Beautiful Boss (Beautiful #9) - Christina Lauren Page 0,11

through every part of me. My toes curled, and I was coming so hard I couldn’t cry out or even say his name. He rocked into me one last time, so deep it took the breath from my lungs and I could feel him, muscles tense as he came inside me.

Will fell back to the bed and pulled me with him, cradling me into his side. “Holy shit.”

I blinked up at the ceiling, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. My bones were rubber; air cooled my fevered skin. I looked over to Will before reaching for the clock on the side of the bed. Six hours, twenty-two minutes to go. Not bad.

Sitting up, I filled two glasses from a bottle of chilled water on the bedside table, emptied mine in a single long draft, and climbed up onto Will’s lap.

His eyes moved down my naked body before he took the other glass from my hand. I watched him drink, marveling at his throat as he swallowed, his bare chest, his messy hair. This body? Was mine. Once he’d finished, I took the empty glass and pushed him back down to the pillows.

“Now,” I said, raising a single brow, “about that list . . .”

Three

Will

“Are you sure you don’t mind postponing the honeymoon?” On the couch at my side, Hanna turned her face up to me, squinting in the late-afternoon sun that streamed through our living room window. “Are you worried it will feel sort of . . . anticlimactic?”

A wild wedding, a sleepless wedding night, another interview checked off the list, and there we were: one week later, already back in our apartment, back in our day-to-day life.

There was something reassuring about taking the monumental step but then immediately falling back into pace with the rest of life. It reaffirmed what I’d told Hanna all along: The us beneath it all didn’t have to change. We could still be exactly who we were before. Married folk definitely lazed around in their underwear on a Saturday afternoon.

“I’m fine waiting.” I kissed her nose, pulling her closer. “As long as you don’t tack on any more interview trips in the meantime.”

Our rescheduled honeymoon was already booked for a little over a month after the wedding—late October—with a job-interview-free week beforehand to pack, finish up anything important in the lab, and hold any critical meetings. I wanted as much time with Hanna at home as possible.

I felt her response to this in her tiny hesitation¸ saw it in her small wince. “Hanna?”

“Not even for Caltech?” she asked sweetly.

What an odd feeling: to be fed up, to want to roll my eyes when my wife—holy fuck, my wife—received an interview request from Cal-fucking-tech.

“And when would it be?” I asked.

“Late October? We would still have a few days to get ready for the trip.” Her smile was so sweet, so genuinely hopeful, how could I possibly tell her no?

How would I, anyway? This was her career, her dream. Hanna was being courted by academic institutions all over the world. Her first interviews had been local: Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins. But then the invitations had spread: Cal, Stanford. Max Planck in Germany. Oxford in the UK. And now, Caltech.

The thing was, we hadn’t really talked about how it would be if she wanted to move. We were in a holding pattern, stuck in a conversation on pause.

I kissed her nose again in answer.

“Does that mean yes?” she asked, studying me with a little smile.

“It means I would never tell you no, Plum. I think you should visit the universities you want to consider.” Kissing her mouth, I asked, “Do you feel like you have a favorite yet?”

She scrunched her nose at this. “I mean, not really?”

I watched her blink a few times, the tiny panic a little flutter in her breath. This process was a daunting one. I remembered being at that point myself: out of my post-doc and ready to tackle the next phase of my career, yet unable to believe, no matter how good my publications were, or how many job interviews I got, that I’d be able to hack it day in and day out running a lab. Research is scary. Academic research is cutthroat.

It’s one of the reasons I went into industry: I trusted my ability to determine whether a technology could be profitable and how to get it there more than I trusted my ability to come up with something innovative in its own right.

Likewise, Hanna knew her