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She weaved her fingers through his hair, biting at his lower lip when he lifted his head. I called you when I needed you.
A frozen moment, their eyes locked into each other.
It felt as if he was looking through her heart, through her soul, through to the very core of who she was. But she saw him, too, this magnificent being full of power and secrets so deep and old, she wondered that she"d ever learn them all.
The kiss stole her breath, her thoughts, her everything. Moaning, she ran her fingers over the arch of his wings, felt him grow impossibly harder inside her. It was almost too much. She rose, her body releasing his with tortuous slowness, his mouth taking hers until she was a creature of the flesh, her senses awash in pleasure.
Tightening his grip on her waist, he pulled her back down. She went, needing the intimate friction, the earthy pleasure.“Raphael.” He broke the kiss to move one hand up to cup her breast, running his thumb over the part of her nipple that peeked above the waterline.
There was something unbelievably erotic about watching him touch her, his eyes a brand, his fingers so long and sure. Clenching her own hand on the slope of his wing, she moved impatiently against him. His head jerked up, eyes glittering like gemstones. The hand on her back shifted, fingers stroking the oh-so- sensitive inner curve of her wings.
“Stop that,” she said against his lips, unable to halt the slow, hot caress of her flesh on his, a tight release and sheathing that made her heart thunder.
So sensitive, hbeebti.
She didn"t understand it, and yet she did. He"d said something beautiful to her in a language that she only ever heard in hazy dreams now, a language that—no matter the associated memories of pain and loss—had always meant love.
Taking his hand, she brought it to her lips. The kiss she pressed to his palm was soft, his response a blaze of cobalt. And then there were no more words. Only pleasure. Searing, bone-deep pleasure. She broke apart, held in the arms of an archangel who would never let her fall.
“Mama?” Why was her mother’s high-heeled shoe lying on the tile of the foyer? Where was the other one? Mama hadn’t worn high heels for . . . a long time. She’d probably just gotten sick of it and kicked it off. Yeah, that must be it. But if she’d started to wear them again . . . maybe things would get better, maybe she’d smile and it would be real.
Her chest hurt with a painful kind of hope.
Stepping inside the cool wealth of the Big House, the house that had turned her daddy into a man she didn’t know, she went to reach for the shoe lying abandoned on its side. That was when she 244
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saw the shadow. So thin, swinging so gently.
She knew.
She knew.
She didn’t want to know.
Her heart a savage knot of barbed wire, she looked up. “Mama.” She didn’t scream. Because she knew.
The sound of tires on gravel, Beth being driven home from elementary school. Elena dropped her bag and ran. She knew. But Beth must never know. Beth must never see. Grabbing her sister’s small body in her arms, she pushed past the man who’d once been her father and out into the bright sunshine of a cloudless summer day.
And wished she didn"t know.
Elena dressed with quiet determination the night of the ball. But the past, it lay like a thick black blanket over her, heavy, suffocating. She wanted to claw at her neck, to gasp in desperately needed air, but that would betray weakness. And here, any weakness would be blood to the sharks that circled below the music that permeated the city.
Turning, she spied the sweep of blue the tailor had designed for the ball. It was a dress. But it was a dress for a warrior. Already wearing panties and the spike-heeled black boots that came up to her thighs, her weapons strapped to her body, she picked up the dress, the fabric like water against her fingertips.
“You tempt a man into mortal sin.”
She sucked in a breath as she saw her archangel, his chest bare, his legs clad in formal black pants. “Look who"s talking.” He was beauty cut by time, a lethal blade honed through the ages.
Lifting the dress, she stepped into it. The material slid against her legs as she drew it up, the top half pooling at her hips. Raphael prowled to her, his eyes skating over the naked flesh of her breasts. Possession glittered in those eyes, and that was all the warning she got before the storm of his kiss, the touch of his fingers . . . the angel dust that filtered into her very pores.
She held the kiss when he would have broken it. “Not yet.” Then she took her archangel, drinking in the taste of him until it suffused her veins, infiltrated her cells.
“You,” Raphael said against her mouth when she finally set him free, “will kiss me like that tonight.”
It was an order she could live with. “Deal.”
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