“Don’t you know any better than to go walking alone in the woods at night?” she heard a man with a thick Irish brogue say.
The accent didn’t help her with his identity. Most of the men here had an Irish accent.
“Who’s there?” she said.
The man stepped closer to her. It was the man from the bedroom the night before.
“It’s Wesley,” he said.
“You don’t know how good it is to see you, Wes,” she said. “Can you get me out of this creek?”
“Of course I can, but let me look at your arm first,” he said and lifted her arm to his face.
He didn’t actually look at her arm. He just smelled it.
“It’s broken,” he said and gently crossed her arm across her chest. “Hold it there until I get you home. We don’t want to damage it further by bumping it.”
“How do you know it’s broken? All you did was sniff it,” she said.
“That’s all I need to do, lovey. I can smell your bone marrow leaking into your blood stream,” he said simply, as if smelling escaped bone marrow was a common everyday skill.
“You can actually smell bone marrow?”
“Aye, darlin’,” he said. “I surely can.”
He picked her up like a baby, bent his legs, and jumped. He ascended quickly and landed silently at the top of the creek.
“How do you do that?” she asked in wonder.
He looked at her in confusion, “How do I do what?”
“Jump like that and then land without making a sound.”
He laughed quietly, “The jumping comes naturally, lovey. The silent landing is a learned skill. You’ll never catch a vampire if it hears you coming.”
He started walking back through the trees.
“You can’t carry me through there! It’s too dark,” she said.
He laughed again, “It’s too dark to you. I however, can see just fine.”
He had a sexy laugh and was a very attractive man with dark hair and beautiful brown eyes. If Dani wasn’t in love with Gabriel, she’d be all over him.
“So what brings you out on a fine night such as this, if I may be so bold as to ask?”
“I just felt like going for a walk,” she said.
“Is that right?” he said. “And where is your angel, darlin’?”
“Well Wesley, to you the truth, I have no fucking idea,” she answered honestly.
Her arm was starting to really throb. If Gabriel didn’t come back soon she’d have to go to the hospital.
She was starting to feel very lightheaded.
“I’m dizzy,” she said.
“Aye, that would be the marrow,” he said.
She looked up at him, “Would you mind if I rested my head on your shoulder?”
“Not at all, lovey,” he said. “Consider it yours.”
Dani rested her head against him and closed her eyes. She’d started to drift into a pain filled sleep when she felt something crawling on the base her back where her shirt had pulled loose from her jeans. She had one thought and one thought alone. SPIDER!
She opened her eyes and tried to launch herself out of Wesley’s arms.
Her bottom half fell, but he held tight to the upper half of her body. She tried to twist around to slap at her back with her good arm, but only managed to pull them both over. She fell on her back and Wesley landed on top of her with his hips between her thighs.
“Praise be to God, woman! What the hell was that all about?” he snapped, rising up on his elbows.
“There was a spider on my back,” she said through gritted teeth.
“So logically, you thought the best course of action would be to kill us both and hope the little bugger died in the fall as well?”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking that far ahead,” she said. “I just wanted to kill it.”
“Well, do you think you got the little bastard?” he asked with a smile in his voice. “Is it safe to get up now or do you want to roll around a few times to make sure he’s well and truly squished?”
“Shut up and get off of me,” she said.
He tried to get up, but her hips came up with him, “What the hell?”
“I think my button is stuck in your zipper,” Wesley said. “Hold still while I try to free it. I don’t want to jar your arm anymore than we already have.”
4.
Gabriel had needed to do something to work off his anger, so he’d done something he hadn’t done in eons; he swam. He’d walked across the land that Potter’s family lived on and jumped over a small cliff at the edge of the property. He flew across a field, made his way to the Cumberland River on the other side and dove in.
He tried not to think about what his Father thought of him, but it happened anyway. Gabriel had served Him loyally from nearly the beginning of time. In all the time since Gabriel had been created he’d defied his Father only once.
He could almost understand if He was against him being with Dani because Gabriel was an angel. He could debate that point with
his Father. But He thought Gabriel wasn’t worthy of Dani! Dani must have believed Gabriel was worthy of her because she’d opened her body and her heart to him. She loved him!
Or at least she had until he’d bitten her head off on D.J. Bridge for showing concern for him and then practically yelled at her to go away. She may now think that being with him was a bad decision after all. He would have to find a way to make it up to her without explaining to her exactly why he was so angry.
He couldn’t say ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you, Dani. My Father had just told me to keep my hands off of you. And I’d just damn near chopped my brother’s head off because he said you weren’t worth the price I have to pay for having made love to you.’ She would take the responsibility for all of that on herself.
And it wasn’t hers to bear. Gabriel had made the choices that had brought things to this point, not her. He was the one who would pay for those choices, not her. As long as Gabriel lived, she would never know the truth of it. The truth would destroy her before Lucifer had the chance.
Gabriel hadn’t realized how long he’d swam until he surfaced and saw the sun had started to set. Dani would be wondering where he was. He dove back under the water and swam back to the point in the river where he’d jumped in. When he climbed out onto the bank of the river, it was full dark.
