Mella!
Was he putting these ideas in my head?
Well, he’d said he was a sex demon.
I didn’t believe that for a minute.
His eyes were still closed.
Maybe I could get him to open them.
“I’m going to touch your back.” I reached for that mane. It was soft. On his head and neck, his hair was long enough that I could wrap my fingers in it. As it tapered away, it got shorter. I petted it, and watched muscles ripple all down his back until his buttocks clenched.
His hand was a fist again.
I couldn’t help myself. “I’m going to touch your skin now.” Those fabulous muscles felt like silk under my palm. I knelt on the edge of the bed, so that my bare knee touched his side. He flinched. My knee sizzled where it touched him.
“I’m going to give you a backrub.” I swung my leg over his back, and felt a thrill so exquisite, it was like the first time I got up on my uncle’s draft horse when I was thirteen. He was big and hot and wide between my thighs. Slowly, I lowered myself until I was touching his butt. Electric joy!
He turned his head, smashing his face against the sheet.
We’ve got to get this guy in a better mood.
I ran my hands up on either side of that mane. He arched under me. Was that good or bad?
At his shoulders, I stopped and began to knead them, feeling for knots, stroking long and deep and slow and hard. Slowly, he relaxed under me. I worked my way down his arms, one at a time, torquing those hard biceps, pulling from his hand up his forearm to his elbow.
At one point, my hand slid down his right palm and past it.
I felt his fingers close around my wrist.
I froze. I was lying chest-to-his-side against him. My bare butt stuck up in the air. My ear was against his back. I could hear his heart thundering. My left breast was jammed against his mane at the small of his back, where the hair was bristly. Oh God. The two of us, I realized, were breathing hard. Every breath made that bristly hair rasp against my nipple.
His fingers tightened on my wrist.
I closed my eyes and reveled in those feelings: his sudden strength, his stillness, my sudden helplessness, a delicious feeling like drowning in sleep, although my body was afire with the touch of his fingers, the bristly hairs poking my nipple, the sweat on his back—I licked it—he gave a huge gasp and shuddered all over.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he just came.
“Let go of me,” I said.
His fingers jerked open.
I straightened.
Now might be a good time to talk to him. While he was all unwound.
“Turn over,” I said, not realizing how it would feel to have that big body turn between my thighs. I knew a moment of panic.
Can I face him?
Then I saw the panic in his eyes.
I glanced down at his cock. While I watched, it went from lying semisoft against his groin to fully hard.
It was dark, dark red. Shiny. And very wet.
He’d come, all right. And he was ready again.
Well, shoot, I thought. His brain may be scared, but his body knows what it wants.
Our eyes met.
She looked into my eyes, and I realized this was it. Whatever she was going to do to me, it would happen now.
Earlier, I could have leaped up, I could have vanished, I could have thrown myself out of her window…but it was too late now.
She straddled me the way I’ve seen soldiers straddle women. The way that woman had straddled the angel last night on the hood of that car.
I held very still.
She leaned over. That beautiful, deadly mouth came closer to my throat. “Do you know what I’m going to do now?” she breathed.
“No.” I could feel my talons sliding out. Fight or flight? I felt breathless with fear and indecision.
She put her hands on either side of my head. “I won’t tell you to relax,” she whispered. “But I want you to hold still.”
She locked eyes with me.
Two things happened at the same time.
She leaned even closer. Her bare breasts brushed my chest, then lay there, making my cock ache and my heart hammer with fear and the other thing.
Also, she came right up to my face and brushed her lips on mine. One, two, three times.
I imagined that I could see right inside her, through her eyes.
It would happen now. Now. I felt like dying. I threw my arms out at my sides and sank my talons into the bed with little tearing sounds.
She sank closer over me. I felt a series of crazy sensations on my cock, cool, slippery, hot, tight—tight—
—Tight—tighter—
“Kill me,” I begged her. “Please.” I meant it. If she sucked the life out of me now, it would be worth it. It couldn’t possibly mean to her what it meant to me, and I didn’t care.
