He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Alex Pov

The knock came twice sharp, hesitant. I yanked the door open, heart already slamming.

Maya stood there in the dim hallway light, eyes wide and confused, like she’d forgotten why she’d come. Our gazes locked, electric and unspoken. Heat crackled between us.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you,” she whispered, voice shaky.

She turned to leave.

I grabbed her wrist, spun her back, and crushed my mouth to hers.

She didn’t pull away.

Fuck, she melted. Her lips parted instantly, soft at first, then hungry.

The kiss deepened fast, tongues sliding, teeth nipping, breaths turning ragged.

Low tension exploded into raw need.

My hands roamed down her body, gripping her ass, pulling her hard against my cock, already throbbing and straining.

Clothes didn’t stand a chance. I ripped her top open, buttons flying. She yanked my shirt over my head, nails raking my chest.

In seconds we were naked, skin on skin, her over one month pregnant belly pressing against me as I backed her against the wall.

We were animals….. starving, desperate.

I cupped her heavy breasts, thumbs teasing her dark nipples until she moaned into my mouth.

She grabbed my cock, stroking it roughly, guiding it between her thighs.

I found her pussy…hot, slick, swollen with need.

One deep thrust and I buried myself inside her.

Maya gasped loud, eyes fluttering. “Alex…” Her walls clenched around me, so tight, so wet.

I went slower for a heartbeat, mindful of the little swell of her belly carrying my child, but she rocked her hips, demanding more.

No restraint tonight. I fucked her hard and fast, pounding deep with every thrust. The sound of skin slapping filled the room, mixed with her breathy cries and my low growls.

She was soaked, dripping down my shaft as I drove into her again and again, hitting that perfect spot that made her tremble.

“Fuck, Maya…. so good,” I groaned, gripping her hips, thrusting deeper…

Her moans turned into sharp gasps.

She came first, body shaking, pussy pulsing around me in waves.

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That pushed me over.

I buried myself to the hilt and exploded, filling her with hot spurts as we both shattered together.

We stayed locked like that for a few ragged breaths, sweat-slick and panting.

I expected her to stay, to curl up in my bed, belly against me.

But Maya slipped from my arms, picked up her pink silky nightwear from the floor, and slid it over her curves. The fabric clung to her breasts, sexy as hell.

She looked at me, eyes still dark with satisfaction, and gave a soft smile.

“Good night, Alex,” she said simply.

Then she walked out, leaving me standing there naked, heart still racing, the taste of her still on my tongue.

****

The alarm was unnecessary.

I had been somewhere between sleep and waking for the past hour, in the specific half-conscious state that follows a night that contained more than sleep.

The alarm confirmed the time.

Nothing else required confirmation.

I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling and let the previous night settle into its proper shape.

She had knocked.

Three times, careful and deliberate, and I had opened the door and found her standing in the hallway in the dim light with her hands at her sides and her expression stripped of every prepared version, not the boardroom Maya, not the legal-pad Maya, not the composed CEO who had sat in a chairman’s chair that morning like she had always belonged there.

Just her.

Uncertain and present and there.

We hadn’t talked much.

What had followed was, I searched for the right word and discarded several before settling on the only one that was accurate…necessary. The kind of thing that happens when two people have been circling something for long enough that the circling itself becomes more exhausting than the thing.

The warmth of her, the specific way she held on, the sound of my name in her voice at close range, all of it arriving with the quality of something that had been true for a decade and was finally, simply, being acknowledged.

And then she had pulled back.

“Goodbye,” she had said.

Quietly. Almost gently.

And left.

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I had stood in the room for a moment, listening to her footsteps move back down the hallway, and then I had sat on the edge of the bed and thought about what goodbye meant in the context of a woman who was carrying my child and wearing my ring and walking back to her own room at three in the morning.

I had not reached a satisfying conclusion before sleep had arrived without asking.

I got up.

Showered. Dressed in the automatic sequence of a man who had morning routines precise enough to function

without full consciousness.

Then I went to check on her.

Her door was slightly open. I pushed it an inch further and looked in.

She was asleep on her side, hair loose, one hand resting near her face and the other on her stomach, the position she had developed over the past week without appearing to notice, the body’s instinctive arrangement around the fact of the child.

She looked peaceful.

Completely, specifically peaceful… the version of her face that only existed in sleep, unburdened by the weight of everything she carried while awake.

The boardroom.

The companies.

The trust and the shares and the war she was winning while simultaneously navigating a grief I suspected she hadn’t fully processed and a pregnancy she was managing with characteristic efficiency and an engagement she had accepted and then spent three days trying to reclassify as something safer.

She looked, asleep, like someone who deserved rest.

I stood in the doorway and thought about what it would cost her to feel this way while she was awake.

I didn’t understand her…

That was the honest version.

I understood her professionally, completely, with the clarity of someone who had watched her rebuild from nothing over eight weeks and had been, at close range, astonished by the precision of it. I understood her strategically.

I understood her instincts and her methods and the specific way she moved through a boardroom

I did not understand how to make her feel safe…

That was the gap.

In business, when I encountered a problem I couldn’t solve with existing tools, I acquired new tools. I researched. I brought in expertise. I approached the problem from an angle that hadn’t been tried.

This was not a problem with a researched solution.

This was a woman who had spent eight years having her love treated as a liability and had learned, at a cellular level, that the appropriate response to genuine feeling was to locate the exit before the exit was taken from her.

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And I kept offering her evidence that I wasn’t going to do that, and she kept receiving it with one hand while looking for the catch with the other, and I did not know how to make the catch not appear to exist because there was no catch and the absence of one was apparently its own kind of suspicious.

If you haven’t figured out how to make her fears go away, don’t add to them.

The thought arrived with the clarity of something obvious that had taken too long…

I couldn’t fix her fear of trusting.

That was not mine to fix.

Eight years of damage was not going to be undone by six weeks of evidence, regardless of how consistent the evidence was.

What I could do was be consistent anyway….

Not as a strategy.

Not as a campaign to change her mind.

Simply because it was the true version of how I intended to be, and she deserved to see it for as long as it took her

to believe it was real.

I crossed to the bed quietly.

Leaned down and pressed my lips to her forehead, careful not to wake her.

She made a small sound… not waking, just adjusting, her hand moving slightly on her stomach.

I straightened.

Looked at her for one more moment…

Then I picked up my jacket from the chair, my briefcase from the hallway, and left the house for the first time in two days.

The car was quiet on the way to the office.

Darío, to his credit, did not comment on my expression or the hour or any deviation from normal routine.

He drove. I looked out the window.

I thought about goodbye.

The specific way she had said it… not cold, not dismissive.

Almost tender. The word of someone who was thanking you for something while simultaneously closing a door, which was its own kind of thing to receive.

She had come to me last night.

That mattered.

She had knocked on the door and she had come in and she had let the walls down and then she had rebuilt them on her way out, and both of those things were true simultaneously, and the question was which one I let define my

response.

I could take the goodbye as the final word. or Give her space while still to the world we are engaged…

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Starting away from her get amay, the kind that created real distancy washing mens capable of, and I had stopped pretending it was a viable option somewhere around the third week of watching her rebuild berselt at a kitchen table with a legal pad and a cup of coffee that was always cold by the time she remembered it

But staying present didn’t mean pressing…

It meant being findable

It meant the knock, not the goodbye

I looked out the window at the city coming to life and thought: take all the time you need, Mana

I’m not going anywhere.

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