She skirted the empty outdoor pool and opened the door of the pale stone building that most people would have thought was an expensive detached home rather than an area for changing, with a hot tub on the ground floor and a guest apartment on the upper one.
The hot tub tempted her as she passed it, but she headed up the stairs instead, into the small kitchen-diner. She walked through it, shedding her clothes as she went, her steps slowing as a desire formed, one that would have startled her just weeks ago and sent her into a panic.
He couldn’t see her when she was vulnerable, when she felt exposed.
What if she could let him see?
Her hands shook at the thought as she halted in the middle of the cream-and-red living room.
Did she want him to see?
The answer hit her like the thunderbolt that struck outside.
Yes.
She wanted him to see her, not naked—she wasn’t ready for that yet—but she wanted him to see something. A sign that he wasn’t alone and she wanted him too? Was it dangerous to let him see such a thing? She shook that fear away. It wasn’t. She had noticed more than once that he was careful to avoid skin contact with her, that he distanced himself whenever he wanted to touch her to reassure her when she was in danger of drowning under the crushing tide of her memories. He didn’t want to frighten her.
He wouldn’t act on whatever she was brave enough to show him.
He would let her be the one in control, as he always had.
She would set the rules.
It was thrilling in a way.
She strode through the bedroom to the bathroom and ran the water into the clawfoot tub in the middle of it. Her pulse fluttered, nerves trying to get the better of her as the water ran and bubbles laced the surface. All he was going to see was a hint of shoulder, nothing he probably hadn’t seen before, and the fact she was having a nice relaxing bath.
How would he react to that?
Her heart skipped a beat for a different reason, heat flashing through her as her mind traversed the same paths as her dreams had been recently. A sense of power rushed through her as she imagined him turning his gaze to her, as she pictured his fierce reaction to the sight of her in the bath, how his eyes would gain that gold shimmer as they brightened, the one she had realised was sparked by more than anger.
Desire turned his eyes gold too.
Would he ache to see more? Would he grow hard?
Panic crashed over her at that thought, and she breathed through it, chanted in her head that he wouldn’t hurt her and that this was different. She wanted him too. She couldn’t let what had happened to her control her anymore. She didn’t want to be caged by her past, despised how deeply the things Zephyr had done affected her and how they had changed her.
She didn’t want to be that Emelia.
She wanted to be her old self.
The Emelia who had been happy, who had felt strong, and who had been brave.
Three things she would feel if she went through with this.
She twisted the taps and paused as she stared at the bubbles. Was tempting an angel wrong? He had been tempting her since the moment she had met him, and he hadn’t once said it was a sin for him to desire her, or her to desire him.
She pushed that fear aside. If he wasn’t allowed to desire her, he wouldn’t be looking at her in the bath, that was for sure. He was a man of rigid principles who obeyed the laws of his kind. She doubted he would go off the rails because of her. Besides, Sable was a half-breed, and he hadn’t been fazed by that at all. He hadn’t seemed to care that she was the product of an angel breeding with a human.
God, she was thinking too much.
She stripped off the last of her clothes, stepped into the water, and sank into it.
She could do this. She wanted him to see her. She wanted to show him that she trusted him and that she did want him too.
She paused again.
She just wasn’t sure how.
Emelia focused on what he had said to her—that she felt vulnerable, and that was why he never saw her when she was naked.
“I’m not vulnerable,” she whispered, feeling like an idiot.
He probably wasn’t looking at her anyway. This would probably be for nothing. No, not nothing. Even if he didn’t see her, it was helping her. She felt stronger already, more in control of herself and her life. She was being brave again, taking command and doing what she really wanted, without letting her past hold her back.
She closed her eyes, sucked down a deep breath, and let it slowly flow out of her as she relaxed against the back of the white tub.
She wasn’t vulnerable.
She was in control.
She wanted this, and she was allowing it. It was her decision. Her choice. She slowly opened her eyes and fixed them on the ceiling.
Because she had all the power now.
CHAPTER 11
He pushed the book away from him with a sigh and rose from his desk in the office of his apartment. His back ached as he stretched his arms above him, clasping his hands together. The books were still yielding little information on dragons, although he had learned a few things about Hell in the new tomes he had borrowed from the library, bringing them to his quarters so he could be alone with them.
Mostly because he was tired of the Third Commander harassing him whenever he set foot in the library. He was beginning to suspect the male was waiting for him just so he could prod and poke and tell him about all his recent conquests in the city.
The Third Commander wasn’t exactly the sort of angel who took study seriously, and normally, the male was more likely to be found in the common area of the building, sharpening his sword.
He felt sure that if it wasn’t for the Second Commander’s influence, the male would have been kicked out of the Echelon centuries ago and would probably be off whoring himself in a fae town somewhere in the mortal world.
