by Holley Trent
Bobbing his right knee, he tried to wield mastery over unfamiliar body functions and failed. He kept his hands on top of the table and not on the cock expanding uncomfortably in his jeans. He’d always possessed the sense of touch. His body could feel simple pleasures and that was a gift for angels and mankind alike. Pain, however, had been rare. Of all the things stripped from him during his fall, his resistance to pain was one of the first.
If he wanted to live like a man, he had to suffer like one, too.
His exhale came out sounding like a hiss, and he cursed the inventor of whatever fabric his boxer shorts were made of. It felt like millions of tiny little burrs on his cock. He didn’t know much about the physical aspects of sex, but he was pretty sure this was part of his penance.
“You’re looking a little pale,” Sweetie said. “Did you sit down too fast or something?”
“I can teleport. I doubt that a slight change in my body’s position would cause any distress.” Of course, on the rare occasion he teleported now, all the blood in his body didn’t pool in one particularly sensitive location.
“Angels aren’t susceptible to communicable illnesses, so it can’t be that,” she said. “What’s really going on?”
He opened his mouth, but before he could get words out, she put up her hand. “Don’t. Don’t lie to me.”
“You know lying causes me physical distress.” Or did it? He hadn’t tried since falling, and not for a long time before that.
“Okay.” She nodded and finally set the sandwich down. “Maybe you don’t lie, but you’re damn good at leaving shit out. Calvin’s lawyer calls that lying by omission. Don’t forget. Even in my human form, I have better than average smelling. I can smell distress from you. It smells like adrenaline and sweat, just like my brother’s gym bag. The Angel I know doesn’t sweat a damn thing, so tell me now what’s going on.”
“Or else what?”
Her jaw flapped a few beats and forehead furrowed. “What do you mean or else what? What’s gotten into you? Angel doesn’t talk back.”
“Like I said, maybe this is a part of my personality that you need to become accustomed to. And please finish the sandwich. I’m sure you need the protein.”
“Who the hell cares about the sandwich? Why do you—” Her words cut off with a growl of frustration and she pounded the table with one weak fist and snarled at him.
“Scary.” He tamped together a pile of collard leaves before snipping off the stems. “You know, you’re not even all that intimidating in wolf form, but maybe I’m jaded. You’re probably very frightening to the raccoons and squirrels.”
She pushed back from the table and stomped over to him. Growling again, she poked his shoulder and then shook it. “You’re trying to talk me into circles. You know my head ain’t where it’s supposed to be in the first place and I can’t keep up. What is wrong with you?”
“I ask myself that every morning. There’s always something new that’s wrong. Today, it was my hearing. Frequencies are way off. I wonder if it’s the altitude.” He threw the greens into the bowl and stood, carefully disengaging her fingers from his shoulders. His gaze was locked on her pouting lips as he reached for the coat’s zipper and pulled it up.
He turned her before she could look down at herself or him and gave her a small push toward the bathtub. “If you’re not going to eat, then bathe. That should keep you occupied for at least an hour.”
“That sounded a lot like an insult to me, Angel.” She tried to dig her heels in and hold her ground, but he picked her up by her armpits and carried her, kicking and growling to the tub corner.
While he fiddled one-handed with the tub knobs, he kept a grip on her wrist to keep her from scampering away.
“I thought it was cats that were afraid of water, not wolves,” he said.
She tried to kick him, but he moved his knee out of the way just in time.
“You’re trying to put me off, and all I want you to do is answer a damned question!” she shrieked.
“Perhaps it doesn’t suit me to answer it at the moment.” He tested the water temperature with his elbow and wondered if she’d be better off in hot water or cold.
He knew which he needed. He’d already set his mind on a brisk walk through the snow.
“Have you been possessed or something? Tell me that’s not it. Oh, shit, you’d better call Claude and let him get it out of ya.” Her eyes went wide as if the idea dawned on her as the truth and not just wild-assed speculation.
