A Witch's Beauty (Daughters of Arianne 2)

"So that when it gets to be too much, it will be easier for you to join them?"

"So that when the angels or the merpeople or whoever decides my existence will no longer be tolerated, I have another option." She lifted her chin. "It's been here, every day of

my life. And every day I deny it. Even though it promises me a place where I'll be accepted. That's a lie," she murmured, before he could say it. "But it's a manageable option. And it's a nice lie-probably one of the nicest I've ever been told."

She studied him with that odd look she had, as if staring at things far beyond him. "When I was an infant, my mother had to keep me near it. Though it's sealed so they can't come through, I had to have the energy, or I would start screaming, try to hurt myself. It balanced the Dark One part of me until I got older and was able to do it myself. So, in essence"-she gestured-"you're sitting in my nursery. My mother made the first set of sea glass chimes for me, that blue and brown one. I made the others, hanging them in her chamber until she died of the illness the Dark Ones gave her, some type of wasting disease that eventually claimed her when I was seven."

"It doesn't mean you belong there, Mina."

She considered him, lingering on his wings. "What if you had opened your eyes, felt that sense of utter rightness about being an angel, but then you told yourself that wasn't what was written in the stars, or even if it was, you were going to defy it? Every day, even as it called to you until you thought you'd go mad."

"It's different."

"Is it? Then why can't I bear the touch of anything too good, David?" Crossing her arms, she floated away from the rock so they were almost eye to eye. "Why can't I bear anything but darkness and shadows? Why was I nursed on a doorway to chaos and evil I refuse to close? Why shouldn't I step through that doorway? What's stopping me? Why can't I just accept that I'm evil, the way you accept you're an angel, and let the world keep turning the way it's meant to turn?"

"Because I won't let you." David closed the gap between them now. She didn't stop him this time, just kept her eyes fastened on his as he pushed her cowl off her skull, revealing both sides of her, the frame of silk hair for it all. As he did it, he managed to move them farther away from the defile, easing some of the tension in his chest. He'd sensed the rising storm in her eyes, her voice, so he was surprised she didn't resist, but the energy running over her skin was not the energy of the Dark Ones. It was the witch. He could tell the difference and felt a fierce triumph in the knowledge. When his fingers closed on her, she swallowed, but didn't break his gaze.

"I forbid it," he said, low. "It is different, Mina. I've had the blood of Dark Ones on my blade, seen what's in their eyes, what drives them. Pure madness and evil. Whether some insane god or goddess created them, cruelly creating a race with no soul, no hope, no ability to laugh or love, it doesn't matter. You don't belong with them."

"I don't love anyone. I don't laugh. I don't hope for anything, and you're the only one who imagines I might have a soul." She lifted her hands, closed them over his wrists. "And no one forbids me to do anything."

"Want to bet? We've gone through this once. Don't keep testing me. You're a good fighter. But I'm faster, stronger, and I can stop you."

He should have anticipated it, but he'd been anticipating her retort with words, not action. Her ability to use magic without any verbal or energy warning was phenomenal, for the propulsion spell knocked him back and put her an unexpected length ahead of him before he spun to go after her.

He refused to think of what would happen if she reached that debilitating chamber. He didn't have to. He'd follow her through the portal itself, damn it all, where he was sure he'd die in some Dark One world. With her standing over him, that dispassionate look on her face that could tear his heart to shreds even faster than the crushing weight of all that evil.

Thanks to angels' faster-than-light speed, he reached the tunnel entrance first, hitting the outside with his shoulder hard enough to crack rock. As he snagged her cloak, she turned on him with a snarl and a swing of the pipe he recognized too well from their first encounter. In addition to the Inert spell he was too proud to execute, he needed to keep her naked all the time. She apparently carried the whole world under that hideous garment.

Knocking the pipe from her hand with a sweep of his arm, he followed up with a yank that twisted her around. Ducking under him, she forced him to release her or break her arm. When he got a new grip on her, he followed her in the spin, jamming both of them up against the sharp rock beside the tunnel entrance. She cried out, but managed to latch on to an outcropping of rock on either side of the opening as if she could shove herself into the corridor by the strength of her upper body alone.

Enough of this. Locking an arm around her waist, David yanked her back against him, both his wings stretched out to either side to hold them in stasis. For all she was skin and bones, she had a round, tight little backside that slammed into his groin and turned his thoughts decidedly elsewhere as she struggled.

Though angels were pretty carnal, they had unflappable concentration during a fight, which told him his reaction was part of the fight, the weapon he needed to win it.