She lifted her face and shook her head. “Hold still, now. This won’t hurt a bit.”
Then she did it.
Her mouth closed on mine. I felt her tongue probe me. At the same moment, she sank down on me, and that hot, slippery tightness intensified around my cock. She began sliding up and down over my cock. My body heaved, but I remembered to hold still, clenching my talons in the mattress, while her tongue probed and probed, and she sucked and sucked and sucked on my mouth.
My throat got tight and hot. Here we go. So this is dying.
I felt my soul leave my body. She was gentle and loving and she could kill me with such sweetness that I wished we could do it again and again. The tightness in my cock was turning into a huge throb all over my body. If I could feed her with this, this incredible gift of a lovely death, after all my centuries of boredom and, yes, misery—I gave up all those sad centuries with my last breath, surrendering in spasms, feeling her tighten around my cock with rhythmic, shuddering squeezes, feeling joy gush out of me while she invaded my mouth with yet more joy.
When I opened my eyes, I realized I was still lying under her. Her head lay on my shoulder, her mouth slack on my throat. My cock was still buried inside her. At this realization, I felt it twitch.
She giggled against my throat. “You are so horny!”
My talons had withdrawn. Surreptitiously, I brought my hands closer to my sides, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I’d moved.
As I lay there, replaying in my head everything she’d done, I realized that she had vampirized me the way that woman had done to the demon lying on the car, the night we fell. Only it felt as if she’d been putting something into me, not sucking it out. I felt huge and relaxed and full of something I could only call perfection.
After an eternity, she rolled off and lay beside me.
“Look, I’m sorry I said all those mean things before,” she said, to my complete astonishment. She must have seen my emotion in my face. “What? Don’t they apologize in Hell?”
She was still panting a little, her face glowing with whatever had just happened to her. Or whatever she’d done for herself, with me holding still, so I wouldn’t mess up.
Still, I felt a little glow of my own.
I did that. Part of that’s mine. I made her feel like that.
“No,” I said. “We don’t apologize. I didn’t.”
She eyed me. “I hadn’t thought about that part of it.”
“What part of what?”
“The whole, I don’t know, day-to-day part of living in hell.”
“We called it the Regional Office.”
“Regional?” She laughed. I felt myself smile. Her laugh was nice. “As in, where is it?” She pointed downward, raising her eyebrows.
“As in, not the Home Office.” I pointed upward and raised my own eyebrows.
“So what’s it like? The day-to-day thing?” She sat up and stretched luxuriously, and her mass of fluffy blond hair fell back behind her like a waterfall, like a sunrise.
“It’s boring,” I confessed. “You may as well know, I haven’t seen a battlefield si
nce the Crusades. I got out of the office a bit in the fourteenth century, and again when we launched the Gatling gun, but meanwhile,” I shrugged. “I’ve been behind a desk.” I slanted my eyes at her, wondering how she was taking this. “I was more of…an administrator.”
She looked at me now, and reached a hand out to stroke me from my shoulder down my chest to my upper thigh. I felt myself swell all over at her touch.
“That’s so sad. Is that the other thing they do?”
My gaze was fixed on her hand. I wanted it to move over me again. “What?”
“Besides being mean to people. Do they bore you down there?”
Her hand still rested on my thigh. I could feel my cock, a thing I’d used only to jerk on or piss with my whole life, wake up again, and I knew in that moment that I would never miss the Regional Office. She might enslave me, punish me, drive me mad, but if she just left her hand there, I would…
“Earth to Mutt.”
“What?”
“You’re easily distracted, aren’t you?” She dimpled.
I sighed. “You really want to know?”
“I really want to know.”
With regret I sat up and leaned against the headboard. Her hand slid off my thigh. My whole body seemed to sigh with sadness. With a sidelong look at her, I boldly picked up her hand and laid it back on my leg.