Mark turned off the water and indicated the tub. “There’re lots of towels for you, and soap, shampoo … everything you’d need. Uh … ” He hooked a thumb toward the nearby dresser. “There’s clothes for you in the top drawer.”
He stepped back from the tub and grabbed the curtain to cordon off the corner. Once she’d been concealed behind it, he added, “And no, I haven’t been possessed by anything but you.”
“What?” Her response came on five-second delay as if her brain couldn’t process what he’d said.
He didn’t respond. He just walked to the cabin door and unlocked it. He turned back to see her nudging the curtain aside so one eye and all that messy hair peeked out.
He’d need to get out of there while she bathed because he was pretty sure his dick was flawed in such a way that if it got any harder it’d detach itself and create a whole new person via asexual reproduction. And it’d have the only brain Mark had been using since he’d carried Sweetie into the cabin.
The idea of her naked and dripping wet made his balls tighten and throb. It was a wonder his incubus buddies were as sane as they were if this was the shit they endured all the time.
“Fuck.”
He opened the door only to be greeted by an embankment of powder as high as his navel. Snowed in.
He grabbed his short hair and yanked, repeating, “Fuck.”
“Angel,” Sweetie said from behind the curtain, “bring your filthy mouth over so I can introduce it to this here bar of soap.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Mark banged around in the kitchen while Sweetie drained the water from the tub. She needed a bath to clean herself up from the bath—that’s how dirty she was. As she waited for the water to refill, she drummed her fingers on the edge of the tub and tried to clear the cobwebs from her brain.
She hadn’t been lying when she said Mark wasn’t the kind of guy to sweat stuff. He had an enviable cool about him, and panicking just wasn’t a part of his nature. He claimed he hadn’t been possessed, and she’d just have to take his word for that. She didn’t know enough about angels to speculate on what else could be ailing him, but she found it hard to believe that his personality would have changed so much in six months.
Maybe he was right and it hadn’t changed, and she just hadn’t paid attention to that part of him. Hell, she didn’t know shit about what he was like when he was around just the guys. He could have been as gross as her brother for all she knew, and while she loved her big brother very much, she didn’t know if she could get with a man who could belch the North Carolina state song on cue.
“Get with him?” She rolled her eyes at her own wandering thoughts. There’d be no getting, so it’d be in her best interest to exterminate all traces of that train of thought from her mind as soon as possible.
She settled into the tub yet again and slid down until her chin touched the hot water. Never in her life had she imagined that a clean, hot bath would be such a luxury. She’d miss them when she went back out into the wild.
That is, until she forgot. If it was like this last time, she’d forget everything after a while. “Whatever you’re cooking, it sure smells good, angel,” she said as she batted her fingers through the snarls in her hair.
“I bet you’d think anything smells good given your lack of options for the past several months.”
She grunted her agreement and slipped down lower into the tub to wet the top of her head. “When did you become Julia Child?” she asked.
“New hobb
y. You’d be surprised at how many hobbies a guy my age has burned through.”
“Jack of all trades and master of every damn one of them, I bet.”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t say master. I get bored just like everyone else. Sometimes I let hobbies fall off and pick up new interests way before I reach expert status.”
“Like what? What kind of stuff have you given up on?” She imagined him in a number of improbable predicaments including bull running, Olympic heptathlon, and wrestling with lions. That last one made her snort. Her gentle Mark in an arena with a dirty, snarling beast? Minus the crowd and the leather gladiator attire, the scenario sounded way too familiar.
“Too many to itemize.” He rattled a utensil against a pot side, and must have dropped it in the sink because there was a hollow thunk sound right after.
“Name just one.”
“Okay. Painting.”
“Bet you were good at it.” She reached over the tub side and grabbed the curtain. She pulled it aside just enough to see him at the table pouring what looked like rum over a fruitcake. If she had to guess, she’d say it was homemade and that he’d made it. She’d never had a boyfriend who could cook.
