Michael took a deep breath. “What happened with Simon?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I never told anyone what he did, and when I healed myself, all signs of the event disappeared – the broken legs, the sunburn, everything. We got in trouble for not finishing our chores before they returned, but Simon…. Well, he’d seen me jump. And then he saw me get up. And from that moment on, he was either in awe of me or terrified. Or both. I just know he left me alone. That was good enough for me.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was a few moments before either of them spoke again. Finally, Michael leaned back in the cushions of the couch and draped his arms over the back of it. “What happened with your other abilities? When did they surface?”
“Well,” Rhiannon sighed, “as you know, two years later, I ran away from the orphanage.” She felt a bit of shame go through her in having to admit the next bit. “What I didn’t tell you was the reason I ran away. I got really pissed off one morning and accidentally overturned every bed in the sleeping room telekinetically.”
Michael’s brows both shot up, and his smile became a grin. “Impressive.”
Rhiannon shrugged and tried not to smile too. “Luckily, I was alone when I did it. I was being punished again.” That was the part she hadn’t wanted to admit. She’d been a monster child. She smiled a self-deprecating smile and looked side-long at Michael. “I… got into trouble a lot as a kid. Anger issues.”
Now Michael laughed.
Rhiannon straightened and looked over at him. It was the most wonderful sound, deep and throaty. It was fucking sexy.
“You sound like me and my brother, Uriel. We fought constantly back in our realm. Never mean-natured, really, just easy to light up, the both of us. Finally, the Old Man decided to make him the Angel of Vengeance, and he put me in charge of the armies.” He laughed again, and Rhiannon’s lips parted. She felt herself focus on him like a starving woman focusing on cake. “That pretty much did it. I never had the time to fight with him anymore.” He sighed, still laughing. “Now he just fights with Gabe.”
Listening to him in that moment, watching the light dance in his eyes, and witnessing the way his muscles flexed under his shirt when he ran his hand over his smiling face, she could absolutely believe he was an angel.
His shirt….
“Oh my gosh!” she exclaimed suddenly, getting to her feet. “You’re getting blood all over your couch!” He hadn’t changed clothes since she’d healed him, and his shirt and jeans were relatively destroyed, covered in dirt and blood, and ripped in places.
Michael blinked, his brow furrowing. “And?”
Rhiannon grabbed his wrist and tried pulling him up. “It’s a nice couch! You’ll ruin it!” The feel of his skin under her fingers was doing weird things to her. She began to feel panicked.
He patted the empty space beside him with his other hand. “It’ll clean, Rhiannon. Sit back down.”
Rhiannon swallowed hard. Her name sounded very nice when he said it. I wonder what it would sound like during.... If we…. The panic was rising.
“Um, but it’ll set in, and… and….” She realized, as she fumbled for excuses, that she was doomed. He was too close. And she’d wanted him from the moment he’d knocked on her apartment door on police business.
Michael watched her for a moment from where he was seated, and Rhiannon knew that he could see every physical change that was taking her over. He smiled a not-so-friendly smile, and twisted his arm in her grip. As she was forced to let go, he expertly grasped her wrist with the same hand.
Rhiannon’s heart slammed against her ribcage.
A pulse passed between them before Michael used that grip on her wrist to pull her toward him. Rhiannon tipped off-balance and then fell none-too-gently in Michael’s lap.
“What the –”
“I told you to sit back down,” he said, sliding his arm around her waist to hold her in place.
Rhiannon teetered on some sort of ledge, too far gone to be able to think clearly any longer. “Now you’re ruining my clothes,” she squeaked. The air in her lungs had decided to stay there.
“That wouldn’t be a problem if you weren’t wearing them.”
His lips were inches from her own. The space between them held utterly still, charged into immobility by some sort of magic.
“What kind of angel are you supposed to be?” she asked. It was a rhetorical question. But when he smiled next, he was sporting fully-grown, very sharp fangs. And his eyes were beginning to glow.
The world exploded into double-time as Rhiannon cupped his perfect face in her hands and pressed her lips to his in a desperate, hungry, I surrender kiss. Michael turned with her into the couch, pressing her body against the back cushions as he took over and took charge, deepening the kiss with a fevered need that bruised her at once. She felt his fangs prick her lips, tasted blood, and heat tidal-waved over her, turning her universe into a kaleidoscope of feeling and color.
He forced apart those blood-stained lips and drank her in, and she moaned longingly beneath him.
*****
It was like fuel on a wicked fire; he could see her desire in the flush of her face and the glassiness of her entrancing green eyes. He could hear it in the way her heart raced every time he got near her, never mind every time they touched. He could even smell it.
She’d been torturing herself, denying her feelings, fleeing from him in little ways that brought out the hunter in him. You always chase what runs from you.
He knew why she did it. She was having a hard time believing. It wasn’t every day you learned you were an angel, much less an angel made for someone else. And she was scared, too. Of so many things.
The Culmination was probably high on her list.
Hell, it was high on his.
