Chapter 7
CHLOE
I'd built the inside of Lorkin's place in my head on the walk over, and I'd gotten it wrong in every particular.
I'd expected the forge to leak into the home.
Blades on the walls, maybe. Something cold and armed and braced for the end of the world, like the man.
Instead, he pushed the door open into a low, warm room with a banked fire, a kettle, and a chair worn into the shape of someone who actually sat in it.
And on the walls, where I'd pictured knives, there were paintings.
Small ones. Watercolors. Star-figs going gold on the branch, the ridge road under a violet sky, the orchard in the rain.
"You paint," I said, like an idiot.
"They keep the walls from being bare." He said it flatly, in a way that shut the subject, and went around lighting a second lamp, and I understood I'd seen something I wasn't meant to make a thing of.
He showed me the spare room. Small, clean, a narrow bed with more blankets than one person needs, and a door of good, heavy timber with an iron bar resting in two brackets.
"It bars from the inside," he said. "You drop that, nothing in this house comes through it. Not him. Not me." He set his hand flat on the door.
He was telling me to lock myself away from him. He'd hauled a door's worth of iron into the world so that a woman could keep him out, and now he was standing in it making sure I knew how to use it against him.
It did the exact opposite of what he wanted it to. A man who arms you against himself is the one man you're certain you'll never need to.
"Sleep," he said. "Nobody's putting you on any ship tonight." And he pulled the door shut behind him, softly, and I heard him move off into his own part of the house.
I barred it. Then I stood there and let myself, finally, look at what I'd been not-looking at for two weeks.
He was the biggest thing I'd ever stood next to and not been afraid of.
Heat rolled off him like he'd swallowed his own forge.
When he'd laid that hand on the door, the span of it had covered the bar and both brackets, and I'd had the deeply unhelpful thought that a hand like that could cover most of me.
And the horns. He'd ground them down, blunted them, capped the ends in dull metal, but there was a lot of horn left under the caps. A good handful. More than a handful. I'd spent the whole time he talked wondering what the rest of it would feel like under my palms.
"Get a grip," I told the dark. Bad choice of words. I did not need to be thinking about grips.
Here was the actual problem: he didn't want me.
He'd made that brutally clear already, with his mouth still wet from kissing me. He'd practically shoved me to his best friend. I was a problem he was solving for Kazan, and an easy way to keep Maisie from skinning him alive. I was a houseguest. You do not climb on your host.
So I lay down in the too-many blankets, in the little room that smelled of cedar and old smoke, and told my body we were going to sleep.
It didn't take.
After an hour, I gave up. There's a specific misery to lying still and wanting, where every minute makes it worse instead of better. Somewhere past midnight I unbarred the door, quiet, like the iron might tell on me, and went hunting for something warm to drink.
My working theory was that a woman busy making cocoa was not a woman thinking about the wrong minotaur's horns.
The main room still had a low fire. And Lorkin was in the worn chair, turned to face the hall I'd come down, a small knife in one hand and a curl of pale wood in the other, shavings on his knee. Not asleep. Not anywhere close.
Watching the door I'd come out of.
He hadn't gone to bed. He'd planted himself in the dark where he could see the way to my room, with a blade in his hand, ready to sit there all night keeping the world off me while I slept.
I'm not a good enough person to leave a thing like that alone.
"You're supposed to be asleep," he said, low, not looking up from the wood.
"So are you."
"I'm fine."
"You're sitting in a chair holding a knife." I came around in front of him. The fire was at my back, and his face tipped up, and whatever he found in mine made his hands go still. "Is this for me?"
"Go back to your room, Chloe."
He almost never said my name. It came out of him like it cost something to spend.
Here's what I knew, standing over him in the dark. It was my last night, near enough. Tomorrow there was a woman with neat horns who got to decide whether I ever saw any of these people again, and the smart money said she'd decide about me the way everyone always had.
I'd spent weeks pretending I wasn't dreaming about this exact, impossible, soot-streaked male. And the way things were going, I was never going to get another chance to find out what it was like to climb a minotaur.