No one forbids me to do anything.

If he was going to influence her, she expected him to prove he could do it. But he was going to do it with something other than violence, something that proved he could overpower her without pain and fear.

He activated the Inert spell at last, so when she tried to break his grip with magic, it bounced off him harmlessly. Then she went for a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, but she couldn't turn around. Wrapping her tentacles around his legs, she attempted to yank him away from her, but he'd fixed himself to this point in space, forming an immovable wall of air and water at his back. She wouldn't let go of the two sides of the entrance, still trying to pull herself forward. Her hands were not that strong. He could have ripped her away from it, but he didn't want her injuring her broken finger further. So he made the decision to stay where they were, the dull, sinister vibrations humming in front, even as her body stayed flush against him, her heart pounding frantically, a trapped moth.

"Let go," she snarled. Whipping her tentacles from his legs, she thrust them forward, using her more powerful appendages to try to pull herself out of his grip so she could go to that chamber where she'd feed off energy that would whisper to her that she belonged to them. She was theirs.

The nicest lie I've ever heard... To hell with that.

Holding her fast about the waist, David shifted his weight, so she could feel his cock, which had gotten conveniently erect from her squirming. She froze, even as her undamaged fingers curled a little farther into the rock. Her head tilted, capturing him in the corner of her blue eye.

"Got your attention?" he muttered. At the same time, he used the other hand to trace the curve of her undamaged breast, tease himself with the weight of it.

"You belong to me," he said quietly in her ear, following his gut. He knew he might be going down the wrong path, because this was more than what his instinct was telling him to say. It was what he wanted to say himself, crazy as it sounded, primarily because it didn't sound crazy at all. "You're mine, not theirs. And if we have to fight about that every day for the next thousand years, I'm ready to do it. Especially if it gets me hot and hard like this."

Putting his lips closer to her ear so that he could taste the tender skin beneath, he felt her nipple harden against his palm, making his cock respond with increased insistence against her ass. "Are you ready to fight the way I can fight, sweet witch?"

Her fingers convulsed on the rock. He expected it to crumble as a hard shiver ran through her body. "You have different methods from"-she sucked in a breath as he used his fingers-"Marcellus."

"Sure as hell hope so." Because she wouldn't let go of the rock, it was easy to untie and pull the cloak free, with an abrupt, decisive jerk that left nothing but her bare skin pressed back against his chest.

Pushing her hair forward on her neck, he studied the almost perfectly straight dividing line that left a minefield on one side, pure, creamy silk on the other. He put his lips on that demarcation at the top of her spine, the nape of her neck.

It was that delicate, vulnerable point that gentled his touch.

"If I wasn

't so determined to have you right now," he murmured, "I'd find you a beach, where the sun is so warm on the sand it would banish any cold in your bones. I'd lay you on it, just like this, spread you open to take me inside you."

She shuddered again. He could transport her to such a place in a blink, but the first time he took her needed to be here, on this threshold. He had to win this battle, in order to win the others that would inevitably come.

Her left tentacle slowly let go of the tunnel lip, came back and wound around his leg, all the way to his upper thigh. The tip, the soft, brush like feelers, caressed the base of his testicles beneath the battle kilt, making him suppress a growl of response with effort. She could still set off another wrestling match, but her shift of focus seemed genuine. A tentative victory. He set himself to making it decisive, in more ways than one.

He was bruised, aching, and had never been harder in his life. Putting his hands over hers on the rock, he closed them over her wrists. A controlled, downward glide using his wings and the sensual weight of the water molded him against her back in a slow friction until he could caress her spinal column with his lips. He kept going, all the way down to the small of her back. Then back up, his legs tangled with her tentacles so his cock found the open channel between them. With one tentacle anchored around his leg and the other wrapped around a spear of rock, she was spread, ironically vulnerable. Trembling. Her fingers straightened, releasing the rock at last, her signal of surrender both inflaming him and giving his heart a hard lurch. When his mouth reached her nape, the broad head of his cock was stretching her tender mouth below.

"Mina." He laid his jaw against her temple now. One hand released her to follow the bones of her rib cage and the jut of her hips, a disconcerting thinness. Then up again to her breast, the aroused nipple. She jerked against him when he pinched it between his knuckles, feeling a dark satisfaction as it made her undulate against him again, even though the press of her buttocks broke his control.

As he moved to caress the other side in the same way, the scarred side, she stiffened. He didn't hesitate, though, that tension becoming something else as he ran his fingers over the uneven flesh where the other breast would have been. She was still trembling. Harder than before, even.