I clamp down on my body’s response to her. The sound of her heartbeat. The curve of her lips. The arch of her back. The glide of the water around us.
I fight the need I won’t make known toher.
Her eyes are closed.
She inhales.
A long, soft sound that quietly shatters my sense of where I am and what I’m doing, her next exhalation a torment curling through my chest, squeezing my damaged heart.
For an extended moment, as she stays right where she is, her sun-touched cheeks and lips are mine to study.
I want to pull every piece of information I can from them, the way her skin flushes, pales, and flushes again, the way the small tensions play around her mouth.
I take in everything about her.
The puncture wounds on her neck are red but healing. Two other scars mar her skin. One across her right rib, an unmistakable iron burn, and the second across her upper right shoulder that can only have been made by Ember fire. I will ask her about them in time but not now.
Her hands, where they find the tears in my tunic and press to my bare skin, are rough and callused. It was clear to me the moment I first saw her that she worked hard among the fishing communities along the coast.
She hid as a lowborn.
But to survive in my kingdom, she will have to behave as a highborn. She will have to draw herself above all others, distant and untouchable.
As the silence between us extends, filled only with her quiet breathing and the gentle bubble of water, I clamp down on my power, fighting the instinctive, self-preserving push of ice that rises the longer I remain immersed in warmth.
This heat is in direct opposition to my existence, an enemy of my body.
I am of ice.
I am all that is frozen.
This water is living warmth.
It has no power over me, can give me no heat, but I could destroy it easily, freezing it over, along with Thyra.
As if she becomes aware of my internal struggle, she opens her eyes.
Pale blue. Faded.
I expect the tension around her lips to return when she looks at me.
Astoundingly, it doesn’t.
Without a word, she pulls herself closer to my chest, fitting her head to my neck, her hair tickling my chin.
The fact that she can maneuver herself without any help from me is a welcome sign.
Her heartbeats are stronger, and her color remains, filling her lips as well as her fingertips where they peek above the water’s surface.
“You made me warm,” she says.
A near-impossible achievement for a cold creature like me.
She falls quiet again, and I allow the silence to settle.
For long moments, I indulge in the pretense that I can keep her this way. Warm. Safe.
Finally, she stretches against me, and I allow her the freedom she needs to test her body’s movement.
