The walk to his house passed by in a blur, and then the door to his apartment closed, and it was just them and the want that had been building for weeks.
His cold mouth on hers was a shock she leaned into with her whole body. He answered by walking her backward until her shoulder blades hit the wall, pinning her there with the full, solid weight of him pressed against her.
His hands pushed her coat from her shoulders, the heavy wool sliding down her arms before it hit the floor with a muffled thump her ears barely registered. His fingers found the hem of her shirt and slid underneath. His palms pressed flat against the bare skin of her waist, and the cold was?—
Oh, God.
Frost bloomed where his hands met her body, ice-crystal patterns forming against her ribs, blooming outward in delicate patterns she could almost hear crystallizing, and she gasped, the sound punched out of her, raw and graceless, nothing she would ever have let anyone hear on purpose.
He pulled back. One inch. His eyes on her face, checking, the ice-blue of them gone dark and searching in the dim light.
She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him back harder, the fabric cool and crisp under her fingers.
His mouth found her throat. His cold lips dragged along the tendon beneath her jaw, leaving a trail of mint and chill in theirwake. Everywhere he touched, the frost followed with delicate tracery on her skin that burned cold and then faded to a tingling warmth that pooled lower and lower. His hands pushed her shirt up, and she helped him get it over her head and then his palms were on her bare stomach, her ribs, the undersides of her breasts, and the cold of him against her heat was a friction she had no reference for. Not pain. Not discomfort. A live-wire current that ran from every point of contact straight to her core.
When her breath hitched on a sound she didn't mean to make, he answered it before she could shape it into something prettier. His mouth moved lower. His hands held her hips. He dropped to his knees, the floorboards creaking faintly under his weight.
His cold fingers hooked into her waistband and pulled, and the cold air of his apartment hit her thighs and then his mouth replaced it, and the shock of his cold lips against the hottest part of her made her skull knock back against the wall and her fingers close in his hair, soft, silver-fine strands sliding between her knuckles. The sound that came out of her was not a sound she recognized. His tongue was cool and deliberate and devastating, slick and minty against her cunt, and every pass sent that electric current of contrast cascading through her in pulses.
“Thorne. Thorne.”
His name became a mantra on repeat, and she came with her hands fisted in his hair. Her whole body shook with it, trembling against the wall, trembling against his mouth, and he held her through it, his hands steady and cool on her hips, lips still pressed to her, letting her ride it down.
He rose. His hands went under her thighs, and he lifted her against the wall as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around his waist and felt the length of him between her thighs, and her hips moved without her permission, grinding againsthim. The sound he made was quiet and guttural, and the most undone thing she had ever heard come out of his mouth.
There was a frantic thirty seconds of fabric and logistics with his hand bracing her weight, her fingers fumbling with his waistband, the rasp of a zipper, his forehead dropping against hers, both of them breathing too hard to be coordinated about it. And then the barrier was gone, and she felt him press against her entrance, cool and smooth and thick, and slick with something that tingled faintly mentholated against her sensitive flesh. She locked her ankles behind his back and pulled him in.
The feel of him was like nothing she had known.
The temperature of him against her sensitive walls created a sensation that was cool and electric from the first inch. It wasn’t shock anymore but a deep, rolling friction that her body answered with a full-body clench. He filled her slowly with that first stroke, subtle ridges along his shaft dragging against her inner walls. He held her weight against the wall, and she felt every degree of temperature difference between them as he sank deeper. Her body gripped him. His jaw went tight. The frost spread across the wall behind her shoulders in a pattern she could hear crystallizing, a faint, glassy tinkling beneath her own ragged breathing.
"Tell me." His voice against her throat. Rough. Barely words. His breath cold on her damp skin. “Tell me what you want.”
"You. Just you." Her voice wasn't much better.
He pinned her to the wall and drove into her with a rhythm that found the edge of too much and stayed there, and the cold of his cock inside the heat of her core was a contrast that made every stroke register twice. She was loud. Sounds came out of her that she would be mortified about later, except that every one of them was answered by his body in the way his hips stuttered when she cried out and the way his grip tightened on her thighs when she clenched around him. She understood thather raw honesty was doing to him what his truth-sense was doing to her. Undoing him. Unraveling every layer of discipline he'd wrapped around himself.
He came with her name on his mouth and his body pinning hers to the wall, and she felt him shake, felt the sudden startling flash of heat that flooded him, his body going warm for an instant.
This man, who had never shaken, was shaking against her, his forehead pressed to her throat, breathing her name.
She kissed him and tasted herself on his cold mouth, salt and musk and peppermint. The combination was strange and intimate in a way that made her stomach flip. His arms tightened around her. The cool weight of them was a cage she had no desire to escape.
He carried her to the bedroom while still inside her.
He laid her down and drew back enough to look at her in the Pine's pale light. His eyes moved over her with an expression she had never seen on his face. Not heat, though there was heat. Not hunger, though there was that too. Reverence.
The second time was the opposite of the first.
Slow. Deliberate. His mouth mapping her body as if he were memorizing the geography of her, tracing topographic lines from her throat to her collarbone to the valley between her breasts, his lips raising goosebumps in their wake. Frost-art formed everywhere his lips touched. Delicate crystalline patterns laced across her collarbone in silver-white filigrees, branching and spreading in real time against her dark skin. She looked down and her breath caught.
There was visible proof on her own body of what he had done to her.
The patterns kept spreading as his mouth moved lower. Frost-lace across her ribs, intricate as old needlework, each design different. Spirals near her hip, branching structuresalong the inside of her arm, and something that looked almost like vines trailing across the soft curve of her stomach. His cold lips pressed to the inside of her thigh and the frost bloomed outward from the contact, white on dark, ice on warmth, and the sight of herself marked by him, claimed in frost and cold and decorated with the visible evidence of his lost control, made something twist deep in her chest.
His truth-sense meant he found exactly where she needed him before she asked. The hitch in her breathing led his mouth to the spot three inches above her knee that she hadn't known was sensitive until his cold lips closed over it and the sensation shot straight up her thigh. The tension in her hips guided his hands. One braced her thigh open, one slid between her legs, his cool fingers finding her with a precision that should have been impossible and wasn't, because he wasn't guessing. He was reading her the way he read everything with that quiet, devastating accuracy that left no room for pretense.
For the first time in her life, she was in bed with someone and could not fake a single second.
