Chapter 12
twelve
. . .
Thorne’s frost reached her boots.
Phoebe watched it creep along the ground, silver-white patterns encircling them, reaching for the toes of her shoes with an almost organic intent. The sight of his control finally, visibly breaking was the final bit of evidence she needed to know she was doing the right thing.
“I’m done waiting,” she said again, her chin lifting, her eyes searching his.
The words were true, and she’d never meant anything more. His truth-sense must have read every layer of them because he leaned down and his mouth found hers and the weeks of being careful and controlled collapsed in an instant.
His mouth was cold against hers, and her whole body lit up at the contrast. His hand came up to cradle the back of her head, his fingers threading into her hair, and the chill of his palm against her scalp made her gasp into his mouth.
He swallowed the sound. His other arm wrapped low around her waist and pulled her flush against him, and she felt every inch of the difference between them.
Her heat and his cold, her softness and the hard wall of his chest. The peppermint taste of him flooded her senses, sharp and clean, and she chased it with her tongue without thinking, opening for him, wanting more.
He gave it to her. His mouth moved against hers, unhurried and devastating, the careful restraint she'd watched him hold for weeks dissolving into something starving.
The cold of his lips numbed hers in the best way, a tingling that spread down her throat and bloomed low in her belly, and she pressed closer, fisting her hands in the front of his jacket the way she had on the stage floor.
The temperature of him did something to her she had no words for.
Every place his body pressed against hers came alive.
Her flushed skin drank it in. She felt frost prickle against her cheek where his fingers had drifted to cradle her jaw, the faintest crystallizing bloom, and the proof of what she was doing to him.
He was losing the discipline he'd worn like armor, and witnessing it sent a fresh ache pulsing between her thighs.
She made a sound against his mouth, low and unguarded, the kind she never let anyone hear.
He answered it with a rumble from deep in his chest that she felt more than heard, his arm tightening around her waist until her feet nearly left the ground.
His mouth slanted over hers, deeper, and she let him take it, let him take everything, because for once in her life she wasn't performing a single thing.
There was no version of herself she needed to be.
There was only this man she trusted more than anyone else, and the way her body had been screaming for him since the moment he'd hit her at a run and rolled them both to safety.
When he finally broke the kiss, his forehead dropped to rest against hers, his breath ragged and visible in the air, the cold of it ghosting across her swollen lips.
"Phoebe." Her name, not Miss Calloway. Her name, rough and low and shaking at the edges. His hand was still in her hair. "Come home with me."
She opened her eyes. He was watching her with that ice-blue gaze that saw straight through every layer she had, and for once she let him. She let him see all of it. The want, the fear she'd set down, the certainty underneath.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. Take me home."
She didn't wait for him to move. She fisted her hands in his jacket again and pulled him back down to her mouth, rising onto her toes to meet him, and she felt him groan against her lips as the frost spread unchecked across the ground.
The walk to his house passed by in a blur, and then the door to his apartment closed, and it was just them and the want that had been building for weeks.
His cold mouth on hers was a shock she leaned into with her whole body. He answered by walking her backward until her shoulder blades hit the wall, pinning her there with the full, solid weight of him pressed against her.
His hands pushed her coat from her shoulders, the heavy wool sliding down her arms before it hit the floor with a muffled thump her ears barely registered. His fingers found the hem of her shirt and slid underneath. His palms pressed flat against the bare skin of her waist, and the cold was—
Oh, God.
Frost bloomed where his hands met her body, ice-crystal patterns forming against her ribs, blooming outward in delicate patterns she could almost hear crystallizing, and she gasped, the sound punched out of her, raw and graceless, nothing she would ever have let anyone hear on purpose.
He pulled back. One inch. His eyes on her face, checking, the ice-blue of them gone dark and searching in the dim light.
She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him back harder, the fabric cool and crisp under her fingers.
His mouth found her throat. His cold lips dragged along the tendon beneath her jaw, leaving a trail of mint and chill in their wake.