He pushed thoughts of the male away just as he had shoved aside the book, and grimaced as he rolled his neck and spread his white wings. His wing sockets cramped in protest and he gritted his teeth and carefully shifted his wings, trying to loosen the tight muscles. Sitting for hours was definitely a bad thing.
Although, he ached far less than he had on returning from helping Emelia with her gardening. If the constant bending, stretching, and lifting took its toll on him, he couldn’t imagine how fiercely it took its toll on her more delicate mortal body.
Leaving her alone the past few days had been one of the hardest things he had ever done, but he had wanted to learn more about Hell and the effects it had on his kind, and that was something she couldn’t help him with. Plus, he hoped that if he left her alone, she wouldn’t turn him away when he returned to question her about the dragon again.
He dreamed of the bastard whenever he slept now, witnessed the male through Emelia’s eyes as he relived twisted versions of her memories, ones far darker than she had revealed to him.
His hand twitched at his side, the urge to call his blade to him strong as he thought about the male. Zephyr. A name was a good lead, and he knew more about what to expect when he entered Hell now. It was as good a time as any to venture there and see if he could locate the dragon.
Sense told him to hold back and wait, to give Emelia more time to recover in the hope she would be able to tell him where to find the dragon. It would cut down the amount of time he needed to be in Hell, reducing his exposure to the darkness infesting that realm and the dangers it possessed.
The more he considered that, the less it seemed like a good thing. The need to hunt the male was growing stronger each day, but that wasn’t the only reason he wanted to step foot in Hell as soon as possible.
Part of him wanted to know if he could grow accustomed to the effects it had on him if he had enough exposure to it.
Getting the dragon’s location from Emelia would be useful, but if he rushed straight there, the drain Hell would have on him would still be fresh and new, stripping him of his stre
ngth and leaving him vulnerable to the male.
Could spending small amounts of time in Hell be beneficial to him? It would spare Emelia the pain of talking about the dragon, would assuage his need to do something about the bastard by making him feel he was finally making progress, and it might allow him to acclimatise to the effects that realm had on him. Three very good reasons to do his own investigation in that realm, leaving Emelia out of it.
Emelia.
Was she well?
Did she think about him as often as he thought about her?
His sleeping hours might be filled with the dragon, but his waking ones were filled with her. It was impossible to keep his mind off her, his thoughts away from running over every facet of her, all the things he had learned and how her expression and eyes changed with every emotion she experienced.
His beautiful little mortal.
He glanced at his bare feet before he could consider what he was doing, driving through the layers of the building to the mortal plane, his gaze fixing on her location. She wasn’t in the garden. Rain lashed the grounds, lightning striking around the manor. Was she in there?
His eyes shifted unerringly to the smaller house beside the pool.
He focused on it and moved through the roof, to the top floor, and stopped dead.
His mouth went bone dry.
Heart thundered.
He swallowed hard, but it did nothing to ease either of those things.
Emelia lay reclined in a bath, her eyes closed and her wild chestnut locks tangled in a messy damp knot at the back of her head. White bubbles clung to her chest, spotting her creamy shoulders in places, and her hands glistened with moisture as she rested them along the sides of the tub.
His breaths came faster as he tried to tear his eyes away but found he couldn’t.
Because she didn’t feel afraid, or vulnerable. She was relaxed, and that was the reason he was able to view her this way.
With those bubbles slipping over her skin as she moved her arms beneath the water, parting as she lifted her hands to flash a hint of a knee and her thigh.
He groaned, the low sound rising unbidden into his throat as she raised her hands and gently scrubbed her neck, the action causing her chest to lift and her breasts to crest the surface of the water. The infernal bubbles covered them, but his breath hitched as they began to slide down from the peaks.
He growled as she sank back under the water just as the bubbles were about to slip off her breasts entirely to reveal the buds of her nipples to him, stealing the pleasure of seeing them from him.
What was she doing?
Did she know he could see this?
She tilted her head back, her eyes still closed, a smattering of suds on her rosy cheeks as she sighed.
Her lips moved silently.
Sent him reeling as he read them.
Are you watching?
Any desire to look away dissipated in an instant, a new feeling replacing the shock of seeing her in the bath. He wanted to keep watching. He felt like a voyeur, knew this was wrong of him and he should look away, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep his eyes on her, couldn’t breathe as he anticipated her next move, silently willed her to flash another hint of pale skin at him.
It was torment, but damn, it pleasured him like nothing else could or ever had.
Anger surged through him, aimed at himself for a change. What was he doing? He curled his hands into fists and clenched them so hard his arms shook as his muscles tensed. This was wrong of him. He had to look away. He was violating her by doing this.
She mouthed something else, something that shattered his entire world and all his restraint with it.
I wanted you to see.
He swallowed thickly at that, was instantly cranked tight by a swift and powerful need, one that startled him, because he felt sure he had never experienced it before now.
