“Paying how?”
The minister waved at a passing dragonfly. “We can discuss details later. I assure you, however, that from here on, your only subjects will be consenting Yamish adults.”
“I’d want a written contract.”
“I thought you might.” The corners of the minister’s mouth twitched. “You will, of course, have to induce the human to stay here. We can’t have him talking to or being seen by others. I presume you have some means by which you could reconcile him to his lot.”
Her bare toes curled uncomfortably into the grass, her shoes having fallen off during the previous night’s flight. “I believe I do.”
I hope I do, is what she thought.
The minister may have sensed her uncertainty. “The only other option is to amputate his wings and perform a memory wipe, the technology for which—as you know—is somewhat barbaric.”
Khira said nothing. No way in creation would she subject Harry’s wonderful mind and heart to that. She wanted him to remain exactly what and who he was.
Amazingly, the minister seemed uncomfortable with her silence. “Well, then,” he said after a pause. “It seems we are essentially in agreement. I’d like to add that I’m pleased to have avoided ordering you killed. Your brain is a national treasure. I might wish you had a different familial derivation, but perhaps true originality needs original soil. Your parents certainly have proven theirs.”
Khira bowed, feeling as if he had unwittingly given her a gift with this compliment. Maybe it was time she made peace with her upbringing. Maybe it was going to bring her more rewards than she’d dreamed. Aloud, she said, “I look forward to meeting with your lawyers.”
The minister bowed elegantly back and returned without further formalities to his transport.
Until it lifted off, Khira refrained from sighing relief.
Harry had never been as content as he was at this moment. He and Khira sat in a sheltered courtyard within the castle, holding hands on a small stone bench, behind which roses as big as soup bowls shed their scent. Khira had told him, word for word, what the minister had said. Unless Harry wished to do himself and her great harm, his life as he’d known it had to be over. Astonishing as it sounded, he couldn’t have been happier.
He lifted Khira’s knuckles to his mouth for a gentle kiss and asked a question that had been preying on his mind. “Was there really a problem with my heart?”
She’d been staring at her new slippers, but now she looked at him. Her gaze was different than it had been when they first met, still serene, but somehow open—as if she were now willing to let him see what he could find within. “I was wondering when you’d ask me that. Yes, your heart had a weakness. It wouldn’t have killed you for another decade, but that seemed too soon to me nonetheless.”
“So you fixed it.”
A tiny pucker appeared between her brows. “The thought of you dying young disturbed me. I suppose I should have realized you’d already engaged my affections.”
“Because you found me so irresistible while I lay paralyzed with my prick gone begging, and even more so when I jumped off a moving train to get away from you.”
“Those circumstances did intensify your pull on me.”
“I’m glad,” he said, because if he hadn’t, he would have laughed.
“You won’t mind…living out here?” she asked shyly.
He kissed her forehead. “I fought all my life to get where I was when you found me: safe, respected, financially secure—everything I’d dreamed of as an orphaned boy. The night you walked into that pub, I’d finally realized it wasn’t enough. I didn’t need things, or security. They left me empty. What I needed was someone to give my heart.”
Khira turned her head away. Harry didn’t think this was because he was saying things she disliked hearing, though he did lighten his tone. “I won’t miss being lonely,” he added, “and I won’t mind living in a place this peaceful and clean. Not being the king of the costermongers might cause me a pang now and then, but I expect I’ll find some way to earn my keep.”
“The king?” Khira repeated faintly, which made him smile. “Harry, I really must apologize for misjudging you so completely when we first met.”
“No need, love. Appearances can be deceiving.” His grin broadened. “For my part, I thought you no less than a queen.”
“Oh, no!” she protested. “My family’s position among the daimyo is very modest: strictly lower upper class. Apart from our ingenuity, the Forette line has very little leverage. That’s why I hoped you might consent to—” Khira cleared her throat as if it were tight. “My parents are in dire need of business advice.”
