11. Sabine #2
His hand comes up. Enormous, scarred, the knuckles still raw from the fight, and he touches the cut with the pad of his thumb so gently that I barely feel the contact.
The contrast is staggering. Those same hands threw a Troll through a steel wall four minutes ago.
Those same fingers crushed a war-chain into scrap metal.
And now the rough pad of his thumb traces a half-inch cut on my cheekbone with the delicacy of someone handling antique porcelain, and his skin against mine sends a jolt straight down my spine from the fact that I have been lying to myself for three days.
"It doesn't hurt," I whisper.
"You shouldn't have come." His thumb stays on my cheek. "You should never have come. If anything had happened to you..."
"Then what."
His eyes lock on mine and the amber in them is molten, liquid, a color that doesn't exist in nature or in any paint swatch I've ever catalogued.
"Then nothing." His thumb slides from the cut to the curve of my jaw, tilting my face up. "Nothing would have mattered after that."
The rain drums against the window he fixed with his bare hands yesterday.
My list of ground rules is still pinned to the refrigerator behind his left shoulder, and Rule Number Seven, which states in very clear block letters NO PHYSICAL CONTACT BEYOND WHAT IS STRICTLY NECESSARY FOR DMI COMPLIANCE, is staring at me in accusatory magenta.
I reach up and pull his face down to mine.
The kiss is nothing like the fake one we performed for the inspector.
That kiss was brief, controlled, a precise transaction designed to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement.
This kiss is a demolition. His mouth covers mine completely and the sound he makes when our lips connect is a growl that I feel in my teeth, in my sternum, in the soles of my feet where they press against his thighs.
His hand slides from my jaw into my hair and his fingers close in the wet strands at my skull, angling my head back, and his other arm hooks around me and drags me to the counter until my body is flush against his and every point of contact burns through my soaked clothes.
He tastes like rain and copper and something dark and sweet that I want to chase to its source.
His tusks press against the corners of my mouth, smooth and warm, and when I open for him his tongue slides against mine with a slow, deliberate pressure that makes my brain, for the first time in my entire meticulous, carefully organized, risk-assessed life, go completely and blissfully blank.
My hands find him. The leather armor is slick with rain and underneath it his body radiates heat like a furnace, and I can feel his heart hammering against my palm, fast and hard and desperate.
I grip the buckle of his armor plate and pull, and the message is unmistakable, and his response is a sound that vibrates against my lips, low and raw and hungry, and his arm tightens around me until my feet leave the counter entirely and I'm suspended against him with nothing holding me up but the crush of his body and the cage of his arm.
"Rule Seven," he mutters against my mouth.
"I'm amending Rule Seven."
"Sabine."
"Effective immediately. I have the authority. It's my refrigerator."
His laugh is a broken, breathless thing that ghosts across my lips, and then he kisses me again, harder this time, deeper, and the hand in my hair tightens and his hips press forward against the counter and I feel exactly how much restraint this is costing him and my brain, my beautiful organized logical brain that has carried me safely through thirty-one years of careful responsible decision-making, looks at the data and arrives at a conclusion that is entirely unprecedented.
More.
His mouth moves from mine to my jaw, tracing the line of bone with his lips, and every nerve ending in my body rewires itself in real time.
The logical architecture of my brain, the neat filing cabinets, the alphabetized folders, the risk assessments, organized by color, all of it crashes like a server hit by lightning, and what replaces it is raw signal.
Heat. Pressure. The drag of his teeth along the tendon in my neck.
The vibration of that low, constant growl against my throat where my pulse hammers so hard he must feel it against his lips.
"Tell me to stop. Sabine. Tell me to stop and I will."
I drag my fingers up the back of his neck, through the short-cropped hair at his skull, and pull him closer. "If you stop right now I will audit you so thoroughly your grandchildren will owe back taxes."
My thighs lock around his waist on pure instinct, which is geometrically ambitious given the sheer circumference of him, and his hand drops from my hair to the back of my thigh and hitches me higher against his body with an ease that makes my stomach flip.
