Snow Maiden - another "kissing book" (excerpt)

Here is another rough excerpt from Snow Maiden, my latest "kissing book" :)

His eyes wandered over her face, her hair, tiny snowflakes caught on his long black lashes and glimmered as they melted on his coat. He caught a white gold lock that blew over her shoulder in the wind. In her rush, she hadn’t tied it back and it brushed against her waistline. Vasilli’s fingers weighed and stroked the piece he held like it was fine silk.
He smiled, shook his head.
“What do you think the truth is? You don’t see anyone here that looks like you do you?”
Nika’s breath puffed in the cold as she exhaled.
“No fair haired child shall be born in the Northern Kingdom,” she recited, “the curse of the sorceress.”
“It’s beautiful,” Vasilli said as though he hadn’t heard her. “I’d never seen anything like it. When your scarf caught on the branches as you ran away from us, I saw it and I had to find the girl with the stolen bread.”
Nika frowned at him which earned her another teasing smile.
“So you do believe them then?” She asked him. “It’s just that when your man mentioned the…whatever it was that did this terrible thing, you acted like it couldn’t be real.”
“I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t half of the time, little snow maid,” he said, still fingering her hair, looking at it like it might hold some magic answers. All Nika could tell for certain, was that she liked watching his hand slip through it. His eyes lifted and he let the lock fall as he looked behind them, passed the farmer’s cottage to the mountain. “What I do know, is that this is going to be a hard winter for my people. We have many enemies for reasons as old as the tales you’ve heard, so old that I fear none of us even know why we are fighting anymore. It’s getting harder for us to leave the North to hunt, especially, when we have to avoid a straight path and go around the forest where I found you.”
Nika’s eyes lit up and she started to speak of all that had gone on there but he pressed his finger to her lips and sighed.
“Now, that place, I know is enchanted and, after what I’ve seen there, I’m willing to believe that maybe the Winter Witch really is the cause of all our troubles. If there is a new menace in our kingdom,” Vasilli’s eyes flicked back to the foot of the mountain again, “ah, well, these are the problems of a king.”
 He started to turn away. Nika wanted to help him in some way, this king who just might be as alone in this world as she was, before she could stop the impulse, she reached for him. Her hand landed on his chest and he turned back. She reached up then and traced either side of his face with her hands.
Question and surprise took up his features in a way she found endearing. Then his lips parted and a smile began but, before it could mature into something common like a word or a laugh, she pushed up on her toes and kissed him. A soft grunt escaped Vasilli’s chest when she launched herself into him but it changed into a low growl and his arms came around her, crushing her to him.
She may have taken his lips but he immediately took over the kiss, opening her mouth with the pressure of his thumb on her chin and delving in with his tongue. He tasted her with a force born of unsatisfied need. She’d let down the damn with her impulsive move and now there was no holding back.
His big hand threaded fully into her hair, while the other pulled her against him until she could feel every hard line of him. The snow still fell light all around them as if the skies knew better than to interrupt the lovers with anything heavier. It landed on their faces and hair melting quickly on their heated skin but neither one seemed to notice. In that moment, Nika felt like one of them, a delicate ice spiral melting above a flame.
Vasilli explored every inch of her mouth, delving in and pulling her to him at the same time. Every cold place inside her, born of fear and her lonely girlhood, began to thaw. The heat took on a life of its own inside of her, growing expanding and touching every part of her until she really thought she might turn to steam and drift away like a puff of breath in the winter air.
Finally, they pulled apart, barely. Vasilli’s forehead rested on her own and they both gasped for the same air. Nika felt light enough to float away but his arms anchored her, still wrapped around her. Her eyelashes were wet and spiky from the snow when she looked up from underneath them at him and Vasilli stared at her. Both blue, she wondered how it was that their eyes could be so different – hers as dark as a lake and his as light as sky.
Finally, he placed a sound kiss on her forehead then held her at arms’ length. Even that small space between them let in the cold. With his arms holding her to him, it had been impossible to feel but now she shivered.  Vasilli’s brow wrinkled and he looked up, a thicker snowflake landing in his eye. The skies would wait no longer. Nika laughed as he blinked at it then yelped when he dove down and scooped her up into his arms.
“You are, once again, out without a coat on, my lady,” he chided as he carried her and placed her up on Bellani’s back.