Page 77

The silence stretched long enough for embarrassment to start crawling up my neck. "Well, say something."

His eyes held mine, and whatever teasing had been there a moment ago was gone. In its place was something quieter and far more dangerous.

"You're certain?"

The question took the last of the humor out of me. I nodded. "I wouldn't have made that spectacular ass of myself if I wasn't."

He drew a slow breath, his jaw tightening as though that answer had cost him the last excuse he had for staying where he was.

Then he pushed away from the door and came toward me.

Slowly.

Not because he was uncertain. I knew River well enough to recognize the difference. Every step was deliberate, every inch of space he closed another chance for me to tell him to stop.

I didn't.

By the time he reached me, my heart was pounding hard enough that I was certain he could hear it.

River stopped just short of touching me.

"Last chance, Firefly."

I looked up at him. "You're really going to make me say it again?"

His gaze lowered to my mouth before slowly lifting to my eyes again. "No." His voice was barely above a murmur. "Now I'm waiting for you to show me what you want."

Then he kissed me.

He tasted like taking a deep breath of cold air by the lake. There was nothing gentle about the first press of his mouth and nothing careless about it either. Everywhere he touched me the chill went through the fabric and into my skin until gooseflesh climbed both my arms.

Underneath it, my whole body came up hot to meet him. The cold didn't numb me. It woke every nerve I owned and left them all shouting for more at once. The heat of my own blood became a living thing moving under my skin, and his hand at the small of my back was a brand marking his possession.

I pressed closer instead of stepping back. River felt that, and his breath caught against my mouth.

I grabbed his shirt to yank him toward me, and whatever careful distance he'd been keeping stopped existing. He met me from chest to thigh, solid and cold and entirely past pretending. The sound that came out of me was not one I'd made before in my life. I sounded like a wild animal in heat.

Goddess.

His tongue breached my lips and every thought left my head. There was the scrape of his jaw. The give of his lower lip when I bit it. The low broken noise he made when I did it again, which I intend to spend the rest of my life trying to reproduce. And underneath all of it, the thing that nearly undid me.

He didn't smell like River from the past.

Two years of cedar and clean laundry and something warm I'd spent an embarrassing number of hours pretending not to notice, and there was nothing left of it. Just cold, and the faint mineral bite of snow before it falls. I got my face into the curve of his neck and breathed him in anyway, looking for it. The grief of missing it went through me so fast and so hot that I bit down on his neck angrily.

River's hands tightened on me hard enough to bruise.

"Hazel." My name sounded like a plea on his lips. Then he went still, the way he always does, and waited.

Instead of answering him I got my fingers into his hair and pulled him back to me. I whispered the filthiest things I have ever said out loud to another living creature into his ear shamelessly.

After that he stopped asking with words.

His shirt went around the room in pieces as I ripped it off his torso. My hands found bare skin at last and his stomach hollowed under my nails while I clawed at him wanting to get closer still. The cold of him was so complete that touching his chest was like pressing both hands flat against a windowpane in the middle of a snowstorm, but I could not get enough of it. I dragged my nails down his sides just to hear all the sounds he would make.

"You are driving me mad," he got out.

"I haven't even started yet."