Archangel's Storm (Guild Hunter 5)

“Enough,” Jason said. “We both need to spread our wings. Come.”

He allowed Mahiya to set the pace, to set their direction, shadowing her vibrant wings as she swept across the skies with the ease and grace of someone who knew the vagaries of the winds in the mountains, understood how the land interacted with the sky. She wasn’t the most technically accomplished flyer, but there was a lingering happiness to her every movement that was impossible to miss and that made her striking to watch.

“Free,” she said to him when they came to a stop on a high hill overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. “In the sky, I have always been free.”

Observing the na**d pleasure on her face, Jason had to fight the urge to wrap her in his wings, hide her from the sight of those who would turn that joy to despair, using her love of the sky to torture her. “Be careful.”

Closing the small distance between them, Mahiya put a hand to his chest in a gentle feminine invitation he knew he had only to step back to reject. In spite of her vivid emotions, she wasn’t a woman who would pursue a man who made it clear he didn’t want her . . . or one who knew that in taking her, he might destroy the very brightness of spirit that caught him in delicate chains, agonizingly painful in their hope.

28

“I am,” she said, “always careful, but you . . . now I know why you are such a great spymaster.”

He didn’t understand her meaning, the warmth of her touch seeping through the thin black shirt he wore to linger on his skin. Drinking in the sensation, he ran his fingers down the line of her neck, hot satisfaction in his blood when she shivered. There was a deeper pleasure in this, in knowing what made her sigh, learning the intimacies of her body. Yet it was a pleasure he’d denied himself for hundreds of years.

“Jason?” Wounded eyes, blue and wet. “You’re leaving?”

“I told you I couldn’t stay.” Couldn’t give her his heart.

Fist clenching in the sheet she held to her breast, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I thought . . . when you kept returning . . .”

He’d been so young then, very good at his job, but far behind his peers when it came to emotions, to relationships. He’d thought that long-ago lover had understood he spoke the na**d truth, never realizing the secret dreams brewing in her heart. A heart he’d broken without meaning to, without even knowing he held the power to do so. It had soon healed for she’d been young, too, and he thought that she might no longer even remember the black-winged angel she’d once pleaded with to stay with her.

But he’d never forgotten the lesson, and he wondered if Mahiya had truly heard what he’d said to her the night before or if she, too, harbored dreams of fixing the broken pieces of him. The truth was, no matter how she compelled him, she would soon realize what was shattered in him was nothing that could be healed, the damage done at such a young age that it had become part of his very psyche.

Yet instead of backing off, he did a selfish thing then. Lowering his head, he claimed the lush intoxication of her kiss, his hands thrusting into her hair to tumble black silk over his skin. She opened for him with a sweet sensual generosity that enticed without design, made him want to caress her every secret pleasure point until her desire was a shimmer across her skin and he knew her like no other man ever would.

“Jason? You’re leaving?”

Tugging back her head with the hand fisted in her hair, he forced himself to release lips swollen from his kisses. “Open your eyes.” It was a harsh order.

Thick lashes rose to reveal tawny eyes hazy with passion. “I see you, Jason.”

“And what do you see?” He stroked his free hand up her side, rubbed his thumb gently back and forth over her nipple through her clothing.

Her breath caught, but she didn’t break the eye contact. “A man who is a storm, who belongs to no one and who will never be tamed. To expect otherwise would be to ask for agonizing disappointment.”

Open eyes, he thought, she had wide-open eyes. “Some might say you’re attempting to seduce me in order to lead me on a leash.”

Laughter, warm and startled, spilled over the hilltop. “Only a fool would attempt to contain or direct a storm. I’m far too smart.”

He took her lips in an open-mouthed kiss in an attempt to drink of her laughter, steal some of her dazzling warmth of spirit to hoard inside him. Her nails dug into his chest through his shirt, her breast pushed into his hand, and her scent, it tangled around him in an exotic wildness.

The gut-deep sense of connection was an intense shock that made his nerve endings burn. He had never felt more real, more a part of the world.

Breaking the kiss only long enough that she could gasp in air, he slanted his mouth across hers again, licking and tasting and sinking into the carnal pleasure. Her nipple was a hard point beneath the fabric of her tunic, and when he squeezed it between forefinger and thumb, she jerked, pulling away from his touch.

Folding back wings that had become fully unfurled, he watched her attempt to resettle her breathing. “Not here,” she said at last, her chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm. “Will you come to my bed?”

It was such a polite invitation, and yet her lips were wet from his kiss, her cheeks flushed with sexual need. “Yes.”

* * *

He’d said yes, but Jason left after escorting Mahiya back to the palace, having received a message on his phone he had to follow up on at once. Sensual frustration tearing through her veins, she decided to take care of a task of her own and headed to Vanhi’s apartments using busy internal passageways. If she was a target, it’d make it difficult for anyone to cut her from the herd.

Vanhi was reading when she arrived. Mahiya bent down to kiss her smiling cheek before taking a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs in the vampire’s living area. “I’m disturbing you.”

“You know you are always welcome.” Vanhi slid an intricate metal bookmark between the pages and put the book on the coffee table. “It worries me, Mahiya, the look I see in your eyes.”

“Vanhi—”

The vampire held up her hand. “I know you too well, my dear. I rocked you when you cried as a babe and when Arav shattered your heart as a young woman.” Sighing, she reached out to take one of Mahiya’s hands in her own, squeezed. “You’ve been waiting your whole life to love someone, my sweet girl. I don’t want you to squander the power of that beautiful heart on a man who will not value such a gift.”