by Mia Madison
“It isn’t quite midnight,” I say and drop to my knees to surrender my mouth to his delicious lips. “You can be my pumpkin.”
“And you’re my Cinderella.”
Epilogue
Twelve months later
Aura
I’d expected a whole lot of shift-eye and veiled smartass remarks from my colleagues when Milo and I came back from Europe. God knows I had to endure enough of them from my sister who was very pouty when she saw the stretch limo parked outside our parents house and discovered the owner was all mine.
I’d made sure not to act all smug over her, seeing as her bf hadn’t even called her on Christmas. I’m supposed to the elder and wiser of us two. I was just so happy that Milo came for me, making all that effort to find out if I was ghosting him and flying back from Japan early to keep the promise he made to a drunk girl.
Because he was completely deranged with jet lag, we stayed up all night. Flor found us in the morning, snuggled on the couch in the den in front of a fire just like I’d pictured. And Milo told me how we were going to handle everything. He had it all figured out and he wouldn’t allow me to leave the company because I’d screwed the boss. Him.
“I need to see you every day,” he murmured into my ear and twirled a strand of hair around his thick finger. “We’re a partnership, I don’t want that to only take place on weekends and when we’re exhausted at the end of the work day.”
“You want to continue fighting with me every day,” I’d joked.
“If it means I get to punish you in my office,” he husked. “I can feel you rolling your eyes and I’m not beyond bending you over my knee right here.”
“You wouldn’t.” I lifted my head off his shoulder to search his face. Grinning as usual. Which didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t one hundred per cent serious.
I didn’t push him that time. But most days since, I do.
His solution was to make me girl boss.
Milo built a geodesic dome inside the office to house my new department. “Seeing as you’re such a liberal ecologist,” he grinned.
And I immediately hired a team of women developers. “Seeing as you’re such a capitalist alpha male,” I smiled.
“Uh huh. We’ll see how that works out for you.”
Argh. I hate it when he’s right. A couple of the women worked out fine but most started covert battles against each other from day one. And once they started making eyes at the boss - my boss - they had to go.
“I had no idea you were so possessive,” Milo said as he piloted his yacht back from Napa with me in the white leather co-pilot chair doing nothing but sip the champagne we bought.
“Maybe you will be too when you see the Ryan lookalikes I’ve hired for the team.”
“Ryan Gosling?” He rolled his eyes.
“Any Ryan will do.” I was trying to prod his buttons, hungry for his attention again even though we’d spent most of the weekend in bed at the spa resort.
This year we’re having a straight up office party. No swanky themes or deviant Santas. Just some great food and a ton of drink and unwind with each other. I made myself the subject of a ton of negative tweets, hashtag GirlGrinch, for cancelling the Christmas movie day so that was reinstated. The geeks got to eat popcorn, nachos and shoot tequila each time an actor said ‘Merry Christmas’.
And this will be our first Christmas at home. We’ve been talking about living together but I know my father will flip out at me giving up the milk before the cow is paid for. I spend most nights at Milo’s Mission District Victorian house that’s been completely re-modernized on the inside. And the nights I’m at my tiny place, if Milo and I have had a fight and I’m ghosting him, I have to put up with my ex-colleague Cutter smooching all over my roommate.
Eww.
My parents came to town for a couple of days and I have lunch with them on Christmas Eve before they head back to Texas. My dad is careful not to make too many remarks about my ‘It’s complicated’ status but I can tell he’s bristling. Milo doesn’t join us because he and I had a little disagreement over where to spend the holidays. He doesn’t want to be with anyone but me.
Alone in my tiny bed last night I realized I want the same but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings - namely my parents. I get through the lunch, barely managing to hold all my emotion in. I’m dying to tell my mom the news and make her Christmas but I can’t until I know what’s happening.
