12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
Demetrius
She's nestled next to me when I wake up.
That's the first thing my mind latches on to. Before the pale strip of pre-dawn light at the curtain edge registers as morning, before any rational thought arrives to spoil the moment. Just that Maddie is there, in my bed, in my arms.
She's tucked against my side with one hand loose on my chest and her hair spread across my shoulder. Like she's been sleeping next to me every night of the past fifteen years. Like our long separation was just a bad dream after all.
My arm is around her, molding to the soft curves of her body, keeping her warm and protected.
I stay very still.
Her hair smells like citrus and something warm underneath, spicy. Cinnamon, maybe. Her back rises and falls against me, slow and even. The hand on my chest is slack, fingers curled against my fur, and I cover it with my own without thinking about it.
God, she's small.
I always forget, when she's awake and running her mouth and absolutely refusing to be impressed by anything, just how small she actually is. Tucked against me like this, she could fit under one arm, and somehow that makes her more dangerous, not less.
She stirs. A small sound, barely anything, and then she shifts against me.
She turns her face into my shoulder and goes still again.
She's not moving, but there's something different about the quality of her stillness now.
Then she moves again, slow and unhurried, and her hips press back against mine.
I can't see much of her face in our position, but what I can see is decidedly wicked.
Wicked, playful, and so sexy I barely remember to breathe.
She stills when her hips find my cock, rock-hard against her.
Her smile widens.
"Good morning to you too," I say.
She huffs a sleepy laugh against my shoulder and keeps her hand moving south.
By the time her fingers close around me I have lost the thread of any thought I was trying to maintain. She strokes me once and I draw a sharp breath through my nose. Twice. I close my hand around her wrist.
"Maddie." I warn her.
She lifts her head and blinks at me, expression entirely too wicked for someone who technically just woke up.
"Problem?"
"Yes." My voice comes out low, almost a growl. "Come up here."
She blinks. Her brow goes up. "But I'm busy down here."
She slides down the length of me before I can stop her, settling between my thighs and looking up at me.
She grips my shaft with both hands and looks up at me, then her mouth closes around my cock.
I suck air through my teeth as she flicks the sensitive tip with her tongue and all higher cognitive function leaves my body through the top of my skull.
She is not in any hurry. That much is immediately clear. She works me with her tongue in slow, thorough passes, tasting and teasing, and her eyes come up to mine with an expression that could finish me on the spot. I press my head back against the pillow and breathe through my nose.
"You're going to be the end of me," I say.
She hums against me in a way that does not help.
She takes me deeper, her small hand wrapping around the base of my shaft, pumping up and down while her mouth works over me.
She sets a rhythm and my hips roll into it without my permission.
Her name comes out of my lips, my voice rough and husky.
She glances up again, satisfied as a cat, and does something with her tongue that almost sends me over the edge entirely.
I close my hand in her hair, stopping her.
"I was getting to the good part," she says.
"Come here." It comes out rough, the guttural sound of a man barely civilized.
She releases my cock with an obscene sound and the grin she gives me from somewhere around my navel is genuinely dangerous.
She comes, reluctantly, like I'm interrupting something important. When she's level with my face I brush her hair back from her cheek and she stops pretending to be put out.
"I want to feel you come all over my cock and fill your sweet, wet pussy with my seed," I say against her mouth, and the sound she makes goes straight to my balls.
I roll her onto her back.
She is perfect. I told her that last night and I meant it and the morning light coming through the curtains does not revise the opinion.
The sheet is pooled around her waist and her dark hair is everywhere and she's watching me from underneath all of it with those eyes that make it impossible to think straight.
"You have that expression on your face right now," she says. "Like a lion about to pounce on a gazelle."
"Yes." I smirk at her. She's always been the only one who can make me smile through anything. "That's exactly what you are, a little gazelle."
"It's alarming."
"Good." I press a kiss to her jaw, and another to the soft skin below her ear, and she tips her head back and all conversational interest exits the premises.
I travel down the length of her throat, over her collarbone, over the curve of her chest. She has her hands in my mane and she's gripping in a way that would be classified as urgent by any objective observer.
