The wanting had a specific location in his chest now, a point two inches left of his sternum that pulsed in time with the beat of the music. No matter how hard he tried, the wanting would no longer fit neatly inside the container he had built for it, because the container had been designed to hold only possibility, and then that morning she had kissed him and turned possibility into fact.
After the show, he walked her toward her quarters. The route was clear. The perimeter was secure. The journalist was off-world, confirmed by transport logs and the departure manifest, and there was no longer any professional reason Phoebe Calloway could not sleep in her own bed tonight.
They walked in the cold, their breath visible, hers in warm clouds and his in fine crystalline mist that caught the lights along the market lane. The festival settled around them, the last vendors latching their stall shutters and the overnight glow of the lights dimming to deep blue and amber. The Eternal Pine’s silver-blue luminescence pulsed slow and steady against the dark sky.
Phoebe’s feet stopped on the path. He stopped a half-step later and turned to her.
She was looking up at him, her dark eyes steady on his.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Her voice wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t performing anything. Her words were quiet and true, and his truth-sense opened on her words and found nothing half-true beneath them.
She stepped close. Laid her head against his chest.
His arms came around her before he decided to let them. One across her shoulder blades, one low on her back, and her warmth hit his body through both their coats with the same force it had hit him on the stage floor. The contrast ached, heat meeting frost, the place where they pressed together becoming something that was neither his temperature nor hers.
His chin rested on the top of her head, and he breathed her in. Her perfume, salt and warmth, and that particular scent her body carried that his Mentharian senses had been cataloging against his will since the night he walked her home a year ago.
“I’m done waiting,” she whispered.
His truth-sense read the words and found nothing in them but the truth. They were clean and absolute, the same resonance he had felt during her empty-house soundcheck, the same warmth that pooled in his chest every time she sang something real.
Frost bloomed across the ground from where he stood, encircling her. Reaching toward her warmth. Delicate crystalline patterns spread across the ground, and for the first time since he recognized the mate bond on the stage floor, he did not pull back.
He finally let himself stop fighting.
twelve
. . .
Thorne’s frostreached her boots.
Phoebe watched it creep along the ground, silver-white patterns encircling them, reaching for the toes of her shoes with an almost organic intent. The sight of his control finally, visibly breaking was the final bit of evidence she needed to know she was doing the right thing.
“I’m done waiting,” she said again, her chin lifting, her eyes searching his.
The words were true, and she’d never meant anything more. His truth-sense must have read every layer of them because he leaned down and his mouth found hers and the weeks of being careful and controlled collapsed in an instant.
His mouth was cold against hers, and her whole body lit up at the contrast. His hand came up to cradle the back of her head, his fingers threading into her hair, and the chill of his palm against her scalp made her gasp into his mouth.
He swallowed the sound. His other arm wrapped low around her waist and pulled her flush against him, and she felt every inch of the difference between them. Her heat and his cold, her softness and the hard wall of his chest. The peppermint taste ofhim flooded her senses, sharp and clean, and she chased it with her tongue without thinking, opening for him, wanting more.
He gave it to her. His mouth moved against hers, unhurried and devastating, the careful restraint she'd watched him hold for weeks dissolving into something starving. The cold of his lips numbed hers in the best way, a tingling that spread down her throat and bloomed low in her belly, and she pressed closer, fisting her hands in the front of his jacket the way she had on the stage floor.
The temperature of him did something to her she had no words for. Every place his body pressed against hers came alive. Her flushed skin drank it in. She felt frost prickle against her cheek where his fingers had drifted to cradle her jaw, the faintest crystallizing bloom, and the proof of what she was doing to him. He was losing the discipline he'd worn like armor, and witnessing it sent a fresh ache pulsing between her thighs.
She made a sound against his mouth, low and unguarded, the kind she never let anyone hear. He answered it with a rumble from deep in his chest that she felt more than heard, his arm tightening around her waist until her feet nearly left the ground. His mouth slanted over hers, deeper, and she let him take it, let him take everything, because for once in her life she wasn't performing a single thing. There was no version of herself she needed to be. There was only this man she trusted more than anyone else, and the way her body had been screaming for him since the moment he'd hit her at a run and rolled them both to safety.
When he finally broke the kiss, his forehead dropped to rest against hers, his breath ragged and visible in the air, the cold of it ghosting across her swollen lips.
"Phoebe." Her name, not Miss Calloway. Her name, rough and low and shaking at the edges. His hand was still in her hair. "Come home with me."
She opened her eyes. He was watching her with that ice-blue gaze that saw straight through every layer she had, and for once she let him. She let him see all of it. The want, the fear she'd set down, the certainty underneath.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. Take me home."
She didn't wait for him to move. She fisted her hands in his jacket again and pulled him back down to her mouth, rising onto her toes to meet him, and she felt him groan against her lips as the frost spread unchecked across the ground.
