Not soft. Not wondering. It was the stillness of a woman whose teeth had just encountered a thing that her teeth were not designed to process — not flesh, not the yielding warmth of biology, but something closer to hitting stone. The resistance was total. Her jaw had closed, her teeth pressed against him with full force, and nothing had moved.
The copper taste of her own effort met her tongue instead.
She looked up.
He was looking down at her.
Not in pain. Not braced. Looking at her with an expression that had, somewhere in the last several seconds, become something she did not have an immediate word for — warmth, with an edge of something sharper. Amusement, but not the dismissive kind. The kind that comes from genuine surprise.
His free hand came up and settled in her hair.
"What a cute woman," he said.
She heard the fondness in it and felt her face go hot in the infuriating way that faces go hot when they receive warmth they haven't requested and cannot immediately reject.