I take my time regardless. I travel over her ribs, along the soft slope of her stomach, and she makes an impatient noise that has my cock throbbing.
Her fingers tighten.
"Demetrius."
"Mm."
"If you stop to admire the scenery one more time, I'm going to lose my mind."
I press a kiss to her hipbone. "The scenery is worth admiring."
"I will throw a pillow at your head. I'm not joking. I will absolutely do it."
I part her thighs and she stops threatening me.
The sounds she makes in the early morning quiet of the room, with the ocean just audible beyond the window and the first light going gold across the ceiling, are the most erotic of my entire adult life.
She is gripping my horns the way she did last night, which I have decided is my new favorite thing.
My nostrils flare. She smells intoxicating. Sweet and warm and so slick with arousal that the sight of her pussy, pink and glistening, spread out in the pale morning light, makes my cock jerk.
"Beautiful," I murmur, and I mean it in the most comprehensive way possible.
I press my lips to her inner thigh and her breath staggers.
I take my time getting there, pressing open kisses up the soft inside of her thighs until impatience creeps into her breathing, and then I lick, pressing my tongue firmly from her slick opening all the way to her needy little bundle of nerves.
Her breath catches. Her hips roll toward me.
I taste her in long, slow strokes, cataloguing every shudder, every shift of her hips, every tightening of her fingers in my mane.
She is soaking, her arousal coating my lips, and I growl against her because she is the sweetest thing I have ever tasted and I could spend the rest of my natural life right here and count myself fortunate.
Her breathing goes shorter, sharper. Her thighs tighten around my head and I take it as the highest compliment. I press one finger inside her, slow and deliberate, and she clenches around me so tight that my cock throbs with sympathetic need.
I curl my finger forward and the cry that breaks out of her is one I'm going to hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
I add a second finger and keep my mouth working her clit, and she's gripping my horns hard now. I begin to move my fingers in earnest, pumping and pressing. Her walls flutter around them, clenching rhythmically, and the orgasm crests under my hand.
"Dem." My name is the last word that leaves her lips before her whole body arches off the mattress and she screams loud enough that I'm grateful for the ocean drowning it out.
I seal my mouth over her and suck as she comes undone. Her release floods my tongue, warm and sweet, and I work her through every shudder and every ragged breath, thorough and unhurried, until she's boneless and trembling and her fingers have gone slack in my hair.
She stares at the ceiling for a moment.
"I would say something," she says in a tiny, breathless gasp, "but I appear to have lost the capacity for language."
I press one kiss to the inside of her knee.
"I'll take it. And now, I'll take you."
I turn her over, draw her hips up until she's on her hands and knees on the mattress, and she makes a startled sound as I position myself.
The morning light spills gold across her back, across the lines of her shoulder blades, the curve of her spine, and I run one hand from the nape of her neck all the way down to the small of her back and hold it there.
I slide home in one long, unhurried stroke. She takes me so perfectly it knocks the air out of me. Hot and impossibly tight, her walls gripping every inch of me, a soft, snug fit that feels like the only place I have ever been meant to be.
The broken little noise she makes wrecks something in me, and I hold still for a beat, just to breathe, just to catalogue this feeling.
I start to move.
Slow. Deep. My hand spread at the small of her back, her breathing coming in short, ragged bursts. The word she says into the pillow might be my name or might be a different kind of prayer altogether and honestly both interpretations are fine with me.
I pick up the pace and she braces against the headboard and the world contracts to this: the slick heat of her around me, the sound of our bodies together in the early morning quiet, the way she takes every thrust and presses back for more.
The pleasure builds at the base of my spine, slow and irresistible, and I feel her beginning to flutter around me again, her walls quivering with the early warning of another release.
I reach around her hip and find her clit with my thumb.
"Come for me," I say against the back of her neck. "I want to feel you come all over my cock."
She makes a sound that is completely and entirely undone and her hips jerk and then she clenches around me so tight that my rhythm breaks, stutters, and I drive deep and hold there as the orgasm tears through her.
Her walls pulse around me in waves. It's too much, the grip of her, the warmth, the sound of her coming apart with my name on her lips.