I call Milo as soon as I get out of the airport after seeing them off. I can’t even put my parents in a Lyft, I have to go and do the manic waving at the departure gate as though that makes up for not going home. He doesn’t pick up, nor the second and third time I call. Is he ghosting me? Has he decided I’m too much work?
The city hasn’t emptied out at all judging by how hard it is to find a parking spot in my neighborhood. And once I get home, I realize the heating’s gone out. I call down to the Super who grudgingly says he’ll come up and check the thermostat.
Milo still doesn’t respond to me and I’m starting to get nervous. Tai and Cutter have gone to Mexico and maybe I’m going to be alone for Christmas for the first time in my life. Me and our tiny tree, wobbling on the pot plant stand every time someone walks past it.
“Coming,” I shout, unnecessarily loudly when the Super finally knocks on the door. It’s after eleven at night for chrissake. Almost Christmas.
I throw it open and there’s no one there, or not until I glance down and see Milo on his knees.
“It’s okay I don’t keep a shotgun,” I say, relief flooding through me that he’s here and on his knees in a repetition of last Christmas when he came for me.
“I’m glad,” he says.
“Why are you on your knees every Christmas?” I laugh.”And why do you ghost me every Christmas?”
“Because every Christmas I intend to ask you to marry me,” he says.
I know I’m supposed to stand there but my legs turn weak and I sink down on them, kneeling in front of Milo in the open doorway.
“You do?” I whisper. “Last year?”
“Will you?” He says, his voice cracking. I’ve never seen my boss so nervous. His hand is shaking as he unrolls his large palm to hold up a bright blue ring box.
“Ohmigod,” I moan.
“Aura I love you and I want you to be mine forever. Last year you didn’t give me the chance to ask you and then I promised your father I’d wait longer than a week before making rash decisions. This year he gave his permission.”
“You saw Daddy?” I squeak. He kept that a big secret.
“Baby you’re killing me here,” Milo says. “You and your family love keeping me waiting. Answer me, will you marry me?”
“Ah will, Sir,” I say in my best Southern drawl.
Tears start pouring over my cheeks and Milo looks like he’s fighting them back as well. He picks me up and kicks the apartment door closed behind him. He carries me to the love seat that’s really an armchair for Milo, his shoulders are so broad. He sits then sets me down between his knees.
His eyes glint as he looks up at me.
“That dress has no fastenings,” he says, his voice low and husky.
“It does but they’re hidden,” I whisper. I can only play this game so far before I have to tell him about his surprise Christmas present.
“Show me,” he orders.
I do as he says but much faster than the last time. Thanks to my raging hormones that are making me desperate for him filling me, sawing hard into my pussy and making me scream for mercy.
When I’m standing naked before him aside from a tiny and dripping wet pair of panties and my heeled boots, his eyes trail up and down the length of me with even more intense appreciation. I can see the love that’s built in them along with the intense lust.
He frowns a little and sits up to cup my weighty breast. He kisses the poking out point. The way he sucks it between his lips sets off a lightning array in my pussy. He licks and bites on the hard bullet point
until I’m panting with need. I can’t wait. I’ll have to tell him after. I set my knees on either side of his hips, straddling his lap, spreading my pussy across his the huge bulge I need filling me right now.
Milo attacks each breast like a wild man. He mangles my tits in his grasp as he shoves the point into his mouth and tongues the huge nipple.
“These are so much bigger Baby,” he says. “You feel incredible. I need to be inside you, I need to feel you tight around my cock while I take you hard and fast.”
“Not too hard,” I murmur, stroking his hair as he sucks my nipples.
He looks up at me.
“So soon?” He asks.
I nod and now his voice does choke. The tears start falling out of my eyes without my permission again. I’m in a pent up state of lusty desire and extreme love, so overwrought I might break open.
“They couldn’t even be sure the reversal would work.”
“Oh it worked,” I say. “I’m nine weeks along so it must have been that weekend after you had the op and couldn’t stop fucking me like a man who had a new lease on life.”