He walked back to the house where he and Dani were staying and went inside. She wasn’t downstairs. He thought that she must have gone to bed and went up to check on her, but the bed was empty. Where could she be? He closed his eyes and dematerialized.
When he rematerialized at Dani’s location, Gabriel couldn’t believe the scene going on before him. Wesley was lying in between Dani’s thighs on the ground beneath the trees.
“Hurry up, Wes,” Dani said.
“I’m trying, lovey,” Wesley said. “Maybe if you grab hold of the button, I can ease down the zipper and get this thing out. I don’t want to tear your pants open.”
“Fine,” Dani said. “Ouch! Be easy, that hurt.”
“Sorry, darlin’,” Wesley said. “Maybe if you were to raise up just a wee bit.”
Dani wrapped one arm around Wesley’s shoulders and arched her hips up against him.
“No, lovey, never mind,” Wesley said. “I can’t reach your zipper with you grinding into me like that.”
Gabriel had seen enough.
“Wesley, you little son of a bitch, if there isn’t one hell of a good reason for what I see going on before me right now I’m going to rip your little Irish ass into fucking shreds and spread your remains between the stars!” Gabriel yelled.
Wesley froze in the act of whatever he was doing, “Did I do you a wrong in a previous life, love, and now you’ll have nothing short of my death as punishment?”
“Wesley,” Gabriel warned in a bone chilling voice.
“Right,” Wesley said. “Believe or not, I can actually explain the compromising position that you’ve found us in.”
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“I’m going to start counting, Wesley, and if you haven’t fully explained this situation by the time I get to three, so help me God, I’m going to kill you,” Gabriel growled. “One.”
“Gabriel, stop! I ju…,” Dani tried to explain.
“Shut your mouth, woman!” Gabriel snapped and took away her ability to speak. “Two.”
“Your wife went walking in the woods alone after dark and fell into the creek and hurt her arm. I got her out and was carrying her home when a wee little spider climbed onto her back.
“Your wife, at that point, decided the only sensible course of action was to perform a triple back flip summersault with a twist. I personally think it was the twist that fucked us over.
“Anyway, I held onto her upper body so she wouldn’t do any further damage to her injured arm, and she went to wailing at her back with the one usable arm she had left and knocked us both to the ground.
“I fell on top of her and the button on my pants got caught in the zipper of her jeans. We were trying to unhook ourselves when you arrived to find us in this altogether compromising yet totally innocent position here on the ground. And now, yet again, I find myself asking for you to please not kill me, Mr. Angel.”
Gabriel snapped his fingers and Wesley flew off of Dani and landed on the ground a few feet away. With Wesley out of the way, Gabriel could see that Dani’s face was covered in blood.
He made light emit from his body so he could get a better look at her. She had a small cut on her forehead and her arm was swollen from her elbow to her hand.
“Fuck me, he glows,” Wesley mumbled from behind him.
Gabriel leaned over Dani and picked her up. He quickly carried her through the woods and back to the house.
5.
Gabriel laid Dani on the couch when he got her back to the house. “What were you doing in the woods? Don’t you know how dangerous that is?”
Dani just glared at him, trying to burn holes in him with her stare.
“Your arm is broken, love, but not as badly as your ankle was,” he said. “I can mend it without having to reset the bone.”
He looked back up into her face and Dani continued to glare back at him. She could feel the muscle under her right eye twitching; a twitch that usually preceded a physical snap.
“You’re being childish by not speaking to me,” he said. “I know you’re mad, but we should talk about it.”
Dani felt the twitch in her eye jump into double time. As if she could speak to him! He’d frozen her damn vocal cords! Gabriel took hold of her arm where she assumed the break was.
Her whole arm was hurting so badly that she really couldn’t tell where it was broken anymore. She felt the hot and cold sensations that she’d felt when he fixed her ankle, and then the pain was gone. She watched the swelling leave her arm so quickly that it looked as if it were being deflated.
He reached up to touch her head, but she batted his hand away. She got up and marched up the stairs to take a shower.
“Dani,” Gabriel called after her. “Don’t you want me to fix that cut?”
She answered him by slamming the bedroom door and then the bathroom door beyond it. She took a quick shower to get off all the grime that had stuck to her, and then stood under the hot spray from the shower head and brushed the leaves and twigs from her hair.
She got out and used her towel to wipe the steam from the bathroom mirror so she could see how badly her head was cut. It wasn’t too bad. The cut was only about an inch and a half long, but it was kind of deep. She would normally go to the hospital for something like this, but she obviously couldn’t do that now.
Luckily she knew a little boxing triage and knew how to fix a cut when she was in a pinch. And she’d seen the supplies she’d need right inside this house. She wrapped a towel around her, pressed a dry washcloth to the wound to stop the oozing blood and went back down the stairs to get what she needed from a kitchen drawer.
Gabriel was still in the living room, “What are you doing?” he asked, but she walked right past him and into the kitchen.
