"I might—"
"You won't hurt me, Taz." He took my hands and put them back on his hips, pressing my fingers in. "Feel me. I'm right here. I'm warm and I'm alive, and nothing you do is going to change that."
A sound escaped me—wrecked, grateful, something between a moan and a prayer. He rolled his hips again and I held on this time, letting myself grip, letting myself want. The cold flared once at the edges of my fingers—a thin rime of frost on his skin that melted almost instantly—and he hissed.
I yanked my hands back. "Cinder—"
"That felt incredible." His eyes were dark, his pupils blown wide. "Like ice on a burn. Do you—can you do that again?" He stood quickly, and I followed him to my bedroom without being directed.
I stared at him. "You want me to—"
"Do it again," he repeated when we lay down. "I want all of you. Including the cold." He took my hand and guided it to his chest, right over his heart. "Especially the cold."
My dragon surged forward with a keening sound only I could hear—desperate, awed, utterly undone by this man who didn't just tolerate what I was but wanted it. Wanted the ice. Wanted the danger. Wanted me.
I let the cold rise, just barely, just enough that frost crept across my fingertips and bloomed against his skin. He sucked in a sharp breath, his back arching, and the sound he made—low, guttural, hungry—destroyed every reservation I had left.
"More," he gasped. "Taz, please—"
I surged up and kissed him, rolling us so he was beneath me on the bed, my body covering his. The temperature contrast was staggering—his heat bleeding into my cold, my cold sliding across his skin in delicate patterns that made him writhe and grab at my shoulders. I kissed down his throat, letting my cold lips drag along the line of his pulse, and he moaned so loudly I felt it vibrate through my chest.
"Off," he managed, fumbling at my belt. "I need these off."
We stripped each other with clumsy, desperate hands—him shoving at my jeans while I worked his zipper with fingers that trembled from something other than cold. We tangled together, skin against skin, and the gasp he let out when my bare chest pressed against his was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard—a sharp, breathless intake that dissolved into a groan as the cold of me met the heat of him everywhere at once.
"God," he whispered, his hands sliding up my back, pulling me closer instead of pushing me away. "You feel like—like standing in a snowstorm. But good. How is this good?"
I didn't have an answer. I just had him—beneath me, around me, his legs wrapping around my hips, his warmth soaking through my skin like spring thaw. I kissed his collarbone, hisshoulder, the soft hollow of his throat where his pulse jumped against my mouth, and everywhere my lips touched, I felt the frost bloom and melt in the same breath.
"I want—" I started, then lost the words when his hand wrapped around me, hot and sure, and every coherent thought I'd ever had disintegrated.
"Tell me,” he murmured, stroking slowly, watching my face with those sharp, clinical eyes that saw everything—every twitch, every hitch of breath, every place where the cold spiked and retreated. "Tell me what you want."
"You." The word tore out of me, raw and honest and so simple it felt like a confession. "Just you. All of you."
His grip tightened, his thumb sliding over the head in a move that made my hips jerk and a thin layer of frost race across the pillow beneath my hand. He didn't even glance at it. His eyes stayed locked on mine, dark and steady and blazing with something that looked like reverence.
"Then take me," he said.
My dragon roared—silent, internal, a sound of pure, staggering want that resonated through every frozen cell in my body. I kissed him hard, tasting his mouth, memorizing the shape of it, while my hands explored lower. When my cold fingers wrapped around him, he bucked into my grip with a choked curse that I swallowed whole.
"Fuck—that's—the cold is—"
"Too much?"
"Not enough." He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me down, kissing me with a ferocity that made my vision blur. "Don't hold back. I can take it."
So I didn't.
We moved together in a rhythm that felt ancient—older than hockey, older than medicine, older than the careful human lives we'd built around ourselves like armor. I stroked him with onehand, and the contrast of temperatures turned every touch into something overwhelming. His heat made my nerve endings sing. My cold made him gasp and arch and dig his nails into my shoulder hard enough to leave marks I'd wear like badges.
The frost came and went in waves—spreading across my knuckles, kissing his hip, melting against the heat of his stomach. Each time it touched him, he shuddered and made a sound that drove me closer to the edge. Not pain. Never pain. Something electric and sharp and addictive, like plunging into cold water on a hot day—the shock of it followed immediately by the thrill.
"Taz—" His voice fractured, his rhythm stuttering. "I'm close, I can't—"
"Let go," I breathed against his mouth, the same words he'd given me the first time, returned now like a promise. "I've got you."
He came with a cry that he muffled against my shoulder, his body seizing, heat flooding between us in a rush that made my cold skin steam faintly in the lamplight. The sight of him—undone, trusting, completely given over—hit me like an avalanche.