“You’re right, it was boring. For one thing we don’t get days and nights there, not unless we’re thinking about it. So I was in the office for months at a time.”
“What do you eat?”
“Junk food. And there’s never anything in the vending machine but cat’s pee to drink. I’m telling you,” I vowed, “Baz could have bought me for that first cup of coffee, if he hadn’t already earned a good century of fealty with all that beer the night before.”
“Baz,” she said.
“He’s teaching me how to be a sex demon.”
She laughed in my face. I would have—a week ago—punched her. Now I just wanted her to laugh again.
If confessing made her laugh, I’d keep it up forever. “I need the skills. I’m out of a job.”
“He’s not teaching you very fast, is he?” she said, trying to stop herself smiling, I could see.
“He hasn’t told me very much yet,” I admitted.
She nodded. “I’m sorry I said you suck,” she said quietly. “I was just so excited. I mean, a sex demon! I really wanted you to be a sex demon.”
“I guess I’m not a very quick student.”
She gripped my knee and shook it, sending a thrill clear up into my skull. My cock stood straight up. “Hey. You’re not that bad.”
“Yes, I am.”
Her voice went throaty. “So what did he tell you to do?”
I flushed and looked at the wall. “Go slow. Listen to you.” I put my hands over my cock so she wouldn’t see what it wanted to do.
She didn’t say anything, and I looked back.
Her eyes went wide. “Maybe he knows something after all.”
“That was right? He wasn’t just fucking with me?”
She smiled again. “It was exactly right.” Her grip on my knee tightened. Her eyes glowed. She leaned toward me, closer and closer, until her soft body lay across my chest, and then, gently, shattering me in a million pieces, she touched her lips to mine.
“You, you fluffy thug!” I yelled, socking Jeff on the arm. “I knew you would get like this. It was just a matter of time.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Keek,” Jeff said feebly. He was sitting cross-legged and naked on my bed. I couldn’t see his fluffy white wings, but he was all angel right now. The arrogant jerk.
I was standing over him, definitely not on the bed. “Oh, really? You only said I was born sinning, and I know all about the sins of the flesh, and you have a pure soul and you’re a fucking angel—”
“I’m a fucking angel,” Jeff said, with a look of sober wonder.
“Does that hurt?” I snarled. “Words hurt more than anything, you bastard. Word hurts don’t heal.”
“I don’t know if I’m a bastard,” he said. “It’s possible.”
“You—what?” I paused in the act of socking him again. I was naked, too. Sweat was chilling and drying on me, along with other fluids I had been more than happy to get smeared with, only a few minutes ago.
He said, “They don’t tell us much about our past if we grow up in the Home Office. The past is not important. What’s important is that we arrived purified.”
I lowered my fist. “You are seriously fucked up, you know that?”
He looked at me with sympathy. “I only know I was baptized four minutes before I died. That’s how I got to the Home Office pure, so I could be made an angel. Everyone is born in sin,” he offered, as if this mitigated his insults.
I leaned forward and put my hands on his knees. “Do you understand what meanness is? Saying hurtful things? Sneering at people you think are beneath you? People you’ve just been fucking—” My voice rose and I shoved away from him, unable to look at his perfect, puzzled, unhappy face. “I should have boned that Indian lust god when I had the chance. He didn’t judge me.”
“Indian lust god?”
I started putting on my clothes.
“Yeah,” I said with my back to him. “This big scary demon carried you off bleeding, and I was running through the streets like a mad thing in my pajamas, looking for you, and the lust god found me crying and lost and desperate and heartbroken, and he took me back to his lair and gave me hash cocoa. I could have boned him then. But he was a gentleman. He didn’t judge me. He gave me shelter and let me sleep it off.”
I jerked my skirt up and turned to face Jeff. “And next morning, there you were. You didn’t call me a sinner when I took you into the shower.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“That’s lame,” I snapped.