Dani dug through a kitchen drawer and pulled out a tube of Super Glue that she’d seen earlier, and carried it back up the stairs with her. She was looking in the bathroom closet for cotton swabs when she felt the pressure in her throat let go. Gabriel had finally remembered to release her vocal cords.
She found the swabs and carried three of them back over to the sink with her. She pulled the washcloth from her head and rechecked the cut for bleeding in the mirror. The blood flow had stopped. She wet the washcloth and wiped the clotted blood from the cut, then spun the cap off the Super Glue.
She held the cut slightly open and laid a thin line of Super Glue deep in the wound, then used two of the cotton swaps to run down each side of the cut to seal the wound shut. She then turned the swaps sideways and used the plastic bars to pinch the wound closed for ten seconds. She released the wound and looked at it in the mirror. It was sealed.
She used the third swab to wipe away the excess Super Glue before the beads had time to dry on her skin. She threw the bloody washcloth and swabs into the small trashcan under the sink and left the bathroom.
Gabriel was sitting on the end of the bed, waiting for her.
6.
Gabriel looked up at Dani, “You can speak now. I’m sorry I left you that way. I’d forgotten I’d done it.”
He got up and walked over to her, “Let me fix your head,” he said before he realized that she’d already done something to it. “How did you seal this?”
“Super Glue; the stitches of champions,” she said, quoting her old coach, and then stepped around Gabriel to get the bag with her clothes in it.
“You squirted glue into that cut?” he asked, going to her and placing his hand on her shoulder. “Are you crazy, Dani?”
“Oh, I’m Dani again?” she snapped, and brushed his hand from her shoulder. “Because I was beginning to think my name was woman as much as you’ve barked it at me today.”
He took her shoulders and turned her around to face him, “I’m sorry.”
“Stop touching me,” she said pulling away from him. “I’m pissed and I’ll probably hit you, and I don’t really feel like going rounds with you like I did with Buddy. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.”
Gabriel’s head jerked as if he’d been slapped.
“Hit me all you’d like, Dani,” Gabriel said. “I can promise you that I’ll never lift one finger to you in return.”
Her shoulders slumped and Gabriel could see how tired she was; of him or just this conversation, he wasn’t sure.
“I apologize, that was uncalled for. I know you’re nothing like Buddy,” she said quietly. “Are we done here?” she asked, throwing on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.
The last comment made Gabriel’s skin crawl with fear, “What do you mean are we done?”
“Are…we…done?” she asked with her back to him and her hand on the doorknob.
Gabriel just stared at her in stunned silence. He suddenly found it hard to breathe. There was no misunderstanding in what she was saying or what she meant. She was asking him if they were done being together. And now it was him that was left with the inability to speak.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said and turned the doorknob.
Gabriel instinctively knew that if she walked through that door that there would be no going back for them. He raced over and slammed the door closed before she’d opened it more than a few inches.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked in a wavering voice. “Why would you ever think we’re done?”
“It occurred to me the moment that you thought I’d snuck off to fuck a stranger in the woods while you were gone,” she said without turning to face him.
“Dani, no, I never thought that,” he said, forcing her to turn and face him. “I was just…,”
“Jealous? I know,” she said. “And don’t take this the wrong way, but so was Buddy. And when he got jealous
, it never turned into anything good.”
“I would never hit you, Dani,” he said. “Please believe that.”
“You can’t really believe that I’m the only person Buddy ever hit,” Dani said. “He would pick a fight with any man he thought had even looked me. He wouldn’t actually start in on me until we were alone.”
“Dani, I wouldn’t…,” he tried to say.
“But you did, though,” she said, cutting him off. “Wes is a good man and he was helping me, but you couldn’t see that because you were to busy seeing what you wanted to see. Or maybe just what you expected to see.”
“I know Wesley is a good man,” Gabriel said, trying to pull Dani to him, but she wasn’t having it. “I know that better than you do.”
“Really, because you treated him like straight up trash,” she said. “And for what? Helping your woman while she was in pain? For trying to carry me home when I couldn’t make my way there alone? He was just trying to get me out of the woods and you were going to kill him for it.”
Gabriel wanted to argue back with her, but he couldn’t. Every word she’d said was true. He had jumped to conclusions when he’d seen them on the ground. And she’d given him no cause to feel that way; and for that matter, neither had Wesley.
“You’re right, about everything, and all I can say is I’m sorry, and that it will never happen again,” Gabriel said and bowed his head. “And beg you not to leave me. I’ll get on my knees if it’s what you want. I love you, Dani.”
She gazed up at him for a moment and then wrapped her arms around her neck. “I love you, too. And I don’t want to be away from you. I want to be with you forever.”
Gabriel wanted that more than anything. To be with Dani forever was a beautiful dream, but he was afraid that a dream was all it could ever be. But he’d hold onto her for as long as he possibly could.
“Now will you let me fix that cut on your head,” he asked, smiling down at her.
“You don’t like my home triage?” she asked with a smile.
When Angels Fall Page 14