But when she jumped up from that couch and spun around, her red hair flying like silken flames, her impossible jade eyes flashing like lit-up cabochons, a part of his soul shoved itself over the point of no return and held there. Then she grabbed his wrist and he felt her pulse through her touch and heard it racing in his eardrums – and the rest of him hurtled willingly right over the edge.
To hell with the Culmination. They deserved this.
Now, in this unbelievable moment of bliss, with her body trapped beneath his, and her kiss opening up to him, Michael tasted what had been denied to him for countless eons, and he knew he would have sacrificed the universe to ten Culminations to be here now, just like this.
Or in his bedroom.
With that thought, Michael shifted, shoved his arms around her slim body, and lifted her from the couch. She gasped against him, but he swallowed the sound, deepening the kiss even as his fangs yearned to pierce something other than her lips. He spun and strode through the living room, kicking the coffee table out of his way so hard that it overturned and whatever was on it went flying.
Rhiannon’s right hand slid behind his neck to held on tight while the fingers of her other hand curled into his shirt against his chest. His boot slammed open the door to his bedroom. In another two strides he was at his bed, lowering her to the sheets beneath him.
She clung for a moment, unsure of what was beneath her, but he was in no mood for hesitation. As soon as her back touched the mattress, he rose up above her, breaking the kiss. Rhiannon made a small disappointed sound, and Michael’s entire body reacted. It was his final undoing.
Lust surged through him, hard and relentless. He wanted more. So much more.
He could have done away with their clothing with no more than a thought. The vampire in him gave him that much dark power. He could have left her defenseless and reeling from climax after climax without even touching her. He could have demolished her mind and made her his slave.
But where was the sport in any of that? Michael had never been the kind of archangel to take the easy route. A prize was so much more rewarding when you had earned it.
Rhiannon gazed up at him through half-closed lids; her lips were part
ed, and her breaths came short and fast. He could smell the lust in her blood, hormones that stormed her body like unchecked warriors. They did the same to him, like a siren call to a lost sailor.
He could also smell her fear.
Her gaze was focused on his mouth, watching his fangs. There was need in her eyes; her entire body swelled with it, ripe and wanton. She was afraid of him, but the fighter in her yearned for the same darkness that scared her. They were kindred spirits.
Michael moved with blurring speed, re-claiming her lips because he needed her, couldn’t stand to be without her a millisecond more. But as he did, he curled his fingers beneath the hem of her shirt and ripped it apart, shredding it from her body.
Rhiannon cried out into his mouth, but only from surprise. He gave her no recourse, going for the waistband of her jeans next. She made a small sound of protest against him, and he felt her palms press hard against his chest.
Michael smiled against her lips. His gums ached with a mounting, different kind of hunger. If she hoped to shove him away again, as she had earlier, she was in for a surprise. He’d let her get away that time. Now, he wasn’t going anywhere.
In some kind of desperation, Rhiannon turned her head, breaking the kiss. As she did, his fangs scraped against her bottom lip, nearly pricking their full plumpness again.
He growled, the monsters in him bucking and rising, clawing at the ground to gain control.
“Michael!” she rasped, and her eyes echoed her desperation. It wasn’t a real desperation, per se; more of a very great admonishment laced with unruly amounts of desire. “Don’t you dare!” she chided between breaths. “These jeans are Roberto Cavalli!”
He chuckled, and it was a very dark sound. He pinned his arms on either side of her head and moved over her like a massive predator over weakening prey. She was purposefully taunting him, he knew. She was fighting with him in a new kind of way, because that was all she knew how to do – fight.
She was playing with the worst kind of fire.
“Then take them off, Rhiannon,” he warned her, his deep, rumbling voice nearly unrecognizable in its lust. “Or I will do it for you.”
Her eyes widened. Her heavy breathing forced her breasts to rise and fall in eager, milky tantalization above the lace of her demi-bra.
“Now,” he added in all seriousness. She had very little time to save what garments yet remained on her precious, tempting body.
Rhiannon stared up at him for a few beats more, and something inordinately stubborn passed over her beautiful features. So slowly that it was a direct challenge to him all its own, she placed her hands upon her stomach and slid her fingers over her abdomen toward the buttons of her jeans.
The growling sound grew, like thunder low and ominous, and Michael was barely able to concentrate on it enough to realize it was coming from him.
Rhiannon ignored his impatience. Like a peasant taunting a king on a throne, she smiled. It was a smile as sultry and ultimately teasing as the movement of her fingers over her taut stomach, and Michael could scarcely believe that she would tempt the beast in such a fashion.
He watched, temporarily stunned by her brazenness, as she popped open the top button on her jeans and slid the zipper down one grueling rung at a time. It made a stark sound in the silence, like a countdown for a ticking bomb.
Michael felt his downfall like a rollercoaster dropping out from under him. He may have been the Warrior Archangel, but she was the Warrior Archess. After all this time, after all the battles he’d heralded, despite all the damnable supernatural monsters inside him in that moment, and regardless of the incredible strength surging through every pore in his body, he was going to lose this battle.
“You win,” he said aloud.
