He kissed my throat. Open-mouthed, unhurried, the kind of kiss that wasn't going anywhere because it was already exactly where it needed to be. I tilted my head back and let him, let the warmth of his breath melt the thin layer of frost that had formed along my pulse point, let his tongue trace the vein beneath my jaw while my hands found the waistband of his sweats and tugged.
He lifted his hips. I got them down. He kicked them off the rest of the way and then reached for mine, and the careful, deliberate way he undressed me made something fracture in my chest that I'd been holding together with ice for thirty years. He wasn't rushing. He wasn't frantic. He was paying attention. The way he paid attention to everything, with that quiet, relentless focus that saw things other people missed and refused to look away from them.
When we were both bare, he paused. Propped himself on one elbow and looked at me. Just looked.
I wanted to hide. The instinct was ancient, bone-deep, the same reflex that had made me build walls and wear masks and sleep on the far side of every bed I'd ever shared. Being seen like this, fully, without armor or angle or the excuse of darkness, felt like standing in an open field during a blizzard with nothing between me and the sky.
But Cinder's eyes weren't the sky. They were warm and brown and full of something I'd spent my whole life being told I didn't deserve.
"You're beautiful," he said.
"I'm covered in frost."
"I know." He traced a line of it down my sternum with one finger, watching the crystals dissolve under his touch. "Still beautiful."
The sound that left me was embarrassing. Raw and broken and small, the kind of noise a man my size shouldn't make, butCinder caught it with his mouth, kissing me deep and slow while his hand continued its path down my chest, my stomach, the trail of hair below my navel. When his fingers wrapped around me, the cold surged and then surrendered in the same breath, and I arched into his grip with a desperation I couldn't disguise.
"Let me," he whispered against my lips. The same words I'd heard him use in the medical room a hundred times, steady and sure, the voice of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and would not be rushed. "Let me take care of you."
I nodded because my voice was gone.
He took his time. Of course he did. He was meticulous by nature, thorough by training, and everything he did with his hands carried the precision of someone who understood anatomy at a cellular level and had decided to use that knowledge to systematically dismantle me. His grip shifted, tightened, found a rhythm that matched my breathing, and every time I got close, he eased off just enough to keep me on the edge, hovering, trembling, the cold pouring off me in waves that should have frozen the sheets but didn't touch him.
"Cinder," I managed. "Please."
He looked up at me. The expression on his face was something I'd never seen from him before. Not clinical. Not careful. Open. Vulnerable in a way that mirrored my own, like he'd finally stopped performing composure and was showing me what lived underneath.
"I need you," I said. The words scraped out of some deep, ancient place. "Not just this. All of it. I need you inside me, Cinder. I need you to stay."
Chapter twenty-six
Line Change - Substituting players on and off the ice during play or stoppages.
Taz
His breath hitched. Not surprise. Something deeper. Recognition, maybe. The sound of a man hearing the thing he'd been waiting for without knowing he'd been waiting.
He kissed me, slow and thorough, his free hand sliding up my thigh, and I felt every point of contact like a brand, warmth searing through the frost, melting me from the outside in. When he pulled back, his eyes were dark and certain.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Turn over."
I did. Rolled onto my stomach and felt the cool sheets press against my chest, felt his weight settle along my back, his mouthfinding the knob at the top of my spine, then the one below it, then the next. Mapping me. Vertebra by vertebra. The way he mapped everything, with that devastating patience that made me feel less like a body being touched and more like a text being read by someone who actually wanted to understand the language.
His hands smoothed down my flanks. I heard him reach for something on the nightstand. The click of a cap. The slick sound of his fingers, and then his hand was between my legs, careful and warm and impossibly gentle for a man with that much quiet steel in him.
The first press of his finger drew a sound out of me that I buried in the pillow. Not pain. Sensation. The shock of warmth entering a body that ran cold, the intimacy of it so acute that my dragon stirred beneath my ribs and then, for once, went still. Not asleep. Not agitated. Just present. Watching. As if it understood that this was something worth being quiet for.
"Okay?" Cinder murmured against the back of my neck.
"Yes." My voice was muffled. Wrecked. "More."
He gave me more. A second finger, slowly, working me open with the same focused attention he brought to every impossible thing he'd ever faced. I could feel the precision in it, the way he angled and adjusted, reading my responses the way he read vitals, catching every hitch of breath, every involuntary clench, every moment where the cold flared and then smoothed out beneath his touch.
By the time he added a third, I was gripping the pillow with both hands, frost crackling along the cotton, my hips pushing back against him without my permission. The cold was doing something I'd never felt before, cycling through me in waves that crested and broke against the warmth of his hands, and instead of fighting each other, the two temperatures braided together into something entirely new. Something that felt likeequilibrium. Like the thing I'd spent my whole life searching for without knowing its name.
"Taz." His mouth was against my ear, his body draped along my back, and I could feel him hard against my thigh, could feel the restraint trembling through him. "I need to hear you say it."
"Yes," I said. "God, yes. Now."