed.
I really was afraid you'd been sleeping in one at that point. "
I look down at my grey t-shirt and my dark jeans, annoyed that she managed to throw me off balance. "For your information, I own plenty of non-suit clothing items."
"Progress," she says, turning back to her mug. She brings it to her lips and takes the tiniest, most careful sip while staring at me over the rim. "Only about four more garments to go before you qualify as a normal person."
I shake my head, unable to maintain my annoyance. "That mouth of yours really should get you in trouble more often."
She smirks, her face still half hidden by the mug. "That's because of my irresistible charm. People love a sassy girl."
And there it is, that tiny bubble of chuckle slips out of me before I realize I'm laughing. I've only been back in Maddie's orbit a few weeks, and in that time, I've laughed more often than in the past ten years combined. Pretty sure she would find it sad if she knew.
Silence stretches between us as I shift my weight from hooves to hooves.
"I have something for you," I blurt out, happy to have found a good reason to break the awkwardness.
I pull out my checkbook from my jeans' back pocket and set it on the table as I retrieve a pen from the far right drawer of the cabinet where I know Mrs. Fairweather keeps some. "It's been two weeks."
Maddie says nothing as I write the check. I glance up and see her watching me, an expression I can't pinpoint on her lovely face. Then I hand her the check and she stares at it for a few seconds before taking it.
She looks at the piece of paper, then back at me for a beat. She puts her mug and the check down on the countertop beside her and crosses her arms, staring at me.
"Why?"
I blink, confused. "Why what?"
Maddie chuckles, but it's a humorless chuckle.
"Would you have given me this," she says, flipping the check in the air, "if I hadn't kissed you?"
My brain stalls out completely, which is a new and unwelcome experience for me.
"I'm afraid I don't understand." And I don't. "You didn't expect me to pay you?"
Maddie scoffs and then glares at me, seeing straight through me, like she always did.
"This is a check for fifty-three thousand dollars." She says it like an accusation.
"Yeah." I glance around like I'm looking for an escape route, but it's ridiculous. There's nowhere to run. "This is the amount we agreed on, isn't it?"
She nods and then pinches her lips, then takes a moment to herself.
"Are you in the habit of giving your employees the full amount of a contract in advance?"
The question lands and I freeze.
"It's not like that," I protest. "Of course this has nothing to do with us kissing. I know you. I can trust you to finish the job."
She shakes her head and looks at the check again, then swallows visibly.
"Do you even know what that number feels like to a regular person?"
Now at that, I bristle. "I am a regular person."
She scoffs again and taps the countertop with her nails.
"This is nothing to you, isn't it? It's everything to me and it will mean the world to my parents, but for you, it won't even make a difference."
The kitchen goes still as I take in what she said. And she's right, too. I wrote that check without even thinking twice. It is nothing to me.
But it's not nothing to her. I know that. I'm not the out-of-touch billionaire living in the clouds she thinks I am.
"You're right," I say. "It doesn't cost me very much. That is a fact about the world, not a judgment about your value."
I look at her, this woman who was eighteen years old the last time someone could have called her naive about anything, and I hear what she is saying. Not just the words. The thing under the words.
"Did you think," I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I planned, "that I was trying to buy your love back then?"
She blinks.
"No," she says. "I know you weren't. But you weren't able to understand that the kind of money you have, the kind of power, it's a great gift, it really is. But it's also a trap. I didn't want to get trapped by it. I wanted to keep loving you while still achieving my own goals. I wanted us equal."
She smiles and it's the saddest thing I've ever seen. "But you didn't want equal. You wanted everything or nothing."
The old wound, the one that took the shape of Maddie, reopens inside my chest, fifteen years old and still bleeding like it happened this morning.
"I'm not trying to buy my way back into your life."
I take a step around the island as I say it. The gap between us closes from several feet to approximately not enough.
She looks up at me. The guarded thing in her expression has dissolved. What's left is something so direct it takes a year off my life.
"I know," she says. "I don't think that."
Her eyes are dark in the kitchen light and her lips are slightly parted. She hasn't moved, which means she is choosing to be this close to me. It makes me brazen.
"I want to kiss you," I say. "Right now."
She looks at me for a long moment, then passes her tongue over her lower lip. Her eyes are wide and brilliant and her chest heaves with shallow, fast breath.
"I want that too," she says.
Then I move like I've pictured myself doing it thousands of times over the years.
I kiss her.
Not carefully. Not gently. I kiss her like the desperate man that I am.
My hand finds her jaw and I tilt her head back and her mouth opens under mine.
My lips seal over hers, pressing and demanding.
She opens for me and I invade her mouth with my tongue, her taste filling my brain with the fog of lust.
She tastes sweet and vaguely floral like her herbal tea as her tongue battles with mine. My other arm goes around her waist and pulls her in, flattening her flush against me. She moves willingly, molding her soft curves to my hardness. My cock instantly responds, painfully hard inside my jeans.
Her hands curl into the fabric of my shirt and she moans in my mouth as she presses her hips against me, clouding my brain with the kind of hunger that can never be satisfied.
I break the kiss just far enough to breathe and she makes a small, wounded sound of protest. I press my lips to the line of her jaw, the soft skin just below her ear, and she tips her head back to give me room.
"Demetrius." My name in her mouth, like she's run out of anything else to say. "Don't stop kissing me. Please, please don't stop."
My hand at her waist finds the hem of the nightgown and her skin is warm under my palm. I press my lips to the hollow of her throat and she arches into it and her fingers find my hair and I am completely and entirely finished being a rational man.
Nothing could have prevented what comes next.