Iva kissed him because if she gave herself two more breaths the bright room might become enough to stop her.
No protective dark this time. His mouth took hers in clear reef light that showed everything. His hand slid to the nape of her neck and then forward over the side of her throat, leaving a warm faint slick where the oil transferred.
He pulled back just far enough to look at her. "Still yes?"
The tenderness of the question would have ruined her if she let it. She kept her voice rough instead. "If you make me say yes each time, we'll lose the whole morning."
That brief flash of teeth again. "Then come here."
As if she were not already nearly in his lap.
He lifted her onto the worktable in one clean movement and spread her knees with the calm authority of someone rearranging tools for better access. The bright panes remained over his shoulder, white with morning. She could see the walkway in slices around him: a plank rail, the pale post outside, movement once as someone crossed the far end and did not pause. Her breath snagged on the sight.
Mavrek followed her glance and looked at the window too. Then back at her.
"You may stop now if this is not what you came for."
Iva dragged him closer by the front of his shirt in answer. "Stop offering the reasonable path. I dislike it."
He kissed her hard enough to silence whatever answer he might have given.
This time she was less outside herself. The first night she had seemed to hover somewhere above her own body half the time, cataloguing evidence even as he made it. Morning stripped that refuge away. The light was too clear. The glass too present. Every sensation arrived without the softening dark allowed.
His mouth went to her throat and she felt exactly where the oil on his fingers touched her skin as he opened the collar of her blouse. Warm thumb beneath the jaw. Callused fingertips at the hollow of her throat. The transfer of maruk there as legible asink. She knew what it would smell like an hour from now on the walkway. The knowledge made her wetter.
Mavrek pushed the blouse off one shoulder, then the other, not bothering with more buttons than necessary. His hand skimmed down her forearm to bare her wrist, turning it up. The place she'd scrubbed two mornings ago as if friction could alter truth. One of the places claim oil would read longest in daylight.
"Still there," he said, thumb brushing the inside of the wrist.
"Do not catalogue me before breakfast."
"Too late."
He bent and kissed the pulse there, then licked the faint salt from her skin in a stroke so intimate she actually gasped.
If anyone looked in now, they would see exactly what she was. The thought should have stopped her. Instead her thighs opened wider.
Mavrek's eyes lifted at once, sharp with hunger. "Aye."
"You are impossible."
"So they say."
He dropped to his knees between them before she could reply. No ceremony. Just one large body lowering itself in full morning light until his hands were on her calves and his face level with her lap. Her whole body went hot and cold together.
"What are you doing?"
His look could have been called patient if patience had ever burned like that. "You came early."
Then he pushed her skirts up her thighs and kissed the inside of one knee.
The first touch of his mouth there made her hands fly to the table edge. The second, higher up, made the walkway outside the window seem to rush closer. She could see the blurred shadow of someone passing beyond the glass and had to clamp her lips together against the sound trying to leave them.
Mavrek noticed everything. Of course he did. One hand slid up her thigh and held it open while his thumb stroked once over the soaked fabric between her legs.
"That heat was in you before I touched you."
"Do not speak."