Well, she still didn’t have a boyfriend who cooked, and probably never would. Wolf men didn’t tend to be especially domestic, and no other man she’d met from any other compatible group had indicated a keen familiarity to the workings of a kitchen, either.
Sighing, she let the curtain fall back. Comparing every man to Mark wasn’t helping her with her pickiness problem. “Why’d you quit painting?”
“I guess I was good, technically speaking, but incredible art requires a certain passion that I just didn’t have. You have to do some living to make art that touches people.”
“Living? You’ve done more of that than nearly everyone.”
“Not really.”
When he didn’t elaborate further, she pulled the curtain back again.
He looked up from the cake and immediately averted his eyes from her.
“Nice of you to be a gentleman, but you really can’t see anything. Tub is covering me from my collarbones on down.”
He turned his head and looked at her sideways as if that would somehow reduce the potential for scandalization. She had one mind to just show him what he obviously didn’t want to see. What would he care, anyway? He’d probably seen thousands if not millions of naked women in his time. Hell, he’d seen her naked, in fact. Maybe he hadn’t liked it.
She slumped down farther in the tub at the thought.
“Living is … somewhat different than being alive,” he said softly. “To live, to really live, you have to have wants and desires of your own and the motivation to fulfill them. Living is about searching for your greatest happiness, and sometimes that means being a little selfish. To live, you’ve sometimes got to set the expectations of others aside. You’ve got to stick your neck out to get what you know will fill you up and make everything you’ve endured worthwhile.”
She was afraid to ask, but now she was used to her body working apart from her brain. The words slipped through her lips unfettered. “Are you living now, Mark?”
Now, he looked at her dead-on, removed his glasses, and folded them closed. He tried so hard to be plain and to blend in—to be average, but he just wasn’t.
“You’ve got to have a soul to live, Sweetie. Until recently, I … I didn’t have one. I’m not what I was. I’m—” He paused and blew out a big breath. “I’m not exactly an angel anymore.”
No one could accuse her of being a stupid woman, but those words didn’t make a lick of sense. Of course he was an angel. Who else would pull her out of the snow? As far as she knew, even the wolves didn’t care that much about her anymore.
“You’re lying,” she said, shaking her head.
He shook his head solemnly. “I’m not. Feel out my energy. I think you know it feels a little different. Now you know why. I’m bound to the Earth now. I’m as much man as I am other.”
She pulled up the tub stopper with her big toe and frantically reached for a towel. “You’ve got to give it back. You’ve got to … do whatever you have to, but you have to go back. You can’t just be a—”
“Be a what?” His voice was far too calm and his body too still there at the table. His face was an unreadable blank, but now she knew it was because he was working at it. Whatever emotions he had ping-ponging around in that complicated noggin of his, he had locked down tight as a drumhead. How long had he been practicing that? Weeks? Months?
“Just a man!” she shouted as she scrambled from the tub. Disoriented, she slipped on the wet floor upon stepping out and although she saw the wood slats careening ever closer to her face, her reflexes were no longer sharp enough for her to try to break her own fall.
Mark did, though.
Fast as light, he moved across the room and grabbed her before she hit the floor. He held her out at arm’s length, and that stoic expression cracked. “Even if I were just a man, what’s so wrong with being that?”
“How can you even ask that? Mankind, shit, we’re nothing. We’re just animals trying to get our needs met and there’s nothing so noble about that. Why would you give up God’s favor to be stuck here?”
“For free will, Sweetie. For a path of my own. For passion. All of that is worth falling for.”
“F-falling?”
Although she’d understood in the back of her mind that angels didn’t have souls, it hadn’t dawned on her that he no longer was one.
Her angel … wasn’t.
As if he could glean that bit of upsetting thought from her, he pulled her closer and wrapped his arms around her.