Then he ripped the jeans from her hands and tore them from her body, eliciting a mock cry of outrage from Rhiannon. He silenced it with a bruising kiss swathed in punishing Nightmare power that stole the breath from her lungs and plunged her head-long into an orgasm that rocked her body beneath his and took the fight right out of her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
She’d had her warning, and she’d ignored it. She’d chosen to fight instead, the way she always fought, but she’d forgotten who it was she was going up against. And now her body betrayed her, succumbing to the wicked magic that ran through the man above her thicker than the lifeblood in his veins. Her thoughts reeled, spinning inexorably into oblivion as her womanhood pulsed hard, and pleasure ricocheted off every nerve ending she possessed. She cried out, but the sound was distant, heard only through the fog of the bliss that clouded her mind.
Eyes shut tight against the orgasm, she felt him shred what was left of her clothing, ripping it away like so much tissue paper. She knew he could have simply willed it all away, but chose to tear it from her instead, bearing her before him by sheer force, the way a warrior would.
Righteous anger laced her desire, familiar adrenaline joining the pleasure and giving it a ragged edge. She gritted her teeth as moisture flooded her core, and heat engulfed her, stealing so much of her strength. She wanted to battle, she needed to remain strong, but there was no hope. She rode out the orgasm with a low moan of surrender and clutched at him blindly as he again lowered himself above her, all fire and ice and sizzling electricity.
Somewhere outside, the sky was answering her spirit once again, and thunder rode through the heavens like the portent of her final downfall.
His lips were at her ear, his breath upon the flesh of her neck as he laughed with infinite cruelty, letting the sound of his victory wrap around her, punishing her as surely as the chains of his incubus magic.
“You are absolutely stunning, Rhiannon,” he told her before he placed a tender but threatening kiss upon the taut skin beneath her ear lobe. “Naked and writhing in ecstasy in my bed. You should see yourself.” More laughter, a low chuckle that licked like flames inside her, edging her closer to a second, forbidden climax.
She fought for breath, forced it between her lips. “Go to hell,” she gasped, losing any further speech as one of his lips again brushed her neck, this time over the throbbing pulse of her vein.
Rhiannon forced her eyes open to meet his now red-burning gaze.
He rose on one elbow above her and pinned her with a look of searing, carnal craving. “Oh, I most likely will.”
She’d never seen anything so beautiful, and she’d never looked upon anything so terrifying. He might have been carved from alabaster, all ridges and grace, all untapped strength and skin that housed a vessel of sheer magic. But his eyes glowed like the blazes of hell, fangs threatened in a devil’s smile, and waves of pulsing pleasure radiated out from him to lick at her flesh like whips of sexual intoxication. The flames flickering at the centers of his vampire pupils were the fires of her annihilation.
“And I’m taking you with me.”
She hadn’t known that his hand was there, fisted at the back of her hair, until he yanked her head back to expose her throat. She gasped, ready to cry out, but that second orgasm she’d felt inching closer washed over her with infernal intensity, sucking the air from her lungs as his teeth drove home.
The duplicity of sensations hit her from both sides, a pain and pleasure of epic proportions, threatening the temporary sanity of her mind. There was wetness beneath her fingertips, but only vaguely did she realize it was his blood, running beneath the nails she’d dug into the strong muscles of his back.
Wave after wave of intensity rode through her as he pierced her without remorse, sinking his teeth deep and hard, claiming her exactly as she’d been so afraid – and so hoping – he would.
But it hurt…. And it felt so good. He drew hard against her, pulling her precious life blood from her veins and into his with unbridled selfishness. The sensation was a constant rise and fall of surrendering passion, holding her in some sort of pleasure stasis, trapped in the velvet and satin of vampire love.
But a new need was blossoming within her, one that rode like an earthq
uake beneath the incubus pleasure he swathed her with. It was deeper, more demanding, more real. There was an emptiness within her that ached and bloomed and opened, hot and slick and maddeningly real.
That hurt too.
Rhiannon’s eyes flew open once more, and she inhaled sharply, the world slamming into her like the kiss of a whip when she felt Michael’s fingers brush through the strawberry blond curls between her legs to slide to the heart of this new, throbbing need.
She was so slick, so sensitive, his slightest touch caused her to buck beneath him, and he chuckled against her skin as he drank harder, punishing her movement with another wave of fang-induced pleasure. He touched her again, gliding over the swollen flesh of her lips to press slowly, firmly, between them.
Rhiannon cried out, and the rumble of thunder that had courted them earlier became louder, closer, riding over the apartment complex like a massive beast.
Every orgasm he’d given her had been a part of his plan. She realized his cruelty as his fingers continued to press inward, sliding past her swollen defenses with expert, tender brutality. He’d only fueled her, prepared her, sensitized her to his touch. He’d flushed her body with pulsing desire and swelled it pink with every climax he’d sent crashing over her – so that he could do this now. So that he could torture her with his final touch, this winning and wicked subjugation of her quivering, aching body.
You bastard, she thought. Monster! Angel….