His other hand finds my waist. Spans it completely, thumb to fingertip, and the sheer geometry of that makes my brain white out for a full second. He lifts me off the canvas sacks like I weigh exactly nothing and sets me across his lap, my knees bracketing his hips, and the stone wall is cold against my back but hisbody is a furnace against my front and the contrast short-circuits every remaining rational thought.
We break apart. Panting. Forehead to forehead. His breath comes in hot gusts against my swollen mouth.
"This doesn't change anything about the festival," I say.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"I'm still going to destroy you."
"Looking forward to it."
"Good."
I kiss him again. Harder.
Above us, the storm latch rattles against the oak door. Rain hammers the stone foundation. The magical icebox pulses blue, then violet, then a shade I don't have a name for.
And somewhere in my coat pocket, my phone buzzes. Three sharp vibrations against my hip.
A text from a number I don't recognize.
I ignore the phone.
Whatever it is can wait. Whatever it is doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is the furnace of him beneath me, the rough drag of his palms up my sides, and the obscene way his fingers nearly overlap when they wrap around my ribcage.
"You're shaking," he says against my mouth.
"It's a freezing cellar."
"Liar." His teeth graze my jaw. "You're not cold."
He's right. I'm not. The chill radiating off the stone walls prickles along my shoulder blades and the backs of my arms, but everywhere his body makes contact, I'm molten. The differential is maddening. Arctic on one side, volcanic on the other. My nervous system can't parse the data and gives up, translating everything into pure, screaming want.
I yank his shirt from his waistband.
The flannel resists. Still damp, clinging to the terrain of him like shrink wrap on a topographical map. I get it freeand my hands find bare skin and the sound that escapes me is embarrassing. Absolutely mortifying. He's burning. Not warm. Not feverish. Actually, structurally burning, as if his core temperature runs fifteen degrees hotter than any human's. My frozen fingers splay across his stomach and the muscles beneath jump and contract under my touch.
"Your hands," he hisses.
"Cold?"
"Freezing. Don't stop."
I shove my palms flat. He sucks air through his tusks. The sound is raw and involuntary and it feeds something ravenous inside me. I drag my hands up, mapping the architecture of him. Dense muscle over heavy bone. No softness anywhere. A body built for splitting firewood and hauling kegs and catching women on slippery stone steps.
His hands find the buttons of my chef coat.
The coat is sacred. Custom-tailored. Pristine white Egyptian cotton, or at least it was before the barbecue sauce incident, and now it's rain-soaked and cellar-damp and streaked with buttercream and his massive fingers fumble the first button and I hear a tiny sound of surrender.
"I'm going to rip this."
"That coat cost four hundred euros."
"I'll buy you ten."
"You'll buy me twenty, and they'd better be Egyptian cot..."
He pops every remaining button in one downward pull. The sound of thread giving up is sharp in the stone chamber. Cold air hits my collarbones, my sternum, the thin camisole beneath, and I gasp. His mouth follows the gasp. Lips on my throat. The scrape of tusks against the tendon that runs from jaw to shoulder, not sharp enough to break skin but present enough to remind me that the person underneath me is nothuman, has never been human, operates on an entirely different physiological framework.