He slid my jeans down my legs, then slowly moved them down my legs, positioning himself between them. I tried to catch my breath as I looked down at the outline of the erection in his gray boxers, his cock large, and I felt anticipation building as he slid the tips of his curled fingers down the sides of my panties and slid them down my legs.
“You’re so fucking sexy, Lily,” he said.
I groaned as he kissed the inside of my legs, then sat up slightly so I could tug at his underwear. He laughed and moved them down his legs, slowly, so that he wouldn’t hurt himself.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” I said.
“I’m not hurt,” he said, biting down on his lower lip. “Everything is good.”
He wrapped his fingertips over my legs as he positioned himself between my legs. I helped guide him in, his cock thick and hard in my hands, and in a second, he was thrusting inside of me, slowly at first as we both got used to each other.
He looked into my eyes; his lips parted.
“Fuck,” he said in a hoarse whisper, and all I could feel then was the way he felt inside of me, the way his body was firm and lithe and masculine over mine, and I wanted him, and I wanted all of him.
I wrapped my legs around the back of his legs, vaguely aware to not do it too tightly in case it hurt him, and he thrusted deeper and deeper and harder and harder into me, until we were both moaning, until I was digging my nails into the comforter under me and until I was hearing him say garbled words I couldn’t understand, my orgasm feeling like little explosions of firework clusters going off all over my body and under my skin, from the core of my body to the tips of my fingers and to my curled toes.
I could hardly hear anything as the orgasm kept spreading over my body, as I heard him say something, though I had no idea what he had actually said.
Exhausted, my body slowly untensed, and he rolled over and off me, though he immediately went on his stomach instead as I pulled my underwear up.
He held my hand.
“Are you sure you’re okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?” I asked.
“Such a romantic,” he replied. “No. No hospital. But I do need to ask you one question.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“A date,” he said. “Dinner, a movie—but maybe not a horror movie. How do you feel about a romcom?”
“I knew you were going to ask that.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course that’s a yes.”
EPILOGUE
ELIAS
2022
I woke up early in the morning from the sun streaming through the window and searched for my wife on the bed, but she was nowhere to be found. Her side of the bed was still warm and I could hear the clatter from her keyboard even through both of the closed doors.
I stretched and walked over to the kitchen, where she was working on the breakfast bar.
She was wearing her now long black hair up in a bun and smiled at me as I approached her. “Good morning, hun,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Sorry. There’s coffee on the pot.”
“You didn’t wake me up, Lil,” I said, kissing her lips. “The bed is just too cold and big without you.”
“I just wanted to get a little work done before Basil came over,” she said. “He’s bringing over some research and I want to finish this chapter’s outline before I move on to the next.”
“You’re doing amazing,” I said. “You’re already writing the book. Will you let me read this chapter?”
“When I’m finished with it, but it might be too spooky.”
“Wow,” I said. “Too spooky even for you?”
“It’s the spookiest chapter so far,” she replied. “It’s going to be very hard for you to get through.”
I walked over to the kitchen, served myself some coffee and sipped it while I looked at her concentrate on her manuscript again, her brown eyes slowly moving over the words on the screen. Ghost was sitting at her feet, purring, and barely looked up at me as I approached her. No surprise there, our cat had always preferred Lily. After she had scratched her.
At least she definitely didn’t have rabies.
“Which chapter is this one?”
“Thornbridge Keep,” she said quietly.
“At least that one has a romantic ending,” I replied.
She smiled. “You’re not wrong,” she said. “What is your day looking like?”
“Boring paperwork, mostly,” I said. “I’m overseeing that evaluating prevention program for the hospital nearby, but I’m also trying to get a better idea on how the… other realm… might affect this.”
“How are you phrasing that?” she asked.
I laughed. “Not like that,” I said. “I’m trying to frame it as a psychological phenomenon.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I mean, I guess it kind of is.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Will you be able to get out of there for three o’clock?”
I sipped on my coffee a little more, Ghost coming up to me and rubbing herself between my legs.
“I already fed her,” Lily said. “Don’t believe her lies.”
I laughed. “Tell me you already ate yourself,” I said. “You didn’t just feed the cat, did you?”
“No, I haven’t eaten yet,” she replied. “I didn’t want to wake you up by puttering around in the kitchen.”
“You have to wake me up,” I said. “You both need to get some food.”
“I can wait thirty minutes, Eli.”
“You shouldn’t have to wait thirty minutes,” I said. “Eggs and bacon?”
“You spoil me.”
“I hope so,” I said. “I can leave work early and we can go shopping for anything else we need for the baby’s rooms.”
