The taunt is designed to provoke. Delivered with the precise inflection that she uses when she wants to force a reaction from behind my mask, each word calibrated to hit the gap between my composure and my honesty.
I say nothing.
Instead, I move.
Forward. Closing the distance between the sink and her stool with two strides that bring my body into her immediate proximity. She is seated, which places her face at the level of my chest, her green eyes angling upward as my approach registers in her peripheral vision and converts to direct focus.
I lean in.
My hand rises. Slowly. The motion visible and telegraphed, providing her the opportunity to retreat that I know she will not take because retreat is not a word that exists in Sage Holloway's operational vocabulary. My fingers settle against the front of her neck. Not gripping. Resting. The lightest possible contact between my palm and the warm column of her throat, the touch carrying the specific, controlled authority of a man who is testing a boundary with the full understanding that the woman before him will either accept the advance or remove his hand with a force that his wrist will remember.
She stills.
Not with fear. I am watching for fear. Have been trained to identify it through every micro-expression and physiological signal that my analytical brain catalogs in real time. Pupildilation. Breathing pattern disruption. The muscular tension that precedes flight. The specific, involuntary flinch that trauma survivors produce when contact approaches territory their nervous system has flagged as unsafe.
None of it appears.
Her breathing accelerates. Her pupils expand. Her chin lifts against my palm with the deliberate, defiant elevation of a woman who has been offered a challenge and is accepting the terms. But the fear is absent. Replaced by a heat that radiates from her skin through my fingers and up my arm and into the center of my chest where it detonates against the specific, desperate need that has been building since the locker room.
I kiss her.
Firmly. With a possessive roughness that I deploy as a test, the pressure arriving with enough intensity to communicate that this kiss is not the gentle, inverted version from last night. This kiss has teeth behind it. Intent. The specific, Alpha-frequency assertiveness that I have been leashing in her presence and am now allowing slack because the hand on her throat is an invitation for her to show me whether she matches.
She matches.
Her mouth meets mine with a fierceness that bypasses negotiation and arrives directly at confrontation, her lips pushing back against the pressure I applied with an equal and opposite force that converts the kiss from a unilateral action into a bilateral collision. Her hand finds the back of my neck, fingers curling into the short hair at my nape, the grip firm enough to produce sensation and possessive enough to communicate that she is not receiving this kiss but participating in it with the full competitive intensity she brings to every interaction on and off ice.
I groan. The sound vibrating against her mouth, the vocalization involuntary, produced by the specific neurologicalevent of discovering that Sage Holloway kisses the way she plays hockey: relentlessly, with technical precision layered over raw power, holding nothing in reserve.
We are breathless when it breaks.
The separation is mutual, our mouths disengaging at the same instant, the contact dissolving into the heated air between our faces. Her green eyes are wide and dark, the pupils claiming territory from the irises in the specific dilation that Alpha biology recognizes as arousal and responds to with a corresponding escalation that I can feel in my blood and my groin and the thinning barrier of self-control that is the only thing preventing this kitchen from becoming a location I will never be able to cook in again without remembering what she tastes like.
A knock lands on the door.
The sound is sharp, practical, carrying the specific two-rap cadence of someone whose arrival is expected and whose patience for waiting is limited.
She pouts.
I huff. The sound carrying the concentrated frustration of a man whose momentum has been interrupted by institutional timing. I lean in, my lips arriving at the proximity of her ear, the whisper delivered against her skin rather than into the air.
"Saved by whoever is at our door."
She smirks. The expression curling against the heated air between us with the specific, provocative energy of a woman who has been denied a conclusion and intends to make the person responsible regret it.
"Probably Miss Phillip." She tilts her head, her green eyes holding mine with the challenge that has not left them since my hand found her throat. "But you weren't going to do anything."
The taunt lands in the center of my sternum.
I stop her from sliding off the stool. My hands find the counter on either side of her hips, my arms forming a cage that pins her between my body and the island, the position closing the distance that the kiss had briefly opened. My hips press forward, the contact deliberate, the evidence of my arousal meeting the space between her thighs through the minimal layers that separate us and communicating, with a specificity that language cannot match, exactly what I was going to do.
Her breath catches.
I lean in. My lips at her ear. My voice dropped to the frequency that exists solely for her, the register that I discovered during our locker room encounter and have been deploying with increasing precision ever since.
"I'd be tempted to peel my shirt off you and see that pretty, luxurious body of yours you like to hide from the world like a sacred deity."
The red that floods her face arrives with a violence that could be mistaken for a medical event. From her jaw to her forehead, the blush consuming every freckle and every centimeter of visible skin with a thermal output I can feel radiating against my own face from the proximity.