You only get so many last nights. I wasn't going to spend this one being polite.
I set my mug down on the table. I watched him watch me do it, watched him understand, watched him not get up and walk away, which he could have. Then I climbed into his lap.
The heat of him hit me everywhere we touched.
He ran hot as the forge he worked, and it soaked straight through my leggings the moment my thighs spread to settle over his; the sheer breadth of him forcing my knees wide just to fit around him.
His hands came to my waist on reflex, to steady me or to set me aside.
I never knew which. The second they landed, they did neither.
They just stayed. And God, the size of them, both spanning my middle with his fingers nearly meeting at my spine, all that enormous, calm strength that could have lifted me off and set me down across the room. He didn't.
And I could feel him. Even now, jaw clenched, his whole body locked into one more act of restraint, he was hardening under me, thick and insistent against the inside of my thigh.
The feel of it lit me up from the inside out. My nipples drew tight. Everything low in me clenched down on nothing and went slick and molten, and I knew that if he slid one of those huge hands between my legs he'd find me already soaked through.
"Chloe." Wrecked, now. "Go back to your room. I'm trying to do one decent thing."
"I know what you're trying to do." I flattened my hands on his chest, and even through the worn shirt the heat of him stung my palms, the muscle beneath shifting as his whole body strained against staying still.
"You've been trying to do the decent thing.
You decided what was good for me and you've been white-knuckling it ever since.
" I leaned in and set my open mouth to the side of his throat, just to find out, and he tasted of salt and hot iron and warm skin, his pulse slamming against my lips.
A shudder rolled through his whole huge body.
"I know what I need," I said against his skin. "It isn't you being decent."
And I kissed him.
The sound he made.
It came up out of the bottom of him, a groan with a growl threaded through it, the sound of a man who'd finally stopped fighting.
His arms locked around me and hauled me flush against him.
His mouth opened over mine, and he kissed me back, deep and graceless and starving.
He tasted of smoke and heat, dark and unmistakably him, and his tongue stroked into my mouth slow and filthy while the rest of him shook with the effort of staying gentle.
Nothing about him was careful now, and all of it still was, somehow.
His mouth was rough, his hands greedy up my back and into my hair, and underneath it all that strength stayed leashed.
He kissed me like he was making up for every no he'd ever handed me.
I rolled my hips down into him, couldn't help it, and there he was, gone fully hard now, the thick length of his cock riding up against the seam of my leggings right where I was open and aching for it, so big it made my mouth water.
I ground down on him without a shred of shame, dragging the swollen center of me along that ridge through the cloth, the friction stoking me hotter with every pass until I was drenched, until the only thing keeping me quiet was his mouth on mine.
"You feel that," he said roughly against my mouth. "You feel what you do to me."
"Yeah." I rolled down on him again, slow and filthy, working myself along him just to feel his whole body lock up and that growl punch out of his chest. "I want it. I want all of it."
He swore, low, and stood up out of the chair with me still wrapped around him like I weighed nothing, one arm bracketing my back, and carried me down the hall.
His room was dark and warm. It smelled of him. He set me on the bed like the breakable thing he kept insisting I was, then stood over me a moment, chest heaving, fighting it one more time.
"Last chance," he said. "Tell me to go."
"Take off my clothes, Lorkin."
He undressed me slow. That was the part I hadn't braced for: how his hands shook the whole time and still went careful, easing my shirt up and off, peeling my leggings down my legs.
Then he looked at me, naked in his bed, his eyes dragging down my body slow and starving, and I felt the low rumble that rolled out of his chest in my back teeth.
He looked at me like he wanted to wreck me and worship me in the same breath, like he couldn't believe he was allowed either.
Then he put those enormous shoulders between my thighs and shoved them wider, wide enough to fit the breadth of him, and hauled me down the bed by the hips until I was spread open against his mouth. The first hot flat drag of his tongue up the center of me bowed my whole spine off the mattress.
He took his time.
Careful, thorough Lorkin, who finishes what he starts.