031 - His Chill

031 - His Chill
|||YASMIN|||

I didn't breathe. 
I couldn't. 

The image of him was seared into the back of my eyes. The candlelight moving across all that ink and scarred skin, he stood with the confidence of a man completely unbothered by being looked at. I'd seen men without their shirts before. I'd been married. It shouldn't have rattled me the way it did.

And yet.

A sliver of logic broke through the warm, noisy mass of heat and curiosity crowding my chest and my mind. I spun on my heel, my hand already reaching for the door.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I should have knocked, I wasn't thinking, I'll just—"

Cold fingers closed around my wrist.

Not grabbing. Just closing. Curling gently around the thin skin where my pulse hammered embarrassingly fast, and somehow that soft grip seared through me more thoroughly than the sight of him had.

I stilled.

"You came here for something." I could hear the amusement threading through his voice like a current beneath still water. "So get it. And it's your room, Yasmin. You don't have to apologize for coming into your own room."

Mortification crawled up my neck and set fire to my ears.
My cheeks burned but I managed to bite back a sound that lodged at the back of my throat. 

I turned back around because refusing to would have been worse. His hand dropped from my wrist the moment I moved, but I could still feel the ghost of his fingers against my pulse point as I walked through the room. 

The necklace was on the small table by the bed where I'd left it and I kept my gaze carefully averted, focused on the silver chain, on the snow falling in grey curtains beyond the glass. Anywhere that wasn't him.

I picked up the necklace.

My fingers immediately betrayed me.

The clasp was simple, a thing I'd done a thousand times without thinking, but my hands had gone clammy and the tiny mechanism slipped through my fingers twice before I'd even gotten it near my throat. I tried again. Failed again. My reflection in the window glass showed a woman fumbling with jewelry like she'd never held it before in her life.

Wonderful.
Just great. 

I felt the chill of him, my entire frame attuned to his increasing proximity, the coldness felt like a burn as he closed the distance between us. My eyes lifted and I saw him, closer, right behind me in the reflection. 

Our eyes met in the reflection. Just briefly. Just long enough to make my breath catch. 

Then he reached around me and took the clasp from my fumbling fingers without a word.

His hands were steady where mine had not been. I watched in the mirror as he worked the tiny mechanism with careful, unhurried movements, those scarred calloused hands handling the delicate silver chain with a patience that made my chest ache strangely. The necklace settled against my collarbone.

Then his fingers brushed the back of my neck.

Just barely. Just the faint cool whisper of his fingertips against the small hairs there as he secured the clasp, and every nerve ending in my body fired at once. My breath stuttered to a halt when I'd only started breathing again. The small hairs along my skin rose in a wave.

He leaned down.

His lips touched the back of my neck, so soft it was almost imperceptible, almost something I could have convinced myself I'd imagined if I hadn't seen it in the mirror with my own eyes. Seen his head dip. Seen the deliberate press of his mouth against my skin.

The sensation jolted through me like lightning.

"Beautiful," he murmured, his lips still close enough that I felt the word more than heard it, felt it ghost across the sensitive skin beneath my ear.

I pulled away.

The movement was abrupt. My body made the decision before my mind caught up, stepping forward and out of his orbit on pure instinct. I turned to face him because turning my back felt dangerous in ways I couldn't articulate.

"I'll leave you to finish dressing."

My voice came out steadier than I felt. I was almost proud of it.

But then I made the mistake of looking at him.

My eyes moved across him without my permission, drinking in the mass of him the way parched ground drinks rain. The tattoos. The scars. The broad line of his shoulders and the way he stood like the room was built around him, effortless and entirely unaware of it.

"Do they hurt?" The question slipped out before I could stop it. "When you get them done?"

Something shifted in his expression. The amusement softened into a look that made my heart pound. He looked...softer.

"Like hell." A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "But that's part of the point. Replacing one kind of pain with another. Choosing the marks on your skin instead of just accepting what war gives you."

I'd drifted closer without realizing it. Close enough now to see the details properly. The way a raven's wing curved with deliberate care around a particularly brutal scar on his ribs, the edges of the ink following the raised skin like a frame. Wolves ran across his shoulders, their bodies stretched mid-leap, chasing something just beyond the curve of his collarbone. Or running from it. I couldn't decide which.

"They're beautiful," I said quietly.

"They're a lie." His voice had gone rough. "Making something ugly look like it was meant to be there all along."

I looked up from the ink and found his eyes already on my face, watching me with an expression I didn't know how to read. Not the easy amusement he usually wore like armor. Something beneath that. Something more exposed.

It shouldn't have scared me. But it did. 

The silence stretched between us, full of things neither of us were saying. His hand lifted and I tracked the movement with my peripheral vision, felt my breath catch in anticipation. His fingers rose toward my face and for one suspended moment I thought—

He reached past me.

His formal jacket hung on the hook just over my left shoulder. His fingers closed around the collar of it, and the brush of his arm past mine was feather-light and entirely devastating.

"We're going to be late," he said.

His voice was perfectly even. Like none of the last five minutes had happened at all.

I stepped back and nodded once. "Right."

I made it to the sitting room and stood there for a moment, pressing the backs of my cool fingers to my hot cheeks.

The back of my neck still burned where his mouth had been.

Beautiful, he'd said. Just that. One word breathed against my skin like it required no elaboration, and somehow that was so much more undoing than anything more elaborate would have been.

I pressed my fingers harder against my cheeks and ordered myself very firmly to stop thinking about it.

I was still ordering myself when he emerged from the bedroom, jacket on, golden hair brushed back, looking entirely composed and infuriatingly attractive.

He glanced at me. "Ready?"

"Yes," I said.

And I followed him out into the hallway, my spine straight and my face composed and the back of my neck burning all the way down the corridor.