16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
Demetrius
It takes me four times as long as it should to read the lease for the penthouse I'll be renting in Long Beach for the Windemere acquisition.
It's a nice place.
The penthouse is nine thousand square feet on the thirty-second floor, floor-to-ceiling glass, a private elevator, a private rooftop garden and a 360 view of Long Beach. The kitchen is all white stone and chef's appliances and I made sure a fitness room and a hot tub were included.
I sign it with an uncharacteristic tremor in my hand.
I don't know why I'm so nervous. I have no trouble with decision-making.
Never have. A decision is a calculation: the correct result for the given variables, arrived at through the proper method.
The penthouse is the correct result. I need somewhere to live with Maddie and I found it. So that's done.
I set the lease aside and open the next file. The Meridian Pacific paperwork has arrived, which is slightly ahead of schedule, which means Marcus's people moved faster than promised, which means the chief of staff personally expedited it.
Maddie is going to have the offer in front of her by tomorrow.
The relief is almost physical: a specific easing in the chest. The position at Meridian Pacific's ICU is the kind a nurse with Maddie's credentials would normally spend years competing for.
She deserves the position. She's fully competent for it and it might put her career back on the track it was before Grace's diagnosis.
It's objectively perfect.
Then why does it feel like a shameful secret?
I sigh, then massage my brows, trying to ease the stubborn headache that dug in its claws hours ago. When I open my eyes again, I look at the clock and shake my head. It reads eleven forty-seven. I have been working without a break since nine this morning.
I lean back and look at the ceiling and the question that makes my stomach twist in painful knots shoots through my tired brain.
Will Maddie even want to come with me?
Agatha's words rise uninvited.
Have you asked her what she wants?
I haven't. I know precisely why.
I am good at reading situations. It is one of the things that made me what I am: the ability to correctly assess a set of variables and arrive at an accurate conclusion.
But this time, no matter how much I work the variables, I'm back to square one. I can't make sure she will say yes.
That's the part I haven't looked at directly. Not because I flinch from difficult truths. I'm afraid of this particular answer because it points at something no amount of money can fix.
If she says no, it won't be because the job is wrong or the city is wrong or the timing is wrong.
If she says no, it will be because I'm not enough. Me. Demetrius Thornwood.
If that's not enough, there is no solving it. No calculation adjusts for it. You cannot leverage your way out of being insufficient.
I sit with that for a moment.
I try to convince myself that I have every angle covered. The lease is signed. The offer arrives Friday. She is smart and perceptive and she knows me, underneath all the years and the damage, she has always known me. When she sees what I've built for her, she'll understand.
She'll understand.
The knock is quiet but I startle anyway.
"Come in," I say, and then she does.
Maddie in a nightgown is, empirically, a lot.
The thing is pale and soft, loose at the hem, with a little drawstring she hasn't bothered pulling, so it slides off one shoulder and exposes her collarbone and the line of her neck.
She is barefoot. Her hair is down. She has a glass of red wine in one hand and she takes one look at the state of my desk and her mouth turns to a sexy, pouty frown.
My cock stirs to life.
"It is almost midnight," she says. "I was getting tired of waiting for you."
"I'm so sorry."
"You've been working non-stop all week." She comes in and takes a dainty sip of her wine. "You need to let out some tension or you'll snap like a twig."
She crosses to me with that wicked smile, the one that makes my cock instantly and painfully hard. I look up at her and my breathing accelerates.
She's so beautiful, so blindingly, heartbreakingly beautiful.
And then she leans down and her lips close on mine. My hand finds her jaw before my brain has fully processed what's happening.
She tastes like the wine and something underneath it that is just Maddie and makes my entire body tingle.
I kiss her back, my hunger for her immediate and imperious.
Then I pull back and brace my forehead against her, breathing in her smell, her breath, everything that makes her the center of my universe.
"Are you happy with me?" I ask.
She pulls back a few inches and looks at me, an unreadable expression on her soft, perfect face.
"Yes," she says. "I'm very happy, right now." She tilts her head. "Are you happy with me?"
"Happy with you? No, I'm not happy with you." Her perfect face scrunches and I brush her cheek with my thumb. "What I feel when I'm with you is not just happiness. I feel complete, perhaps for the first time in a long, long time. When I'm with you, I have everything I could ever have wanted."
Don't you have enough already? Agatha's words, again. Yes, I have enough. As long as I have Maddie with me, I'll always have enough.
"I love everything about you," I say. "I want to make up for every year we wasted."
Her fingertips trace along my jaw, which does not improve my cognitive function.
"Are you telling me what I think you're telling me?" she asks.
"I'm telling you I love you." Plain. There is no version of this that benefits from elaborate construction. "I've always loved you. I will love you for the rest of my life."
Her expression turns, quick and quiet. Not surprise, exactly.
"You're telling me I'm stuck with you," she says.
"Sadly, yes."
She kisses me again, slowly, both hands cupping my jaw, and when she pulls back her eyes are bright.
"I love you too," she says. "I never stopped."
