“Distant. Untouchable. You flinched when I so much as brushed against you. And now you burn.”
I couldn’t speak. The petal was erupting in my blood, screaming for more contact, more heat, more of him. My body was a starving thing, and he was a feast spread out before me.
“Were you just waiting for an audience to come alive?” His lips brushed my ear. “Or is this something else? Something you took? Something you shouldn’t have?”
I grabbed his coat.
Pulled him down.
Our mouths met, and the world dissolved.
The kiss was rough. Demanding. His lips moved against mine, hungry as my own, neither tender nor gentle but consuming.
His teeth grazed my lower lip, and I gasped, and he used that gasp to deepen the kiss, sweeping deep into my mouth.
I let him.
Not because I wanted to be known. But because his mouth was hot, his breath was hot, his tongue was hot and I was drinking it in. Draining his heat with greedy, desperate touches.
His exhale filled my lungs. His heat flooded my veins.
He was a furnace, and I was a frozen thing finally, finally thawing.
My fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him closer. I needed more. I needed to consume him the way the cold had consumed me.
His hands left the wall. Found my hips. Gripped hard enough that I should have bruised, would have bruised, if my dead flesh still marked, if my body still remembered how to respond to pressure and pain.
He lifted me, pinning me more firmly against the stone, my back scraping against the rough surface, my legs wrapping around his waist without conscious thought.
The position forced our bodies together from chest to hip, and the heat of him was everywhere, flooding through the velvet between us.
I kissed him harder.
Drank deeper.
His mouth moved from my lips to my jaw, then to the sensitive hollow where my pulse should have been beating. His teeth scraped against my skin, not quite biting, and a sound escaped me, a moan, a gasp, something animal and desperate.
He pulled back.
I made a sound of protest. Tried to chase his mouth, to pull him back down, to continue drowning in his heat.
But his hand caught my chin, held me still, and his gaze sharp enough to cut through the petal’s haze.
“You taste strange,” he said.
The moan died in my throat.
“What?”
“Chemical.” He ran his tongue over his lower lip, slow and deliberate, tasting the residue I’d left there. “Bitter. Metallic. Like alchemy and ash.”
His eyes narrowed. “Like something that shouldn’t be in a woman’s blood. Something counterfeit.”
The cold was creeping back.
Not physical cold. The petal still burned in my veins, still flooding me with stolen warmth. But the cold of fear. Of exposure. Of feeling the ground begin to crumble beneath my feet.
“It’s just the wine,” I managed. “The vintage was bitter. I should have chosen something sweeter.”
