"Say it again," he said quietly.
Iva's throat went dry. "What."
"That you were right."
Her laugh came out thin and frayed. "You seem to be having a difficult evening."
"Aye." He took one step closer. "Say it."
Every instinct she had trained into herself since the guild screamed to turn this sideways into wit. To make the room safe by refusing the obvious. To step back. To apologize for competence by pretending it had occurred accidentally and therefore did not need to carry consequence.
The stepping-back belonged to another version of her now. One who had crossed her own name out of margins and called it prudence.
She did not step back.
"I was right," she said.
Mavrek closed the distance and kissed her.
No patient testing this time. The argument was still in it. The rough edge of his brief irritation had not vanished; it had been translated. His hand went to the back of her neck and took her mouth like the continuation of the same fight by other means. Iva made a startled sound against his lips and then another, lower, when he backed her into the sample wall hard enough that pinned strips crackled behind her shoulder blades.
Paint dust broke loose into her hair.
He kissed like a man who had spent twelve hours holding himself in the narrow lanes work allowed and now had no interest in lane discipline. She tasted the last bitter trace of tea on him, the salt of the day, the iron heat of his mood. When she opened for him his tongue pushed in deep and sure and she clutched at his shoulders with hands still gritted in mineral powder.
"You were right," he said against her mouth, as if the words themselves made him rougher. "Gods curse me, woman, you were right." No one in Brineshell heard it but the sample wall and the panel on the easel. Some traitorous part of her noticed that too.
The honesty of it went through her like a knife.
Iva's laugh broke into something much more dangerous. "You sound furious."
"I was." His mouth slid to her throat, teeth just touching. "And then I looked again."
That nearly took her knees out.
Competence and desire had crossed wires so completely she could no longer tell which had lit first. He wanted her because she had stood her ground, because the patch dried clean, because she had not apologized for surpassing him. The truth of that was so naked it made her cunt throb.
She fisted his shirt and pulled him closer. "Then stop talking."
He made the low sound she had already learned meant approval and pushed one thigh between hers. The pressure landed exactly where she was aching and she rocked down on it before dignity could intervene. The sample wall behind her gave again — brittle paper, pinned boards, one dish clattering from a shelf and rolling under the table.
Mavrek's hand flattened over her sternum as if he needed to feel the force of her where it mattered. "Aye. There."
He knew. Of course he knew. She had been loudest after the argument, after the patch, after certainty. The connection was humiliating and exact.
"Do not look pleased," she said breathlessly.
"Why not?"
"Because I dislike being legible."
"Too late."
That got him a sharp bite at the hinge of his jaw, which in turn got her blouse opened by sheer impatient force. Buttons skittered against the floorboards. He shoved the fabric off her shoulders, tugged her chemise down enough to bare both breasts, and stared once before he put his mouth on her.
The back wall dug sample edges into her spine while his tongue roughened one nipple to aching hardness and his hand worked the other. Twelve hours of labor were all through the room and all through them. Dust at her nape. Sweat drying in the hollow of her back. The faint soreness in her thighs from the scaffold. His forearms rough with old pigment and the day's fresh grit. Nothing polished. Nothing cleaned into romance.
The mess of it made the wanting feel truer.