A Witch's Beauty (Daughters of Arianne 2)

He couldn't help but notice, however, the way the change made the difference between the two halves of Mina's face less marked to him, as if she'd opened something inside herself, something far more fascinating than what was on the outside.

Macabre. Freakish. Abrasive. Those were just some of the distasteful words he'd heard other angels use to describe her. But, with one orange, he'd found a fissure through which he was getting a rare glimpse of something else.

So for the next five minutes, he remained still and silent as she removed the peel, sniffed each piece. When she had it all removed, she began to lift the whole sphere toward her mouth.

"Hold on... here." David reached forward. She was reluctant to relinquish it, as if she thought he might take it away, so instead of doing that, he put his hands over hers, guided her thumbs into the center and helped her split it open, trying not to think about how much that succulent channel was like the moist petals of a woman's sex.

Goddess, he wasn't a teenager. He'd had women before. He didn't know why being around her made him think about sex so much.

He withdrew his touch, albeit reluctantly. As she began to break off the individual slices, she laid them out in a precise fan pattern. On one piece, the outer skin had torn, and she touched the glistening teardrops layered beneath. Picking it up, she sniffed and gave him a glance.

"There's no hope of getting you to share that, is there?" he teased.

She put it down again. "I'll eat it later."

"You said you were hungry. Here." Lifting a slice, he took a bite to show her how to eat it, and then, rather than handing it back, he did what he wanted. He extended it toward her mouth.

Mina stared at him. David tried to keep his expression casual, even as he fiercely willed her to part her lips and let him place it on her tongue, demonstrate the potential for trust, acknowledge the inexplicable connection he'd felt since he'd met her. If she refused, he would release the slice, but for now he waited, made the offer.

She grazed his fingers with her mouth, such that she took a quick, jerky bite and managed to spray them both.

"Yeah, they do that." Unruffled, David extended another slice. "No point in cleaning up until you're done."

THERE were fruits in the ocean that smelled of the sea, tasted of its salt. But this was of the earth, exploding with sunlight, as if the sphere were plucked straight from the sky. And the taste. Oh, gods. The piece in her mouth was something she wanted to savor, so that she spent quite a while chewing that small bite, now that she'd gotten past her wariness at its unfamiliarity, his motives. She wasn't sure what the shiny blue squares were, but if they were anything like this, it was no wonder Anna spoke so well of the wide variety of things to eat in the human world. She'd been intensely fascinated by such stories, but, as she'd said, she'd never asked Anna to bring her anything. David had done it, without being asked.

The warmth of the fruit reached into the cold in her bones that hadn't left her since she was nine years old. She'd learned physical discomfort was an ally against her worst enemy, the dark urges she'd fought down so often. Now they couldn't get an upper hand except in her dreams. Or when she was unbalanced, out of her element, as she was with David.

But tasting his fruit, feeling his proximity, stimulated urges that had a different feeling from those that connected to her nightmares and the whisper of the Dark Ones. However, anything that suggested a loss of control wasn't to be trusted. Even so, she couldn't stop herself from tasting the tips of his fingers when she took the slice from them. As he stretched out on a hip and elbow beside her on the floor, the short kilt he wore casually inched up his thigh, revealing the inner line of muscle. The smooth ridges across his stomach tightened.

The urge to spray all of that with juice and lick it off had to be a dark compulsion. Didn't it?

When she finished chewing, he had the next slice in his hand. Instead of reaching for it, she shifted her glance to his face, then away. Such a brief moment that it might have escaped notice, but it didn't. The expression that flared in his eyes was enough to give her the courage-or foolishness-to wait and see what he would do.

He broke that second slice in half by biting it. Fed her those two pieces his lips had touched, leading with the side he'd bitten. It made her own lips vibrate more than could be explained by the tartness of the fruit.

He was focused on her face, making her realize the cowl of her cloak had fallen back. She rarely exposed her full face to another, but she realized he wasn't looking at it. He didn't latch on to the scarred half with macabre fascination, or obsess over the Venus side, as she spitefully called it. He was looking at her.

This was dangerous. He was creating confusion in her, changing things so she couldn't anticipate her reaction. And yet, when he dipped a fingertip to her chin to catch a stream of juice and take it back up to her lips, she parted them enough to let him spread the collected juice on her bottom lip. Then she pressed them together, trying not to look at the hand too obviously, too greedily, as he took it away. No, greed wasn't the word. Need was.

It seemed that after each slice, her body was drawing tighter and tighter, like a boat anchored in a rising gale, the pressure building to the point the rope would snap.

He'd stopped, his fingers touching her cheek, a light stroke, his eyes the warm brown that could reach inside her and melt things that were far too cold, things that needed to stay cold.

The cat collapsed into a pile of bone, clattering to the metal floor of the wrecked freighter in a racket amplified by her own fear. She started up, backing away. Concentration error. She certainly couldn't afford any of those. That was it. He was wrecking her concentration.

"I'm... you need to go somewhere else now. I need to finish this potion."

He rose, and her pulse leaped high in her throat at the loose, graceful way he moved, with a still intent as focused as the charging of her potion.

"Why are you afraid of me touching you?"

"I'm not. It doesn't mean anything. I can't... You need... Stop there. I'm not..."

She stopped, unable to find any coherent words. Her throat was seizing up. She coughed, mistakenly trying to breathe out of gills that weren't there. The horses began collapsing one by one, then in increasing groups, like puppets with severed strings, toppling back into piles of bone. The deafening clatter resounded within her head and had her spinning, seeking an escape.

When he caught her arm, before she could react in defense or violence, he pulled her close and put his hands over her ears. He also wrapped his wings around her, creating a comforting buffer with his solid body. Thankfully he was still human enough that the proximity of his wings wasn't too much. It didn't hurt. But one day soon, when he matured and was no longer a fledgling, she wouldn't be able to bear his touch, its disruption, its lack of balance. Good and evil had to be equally balanced. It was important, the first priority.

When she sank down, overcome with the weight of despair, he followed her. As he went to one knee, she somehow found herself on her back, gazing up at him, holding on to his upper arms with clenched hands. The night sky she'd formed for herself on the ceiling was dissipating, going with the same spell as the horses. Glancing up, he noticed it for the first time, the mist of the clouds and the sparkle of the stars she'd created. The moon drifted away like an errant balloon, getting smaller and smaller until it popped against the side of the freighter wall and left only ugly gray metal, a crisscrossing of beams.

"How did you know about the noise?" she managed.

"You had the horses running, but without touching the floor. You prefer the deeper, quieter places of the ocean. The louder it got, the more panicked you looked. I put it together."

Still keeping one hand on her, he reached into the waterproof sack from which he'd drawn the orange and came out with a square of paper cloth. "Those oranges were juicy," he said calmly, as if nothing were amiss. "Good thing I nabbed these napkins, too."

"You stole these things?"

"Somewhat.

" He looked charmingly abashed. "It was just a small handful from a wedding reception. I didn't think they'd mind."

Wetting the napkin with his own mouth, he wiped it along her lips, removing some of the stickiness. However, the way his eyes followed his motion made her lips part, a noise coming from her throat.

"Would you like me to use my mouth to remove the juice?" he asked, low. "Tell me yes, Mina."

"No." She shook her head. "I don't want you to do that."