He kept pausing whenever I said something, as if he was actually thinking it over. Or maybe, I thought grimly, he was just so dumb that he couldn’t think up a comeback without a time-out.
“Ignorance does not mitigate sin,” he said finally. “The errors we commit exercising free will have consequences, regardless of extenuating circumstances.”
I breathed deeply, holding back the clout on the ear he was begging for. “Get out.”
He looked alarmed at that. “Keek—”
“Out. Now. Or I’m gonna commit an error with my fist. And we don’t want that, do we?” Sarcasm wasn’t keeping the tears out of my voice. I pointed at the door. “Out!”
He swallowed. “Please.”
I glared at him. “Jeff. Jeff. Jeff. Get out of my apartment.”
And he vanished.
I wouldn’t have believed I could fall asleep with this amazing man in my bed, but I must have, because I woke up to the sound of my roommate crying in the next room.
Then I realized I was in my own bed, and with a man. For a moment I thought it was Tyler, and I felt a sudden flash of that self-hatred I’d trained myself to feel when thinking about Tyler, the selfish, bad-in-bed rat.
Then I realized who it was.
The long crest of thick fur down his back might have been the tip-off. Plus the warm leathery wing curled around me like a blanket.
His whole body was curled around me. In his sleep, he had pushed his face into my boob and was now sucking on it, suckling so slowly and sweetly that my heart melted. He was like a baby trying to nurse and sleep at the same time.
Then Keek banged on my bedroom door. “Mella? Are you in there? I need you.”
In an instant, my demon woke. I felt him stiffen all over. His big hands tightened on my back and his mouth stilled on my breast.
The door opened. I lifted my head and scowled at Keek.
“Do you mind?” I hissed.
Keek withdrew her shocked face immediately. “Sorry.” She sniffled. “I thought—”
She broke off on a sob and shut the door.
“Keek!�
� I called. “Oh, hell.”
I could feel Mutt quivering in my arms.
“Shh, baby, shhhh,” I murmured to his head. “It’s just my roommate having a crisis. She gets ’em about twice a week.”
He shivered harder, and I petted his crazy shock of red-black hair. Slowly he began to calm and go still. “It’s okay, baby,” I started to say.
Something sharp prickled against my back. “Ow, dammit. Did my hairbrush fall into the bed?”
He pulled away and sat up. His face was sheepish. His eyes rolled.
“Sorry,” he said in a small voice.
I let go of him reluctantly.
Then I saw that his hands had become huge claws with inch-long, razor-sharp talons. His horns curled out of his forehead, and his wings were up, too, all scary and pointy behind him.
“Holy shit,” I burst out. I was up out of that bed and standing three feet away in a heartbeat.
There were deep slashes in the bed. Right into the mattress.
“Did you do that?”
Mutt swallowed. “I thought you were going to kill me,” he said in a small voice.
This is what he does when he’s scared. Goes all menacing demon. I looked from his talons to the slashes in the mattress.
“Did you really. Well, I didn’t,” I said, for lack of anything smarter to say.
He blinked at me. “Thank you,” he said.
I got the impression that this might be the first time he’d ever said those words. His eyes were like saucers. While I watched, his wings shrank and retracted somehow into his back, and his claws softened and became ordinary hands.
He looked so puppyishly worried that I reached out and tousled his crest.
“You’re okay, sweetie.” I looked at the mattress again. Bits of stuffing were coming out of the slashes. “Although this mattress is toast.”
The bed also smelled like fabulous sex.
He looked amazingly tempting there, long and broad and muscly and obviously eager to please. I could feel his body heat. I could smell the sex on his skin.
Plus the big red demon cock.
Out in the living room, Keek broke into a storm of louder sobs.
“Oh, brother.” I rolled my eyes. I looked at the door and back at Mutt, so tempting there on my ripped-up bed.
It's Raining Angels and Demons Page 7
