"I think you're afraid to kiss me," he said. His warm brown eyes were serious, discomfiting her. Easing himself back to a reclining position beside her, he turned on his hip, a slow shift. As she watched him come closer, her fingers tightened on her stomach. He propped himself up on an elbow, leaned over her, his chestnut and brown hair falling over his shoulder so it was so... touchable. She needed to move. Now.
"You think I'd fall for a childish ploy like that?" she rasped.
"No playing, Mina." He was getting closer.
"Shouldn't you be afraid to kiss me?" She got the words out of a throat gone thick, as if she'd put a paralysis spell on her own voice.
He nodded. "I'm afraid you won't like it."
"I won't."
He kept coming, anyway, as her pulse leaped hard and high, lodging itself where her swallowing reflex was. It didn't matter. Her mouth had gone dry.
When his lips first brushed hers, she couldn't help it. She jerked. Her hands closed again, but nothing could stop the shudders from sweeping out from that movement as if it had been a rock thrown with force into a tide pool. Her heart felt like that thrown stone, sailing through the air, a quick, astonishing drop, the explosion of reaction around it.
And all he'd done was let that first bare touch happen. He held still, his mouth light upon hers, his gaze studying her face. Then he slid his hand into her hair, just beneath her ear, a sweep along her neck, a caress of the scarred boundary of her jaw. When his hand coursed over the roughness, he didn't act as if he was feeling ruined flesh. Nor did she feel it, for the nerve endings were electrified beneath, her body wanting to move, gravitate up toward that touch. She couldn't possibly, but if she moved her chin, maybe he wouldn't notice how it brought their lips that much closer together, increased the pressure.
"Touch me, Mina," he murmured. "Please."
"I don't know how."
His eyes didn't shift from hers as he found one of her hands, brought it up to his chest, let her fingers curl of their own volition into his skin.
"Learn."
Four
HIS words not only brought a rush of response, but the return of water to the hold. She was at least able to choke it down to a simple rematerialization, rather than a tidal wave rush from the outside. The piles of bones floated off the metal floor, separating to drift in their own patterns now.
Had she ever been so overwhelmed? Panic drowned in sheer need for something she hadn't even realized she wanted so much. The practical side of her mind, which usually dominated most of her thinking, pointed out that she was sexually mature yet inexperienced. Since she'd never been seduced, let alone by an angel, this could of course result in an aroused response. But not the waking of a hunger so intense she could only be swept along by it when he issued that one-word command.
Flattening her palm on his chest, she felt the heat of him even through the water. Most angels didn't have body hair, and so what she found was hard, sleek muscle that flowed under her touch like a powerful animal. She supposed that was what he was, which quickened her blood even further. He slid his other arm beneath her to lift her into the demand of his body. No uncertainty, no hesitating. He was reading her desires, responding to them as if she were speaking them aloud. When his fingers stroked the small of her back, caressing the top of a buttock, she strained into him. Limbs loosened to his touch, even as need made her throat tight, leaving her unable to speak a word when he reclaimed her lips. And claim was the right word, for hers parted in mindless surrender.
His tongue found hers, tasted, tangled. Taking his time, he left nothing unexplored, even tracing the scar furrows on the roof of her mouth and the moist insides of her cheeks. Rather than causing him to withdraw, those discoveries just made him slow his pace, stroke her even more languorously with his clever tongue.
His lips were so firm that she put her hand up to wondrously feel the way they fit over hers. The thin film of wet heat just inside made her fingers slip, tease the corner of his mouth. Turning his head, he captured one digit and drew it in deep. Then he was holding her wrist, just below her pulse so he could bite her palm, jolting her body like the electric shock of an eel, but far more welcome.
With the water's return, she'd automatically shifted back to her mermaid form and had one tentacle curved over his back now, holding them bound together, even as they drifted like the bones. A sensual, aimless floating. His wings spread above like the shadows of clouds. She cried out when the hard length of him pressed between the tentacles, where her sex rested, just like a human, another thing the mermaids found so odd and different about her. But she found her differences wondrous now, for she used the hypersensitive feelers on the ends of the tentacles to explore every inch of his skin. Managing to wrap them around him, she still had enough left over to rest the tip in the feathers of one wing, soft as the mother's kiss she'd never had.