She smiled. “Fine,” she said. “As long as you come to this sonogram.”
“What do you think, babe? Boy or girl?”
“I have no idea,” she said, putting her hand over her stomach. “I just hope they are healthy and happy.”
“Well, I have a feeling,” I said. “I think it’s going to be a girl.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m basically psychic.”
She laughed. “Well, you do have a fifty-fifty chance of being right,” she said. “So I suppose there’s that.”
I walked over to where she was again and my heart leapt in my chest as I kissed her again. She put her hand on my chest, her ring glistening on her hand—the only ring, other than mine, in our house—and everything, absolutely everything, was right for the first time in my life.
“You know,” she said. “If she is a daughter, what do you think of the name Holly?”
Then she kissed me again and I forgot all about making breakfast.
THE END
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The Healing Process (The Ghosts Of Thornbridge Keep Boook 1)
THE BARON AND THE BABE
LARISSA DE SILVA
CHAPTER ONE
Ari
I knew it was coming. I knew it.
I felt it, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t know if it was because I was living in denial, or just because the idea that it would happen again scared me. But
I felt cramping, and then, maybe three minutes later, it had started.
Another period.
Another failure.
I knew that Roger had to be the first person to know. He was invested in this, maybe even more than I was. We had been lucky. It just hadn’t taken. We hadn’t had any losses yet. We had started going to a specialist, but the IVF process was still a way off.
Dr. Zaphyr had said that we were lucky we hadn’t conceived yet. She recommended a therapist to everyone whose pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. After she told us that, she stared. As if she wanted me to ask her to recommend a therapist.
But we weren’t there yet. We were trying, and that was all that we could do.
I went to the bathroom, fixed my tear-stained make-up, and sniffled a little before I went back into our living room. Roger was watching the TV—golf, I think—and he barely looked up at me as I slowly shook my head.
He didn’t say anything.
“Roger,” I said, trying to keep my voice from quivering.
He looked up then, and our gazes met for a long second. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I’d told myself before that I wasn’t going to apologize about this again. “I got my period.”
He looked back at the TV. He muttered something, but I couldn’t hear him.
“What was that?”
He looked up at me again. “Nothing,” he said, then straightened up a little bit. “It’s just, it’s not a fucking surprise, is it? Knowing you.”
I blinked. “You think I made this happen?”
He took too long to answer. By the time I heard his voice, I wasn’t in the living room anymore.
***
The divorce, my lawyer assured me, was going smoothly. I had no point of comparison, nothing to relate it to, and I wasn’t particularly interested in delving into the process.
As long as I got to keep what was mine, he could protest all he wanted. My friends all told me that I should be able to see what had happened between us as a blessing in disguise—you didn’t really want a kid with that guy, did you?—but it didn’t feel like a blessing. It felt like a slap in the face, like I hadn’t even managed to escape our relationship with dignity.
He had been the one to push for the child, and I always wanted to please him, but I had realized that I desperately wanted a baby, too. Divorce, it turned out, was a long, drawn-out process, and while there was a part of me that told myself it was archaic to worry about being past my prime before I got pregnant, I couldn’t afford to just go for it by myself.
And the idea of finding a man… it wasn’t just distasteful. It was as ludicrous as the moon being made of cheese.
I knew what I had to do. I had to keep my head down, keep doing my work, and worry about that, and only that. That was what my therapist had recommended. It was funny, I had ended up asking Dr. Zaphyr for a recommendation after all.
That was why I kept going to work, even though every time I interacted with a child, I felt a very particular and very insidious kind of sadness. I knew it wasn’t going to go away, but if I wasn’t able to bring my own child into this world, then the least I could do was make sure that the children around me were as happy and healthy as they could be.
“Who is coming in next?” I asked my assistant, who was dutifully standing next to me.
“Her name is Tatiana Wilde-Garcia. She’s three and a half.”
“Three and a half? For a well-child?” I asked her.
“The family just moved into the area,” Kelly replied. “They’re a bit—”
“Wait, so this is their first visit?”
“Not to our practice,” Kelly said. “They did request another doctor after seeing Dr. Dayleview for the first time.”
I blinked a little. “Did they say why?”
“They wanted someone a little more, uh, thorough.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Fine, okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to make a big show of it.”
“Yeah. The father is a little… he seems a little health anxious,” Kelly said, her polite way of saying that this father was going to be an off-the-wall level nightmare.
