In this moment, I can’t seem to make myself care.
“Gods,” Penn mutters, his mouth ripping away from mine long enough to drag in a much-needed breath. I’m panting hard, too, my lungs screaming beneath the piercing cold of my Remnant. But that doesn’t stop me from yanking on his nape, pulling him back down to me. I am not yet ready for this moment to end, not yet willing to let the building fervor between us sputter out.
I need his mouth.
I need his touch.
Never in my life have I needed anything so much.
His lips claim mine again in a bruising, brutal kiss I feel in every corner of my body. He’s touching me, his warm hand palming my breast, the heat of it sinking into my flesh, igniting my bloodstream. Setting off a drumbeat of passion that increases with every pound of my frantic heart.
The smell of burning foliage tinges the crisp night air. Scorched leaves sail around us, their dry edges smoldering, caught up in wind currents I cannot control. I do not even try. My emotions are too raw, too immense to tamp down. They singe back and forth down the bond between us, growing hotter and hotter, until it is a potent channel of pure, fiery desperation. Mine, Penn’s. They tangle into one. I can no longer separate our feelings, can no longer discern my own desires from his.
I hope,gods, I pray he is feeling the way I am right now. I hope his need for me is threatening to set his very skin aflame, for mine feels mere seconds from kindling.
I pour all my heat into the kiss, conveying with my body all the things I have spent weeks too afraid to put into words. My pulse spikes when his other hand slides down to cup the curve of my ass, pulling me flush against him, and I feel the hard evidence of his own passion pressing firmly against my midsection.
He is burning for me, too.
A wildfire in his blood, in his body—one I sparked. One I want, with sudden wild longing, to stoke until we are both utterly consumed by it. Until the past burns away, leaving space for something new to grow between us.
The realization is enough to send my mind reeling. My thoughts are fractured splinters I cannot cobble together into a cohesive thought, let alone put into words.
I want more.
I want him to—
A sudden, strange bellow in the distance splits the night, so loud I think it’s thunder. It echoes violently enough to shake the heavens. Not the roar of a bear or the howl of a wolf. Throatier. Harsher. Infinitely scarier.
We jerk apart, both breathing hard. Penn stares at me with a half-dazed, half-desperate expression I’m sure is mirrored on myown face. But with several hard blinks, the fog of lust lifts and his frame goes rigid against mine. His hands leave my body and he pushes me out of his arms with the same urgency he used to pull me into them.
“We need to go,” he tells me in a muted clip. “Now.”
The strange bellow comes again, rending the sky, and his jaw tightens.
“What is that?” I whisper, looking around in the darkness. Alarm suffuses my bloodstream, banishing any residual passion. It sounds like no animal I’ve ever heard. It sounds like—
“Ice giants.” Penn’s eyes are fully clear of the burning desire I saw in their depths only seconds ago. “There’s a colony nearby.”
I gasp. “What?”
“It is not called the Forsaken Forest without due cause. There is a reason these woods are given a wide berth. Each year when the Cimmerian snows begin to thaw, they make themselves at home here in bone-riddled caves, feeding on anything stupid enough to wander into their path before they go into hibernation for the summer months.”
He glances over my shoulder, into the dark. His body is alert with tension. As if, at any second, we might find ourselves face-to-face with a mythological hoarfrost monster. My heart quails when I think of the strange copse of trees I’d found myself in only hours ago, with its snapped branches and deathly stillness. I press my lips tight together, wondering just how close I had come to death at a set of gargantuan hands.
“You are lucky you did not stumble straight into their midst,” he mutters lowly. “Or we would not be having this conversation.”
“Right,” I say weakly. “Lucky.That’s me.”
He doesn’t seem to notice the wry twist in my voice. He’s busy stomping out the embers of my fire with his boots. He collects my belongings from their spot by the hollow tree, passingme my bow and quiver to sling over my shoulder as he jerks the rucksack strap up onto his own.
When our eyes meet again there is a moment—a moment of unspoken words, a moment of unfulfilled promises—that suffuses the air between us so thickly, neither of us draws breath. A moment that begs formorethan a moment; for hours, for days, for a whole bloody month to finish what we started.
“Home?” he whispers finally, voice gruff.
Such a small word.
Such enormous implications.