He had pulled away because it was right. She was frightened. She was in his home because her home had been violated. She was reaching for him because he was solid and safe and there, and he would not mistake that for anything else.
His truth-sense, quiet in the dark, disagreed.
Thorne lay with both of those things and did not sleep.
ten
. . .
Phoebe layin Thorne’s bed and could not sleep.
The sheets smelled like him. That was the problem. Well, one of the problems. Peppermint and frost mixed with the scent of a winter morning. She pressed her face into his pillow and inhaled before she could stop herself. The scent moved through her chest, settling into her body.
His bedroom was spare and precise the way he was. Nothing extra, nothing wasted, every surface clear. But the wool blanket folded at the foot of the bed had been washed so many times it felt like crushed velvet under her fingers. It was soft enough that she’d pulled it up over the duvet and around her shoulders without thinking. But the most surprising thing was that the nightstand held actual paper books with cracked spines and pages wavy from use next to a reading lamp angled for someone who stayed up too late reading them.
She picked up the top book and read the title. It was a collection of poetry. Earth poetry, she realized as she opened the cover. Emily Dickinson. The spine was broken in three different places. She set it down and stared at the ceiling.
On the other side of the bedroom wall, in the living room, the leather of the couch creaked as Thorne shifted his body. Her ears tracked the sounds with a precision that embarrassed her.
He was awake. She was awake. The wall between them was the only thing separating them, and her body was trembling. Not from fear or cold, but from want. The want was there, and he was not, and it was excruciating.
She squeezed her eyes tight, willing the want to go away.
Instead, she thought about his arms.
She thought about the cold lock of them around her on the stage floor, his chest a wall of muscle against her while his breath ghosted against her hair. She thought about those same arms in these sheets, his body against hers, the temperature contrast between his cool skin and the overwhelming heat pooling between her thighs. She thought about his mouth pressing against the curve where her shoulder met her throat. His hand flat on her stomach, his fingers spread wide, and the cold of him sliding under the thin cotton of her borrowed sleep shirt.
The want flowed through her like a slow fire that started below her navel and refused to stop. It climbed her ribs, sat in her throat, and pulsed like a heartbeat between her thighs. She pressed her face harder into his pillow and breathed him in again and accepted the fact that she had already lost the fight against doing that.
You could open the door.
It would only take eight steps across the room, and she would be standing over him in the dark, and when she said, “I want you with me,” he’d know she was saying the truth. He’d know the want was real and true. He could open the door and he would know how much she wanted him.
She closed her eyes instead.
It was the hardest thing she had done since landing on this planet.
Safe.
It was the first word Phoebe thought when she woke the next morning. She snuggled deeper into the blankets and allowed the feeling to wash over her for three disoriented seconds. Warmth, and safety, and winter with peppermint in the sheets surrounding her.
Then she remembered, and the warmth became something more complicated.
A soft knock at the bedroom door, and she opened her eyes fully.
Thorne’s deep voice came low through the wood. “Coffee.”
She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. The borrowed sleep shirt, one of his that was miles too big for her, had decided to slip off her shoulder and stay there. She pulled it back into place the best she could while making her way to the door. She opened it.
Thorne stood in the hallway in a plain white shirt and dark flannel pants with his silver-white hair mussed from the couch and his bare feet on the cold floor. He was holding two steaming mugs in his hands. His eyes dropped to the shirt she was wearing. It was one of his. Something moved across his face for the briefest moment before his stoic mask clamped it back down.
The want that had blessedly left her alone long enough for her to get a few hours of sleep came rushing back for an encore performance, and her nipples hardened into pebbles. She had traveled her planet and performed with some of the most beautiful humans alive during her career, and none of them had undone her the way this man had in mere seconds with hisbare feet and mussed hair bringing her coffee in his bedroom doorway at seven in the morning.
“The cream ratio may not be precise,” he said. “I do not keep dairy, so I acquired some from the market vendor who opens early.”
He’d gone out already. Before she woke up. Dressed like that to get cream for her coffee.
She took the mug made exactly the way she liked it, with the right amount of cream turning it the color of caramel. Their fingers brushed on the handoff, and the sensation of his cold fingers against her warm skin shot through her hand, traveled through her arm, and settled somewhere behind her navel. She concentrated very hard on holding the cup steady.