He lifts me off the counter entirely. Both hands under my thighs now, fingers spanning nearly the full width of them, and my legs are wrapped around his midsection and my arms around his neck and the size difference is frankly absurd.
My feet don't even come close to meeting behind his back.
I'm clinging to him like a koala on a redwood and some vestigial shred of my dignity tries to raise a complaint about the optics and is immediately shouted down by every other system in my body.
He walks us toward the bedroom, his mouth never leaving my skin, trailing heat along my collarbone, up the side of my neck, behind my ear.
He navigates the hallway without looking, without bumping a single wall, which means he's memorized the layout of my apartment in the dark, and that small domestic detail hits me harder than it should.
He knows my home. He's been paying attention. He always pays attention.
My back hits the mattress and he follows me down.
The bed groans in protest, an ominous creak from the IKEA frame that was designed to support one sensibly-sized human woman and not a fully armored Orc bounty hunter, and he catches himself on his forearms on either side of my head before his full weight settles.
The consideration in that gesture, the instinctive calibration of force even now, even with the remnants of berserker adrenaline still flickering in the gold traces of his tattoos, makes something behind my ribs crack wide open.
He's enormous above me. His shoulders block out the ceiling light.
His forearms frame my head like the walls of a canyon.
I can see every detail of his face from this distance, the silver piercings catching the ambient light, the faint scars that map a history of violence across his jaw and brow, the way his pupils have swallowed the amber of his irises until only a thin ring of gold remains.
"You're so small." He says it like it scares him. Like the reality of our proportions is hitting him fresh and the math is alarming. His hand comes up and spans the entire width of my ribcage, thumb to pinkie, and his expression shifts into something fierce and agonized. "I could hurt you."
"You won't."
"You don't know that."
"I'm an accountant, Jagger. I assess risk for a living.
" I reach up and trace the glowing line of a rune that curves along his collarbone, feeling the raised texture of the ink under my fingertip.
"And right now the biggest risk in this room is that you're going to talk yourself out of this while I'm lying here in a wet cardigan. "
His jaw clenches. The rune under my finger pulses gold, warm but not burning, and the war plays out across his face, duty and desire and a fear that runs deeper than combat.
Then I hook my fingers into the buckle of his chest plate and pull, and the leather comes loose with a sound like a sigh, and he shuts his eyes and drops his forehead against mine.
"The cardigan is a problem," he agrees roughly.
Getting the armor off takes both of us. The chest plate has a series of interlocking clasps that my nimble, spreadsheet-trained fingers handle with surprising efficiency, and he shrugs out of it and drops it over the side of the bed where it hits the floor with a thud that rattles the nightstand.
The shirt underneath is black, damp with rain and sweat, and he pulls it over his head in one motion that puts every line of his torso on display.
The runes cover him from collar to waistband.
Intricate spirals and angular scripts in a language I can't read, all of them shimmering faintly gold in the dim bedroom like a constellation mapped across grey skin and dense, scarred muscle.
He's broader without the armor. The leather was compressing him.
I sit up and I start kissing his shoulders, working my way down.
He goes completely still. Stops breathing.
His hand hovers over my shoulder, not touching, trembling, and I feel his heartbeat against my lips, fast and heavy, and I trace a rune with my tongue and he makes a sound like something inside him breaks.
Then his hands are on me and the cardigan is gone.
He peels the wet fabric off my shoulders with a gentleness that borders on reverence, and my blouse follows, his fingers working the buttons with a care and precision that would be comical given his big hands against the tiny pearl closures if the concentration on his face wasn't so devastatingly sincere.
Each button is a small victory. Each inch of skin revealed earns a sharp intake of breath that I feel against my sternum.
"You're warm." He sounds bewildered. Like he expected something else.
Like the simple biological reality of my body temperature is a revelation.
His palm flattens against my bare stomach, covering the span from hip to hip, and his heat sinks through my skin and into my core. "How are you this warm?"
"Mammals, Jagger. We regulate our..."