The release hits me all at once.
I come with a growl pulled from somewhere deep in my chest, burying myself to the hilt as I spill inside her, holding her hips to me while every wave crashes through and the pleasure goes on and on.
Afterward we lie there while our breathing returns to something workable. She turns over and tucks herself back against my side and something in my chest does a slow, complicated thing.
The thought arrives unbidden and lands with the weight of a fact: I am not letting this go.
I was a fool once and let my wounded pride cost me the love of my life. I was terrified of losing her and I lost her anyway.
Not this time. This time, I will do whatever it takes to keep her right there, where she belongs. In my arms and in my bed, content and safe.
"I have to go check on Agatha," she says into my shoulder, pulling me from my thoughts.
"Not yet."
She tilts her head up and gives me a look that is trying to be stern and is not quite succeeding. "Demetrius."
"Five more minutes."
She considers it. Then she puts her head back down.
I get the five minutes. And then she's up, totally unbothered by her nudity, which I find profoundly attractive and tell her so.
She doesn't dignify this with a response, but her mouth twitches like she's fighting a smile.
She pulls my old t-shirt over her head and it's so big, it covers her all the way to her knees.
She goes out after giving me a quick little wave of her hand.
The room is quiet without her in it. I stare at the ceiling for a few moments and then I get up. I know exactly what to do.
I shower, I dress, I make my way down to the study. I open my laptop and go through my contacts.
I find it easily enough.
Dr. Marcus Webb, Chief of Medical Staff at Meridian Pacific, the most prestigious hospital in Los Angeles.
I sat on the hospital foundation board for three years.
I sent his daughter to an internship at a Thornwood Industries subsidiary in London, launching the girl's incredibly successful corporate law career.
He owes me considerably more than a phone call.
My hand goes to the phone and stops there.
I could tell her about Long Beach right now. I could tell her and I could explain that I want her to come with me.
And she might decide not to.
I pick up the phone. It rings twice before he answers.
"Marcus, this is Demetrius Thornwood."
"Demetrius." The warmth in his voice is the kind that has nothing to do with the favor bank, which is one of the reasons I respect him. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm relocating to Long Beach," I say. "Acquisition. I'm building a new operation there and I'll be on-site for the foreseeable future."
"Good for you." A pause. "That's a long trip from Boston."
"Yes." I turn the pen in my fingers. "I'm looking for an ICU nurse position. Not for myself, obviously. For someone I care about."
There is a beat of considering silence.
"What's her name?"
"Madison Berwick." I set the pen down. "She's an excellent nurse. I would consider it a personal favor if she could find a position at Meridian Pacific."
There's a long pause where I can almost feel Marcus's internal wheels turning.
"I'll make sure the right people see it," he finally says.
"Thank you, Marcus."
We exchange a bit of the usual pleasantries and then I hang up and the study goes quiet again.
I sit back.
I have no choice but to move to Long Beach for the Windemere acquisition, but this time around I'm not going to make the same mistake I did as a rash eighteen-year-old boy. If Maddie gets the ICU position she deserves, she will be happy to follow me for the move.
I will smooth every path, remove every obstacle for her to come with me to Long Beach.
I hand her the finished offer, every path smoothed, every obstacle already gone, so there is nothing left to say no to. When the position is hers and there is a home waiting for us, I will put the whole of it in front of her at once, and she will see it was built for us.
It's the best of both worlds, really. I close the deal of a lifetime, the deal that will plant Thornwood Industries firmly on the West Coast, and Maddie gets back the career she loves.
There is, somewhere in the back of my skull, a small and inconvenient flicker. The kind that shows up when a variable has been left out of a calculation. The kind I have, over the years, learned to respect.
I consider it for a few seconds before deciding I'm just being silly.
Maddie is proud. Maddie wants to be independent.
She refused to give up her career for me once and she was right to.
This is not giving anything up. This is having everything: her career and her autonomy and a position any nurse in the country would be competing for.
I'm not taking anything from her. I'm opening a door, that's all.
I'm doing the right thing. I'm certain of it.