“I am a mother, Raphael.” A pause, an instant of piercing sorrow. “I was a mother.”
“Now you would make other mothers feel the same pain?” Neha was one of the few in the Cadre who had always treated mortal children as precious.
A slow blink, cold and dark, as she stared at him with a gaze that had been known to ensnare lesser angels. “I think you wil soon have far bigger problems to worry about than my modest games.”
Raphael said nothing.
Smiling, Neha reached out of the shot, and when her hand returned, those elegant fingers held a black orchid. “I thought this was a nice touch on my part.” She ran the ebony petals over the cobra’s skin. “It’l amuse me to watch you when she rises. She left you to die broken on a field far from civilization, did she not?”
Having expected the taunt, he didn’t react. “Neha,” he said softly. “I wil , if not forgive, not retaliate against these trespasses because you lost a child—
but do not play games in my territory again.”
Neha laughed, a bitter hiss of sound. “What would you do to me, Raphael? I have lost that which matters most.”
“A lie,” he murmured, waiting until her laughter died to deliver his coup de grace. “You would not like to lose your power.”
Neha’s expression went flat, hard. “You are arrogant enough to think you have the strength to affect my rule?”
“Never forget that I was the one who executed Uram when it needed to be done.” It had taken something from him to end the life of another archangel, but Uram had turned monster and could not be al owed to savage the world. “Never forget what and who I am, Neha.”
The Archangel of India held his gaze for a long, long moment. “Perhaps your mortal has not changed you after al .”
Raphael said nothing to that, ending the cal , but as he turned to walk up to join his hunter, he knew Neha was wrong. Elena had changed something fundamental in him. Do you wait for me, hbeebti? he asked, touching her mind, finding her awake.
The bed’s cold without you.
As he opened the bedroom door, he knew he would never again be able to return to the life he’d led before her—where hardness of the heart was nurtured and love termed a weakness. “Are you tired, Elena?”
Rising up into a sitting position, his hunter al owed the sheet to slide down to pool at her waist.
12
Elena’s throat went dry under the unwavering focus of Raphael’s gaze, the skin over her breasts suddenly too tight. Her need for him was a deep, aching hunger fueled by a day that had stirred hidden fears, painful secrets. She wanted his mouth on her, his hands on her—but there was a dangerous look to him tonight. Nothing akin to the rage that had made him burn so cold after the events at the girls’ school, nothing that scared her ... except in the most sensual of ways.
“Planning to come over here, Archangel?” she asked when he continued to caress her only with those eyes of inhuman blue, the ache inside her transforming into something darker, hotter.
He leaned against the closed door to the bedroom. “First, I intend to savor the view.”
She was a hunter, had never been a prude, but he made her skin flush, her nipples bead to urgent points. “At least take off your shirt,” she said, rubbing her feet against the sheets. “Make it fair.”
“Why would I wish to do that when I have a naked hunter in my bed, ready to submit to my every whim?”
Her toes curled, because right now, that look in his eyes—it was that of a conqueror, a man used to surrender. But that wasn’t the only thing she saw on his face. The faintest of smiles tugged at those lips that knew her every hidden pleasure point; his shoulders were relaxed in a way that told her he was playing with her. Oh, not al of it. A large part of him was, in al probability, experiencing the same arrogant satisfaction as any conqueror faced with a woman clothed only in her skin, a woman who had no intention of denying him anything . . . but this particular one had given her the right to make her own demands.
Eyes on him, she ran her hands down her rib cage, then back up to palm her breasts. Liquid heat in that gaze, but he didn’t move from the doorway.
“More, Elena.” It was a command, given in the tone she only ever heard in bed, sexual and demanding and, sometimes, without mercy.
“Always with the orders,” she whispered, rol ing and tugging at nipples that begged for a harder, bolder touch, yet so unbearably sensitive that she thought she might shatter if he so much as put those strong hands on her. “Maybe I want to be the one giving orders in bed.”
“What order would you give?” An intimate question, his gaze lingering on her lips with unhidden intent before dropping to the hand she slid provocatively under the sheet.