Pants to pants, Avery ground her weight into him with a friction that was only a precursor to what lay ahead. The room was hot. She was hot. And she was unreasonably needy.
She nipped at his skin like an animal in heat, taking small bites from his neck to his waist. The man beneath her liked it all. His warm fingers found her breasts and brushed the raised tips before moving to her back for better traction. Tugging her closer, so that their heated gazes connected, he said, “All or nothing, angel.”
His brute strength flipped her onto her back. He was on his knees now. In a flash, her boots were gone, along with her pants. So were his. He waited for her to look at him, for her eyes to take him in. Then he sank down next to her with his weight on his elbows and moved once more, so she felt the exhilaration of having his hardness push against the soft folds of the place that would soon welcome him.
The night blurred. The room blurred. Avery heard a sound and realized she’d made it as he entered her with a single stroke that filled her with his hard length. Instead of withdrawing, he stayed there, waiting, watching her with those piercing blue eyes.
“Angels don’t beg,” she whispered.
“No one said they have to,” he returned.
But she couldn’t hold still for much longer. Her core was humming. Far off, that familiar drumming had begun, with no more effort on his part than this first physical hello.
“No,” Avery complained, her voice husky, weak. “Not yet. Not like this. Need more. Want more.”
His grin was a wicked thing, and full of promise. “Do not assume I don’t know how to please an angel,” Rhys said. “Because that would insult me.”
As he began to move, dragging himself back only an inch, Avery halted him with her nails in his skin. She dug in deep, drawing blood she knew was as black as the darkness outside the bank of windows.
With another slight movement of his hips he played with her core, taunting, teasing, daring that drumbeat he had to feel rolling inside her to find him.
“This,” he said, pulling back at last, “is for keeping things from me.”
He drove into her depths while maintaining eye contact. But Avery had had enough, and she had learned a thing or two from the werewolves she’d used for sport.
“Who’s strong now?” she sent to Rhys, rolling out from under him and again straddling the spot where his belly met with the origin of his talented cock. “Who is in charge?”
Using one hand, she inserted him into her body. After briefly closing her eyes, she began to move up and down over him, reveling in the look on his face.
Take and retreat. Give and accept. Avery rode this beautiful creature whose soul was dipped in warm, familiar light. Softer. Harder. A pause before coming back for more...
She teased the thunder inside her, bringing it closer before easing the shudders back into the distance, all the while coaxing Rhys toward the climax he had been determined to keep from her.
When that climax finally arrived, she let herself meet it. With the flames of Earth and the heavens meeting as one, a surge of emotion overtook her. Throwing back her head, uttering a cry well-timed with Rhys’s final desperate groan, Avery let herself go.
And she fell... Not into Rhys’s arms, but into the past, as his hands reached the two deep scars between her shoulder blades that old traumas had marked her with.
* * *
A strange sensation crept over Rhys when he heard Avery’s impassioned cry. Instant recall told him he had felt the effects of that sound before, not only once, in that abandoned building down the street, but a few more times. That sound was getting clearer in his memory and was something he had stored there.
It wasn’t just passion he’d heard in Avery’s voice, but a more potent example of feelings that harkened back to the pain she harbored. She had unleashed that sound, let it out, set it free, and it disturbed him in ways Rhys couldn’t have explained.
A dazed expression had taken over her beautiful, colorless face. Her eyes had glazed. Her swollen mouth was slack. To him, it looked as though freeing all that emotion she had tucked inside had spiraled Avery into another space, one he couldn’t join her in.
“Avery,” Rhys whispered to her with his hands on her rib cage, afraid to release his grip. Afraid she’d disappear in some miraculous way and he’d never see her again or know another moment like the one they had just shared.
“Avery.” He spoke louder, careful to keep his voice calm when his insides were tightening.
She didn’t pay any attention and seemed to be elsewhere.
“Angel,” he called to her, willing her to hear him and respond. But she was gone, if not in body, then in spirit.
Cautiously, Rhys sat up and gathered her into his arms. Getting to his knees, then to his feet, he lifted her up. She didn’t protest. Her eyes were half shut.
Unsure of what to do, he took her to the bedroom, and to the bathroom beyond it. Turning on the shower, adjusting the temperature to hot, he stepped inside with his pale bundle cradled in his arms. Letting the water run over her arms, then her shoulders and back, Rhys waited, willing her to come back from wherever she had gone, calling her name over and over with the cadence of a chant.
It took several minutes for her attention to return and her eyes to focus. Steam rose around them, trapped by the shower’s heavy glass doors. Inside the gray, humid space, Avery’s hand moved. Her fingers curled into her palm in a gesture he’d seen before. Her thin shoulders twitched, as if feeling was returning after a lengthy numbness.
“What happened, Avery? Where did you go?” he asked, racking his brain to recall the exact moment she had left him...tracking back to the incredible climax they had ridden out in tandem and the breathlessness of a passion that had overcome them both. She had been with him on that. She had been there.