I press my forehead to hers. She stays there a moment, then pulls back. Her gaze snags somewhere around my chin instead of my eyes, and her thumb finds the loose strand of hair at her collar and twists it.
"The cancerversary is this weekend," she says. "You know, Cancer-Butt-Kicking-Day, but with a name Mom approves?"
"Of course," I chuckle. "Who could forget Cancer-Butt-Kicking-Day?"
"Dad's on grill duty, so expect everything slightly on fire." The strand of hair gets a twist between her thumb and forefinger. "But literally everyone they know has been invited and it's going to be a great party."
She runs out of momentum there, takes a deep breath, then continues.
"You should come. If you want to." It comes out in a rush. "You can also say no. I understand if it's a lot for you, spending an afternoon with a bunch of strangers."
"Yes," I say. "Of course I'll come."
The smile that lifts her face would be reward enough for the walk over hot coals.
Then her expression turns mischievous, and she kisses me again, her lips demanding and imperious against mine.
Maddie makes a small, startled sound as my arm closes around her and she ends up with her feet off the floor, tucked against my chest. Then she stops being startled and loops an arm around my neck.
"Hello," she says.
"Hello."
I turn to the desk and sweep my arm across the surface and the paperwork cascades to the floor. The lease. The Meridian Pacific folder. The other files. The whole carefully organized evening, gone.
I set Maddie on the desk like an idol to be worshipped.
Her eyes are dark. The lamp at the corner throws warm light across her face, across the pale fabric of the nightgown, across the slide of her hair over one shoulder.
I drop to my knees and drape her legs around my shoulders.
She makes a sound when she understands, small and involuntary, and it goes directly to my nerve endings and makes my cock twitch.
"Demetrius," she says.
I push the hem of the nightgown up over her thighs and look at her. Pink and bare and slick already, the scent of her arousal filling my nostrils, pulling something primal straight up from the floor of my chest.
I press my lips to the inside of her knee.
She gasps.
I take my time getting there, working up the soft inside of her thigh until she makes the sound I was waiting for, the edge of impatience cracking through, and then I press my tongue against her perfect pussy in one long, firm stroke and her hips snap forward.
Maddie's hands find my horns as I lick her from her opening to her tiny bundle of nerves in one long, slow stroke.
That is still, unambiguously, my favorite thing. Her grip on my horns, the surprising strength of her small fingers as she tilts her head backward and shuts her eyes to focus on the sensations. I growl against her and her thighs tighten around my neck.
I work her with my mouth, tracing and tasting, cataloguing every shift of her hips, every tightening of her fingers.
She is soaking, warm and sweet, and completely uninhibited about the sounds she makes.
I press one finger inside her, slow and deliberate, and she clenches around me so tight I nearly climax in my pants.
I add a second finger and curl forward.
"There." Her voice is thin and shaky as her grip tightens. "Please don't stop."
I don't stop.
I work her with fingers and mouth in tandem and the sounds she makes get shorter, sharper, clipped nearly to nothing as she gets close. Her thighs are trembling. The grip on my horns goes hard enough that I feel it all the way down my spine.
She comes apart with my name on her lips, hips rolling against my mouth, walls pulsing around my fingers in tight rhythmic waves. I seal my lips over her and hold her through every shudder, working her slow until the grip loosens and she exhales like she has only just recalled what lungs are for.
"Okay," she breathes at the ceiling. "That was something."
I press one kiss to the inside of her knee.
Then I stand.
Her eyes find mine and she is soft and deeply satisfied and she still has both hands loosely curved around my horns from sheer muscle memory, which I find unreasonably endearing.
I take her hips and lift her off the desk. She makes a sound of surprise and wraps her legs around my waist, arms coming around my neck as she frees my horns.
"Hold on," I say. "Hold on to my horns."
She slides her hands back into place.
I push into her in one long, fluid motion and the feeling is so complete, so total, that I stop and stay there just to take it in. The heat of her. The grip. The soft wrecked sound she makes as her walls squeeze around my shaft, her forehead dropping to my temple.
Then I move.
I don't go gentle. I let all my feeling drive me as I grip her hips and pump into her. The smell of her arousal fills the air and I drive into her fast and hard and the pleasure builds at the base of my spine.
She shifts the angle of her hips and I groan, low, from somewhere below the reach of words, and her grip tightens.
"Like this," she says.
Which is, without question, the most effective direction I have ever received in any professional or personal context in my entire adult life.
She clenches around me as she comes again and I drive into her and hold her to me as my own orgasm lands like something structural giving way.
Deep and total and my whole body locked into it, her name in my throat sounding like a growl.
I spill inside her and hold us both still while the waves go through.
Even afterward, I still hold her.
Just that. Her head against my neck, my arms around her, the Stronghold quiet around us except for our breathing.
I hold her and for once, I don't even think about anything. I just exist, right there, with Maddie in my arms.
After a while she stirs.
"Are you still planning to work after this?" Her voice is slightly muffled by my shoulder.
"I'm done with work."
No deliberation. The truest thing I've said tonight.