“Are they? Well, if they wish to employ me, I hope they’re prepared to amass more leverage than they have now. When I take charge of a business, I do it right.” Harry rubbed his newly shaven chin. “I trust it’s all right to confess I like them.”
Khira couldn’t repress her grimace completely. “I imagine their character is more what you’re accustomed to than mine.”
“Not at all!” he assured her, chuckling. “Just think, though, if you shared your parents with me, tolerating them might seem less of a burden.”
“It’s true you’ve never had parents,” she said judiciously. “You might enjoy any sort, no matter how peculiar.”
“Plus, sharing parents seems like a thing mates should do.”
Khira narrowed her eyes. “‘Mates’ means married, Harry.”
He genuinely enjoyed smiling at her. “I suspected as much.”
She said nothing as to whether marrying him would be welcome, but beneath the thumb he was using to caress her wrist, he felt her pulse racing. She scooted closer, until her entire arm was pressed to his ribs. Harry’s pulse picked up as well. He knew what this kind of contact could lead to.
Self-conscious about the erection growing at his groin, Harry glanced up the nearest castle wall. Khira’s mother had the maids inventing shirts with wingholes behind the upper windows, and Khira’s father kept walking out on the parapet to wave. Maybe tonight, once her parents stopped fussing over them, he and Khira could sneak out of the castle and try making love while flying again. The hope of doing that made him much better than resigned to keeping his new appendages.
Perhaps Khira was entertaining similar ideas. When he wrapped his wing and arm around her, she snuggled her head into his shoulder.
“Mother was right about one thing,” she admitted. “I do feel compelled to do things to prove I can. When I get my lab, I might have to see if I can grow myself a pair of wings.”
“Ah,” Harry said, his heart expanding like a heat wave inside his chest. Then and there he knew, even if Khira didn’t, that she had as good as accepted him. God, he loved her, odd Yamish ways and all. Though his eyes were pricking with emotion, he managed to speak calmly. “You know, you will have to hone a few new skills before you can keep up with me, so to speak.”
“Yes,” Khira agreed, her lovely face a picture of determination. “I’ll have to learn to laugh as well as you!”
Angel and the Hellraiser
Vickie Taylor
Chapter 1
DEATH was a fickle bitch, and Zane Halvorson flirted with her every chance he got.
Okay, so maybe firing a flare gun into his parachute while he was still four hundred feet above his landing zone, and staring up in awe as the fragile nylon disintegrated into ash a little more quickly than he’d calculated had been closer to insanity than showmanship. What the hell? He was an aerial stuntman. He got paid to defy death. To make the crowd scream and mothers cover their children’s eyes to keep them from being traumatized for life by his twice-weekly, seemingly inevitable, gory demise.
Never let it be said that Zane Halvorson didn’t give people their money’s worth.
If one of his stunts did actually manage to kill him, at least he’d die in a manner of his own choosing. On his own terms. Terms that seemed to finally be coming to fruition on a sunny Sunday afternoon at
the central New Mexico Boat and Air Show, as the short-lived glory of the flaming parachute gag dumped him in the lake next to the airfield, well short of his planned drop on the tarmac.
Tempting fate on a regular basis the way he did, he wasn’t surprised to find himself sinking to a dark, watery grave at the bottom of Lake Mitchell. Drifting to his death with a auburn-haired beauty he’d never seen before floating serenely at his side, however, was quite a jolt.
The current fanned a halo of dark, wavy locks around her head. The sunlight glaring off the surface of the water surrounded her in an ethereal glow, like she was some kind of goddess. Her eyes were deep-sea green, and held such tranquility that just gazing into them filled him with peace. Acceptance.
The last bit of oxygen he’d hoarded in his lungs during his descent escaped and gurgled toward the surface in a column of bubbles, and he watched with a kind of detached curiosity. He felt odd. There should have been pain. He’d hit the water at far too high a speed to not be injured. There should have been panic as the weight of his waterlogged jumpsuit dragged him down, and the cords of his demolished parachute tangled around his arms and legs, ending his struggle to kick and swim his way to the surface, to air.
