Henry bounced off his lap with a wide grin on his face. “Yes, please.” He turned and ran out of the door.
Nik ran his hands over his face. “Merry Christmas,” he said out loud to himself.
And for once, he actually understood what the words meant.
8
Ignoring the fact he was completely naked, Lennon opened the doors to the hotel balcony and took a deep cleansing breath of sea air. The sun was just breaching the horizon in a dazzling array of oranges and purples. Waves shushed gently onto the shore, the only sound in an otherwise devastatingly peaceful morning.
Yet, despite its beauty, despite the morning’s ability to bring some semblance of quiet to his thoughts, none of it was as glorious as the woman he’d just left in their hotel bed.
He looked back into the room where Gia lay sleeping. Her long dark hair lay messily over her face and the pillow. One of her long arms hung off the bed. He followed the curve of her back to where the white, crisp linen just blocked his view of her butt. She slept like the dead and he admired her ability to simply close her eyes and drift away. Once, she’d told him it was nothing more than an ingrained habit after years of med school and residency, where sleep was a luxury.
His heart twisted in his chest.
Fuck, he loved her more than anything else in the world.
More than the band.
More than his drums.
More than music.
He could give all of them up in a heartbeat, had even considered doing so when he’d woken from surgery to find his arm gone. But not the pain of his injury, or pain from his loss, could hold a candle to the pain he’d felt when he thought he’d lost her.
Leaving the balcony doors open, even though it was still cool outside, he returned to the bed and sat down next to her, the warmth and proximity to her easing the turbulence of his mind.
They were meeting her brother for breakfast. Randall, the famed surgeon and Head of Neurology at a hospital in Atlanta, had a proposition he wanted to discuss with her, and Lennon knew it was going to be a job offer. Likely a better one than the one she had now, or he wouldn’t be offering it.
He wouldn’t stop her if it was what she wanted, and he’d follow her to the end of the earth. But he’d miss Toronto. He’d miss the band. He’d miss Maisie and Ellen and seeing his bandmates’ kids grow up on a day-to-day basis. He’d miss Daniel, Elliott’s stepson, who had one day just started popping over when he knew Lennon was home. They’d sit and chat, watch hockey, mess around on his drums, and sometimes play video games, although Daniel’s interest in them was waning. Recently, their conversations had turned to girls. He found he liked being called Uncle Lennon, and despite Daniel’s assertion that Lennon gave great advice, he wondered how on earth he was able to deliver anything remotely close to sage wisdom given his own fucked up view of the world. Most importantly, he was grateful for the opportunity to try.
Lennon ran his hand gently along Georgia’s spine, savoring the soft warmth of her skin. Replacing his fingers with his lips, he placed a trail of kisses from her shoulders to the curve of her butt.
Her body flexed beneath his touch, a stretch that tensed every single muscle. Georgia lazily turned over and pushed her hair from her face with her left hand, the engagement ring he’d placed on her finger the previous year sparkling as brightly as Gia did when she smiled.
“Morning,” she said, her words laced with slumber.
This was his favorite Gia. Sure, he loved her when she was all capable and dashed out of the house in response to a medical emergency at the hospital. And he loved her when they were hanging around with his friends, the way she’d slid into their lives without a ripple. He loved it when she sang ever so slightly out of tune, when she closed her eyes and bobbed her head to jazz, or made him cookies for no reason at all. But he loved her most when she slowly woke up for the day, before all the responsibilities of her job filtered in, before she started to think about her to-do list. When she was still simply Gia.
Leaning forward, he brushed his lips over her, a gentle touch of wonder that she was his and he was hers. “Morning,” he murmured.
A sigh fluttered from her lips as her hand slid through his hair to the back of his neck. “Did you sleep okay?”
The fact she always asked every morning, even though she knew about his sleep patterns, warmed his heart. “Better than usual. You?”
“Like a log, as usual.” Her smile was as powerful as a caffeine jolt. Only she could wake him up, make him forget a crap night’s sleep, and make him think the day was packed with possibilities.
Georgia pulled him closer, drawing him back in for a longer, deeper kiss.
Lazily, his tongue sought hers, nothing rushed or hurried, a slow languorous connection. He ran his hand from her shoulder, over her breast, cupping it gently as his thumb brushed her nipple. Goosebumps broke out on her skin. Damn, it was a fucking miracle every day that he could turn her on so easily.
“Make love to me, Lennon,” she said softly.
Those words, softly spoken, turned him on more than he’d ever thought possible. He’d spent the early part of his life attempting to fill all the holes in his heart with mindless fucks and the attitude of a prick. And while he loved nothing more than having sex with Gia, it was when she asked him for something more that he found his heart and home.
The vulnerability of it had once terrified him, but loving Georgia slowly and completely now filled every part of him
Carefully, he pushed the sheet back, climbed onto the bed, and settled between her thighs. “I love when you say that to me,” he said, no longer nervous about expressing his feelings to her. She never laughed. Never judged.
With both hands, she pushed his hair back from his face. Her eyes locked on his. “Make love to me, Lennon,” she repeated.
The words whispered down his spine, through his soul. His lips met hers and they kissed slowly, messily. He ran his thumb along her lower lip, opening it to him to suck on. Their tongues met in a passionate dual, and he inhaled Georgia’s sigh, breathing her in.
Slowly, her hips began to undulate beneath him, and he could feel her wetness begin to spread along the length of his hard dick. It would take nothing more than an inch to slip back and slide deep inside her unsheathed, but given as children were not in their immediate plans, he knelt up and reached for the box of condoms he’d placed on the bedside table.
As he rolled the condom on, he looked down at Georgia’s body. He’d once mocked Elliott for dating a woman of nearly forty, but as Georgia approached her thirty-ninth birthday, he realized he couldn’t have been any more wrong. He placed his hand by her throat and dragged it between her breasts, over the softness of her stomach, to the place reserved for him alone.
She’d waxed before they’d left, he noticed, not that he minded.
“Touch me,” Georgia gasped. Propped on her elbows, she was watching him intently, her eyes not leaving his as he did exactly as instructed. When they were fucking, he always took the lead. Hell, he’d lifted her onto the desk in their suite five minutes after checking in and unleashed his body on hers. But when it came to making love, it was like learning a foreign language… difficult to understand but wildly satisfying.
“Fuck, you’re so wet for me,” he said, adding a second finger, dragging them out slowly, watching as they came out coated in her cream.