My tusk catches her lower lip. She hisses. I pull back an inch.
"Don't you dare," she breathes, and drags me back in.
The cold bites into my overheated skin, steam rising off my forearms where the oven heat hasn't dissipated. Her back presses flat against the freezing steel and she arches away from it, straight into my chest. The size difference is absurd. My hands span her entire ribcage. Her feet dangle fourteen inches off the ground. She wraps her legs around my waist and locks her ankles behind me and suddenly the geometry works, her hips flush against my stomach, her hands gripping my shoulders, her mouth hot and demanding against my jaw.
I break.
Three decades of mercenary discipline. A perfect record. An unbroken code of professional conduct. Gone. Obliterated by a five-foot-four baker with frosting in her hair.
My hand slides up her thigh, pushing flour-dusted fabric with it. Her skin is scalding against my cold palm. She shivers, and it has nothing to do with the temperature.
"You're freezing," I manage against her throat.
"I'm really not."
Her fingers rake down my chest, grabbing the collar of my undershirt. The ruined fabric tears open. Cold air hits the scars across my torso and every nerve ending fires at once. Her palms press flat against my bare skin and her breath catches at the heat of me, always running hot, Orcish blood like a furnace even in a walk-in cooler.
She traces a scar that runs from my collarbone to my sternum. Old. Deep. Her fingertip follows its jagged path, and something in my chest cracks open wider than the wound ever did.
I press my forehead against hers. Our breath mingles in thick white clouds between us.
"This violates the contract."
"You wrote the contract on a napkin."
"Napkin contracts are legally binding in seven territories."
"Sue me."
Her mouth finds the space below my ear. Teeth. I grunt, and my hips pin her harder against the wall. A shelf bracket groans under the pressure. A crate of frozen blueberries slides sideways and crashes to the floor, scattering berries like dark marbles across the concrete.
My hand tangles in her hair, flour puffing out in a white cloud. I tilt her head back. Expose the long line of her throat. The chocolate smear sits right above her pulse point and I drag my tongue across it, tasting cocoa and salt and skin.
Her legs tighten around me.
"Dash."
Not a question this time. A command.
I obey.
The cold steel wall fogs where her body heat meets it. Her nails score lines down my back that I will feel for days. Weeks. Every movement is urgent and graceless and absolutely correct, the way things are when they stop being performances and start being real. She buries her face against my neck and makes sounds that the thick cooler walls swallow whole, sounds that belong to me now, that I will carry in my chest like contraband.
I brace one hand on the ceiling to keep from putting my full weight against her. Frost melts under my palm. My other arm wraps beneath her, holding her up, holding her close, holdingher like the most important thing I have ever been contracted to protect.
Because she is.
She says my name one more time. Quiet. Almost lost in the hum of the cooling unit.
After, we stay pressed together. Her forehead against my collarbone. My back heaving. Frozen berries crushed beneath my boots. The blue light turns everything silver and strange and holy.
Her fingers trace my broken tusk.
"Your contract success rate just dropped to ninety-nine percent."
A sound comes out of me that I don't recognize.
Laughter.