He scrubbed a hand over his face and tried to ignore how hard he was in his trousers. His cock throbbed, bucked, and screamed for him to palm it, to relieve the staggering ache that was bordering on painful. It took all his considerable will, but he resisted the urge to touch himself, because this moment wasn’t about that.
This was about her revealing that she trusted him.
It was about her taking a leap that was brave and bold after everything she had endured.
He wouldn’t ruin the sanctity of it.
When she slowly opened her green eyes and seemed to look right at him, even when that was impossible, he sensed her mood shifting, the nerves rising inside her.
He found the strength to look away, to shut the link between them and give her privacy.
His aching erection still demanded attention.
He dropped his hand to it and was on the verge of stroking it through his white trousers when he stopped himself. His hand hovered over it, his entire body trembling as he pictured her in the bath. The image was stamped on his mind so deeply that he wasn’t sure he would ever forget it.
It would be his new torment.
One that might prove dangerous.
He couldn’t let that hunger she ignited in him build into something he couldn’t control. He couldn’t let the vision of her and his imagination collide to push him over the edge. He needed to be careful around her, no matter how fiercely he needed her.
He hadn’t had much experience with females beyond interacting with the angels he met in the city and the healers who were sent to him whenever he returned injured. He had been too focused on his duty to court them, had little time for socialising because of that duty, and wasn’t exactly a good companion on the best of days. His temperament took care of that, although something about Emelia mellowed it.
Still, he was better suited to hunting and killing than wooing.
What if his lack of experience with the gentler sex allowed the hunger he felt whenever he was around her, the urges he had a difficult time controlling, to overwhelm him when he was around her?
He didn’t want to frighten Emelia, and he feared he would be too rough when lost in the throes of his passion, rather than being gentle with her as she needed.
Just the sight of her taking a damned bath had him treading the very edge of control, in danger of being overwhelmed by his need of her.
Worse than the thought of scaring her was the thought of harming her.
She was mortal, fragile in comparison to him. What if he lost awareness in the heat of the moment? His hunger for her might result in him hurting her, or being too rough, or holding her too tightly, or being too demanding. It was a minefield of dangers, and just one of them would be enough to drive her away from him forever.
He scrubbed his hands over his black hair, tousling it as he growled.
She had been through a lot at the hands of a brutal male, one who was a warrior too.
She had already drawn parallels between them, ones that had made him aware of his size when he was around her, and that he was as quick to anger as his superiors said. Sometimes, his rage got the better of him before he could get himself under control. If that happened around Emelia, would she see him as a monster?
He didn’t want to make her relive the events that had traumatised her, and he certainly didn’t want her to come to view him as someone to be feared—someone as dangerous to her as the dragon warrior had been.
He chuckled mirthlessly.
For the first time in his long life, he felt his temperament was a bad thing, and it had taken a slip of a female to make him see it.
All the centuries of his superiors teasing him about it, all the times others had witnessed it, he had never felt it was a negative. But now he did, because he was aware of how easily it could push Emelia away from him.
The side of himself he harnessed in battle to give him the advantage, the rage and darkness that gave him focus and determination, now felt like a weakness, one that might make him lose his fight for Emelia.
He was unpredictable, even to himself. Emelia didn’t need that. She needed s
omeone stable, calm and gentle, and kind. He was none of those things.
Not really.
He tried his best when he was around her, but it would only take one slip.
He shifted his gaze back to her where she lazed in her bath, letting him see her, wanting him to see her.
Wanting him to see her.
She had faith in him at least, more than he had in himself. He couldn’t trust himself around her, constantly worried he was going to do or say something wrong, but she trusted him. He could see that now. She trusted him not to scare her. She trusted him to help her. She trusted him enough that she had talked to him.
If there was one thing he knew about Emelia, she hated talking about herself.
But she had talked to him.
And now she trusted him enough to let him see her like this.
He still couldn’t believe that.
He drank his fill of the sight of her now that she was calm again, watching every subtle shift in her features, and felt his eyes changing, growing golden.
What had she told him when he had looked at her like this the second time they had met?
He frowned as he sought the answer.
She had said he looked like a wolf.
He was a wolf for her. He burned with a need to hunt her, stalked her whenever the urge struck him and he wasn’t strong enough to deny it, and hungered to taste her. She made him wild, and a little dangerous, roused a fierce desire to protect her and a need to fight for her.
A startling new desire swept through him as he gazed down at her.
He wanted to claim her.
He wanted her to be his female.
His only one.
If that made him a wolf, then he was a wolf for her and only her.
Her Wolf.
Her eyes remained closed, her face peaceful as she lay with her head tipped back, everything below her shoulders beneath the foamy water. He wasn’t the only one who looked at another with hunger in his eyes, though. Her green ones had revealed need to him, had shone with heat and desire that he had sensed in her.
But she was still afraid, still scarred by what had happened to her.
Avenged by an Angel Page 10