Everywhere he touched, the frost followed with delicate tracery on her skin that burned cold and then faded to a tingling warmth that pooled lower and lower.
His hands pushed her shirt up, and she helped him get it over her head and then his palms were on her bare stomach, her ribs, the undersides of her breasts, and the cold of him against her heat was a friction she had no reference for.
Not pain. Not discomfort. A live-wire current that ran from every point of contact straight to her core.
When her breath hitched on a sound she didn't mean to make, he answered it before she could shape it into something prettier. His mouth moved lower. His hands held her hips. He dropped to his knees, the floorboards creaking faintly under his weight.
His cold fingers hooked into her waistband and pulled, and the cold air of his apartment hit her thighs and then his mouth replaced it, and the shock of his cold lips against the hottest part of her made her skull knock back against the wall and her fingers close in his hair, soft, silver-fine strands sliding between her knuckles.
The sound that came out of her was not a sound she recognized.
His tongue was cool and deliberate and devastating, slick and minty against her cunt, and every pass sent that electric current of contrast cascading through her in pulses.
“Thorne. Thorne.”
His name became a mantra on repeat, and she came with her hands fisted in his hair. Her whole body shook with it, trembling against the wall, trembling against his mouth, and he held her through it, his hands steady and cool on her hips, lips still pressed to her, letting her ride it down.
He rose. His hands went under her thighs, and he lifted her against the wall as if she weighed nothing.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and felt the length of him between her thighs, and her hips moved without her permission, grinding against him.
The sound he made was quiet and guttural, and the most undone thing she had ever heard come out of his mouth.
There was a frantic thirty seconds of fabric and logistics with his hand bracing her weight, her fingers fumbling with his waistband, the rasp of a zipper, his forehead dropping against hers, both of them breathing too hard to be coordinated about it.
And then the barrier was gone, and she felt him press against her entrance, cool and smooth and thick, and slick with something that tingled faintly mentholated against her sensitive flesh.
She locked her ankles behind his back and pulled him in.
The feel of him was like nothing she had known.
The temperature of him against her sensitive walls created a sensation that was cool and electric from the first inch.
It wasn’t shock anymore but a deep, rolling friction that her body answered with a full-body clench.
He filled her slowly with that first stroke, subtle ridges along his shaft dragging against her inner walls.
He held her weight against the wall, and she felt every degree of temperature difference between them as he sank deeper.
Her body gripped him. His jaw went tight.
The frost spread across the wall behind her shoulders in a pattern she could hear crystallizing, a faint, glassy tinkling beneath her own ragged breathing.
"Tell me." His voice against her throat. Rough. Barely words. His breath cold on her damp skin. “Tell me what you want.”
"You. Just you." Her voice wasn't much better.
He pinned her to the wall and drove into her with a rhythm that found the edge of too much and stayed there, and the cold of his cock inside the heat of her core was a contrast that made every stroke register twice.
She was loud. Sounds came out of her that she would be mortified about later, except that every one of them was answered by his body in the way his hips stuttered when she cried out and the way his grip tightened on her thighs when she clenched around him.
She understood that her raw honesty was doing to him what his truth-sense was doing to her.
Undoing him. Unraveling every layer of discipline he'd wrapped around himself.
He came with her name on his mouth and his body pinning hers to the wall, and she felt him shake, felt the sudden startling flash of heat that flooded him, his body going warm for an instant.
This man, who had never shaken, was shaking against her, his forehead pressed to her throat, breathing her name.
She kissed him and tasted herself on his cold mouth, salt and musk and peppermint. The combination was strange and intimate in a way that made her stomach flip. His arms tightened around her. The cool weight of them was a cage she had no desire to escape.
He carried her to the bedroom while still inside her.
He laid her down and drew back enough to look at her in the Pine's pale light. His eyes moved over her with an expression she had never seen on his face. Not heat, though there was heat. Not hunger, though there was that too. Reverence.