One at her jaw, tipping her head back. The other at the back of her neck, pulling her in. Her hair is silk under my palm. I release her lips and my mouth travels down her jawline to the soft skin of her throat, and the sound she makes is like a wire pulled taut through my chest. The hand I have at the back of her neck travels down to the small of her back and I use it to press her to me, her round, small breasts pushing against my torso. My cock is instantly hard against the fabric of my pants, the kind of desperate need I have felt only for her.
I'm famished, kissing her like a starving man at a feast.
I press my lips to the hollow at the base of her throat and she arches into it. Her small hands close on my shoulder and travel to my neck, then to my head to get tangled in my mane. She's kissing me back, her small mouth leaving tracks on my jaw, my cheek, then she nips at my earlobe and I nearly lose it.
I want, with everything I own, to keep her exactly here, in my arms, forever.
I pull back just enough. Look down at her.
"I missed you," I say.
Three words. No preamble, no armor. Just the truest thing in the world, said out loud.
Maddie's expression does something complicated. She is looking up at me, her eyes dark, her pupils dilated and full of something I know all too well. Or something I wish I knew. My brain is full of cotton balls and all I can think about is how much I want to keep kissing her.
Then she presses her palms flat against my chest and pushes me back.
I release her immediately.
We stare at each other. A songbird somewhere sings its heart out, but all around us, the air has a muffled, surreal quality.
Maddie brings her fingertips to her lips. She stares at me for one charged, completely unreadable moment. Then she shakesher head, once, and gets up from the bench and walks toward the house.
I watch her go and I know in this instant that the world as I know it has ceased to exist.
Chapter Nine
Maddie
TheRolls-Royceisthemost comfortable car I have ever sat in.
I hate it. Scratch that. I hate that I don't actually hate it.
I hate how the seat seems to have been specifically engineered around the curve of my butt. I know it hasn't. But it sure feels like it.
I hate the temperature, which is perfect without being asked. I hate the way the road just disappears under us, the Rolls apparently deciding that potholes are for other people's cars, lesser cars, cars that haven't achieved whatever this car has achieved. I hate that there's a little panel built into my door that I haven't figured out yet and that I keep accidentally touching and that plays a warm chime every single time, like the car is delighted by my incompetence.
And I hate the driver. Specifically, I hate how good he looks driving it.
There really should be a law against a man this size wearing a suit this well. The charcoal jacket stretches across those wide shoulders in the way only something tailored to one's specific measurements can. Sexy, manly, and devastatingly unaware of how freaking... muncheable he looks.
Yeah. I said it. Demetrius Thornwood looks muncheable. Like a juicy and delicious piece of minotaur beef-cake.
Ugh. I'm going straight to Hell.
It's just that he has no right to look like that. His hands on the wheel are steady and big and his horns catch the light from the passenger window as we come around one of the tight curves on the road down into town. My brain, the absolute traitor, files all of it into a folder labeled Do Not Open and then immediately opens it again.
Two days.
Two days since the rose garden and the kiss I started, and I've been performing a masterclass in strategic avoidance. I found things to do on Agatha's floor when I heard him on the stairs. I took my meals at different times. Very demure, very cowardly.
Agatha, for her part, has said absolutely nothing, but I suspect she knows something happened between us. The old minotaur has as much intuition as a witch.
In the backseat, she has been narrating the landscape to herself in murmured observations about the state of the hedgerows. I have been spending the last twenty minutes replaying the kiss with a dedication that would impress a film editor. His hand at my jaw. His mouth moving to the hollow of my throat. The way he said I missed you, three words with no armor on them at all, and then the way my hands pushed him back while the rest of me was ready to commit a significant number of crimes against good judgment.
I was the one who started it. I was also the one who stopped it.
Both of these facts are extremely inconvenient.