“You are my entire life and now we’ve created a new one together. It’s incredible. You’re incredible. The love of my life.”
“Can I tell my parents now?” I say, laughing as he hugs me and covers my bare body with adoring kisses.
“I’ll fly you down there tomorrow,” he says. “Right after a stop in Vegas where we can make you into an honest woman at last.”
“But first,” I say, yanking his belt open and sliding down his zipper. I pull my underwear across to one side and hitch my spread up onto his delicious head. “These hormones are making me a crazy woman.”
Afterword
I hope you enjoyed my second Bossy Christmas Party. To tempt you into a Christmas Treat, I’ve included the opening chapters of Book 1
Chapter One
Four days into this job and I feel like ripping my skin off from boredom. My dad thought he was being helpful, calling in a favor from a friend of a friend of a friend. Digging up a job and some Christmas cash for his deadbeat daughter.
But two weeks of unpacking musty boxes and collating old papers while the regular clerk takes off over Christmas and New Year's to get married on a beach has me feeling desperate. Leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge comes to mind except I'm on the subway. Jumping onto the tracks would be unfair to commuters battling through winter rush hour in the midst of Christmas shopping season. Although if their jobs are as mind-numbing soul-destroying as mine, I'm sure they'd thank me for the delay.
Jeez, I'm getting morbid at this special time of year.
All of Manhattan's twinkly lights and frenzied crowds dashing from store to store have sent me full-on Grinch. Has no one heard of internet shopping? I cross the street, walk up the block then cross back, just to avoid the red-suited dude wagging his bell at me every morning.
I almost want to beg Santa to make me one of his charitable cases. I'm living with my parents in the untrendy part of Brooklyn. I haven't worked since I graduated with an apparently useless degree in political science more than half a year ago. And perhaps the worst thing, at least in terms of my humor, I haven't gotten laid since I left my Chicago alma mater.
Now I'm waiting on an interminable line to pay for an eleven dollar container of macaroni and mayonnaise. At least the deli's gifting a free coffee with my pasta salad although I really wish I'd hit Starbucks. Blown my lunch budget on a candy cane frappuccino with double whip and screw the damn calories.
I'm so hungry I pop the clam-shell package open and sneak a bite of the creamy carbs, garnishing a look of disdain from the older woman behind me for shoving the twists ravenously into my mouth with my fingers.
“Ooooh.” A soft fizzle of wondrous delight passes along the waiting line.
Great.
Fat globules of snow have started dancing on the other side of the loaded store window. By the time I leave the office tonight, the streets will be a total mess.
You can tell the office workers from the shoppers passing the glass. Pasty faced cubicle rats bundled in layer upon layer of fleece and wool against the freezing wind between overheated office, transit and lunch counter.
All except one.
Just as I get close to the register, a guy in a suit, no coat, strolls in, trailing a whoosh of icy air in his wake. He butts right in front of the woman ahead of me. The fine wool lapel of his exquisitely fitted suit is sprinkled with bulbous snowflakes. The woman at the head of the line is too stunned by his blatant cutting in to say anything and I'm too pissed not to. He may be wearing a five thousand dollar suit and have the classic good looks of one of the billboards over on Times Square but fuckit he can wait his turn like the rest of us mere mortals.
“Excuse us,” I pipe up. “We've been waiting ten minutes.”
Nothing.
Like I'm one of the little snowflakes melting to nothing on his collar. Nothing gets me more riled up than being ghosted.
“Excuse me, there's a line here, don't you know?”
Still nothing and what the fuck, the clerk is serving him instead of blasting him back. She jiggles as she turns to find whatever he's asked for and comes back with a simpery little flutter of fake lashes. Even though she sees a line of people that have been waiting an age. Ordinary little people, not rich jerks dripping with power, definitely not stunning hunky males.
“Georgia, that attitude will not get you far in this world,” my mom still scolds me in hushed tones whenever I came out with some feminist political stance.