Even when she tightened her hold in her passion, he showed no fear. In fact, he even dropped his hand from her face to slide his palm along the black serpentine length of one, following it over his hip, learning the way of her, her unique anatomy. The smooth, firm texture of a sea creature in her element. When he explored beneath, finding the feelers, their joining point with her flesh, he detonated sensitive nerve centers so that she gasped and constricted farther around him.
"Easy, baby," he said quietly, against her mouth, soothing. "You can't harm me, but I don't want you too wound up."
Baby. An endearment, one that human males used, according to her books, reminding her that he was probably as much mortal in his mind as he was angel. She didn't mind that. It soothed, comforted even. Though she couldn't believe her nerves quivered at him calling her baby, it made her believe he wanted to give her a name that belonged to this type of intimacy only, so it couldn't be mistaken for anything less.
Taking her other tentacle up the inside of his ankle, she felt the shape of his foot, the fine line of calf, the backs of his knees, the muscled thighs, and then, as he shifted, the curve of tight, perfect buttocks. The vulnerable small of the back, where so many organs could be crushed, punctured... Swallowing, she began to turn her face away, her fingers clutching at his shoulders in ironic contrast, sending them spinning in an uneven circle and causing the nearest sets of floating bones to imitate the chaotic spiral. She couldn't do this. She couldn't control her reaction, stop the images from pouring in, and she didn't want them to ruin it.
"No, don't leave me yet. We'll stop in just a second. Let me just have this one... sweet... taste." His lips passed under her ear, finding the tiny dolphin bauble she hung from the lobe of her unscarred ear, usually well hidden by her hair. He teased it, then pressed his mouth against the side of her throat, sending things inside of her ricocheting. His other hand linked with her fingers, stretching out her arm and pressing it down, letting her feel his weight resting half across her, as he took them in a stomach-swirling descent to the bottom of the ship. That angel ability to adjust his gravity as he desired, even in the water, so that he was protective and dangerous, in all the right ways.
She could see their blurred, distorted reflection in the metal side of the ship as she turned her head. A strange, fantastical creature of white wings and sinuous black legs, pale flesh, black and brown hair, all of it emitting a soft glow because of his wings. It looked real, perfect, all twined together like that. The reality of it twisted inside her, painful and sharp. It was a lie.
He lifted his head then, reluctantly, his mouth moist from hers. "All right?" he asked.
"Why are yo
u stopping?" she demanded. "Seducing me is okay, but fucking's not? Jonah's rules?"
He traced her lips. His sudden silence made her words feel like garbage flung from the back of a careless human's boat. When his gaze lifted, met hers, the annoyance was all too obvious in the hard flint of his eyes.
She'd faced all manner of anger in her life. Most of it she'd never allowed this close when she could help it, because it was likely to take a physical form. But she didn't feel that from David. In fact, she suspected if his temper toward her did take a physical form, she might welcome the way he chose to express it. Some part of her wanted to know how deeply rage could plumb inside him, if his usual quiet tranquility hid a fury that might consume him, as hers often did her.
"Let me go," she whispered, despite her betraying thoughts. Or probably because of them.
"I won't let that viper tongue of yours push me away, Mina. But be careful. I may just say to hell with being a gentleman." He brought his face close to hers until she couldn't pull away any farther. "Fucking you would be easy. Easy as sliding into a hot spring."
Mina gasped, crying out as he unerringly found her with two fingers, sinking into wetness as her tentacles contracted on him farther, her hands clutching as fierce satisfaction and frustration warred in his face.
"But what I want is your trust. I'll have that first, so what we do after won't be easy." His eyes flickered with ominous intent. "And it will be far more than fucking."
"Fine, I trust you now," she managed. "Can we get on with whatever you want to call it?"
Surprise disrupted his irritated look. His startled snort was close to a chuckle. The sound of it eased her heart, even as it did nothing for the pounding demand of what was happening inside her. When he withdrew his fingers, it made her squeeze as if he were still there, particularly as he tasted his fingers.