But there was no panic. No pain. There was only a gentle touch of the mystery woman’s fingers to his cheek, and comfort, as if someone had tucked a soft blanket around his shoulders on a cold night. That and a slight tingling in his hands and legs as his extremities slowly went numb.
His eyelids grew heavy and slid half-closed. The lake pulsed like a living thing around him, its heartbeat thrumming low and steady in his ears. The woman beside him floated closer, and her nearness enveloped him in warmth.
Who are you? he asked, hearing the words as clearly as if he’d spoken them, though—hell—that wasn’t possible. He was underwater. He was drowning. Maybe he was already dead, though he didn’t feel dead. He felt…satisfied for the first time in a long time. And a little confused.
I’m an angel, she answered in the same freaky speechless communication.
An angel?
Sent to you by God.
Yep. Definitely dead.
With a concerted effort, he pried his eyelids back open a fraction. They were deep in the lake now, darkness closing around them. Yet the light still surrounded her, bouncing off the particles in the murky water in a strange pattern that spread behind her back like…wings.
He slammed his eyelids shut. Who was he kidding? There was no celestial being coming for Zane Halvorson. After a life of beer drinking, bar brawling, and hell-raising recklessness, he was more likely to spend his eternal days breathing fire than angel dust.
His mouth twisted into a wry grin. ’Fraid there’s been some mistake, he drawled in his thoughts.
No. A gentle smile graced the corners of her mouth. I’m here for you. Only you.
He felt her fingers working at the buckles of his harness, and the cumbersome equipment fell away. Instantly he felt buoyant, lighter in body and in soul. Next, her hands moved to the zipper of his jumpsuit.
Okay, normally, a beautiful chick undressing him and professing that she was here only for him would be a real turn-on. An irresistible turn-on, even.
Today, dying at the bottom of this godforsaken lake, it pissed him off.
No. He pushed her hands away.
She arched back, her delicate brows pulling together. Her arms swirled at her sides, holding her stationary in the water. But I’ve come to save you.
To save him? God had sent an angel. To save him. The irony of it burned. The warmth that had suffused him suddenly banked to an uncomfortable heat. Rage. Don’t you get it? I don’t want to be saved.
He’d no sooner thought the last word than a current with the strength of a tsunami slammed into him. The jet stream propelled him up with such force that he felt as if the skin might be ripped from his body. His internal organs plummeted to the bottom of his abdomen. He was a bullet streaking across an open plain, a rocket in the night sky, an untamed creature of the sea, streaking from the dark depths toward the surface, toward the sun. Toward life.
She had a name.
A moment ago, she had simply been. A benevolent life force on a mission for humanity, she had existed as energy, as light and imagination, a small piece of the energy, light and imagination that was the universe, and now she was Rosemary D’Amica, photographer for the Las Nueces Times. She had shape. She had form. She had a name.
She had a body.
She ran her trembling hands down her sides, feeling the strength of the ribs beneath her skin, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips. She tipped her chin down to catch sight of her own heaving chest, her pebbled forearms, and shivered.
God, no!
Being forced to take human form was always a possibility in her job. She’d just hoped she could avoid it….
The sunlight assaulted her eyes, and she flung a hand up in front of her face to ward off the brightness. She was on a boat. The roar of the engine, the slap of waves against the hull, and the simultaneously inhaled breaths of hundreds of air-show onlookers on the shore beat against her eardrums. The cotton tank top and denim shorts she wore chaffed at her skin. The bitter tang of fear stung her tongue.
“Roll him over!” A voice pierced her mind like a needle. She wasn’t used to physical sensation. Until a few seconds ago, she’d existed in a place of quiet, of peace. The light, the sound, overwhelmed her. It was all too much, too loud, too sudden.
