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“Silar!” I squawked indignantly, drawing my knees up closer to my chest and glaring at him, fully aware of how he hadn’t done anything wrong here. This was the fucking kitchen. I hadn’t warned him I’d be using it. But I couldn’t help the shivery creep of colour up my neck and into my cheeks.
“I heard you scream.”
“I… I didn’t scream!” I retorted, snaking one arm out of the tub to grab at my pyjama top. “I gave a very dignified, lady-like yelp!”
“Why? What happened?” He came further into the room with the force of a storm, all that quiet energy crackling and threatening to explode, the lightning-like veins of his eyes completely swallowed by the blinding white glow.
“Because the water is cold, that’s why! I didn’t let it heat up enough!”
“The water?” He only now seemed to register what I was doing in the tub. He jolted, then went stone-still as he registered my nakedness.
Not naked for long, though. I managed to get my arms into the sleeves of the pyjama top, snapped its sides closed over my front, then shakily stood, water pouring off me. The silky top was fairly long. It covered my ass and crotch, at least. But my weird method of dressing had soaked a lot of the fabric, and as I lurched out of the tub and stepped onto the floor, I was fully aware of how hard my nipples were, poking through the now-transparent garment.
Silar was obviously aware, too, his heated white gaze glued to my tits.
And, as if his hands couldn’t help but follow his eyes, he made a choked sound low in his throat, closed the space between us, and pressed his rough, warm palms against my breasts.
16
SILAR
Perhaps in my panic I was too forceful, because Cherry gasped and stumbled backwards at the pressure I applied. Her back bumped the wall, and I closed her in, massaging the soft mounds of her chest, half-blind with terror. I’d read about this in the book. Frost… Frost tooth? Frost claw? Frost something. When the tip of a human extremity gets so cold that it becomes frozen and hard and the tissue dies.
This part of Cherry had not been hard before this morning. I would have noticed. She’d been submerged up to her chest in that cold water and now the ends of her udders were about to fall off and it was all my fault.
Even what I was doing now – trying to warm her flesh and restore healthy blood flow – was not working. If anything, these frost-toothed spots were only getting harder!
You fool. There is a fire right beside you!
Ignoring Cherry’s screech of surprise, I swiftly spun her so that her back was to my chest, her front to the fire. I ripped the cold, damp fabric away from her skin and gripped her soft mounds, aiming the hard points towards the warmth of the fire.
While Cherry had been momentarily still when I’d first touched her – perhaps going into some sort of paralytic shock from the pain – she seemed to have regained full use of all her strength and faculties. She swatted fiercely at my hands.
“What are you doing?!” she cried. She tried to look back at me but only succeeded in slapping me in the face with the long, wet serpent of her hair.
“I am trying to get you warm,” I told her through gritted fangs. “If we can restore heat and blood flow quickly enough, the frost tooth should not cause any permanent damage.”
She gave me another slap on my forearm, then went motionless.
“Frost… Hold on. Do you mean frostbite?”
Frostbite. That sounded right.
“Yes,” I growled, squeezing her softness harder, trying to get the tips nearer to the heat. She gave a throaty sort of gasp at that, her back arching oddly against my front. I tried to gentle my touch, terrified I’d hurt her. “If we don’t act quickly,” I explained, thinking perhaps she did not know very much about this frostbite phenomenon, “then the tips of your udders will die and fall off.”
Cherry paused, and then, in a shockingly careless denial of the severity of the situation, she actually laughed.
“There is so much wrong with what you just said I don’t even know where to start,” she groaned between wheezing breaths. “Do you seriously think I have frostbite of the nips just because I was being all whiny about sitting in a bucket of cold water for, like, thirty seconds? And did you just call them udders?”
“You… You do not have frost tooth?”
“I do not have frostbite,” she corrected. “Though I may end up with third degree burns to the titties the way you seem to be intent on roasting me over this fire.”
Empire, no.
I snatched her away from the oven.
“Get back in the water,” I hissed. A rather nonsensical thing to say, because I was already lifting the tub, ready to drench her in the cold water. There was no way she could get back in it now.