“What am I missing, Avery?”
He’d had his hands on her, on her back, planning to explore every glorious inch. He had held her in place as they tapped into the ecstasy of a complete physical merging.
Hands on her back...
Hell, he had touched her scars. The two big ones. Had that sent her over the edge of an invisible precipice?
He set Avery down, making sure she could stand on her own two feet. Water ran down her hair, her cheeks, as she raised her face to accept it. With her back to him, Rhys caught sight of movement he might otherwise have missed, sure he had to be wrong about what he was seeing. When her skin quaked, his gaze traveled to Avery’s new tattoos.
Stepping back only far enough to study those tats, Rhys froze. His sigils began to burn the way they always did when confronting something spectacularly out of the norm, something that lay beyond the easiest classifications of the supernatural.
The damn wings, inked on her shoulder blades by an artist in a nondescript shop, were moving, when that was impossible. These weren’t real wings. Avery had lost those. They had been stolen from her, she’d said.
Swear to God, there was nothing wrong with his eyesight. The inked vivid blue and gray feathers on her back undulated as if they were coming to life. Each feather’s bright red tip stood out like it had been dipped in fresh blood.
Rhys took another step back, puzzled, not understanding the reasons for or ramifications of what he was seeing. Avery turned her head. Through a curtain of soaked white hair, she said in a hoarse voice, “They’re here. Close. And they’re calling.”
Relief washed over Rhys for about five seconds before he again remembered touching those tats and the grooves they had been meant to cover. Had he helped her along by adding his strength and senses to hers? There had been an earlier mention of Avery’s new belief about having been meant to find him.
Whatever the reason for the catatonic state Avery had slipped into, he had no choice but to recognize that the next phase of the game was on, and that like Avery
, and whether or not he truly was willing to put her through more, he would see this quest of hers through to its conclusion without touching her again.
“Where did you go?” he repeated.
“To the place where they are,” she said.
Brushing soaked strands of hair back from her forehead, and careful not to touch any other part of her, he asked, “Do you know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“Can we find it?”
“Yes.”
“We’re to start now?”
Her eyes were wide and on him.
“All right,” Rhys said. “Show me.”
Chapter 17
The night carried the scent of a nearly full moon, an earthy smell with silvery overtones recognizable to all creatures comprised of Otherness.
In one more day the craziness that moon wrought would begin. Poor Detective Crane, who had allowed an immortal and an angel some time alone in the penthouse, might then be out of commission himself, due to the DI’s own tweaked, very wolfish DNA. Tonight, however, the shadows contained fewer monsters to trip things up.
Following Avery up one street and down another, careful to remain as inconspicuous as possible, Rhys stayed silent. Avery’s hood covered her damp hair and most of her face. Used to drawing stares, Rhys made sure not to make contact with any of the people passing them.
Tonight, mortal was a part they both had to play. Still, he felt eyes turn his way and thought about detouring to the rooftops where he and Avery would be safe from unwanted scrutiny.
They presented an interesting picture—two immortal beings walking down a public street as if they belonged to the world they had found themselves in, instead of merely being pasted onto that world. They were creatures whose origins set them apart from the rest.
“Is it far?” he queried after they’d gone five blocks.
“I don’t know.” She didn’t slow her pace or look at him. “I follow the song until it gets stronger.”
Right. The song was her form of angelic GPS.
“And now?” he asked.
“Faint.” She glanced to her right, at the narrow street branching off this one that was littered with pubs only the locals of this area would know about.
“In the apartment the signal was stronger?” he pressed.
“Infinitely stronger.”
“So we might be heading the wrong way.”
Avery shook her head. He couldn’t see her expression with her face covered up, but figured that determination and excitement would have set her features.
City smells were always overwhelming to his senses, and London was one continuous odor. What he could detect easily enough was the stink of vampires slithering around in the dark spaces of the road Avery was heading toward.
“Vampires,” he cautioned.
“Only four of them,” she said without moving her attention from the road ahead.
“Piece of cake,” Rhys muttered, wary of this latest distraction.
Avery paused long enough to look at him from beneath the black leather hood. Her eyes shone like jewels in its shadow.
“Current vernacular doesn’t suit you, Rhys.”
“One must adapt. I’m particularly fond of nineteenth-century curse words.”
Tuning his mind to vamp static, he said, “And here we go again.”
“No time,” was the response Avery tossed his way with an abrupt change of direction that moved them toward a second side street.
“Tell that to the unsuspecting people of this city,” he remarked, hesitating, plagued by the red flags his sigils were waving at him.
He wheeled around in slow motion to face the threat. Avery rested a hand on his arm, her touch burning into his skin, even through his clothes.
“Hurry,” she advised, gesturing up the street.
“There are too damn many of these mindless bastards,” he said. “Tonight they’re pressing their luck by appearing so soon after sundown.”
