"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.
Chapter Seventeen
Maddie
Thereisaspecifickind of quiet that happens in a room where one person is working and the other is allowed to do absolutely nothing, and I have decided it's my favorite quiet in the world.
Demetrius is at the desk in his shirtsleeves, reading glasses on, making small offended noises at whatever's on his screen. I'm in the armchair by the window in my off-duty uniform, jeans and the grey sweater that won't stay on my shoulder, with my second coffee and a paperback I haven't turned a page of in twenty minutes. Watching him work turns out to be a better hobby than reading.
I like this. No, scratch that. I love it. Just like I love him.