She clapped her hands over her ears, but the voice drilled through.
“Roll him on his side. Do it now, Rosemary!”
Through squinted eyes, she glanced up at the man yelling at her as he piloted the boat toward shore full-throttle. John Murphy, she realized. Part-time staff reporter for the Times. She knew his name the same way she knew her own. The way she knew where she lived and where she worked. In the blink of an eye, this life had been created for her and all the mortals who would swear they had known her all their lives. Part of the grand plan, whatever that was, designed by a higher power. Much higher.
Following John’s gaze, she looked around and realized she was on her knees on the deck of the small boat, crouched over the body of Zane Halvorson. Water dripped from her chin to his still chest.
Coughing as her own burning lungs came to grips with the sudden availability of—and need for—oxygen, she rolled the lifeless man to his side and looked back to John.
“Slap him between the shoulder blades!”
“What?” Violence wasn’t in the angel handbook.
“Make him cough up the water. Try to get him breathing!”
Shaken by her lack of understanding of corporeal matters, she did as she was told and hit the heel of her hand on Zane’s back, then looked back to John.
“Is he breathing?”
She splayed one hand across the cool, damp chest, and lowered her ear next to the man’s mouth, but couldn’t hear or feel anything. “I don’t think so!”
“All right.” John measured the distance to shore with a glance, then turned back to her and shouted. “Rescue breathing.”
“What?”
“Mouth to mouth. CPR!”
At first Rosemary had no idea what he was talking about, but the knowledge flooded her mind the same way all the details of the mortal existence that had been built for her had. She rolled Zane to his back, then checked for respiration and pulse. His heart was beating, but he wasn’t breathing.
As if she’d practiced a thousand times, she tipped his head back, pinched his nose and blew two quick breaths into his mouth, then rolled him to his side, thumped his back and checked for respiration again.
Feeling her senses heighten even more as adrenaline pumped into her system, she raised a desperate glance to John. “Nothing!”
“Try again! Keep trying!”
The boat’s engine revved until they sounded as if they might snap like a wire strung too tight. Rosemary ignored the painful whine, focused on her task. Roll. Breathe.
Roll. Slap. Roll. Breathe. Roll. Slap.
Her stomach lurched as the boat hit the dock hard enough to send her skidding across the deck, grasping the shoulder of the unconscious man beside her to keep him from toppling overboard.
Silence descended with a force as deafening as the clamor that had brutalized her only minutes ago. She could feel the dying vibration of the engine as John cut the motor. The held breath of the people watching from shore.
All of her concentration narrowed into Zane Halvorson. Roll. Breathe. Roll. Slap. Roll—
He coughed. More accurately, his whole body spasmed. Streams of lake water jetted out of his mouth as his hands clutched protectively over his stomach and his knees drew up to his chest.
After a few moments, Zane’s eyes opened. Huge, dark pupils sucked her in like a vacuum. A moment of recognition passed from his eyes to hers, then a hint of inquiry and finally narrow-eyed suspicion. Off to her side, John picked up her camera and snapped off shot after shot of the two of them. Her chest clenched around each gasping breath—Zane’s and hers—until he finally seemed to realize where he was, how many people were watching.
His gaze still locked on hers, he reached out and grasped her fingers. His lips curved in a deliberate smile as he rolled up to his knees and raised their joined hands toward the sky in a gesture of triumph for the crowd.
“Woooooo-hooooooo!” he hollered, and as one, the crowd let out a deafening cheer.
The noise and the light crashed in on Rosemary again. Dizzy and queasy from the onslaught, she tried to pull back, away, but Zane held her tight.
His smile widened, but before she’d recovered enough to read the intent swirling in his hazel eyes, he slipped an arm behind her shoulders and draped her backward in his embrace. His mouth followed her down, and his lips captured hers in a kiss that had her fingers fisting in the wet fabric of his jumpsuit and her muscles turning to jelly.
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