“You’re not like the others—the ones who are all demons now.” She knew a few demons. Some just wanted to be left alone. Some were power-hungry megalomaniacs like John, Claude, and Charles’s father. She knew better than anyone not to judge a group on the actions of a few. All the same, his energy didn’t feel like demon. It felt like Mark. Just different. “You don’t want what they do, so why’d you do it?”
“I told you why.”
“Passion? Bullshit. Nothing’s worth falling for.” She said that last bit in a whisper, but of course he heard it.
He rubbed her back through her soaking wet towel and exhaled. “You’re not nothing.”
You’re not nothing. That meant …
“Wait.” She tried to put her hands between them to push him back, but he was too close. “You didn’t fall for…for me, did you? Because that would be the absolute stupidest fucking thing—”
He stifled her words with his lips and subdued her agitation with his gently probing tongue.
Her legs gave out beneath her and this time it wasn’t due to a slick floor or aggregated malnourishment, but just him. She could hardly breathe for his scent. His skin bore an essence she imagined was the smell of heaven—a stunning mix of man and air and something fresh like spring rain. It was a scent she wanted to curl up in or pull around her like an old blanket.
God, she was no better than a puppy in a crate seeking comfort, and here she was looking for it from the person who’d caused her the distress in the first place. Dumb dog.
Gasping, she pushed ineffectually at his chest until her towel dropped. She couldn’t stoop to pick it up, because he pulled her back to him and demanded, “Kiss me.”
“No. This is wrong.”
“What is? Me loving you? I’ve always loved you.”
Oh, God. Oh, God.
She had to be dreaming. Just a little wolf mania. The canine must have been experiencing a bit of hypothermic delirium.
Nope. His hands on her ass felt very real, and her ears were working just fine.
“Oh, yeah, that’s so wrong. Let me go.” She clawed at his arms, batted at his chest, and even tried to kick his shins, but he held her tighter. He may have lost his place in the angelic hierarchy, but he didn’t lose his strength. Whatever he was, it wasn’t just a man.
She felt th
e sharp protrusion against her belly as she fought him, and stiffened when she realized what it was.
“If I let go of you, will you calm down?” he asked.
“Uh. Not sure what the right answer is.” This had to be a test of some kind. She’d finally give in to her urges, touch him the wrong way, and would receive her first-class ticket to Hell in exchange. She’d always tried to be a good girl, and hey—everyone slipped up every now and then—but this had to be some nightmare. “Yeah, that’s what it is,” she said, laughing to herself. She grabbed up some of her flesh and pinched it so hard she yipped. “Nope, not a dream.”
“Sweetie? Are you going into shock or something? Maybe you need something to drink.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Perhaps a shot of Everclear and a jug of moonshine to wash it down with.”
She started to shake, and she didn’t know if it was from her wild wolf hormones going out of whack again, the slight draft in the room, her dampness from the tub, low blood sugar or blood pressure, or absolute fright. Very possibly all of the above.
“Shit.” He picked her up for the God-knows-how-manyieth time this hour and carried her to the bed. Upon hitting the now-cold sheets, she shook even harder.
“Hold tight,” he said. “Let me bank up the fire.”
She guessed he did it, but she had no memory of it. When he drew away from her, there was only dark, and it didn’t clear until he climbed onto the bed beside her and pulled the covers up over them both.
He pulled her against his body, sharing his warmth through skin and with his hot mouth leaving kisses along the side of her face. Pinned under his muscular leg and feeling very weak, and very wanton, all she could think to say was, “You should probably just let me back into the woods. You can forget all about me and act like this never happened.”
“No. I meant what I said. This isn’t like an angel Rumspringa. I don’t get a do-over.”
“A rum-what?”
“Rumspringa. It’s an Amish thing. Young adults get a certain amount of time to live on the outside so that when they recommit themselves to their faith, they know what it is they’re leaving behind. They’re forgiven for the sins they commit when they’re away from home and are brought back into the fold with no questions asked. For some, though, it’s a get out while you can kind of experience. I don’t fit in either of those camps.”
