I’d never been spoken to like that before.
Never had such graphic sex talk thrown at me.
Even in the rare times that Torvek and I had discussed sex, it had been me going the more brazen route, he didn’t throw it back at me.
And maybe there was something screwed up inside me, but… I liked it from this blazing little Ifrit.
I cleared my throat and I saw amusement dancing in his eyes from me needing to.
“I meant, you get off on being a provocateur.”
“Wow, that’s a really nice way of calling me an asshole.”
“No. If that’s what I’d meant, I would have said it.”
“Yeah, you do curse a lot, don’t you? For a royal especially.”
He’d been watching me.
I proppedmyelbow on the desk then. “That said, I did mean that you’ve really got the dramatic fucker thing down well.”
He slapped his hand to his heart. “Oof. You’re burning me, baby. And that’s really saying something considering the ice versus fire thing we’ve got going on.” He frowned. “Is this about Win?”
“Maybe partly.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Well, between us, it was never my intent to hurt him. Not in any way. All right?”
“But you did. Repeatedly.”
He shifted his weight, then startled me as he leaned in close and whispered at my ear, “Being drawn closer to the likes of me would break him.”
As he eased back, emotion flickered in his eyes.
But with a roll of his shoulders and a steadying breath, he hid it away. “Do you get me?”
“Why flirt with me if you think you’re bad for people?”
“Notpeople.Winter. And you’re not Winter, are you,icicle?”
Before I could even fathom how to respond to that, he sank back in his chair and kicked his zebra-print boots up on the desktop, just narrowly avoiding hitting the interface. “Speaking of some people being bad for others, you up for doing something about that shithead ex of yours?”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he said, as he shoved up the sleeves of his tee, a whole lot of ink coming into view all over his arms. It was a microcosm of his personality—gritty, harsh and hard-edged designs interspersed with artsy and sentimental imagery.
Something stood out to me beyond all of that, though.
The mark on his right forearm.
A surface-level assessment would class it as severe frostbite.
But it was more than that.
There was deep sub-dermal damage, and his skin was literally forced into a frozen state that wasn’t retreating. As I listened and scented it, I couldn’t feel any healing actually taking place—no movement at all.
Fuck,if he wasn’t an Ifrit, he wouldn’t be functioning right now, because his system would have shut down. It was the flaming intensity and his fiery magical makeup that was allowing the frozen damage to be bypassed, his body finding a way to do so. It wouldn’t be possible for most others, save for maybe a magic-wielder highly experienced in fire magic, or a Fire Dragon, possibly an Ancient. And of course… Winter Nox.
“This won’t heal,” I told him, grasping his wrist and examining the damage in even closer detail.