He strode forward with one shoulder brushing the brick of the closest building, moving through the same shadows vampires used to spring their deadly surprise attacks. But the vamp chatter suddenly ceased, as if someone had changed a radio channel. Perhaps they knew he was coming for them and had scattered. Clearly, they wanted no fight.
Slipping around a jutting corner that smelled like stale beer, Rhys entered a dark, mostly deserted side street. Assuming a wide stance with his hands fisted at his sides, he called out to the bloodsuckers. “I thought you knew better than to trespass in this area. Come out and deal with the consequences of trying to get away with that.”
None of the vampires came forward. Of course, Rhys hadn’t expected them to. He waited out a beat of time, listening, inhaling the stale, humid air, before realizing the odor of putrefaction that heralded the presence of the bloodsucker population had gone.
That fact was disconcerting.
He turned around uttering one of those favored curses to find the pale vixen with the undulating tats wasn’t there, either.
“Damn it all to hell and back...”
As he took off at a sprint, Rhys was starting to believe his angel had duped him again. Avery might have brought him this way on purpose, to a place where vampires often hid, in order to deflect his attention from the path she was actually taking. The angel would realize he had to take care of the mortals. She understood he couldn’t allow human lives to be in jeopardy when there was a chance they’d become dinner for the fanged hordes.
Damn her white hide...
If, like him, she couldn’t lie, this misdirection came awfully close to being the same damn thing. And she had suckered him into falling for it. He was beginning to think Blood Knight manipulation was high up on an angel’s list of talents. It was also very unlike heavenly behavior. He planned to tell her so.
Uttering a stream of curses didn’t make a dent in the anger growing inside him as he sent his senses outward, in search of his angel.
* * *
She hadn’t meant to leave Rhys like that, and wouldn’t have if handling vamps hadn’t been one of the things he did best...other than his more obvious proficiencies. Like kissing. Like mind-blowing sex.
Leaving him produced feelings of loss and of being constantly out of breath when she needed enough air to fuel her run. Getting to the end point of this quest had always been her goal, and that end was at long last within her reach.
It seemed to her that the inexplicable flapping sensation of the inked wings on her back was helping to point the way. It was a disturbing reminder that the most important part of her objective for coming to London was near. In spite of that, her heart ached for Rhys.
God, yes. She ached.
The speed of her sprint ate up the ground, creating more distance between herself and the glorious Knight whose lovemaking had only whetted her appetite for more of the same. With her back stinging like a son of a bitch and a leftover thrum for Rhys nestling deep inside her body, Avery took a route less peopled than the main streets.
She refused to slow her pace until the tattoos finally stopped nagging and the song she’d been following was suddenly silenced. Was this due to being in close proximity to the real wings? Had she gotten close to one of the black markets she sought?
Coming to a stop on the sidewalk, Avery became quiet to carefully soak up the scene. Nothing registered as abnormal or as a safe place for the bootlegging black market bastards to ply their trade, unless they weren’t on the street but above or beneath it.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m close.”
The ground beneath her boots shook slightly as two cars drove by. Avery stared down, deciding whether or not the street could be like a layer of skin covering a large, hollow space carved under it, and if that might explain the rumble.
&nbs
p; Had she been unable to locate her wings before this because they rested in an underground location protected by chalk, stone walls, dirt and several layers of pavement?
A smattering of people were coming and going now, probably on their way home from work. Stepping in front of a young man in a gray trench coat, she stopped him midstride, careful to keep her face hidden.
“There’s something under this street, right? I’m curious as to what that is. Do you know?” she asked, pointing at the ground.
Once the man got over his surprise at being halted in such a way by a hooded, leather-clad female, he caught on to what she was asking. “Kilometers of tunnels run under this area. Twenty miles of them.”
“Sealed off or accessible?”
Was that a weird question to pose? The guy’s eyebrow quirked.
“It’s a creepy place that attracts tourists at certain times of the year. There are others similar to this one in other parts of the city. Catacombs and the like. I haven’t been down there, but you can buy a pass to see some of them.” Seconds later, he added, “During the day.”
Avery didn’t ease up on the questions. Excitement had become a cruel companion. “How old are the tunnels?”
“I’m no history professor,” he said obligingly. “But they are supposed to be ancient. Predating the Druids, some say. Other sources suggest the tunnels were carved much later, for mining chalk and flint.”
That was all Avery needed to explain the flutter of her tattoos and the sudden urge to jump down a manhole. What better place could there be to conduct some black market business than a system of underground tunnels, at night, when no tourist would venture down there to interrupt?
What safer place could some savage bastard have for keeping a pair of angel wings?
“Thanks,” she said to the guy, remembering to be polite, but turning away quickly so he wouldn’t continue the conversation hoping to get a closer look at her or assume her behavior was flirtatious. Fact was, she didn’t know how to flirt or waste time on mundane mortal male-female issues. She was a warrior. Fighting was her specialty.
Angel Unleashed Page 15
