“When have I ever called you ‘wife’?”
“You know what I mean.”
I have spoken his name exactly once, and it was one time too many. So long as he is the North Wind, he remains my enemy.
“Aren’t you going to remove your gloves?” I ask.
After a moment of hesitation, he does. I’m not sure what I expected. His hands look perfectly normal. After placing his gloves on the bedside table, he shifts an inch in my direction. I retreat an inch. He does so again, and again, until I’m perched on the sagging edge of the mattress, clawing at the bedframe to stop myself from dropping onto the floor. With him so near, the fire is all but obsolete. Heat pours from his skin.
“You can offer me a little more room,” I growl. “I’m falling off the bed.”
“Perhaps if you didn’t act like I had an incurable disease, you would not be so uncomfortable.” But he shifts back, conceding the mattress as though it is territory relinquished in battle.
I tug the quilt around my body, tucking in my meager blanket defense so no air can infiltrate. “You keep to your side of the bed,” I mumble, “and I’ll keep to mine. Touch me, and I’ll stab you.”
He watches me through a slitted gaze. “And if you touch me?”
A slow heat crawls up my chest and down my back. “I won’t.” As if that would ever happen.
The Frost King watches me clutch the quilt, his blue eyes too sharp. “As you wish… Wren.”
19
FOR THE FIRST TIME INrecent memory, I wake warm.
I’m so unused to the sensation that I do not immediately open my eyes. True warmth, that feeling of flushed skin and loosened joints, has eluded me for years. Drifting in this state of half-wakefulness, I become vaguely aware of a distant sound, a low, even drumming. Something heavy weighs down my waist, a press of heat. It smells of cedar.
Cedar. It can’t be, but… I glance down, squinting against the spill of morning sunlight. The object pressed to my waist is a man’s arm, wrapped tightly around me, fingertips shoved into the space between my body and the mattress.
The Frost King is dead to the world. He didn’t keep to his side of the bed. He rolled over tomyside, invadedmypersonal space, his chest a wall of heat at my back.
My teeth grit as he shifts against me. “Boreas.”
His exhalation ruffles my hair. The sensation raises gooseflesh on my skin.
It’s been too long since I’ve been intimate with a man. I would laugh at the irony were I not so breathless from our intertwined position, and that snaps me awake, the reminder of who shares my bed.
“Boreas.”
Not even a twitch. When I attempt to slide free of his embrace, his arm tightens across my stomach. My fidgeting only succeedsin pressing our bodies closer together. “Boreas!” I snap, my face warming.
Then something long and hard nestles against my backside, and my eyes pop wide. Taut, vibrating energy clamps my muscles. They tighten to the point of snapping, then loosen all at once. My poor, sex-starved body doesn’t care whose arms I’ve found myself in. All it knows is the solidity at my back, the breath against my neck where Boreas has buried his face in my hair. And then—oh, gods—his hips give a slow roll that sends heat spilling through my core, and I all but leap out of my skin. With a dramatic cry, I claw free of his embrace, toppling from the bed onto the floor.
The king hurries around the side of the bed, spear in hand. Mussed hair and a bleary gaze give him a recently tumbled look, though there was no tumbling to be had last night. “What happened?” He speaks in a low, husky rasp.
I turn my head away, blowing out a strange, airless breath. His trousers hang so low on his hips it’s positively indecent. “Nothing.” The Frost King’s beauty is riveting, sure, but he has the personality of a pustule. “I told you to stay on your side of the bed.”
I sense his uncertainty, which in turn makes me feel unbalanced. “You said you were cold.”
“I did not!” I cry, leaping to my feet. Because if what he says is true, I would remember it.
He shrugs, completely unfazed by my dramatic display. “I have little reason to lie.” Something in his gaze sharpens as it rests on me, and my heart skips a beat. “The first time you asked me to move closer, I reminded you of your boundaries.”
If there is a first time, then I must have asked more than once. I don’t want to know. I have to know. “What was my response?”
“You said you didn’t care.”
Then I must have been delirious. Borderline hypothermic. “You should have respected my initial request.”
