““But I wasn’t freezing. I burned. Everywhere his hands had touched me, the skin was seared as surely as if I had been branded there. He lifted a hand to my cheek, and I felt the rough calluses there, left behind by the countless hours his fingers had spent wrapped around the hilt of a sword. But when he bent his head beside mine, his breath teasing my neck just below my ear, and he murmured my name . . . I froze. I couldn’t see Cai’s face. Instead, all I could hear in my mind was another whispering voice. Mael’s.””