“Got it,” I replied. “Don’t bother going in and taking the history before me, then. I’ll handle that.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you certain, Dr. West?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I don’t want him to have to keep repeating the same stuff, and he’ll get the idea that I’m more attentive than Dr. Dayleview, which we all know is just not true at all. Just stick with me, Kelly, and take detailed notes. He might be one of those people whose anxiety is alleviated by knowledge.”
“Do you think so?”
I smiled at her before I knocked on the door to room five. “I mean, honestly, I can only hope,” I replied quietly before projecting my voice into the room. “We’re coming in!”
I opened the door without much warning. The little girl was walking around, looking at the ceiling, which was painted colorfully, and the dad was sitting on a plastic chair and watching her. I couldn’t see him that well, because his face was turned away from me, and he was slouching. I could tell that he was tall, because his legs were long enough that I almost tripped over him. He took a little while to reposition himself, looking up at me after what felt like forever.
The first thing I noticed about him, other than how tall he was, was how tired he looked. There were dark bags under his light eyes, and while it looked like he had tried to make an effort on his hair, it was clear that it had been middling at best. His clothes were neat, but as I trailed down to his feet, I noticed that his socks didn’t match.
“Dr. West,” he said as he stood up. He extended his hand toward me. “You come very highly recommended.”
I smiled at him as I shook his hand. I noticed how soft his palm was, but the tips of his fingers were calloused, and his nails were a little long. The handshake was just on the short-side of awkward before he stepped away from me.
I started to speak. “So this is your—”
“Yeah, my daughter,” he said. “That’s my daughter, and she’s sick, and I want to know what’s going on with her.”
I observed her for a little bit. She was a quiet little girl, a normal size for her age, with big eyes and a little smile on her face. She wasn’t saying anything, which I was a little surprised by, but when she caught my attention, she smiled and waved.
I smiled and waved back, going over to her and kneeling down. “Hi,” I said. “My name is Dr. West. What’s your name?”
“Tati,” she said in a quiet voice.
“Hi, Tati,” I said. “Your daddy tells me you’re feeling a little bad. Can you point to where it hurts?”
She shook her head, and I noticed that her nose was a little stuffed.
“Okay,” I said. “Do me a favor, okay? Your daddy is going to help you get on this table for me, and then I just need you to stay still so that I can help you feel better sooner. Can you do that for me?”
She nodded again. Her dad swept in, picked her up, and she smiled. She was fine before, but she definitely seemed to be doing better in his arms. He smiled back, but there was something about the way he was holding her.
“My assistant here is going to need you to extend your arm,” I said as I indicated Kelly. “And the machine is going to squeeze your arm a little bit. Just stay still so we don’t have to do it again, okay?”
“Heard that, Tati?” Dad said.
She nodded.
“She’s shy,” he said as Kelly got to work.
I turned to look at him. “She has a little sniffle, but she seems okay. Has she had a fever?”
“No,” he replied. “No fever.”
“Any dry cough or sneezing?”
He shook his head.
“What about loss of appetite?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s hard to feed a toddler.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I understand. Is sh
e crankier than usual?”
He shook his head. “No, honestly, she’s always been a really easy-going baby,” he said. “Ever since… for the last few months, she’s been even more quiet than usual.”
“Right,” I said. “So you’re worried her attitude change is linked to her health?”
“Oh, no. Her attitude changed a while ago,” he said, looking up at me and raising his eyebrows when I didn’t say anything. “Her mom died. It’s been an adjustment.”
I swallowed. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Thank you,” he replied.
“So has she been quieter since then?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It happened sort of suddenly, and I think, ever since then, things haven’t been quite the same. I’m worried—I mean, I know it makes very little sense, but it just feels like somehow she’s more vulnerable to getting sick.”
I nodded again. I would have to ask more about the family history, and I knew I was probably going to have to refer him to family therapy, but I couldn’t just spring that on him. “Do you mind if I ask you what happened?”
“Cancer,” he said. “Pancreatic. Stage four by the time it was discovered.”
I swallowed again. “I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”
“Me too,” he said. “She was only thirty-six. I never expected I would be raising my child by myself.”
I waited for him to say something else, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say.
He smiled at me, a little sadly. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t,” I replied. “When did it happen?”
“Right before Christmas,” he said.
I nodded, and looked down at the tablet in my hand, though I didn’t need to read anything. “Well, it’s an adjustment,” I said. “I doubt it’ll be affecting her physically, but you might notice some personality changes. Grief is extremely difficult for adults, and toddlers can’t really tell us how they feel about it.”
He nodded, looking between Kelly and his child. “Well,” he said. “I’m doing grief therapy, and she’s doing play therapy. I don’t know if it’s helping.”
The Healing Process Page 13