She's afraid I'll become an old maid. Alone and unloved. I guess she's right because no man asks me out and no job interview in the last nine months has resulted in an offer. Which is why I'm dredging through papers in a back office, make that box room, at Wellman Finance. A hostile takeover arbitrage place that's three steps away from a ponzi scheme. That is, everything I hate about the business world.
“Hey, Buster,” I shout now, receiving a terrified glance from the woman ahead, concerned about whether I'm about to get chaotic. “Were you never taught to treat women with care and courtesy? Or do you always act like an entitled jerk in public?”
I don't notice the hush falling over the entire store as the decibel level of my voice moves higher and higher. My insult is hurled at such volume the shoppers down the block on Fifth Avenue couldn't have missed it. But still nothing from the arrogant douche, who receives the package of high-strength ibuprofen, drops all his change into the tip cup and is gifted with another flirty grin from the fluttery-lashed clerk. It seems he's going to totally blank me as he turns on his way out the door. Then his eyes latch onto mine and he halts.
I feel like I've been strapped into a straitjacket.
His gaze takes me in. And a red rash of heat rises to my frigid cheeks. I don't think I’ve ever seen a man so gorgeous. No, now that I see him head on instead of only from the side, I can safely say he is the most delectable lickable hunk in the history of all things sexy. Black hair of the kind you dagger fingers through, dark eyes that seem to glow in the deli's fluorescent glare, setting me alight with a delving stare. His perfectly trimmed beard, just skirting past scruff is perfect for friction where it counts. No wonder the clerk was mesmerized into serving him and forgetting about an entire store of low blood sugar customers.
He'll be populating her dreams tonight. And I regret to say, mine too.
His eyes pinion me to the ground. I couldn't speak or move if there was a five alarm fire at the hot counter. Heat rises from the tops of my thighs through my core straight to my nipples. I want to laugh like a girl, I'm so discombobulated by his enveloping eyes. His tongue reaches to the corner of his full enticing lips, as though he's thinking through a solution to the puzzle of what to do with me.
Ohmigod
His hand lifts to my face and his firm thumbpad scrapes lightly along the underside of my bottom lip. He takes a second pass with the tip of his index finger as his tongue touches the same point on hi
s own, much thicker lower lip. That tongue sets off explosions of sparkling light. I want that tongue plundering my mouth just once in my life. It takes every effort not to part my lips around his sensuous fingers as they stroke along the bulge of flesh. Not to suck him in and milk his fingers dry. When he lifts from my lips, I unconsciously send my tongue to replace his provocative touch.
“Mayonnaise.”
His motorbike gang husky voice makes that one word sound like sex in a back alley. He holds up his hand as proof. A dab of creamy dressing sits on his fingertip. My face lights up like a cheap bauble, which amuses him enormously. I want to sink into the floor.
“Sorry for thrusting in,” he addresses the line, although his eyes continue burning through me. “Raging headache.” He holds up the painkillers as further proof. He must be a lawyer.
Everyone on line mutters some version of, 'No problem, feel better'.
Seriously?
“Big meeting and I'm doubled parked,” the suit dazzles with a smile that illuminates the entire world.
Another glance through the tinsel strewn window reveals a stretch town car at the curb, the liveried chauffeur waiting to open the door, trying not to shiver.
“Capitalist douche,” I mutter, then realize it emerged from my humiliation just a little louder than I intended.
“Merry Christmas,” The Suit calls to the crowd on his way out. Offering another of his panty-melting grins and receiving a flurry of responses in return.
His eyes delve into me one last time, probably committing my face to memory for any future government sweep of red rebels. And for some bizarre reason all I can do is take note of the fact that he's left handed and that there isn't a ring on it.
“Dat be the hottest man I saw in this city, ever,” the clerk squeals as she pulls the notes from her tip cup. He left her a twenty and a five. “So generous,” she adds loudly for the line to take notice, right as my turn to pay comes up.