She hooked one leg around his hip, opened her mouth to the wet seduction of his kiss, licked her tongue against his in molten desire. Groaning, he settled more heavily against her, the cold metal of his zipper pressing into the skin of her abdomen as his wings spread above her in a caress of midnight.
“Later.” A husky word against her lips. “You can touch all you wish later.”
The rough promise made her melt. “I intend to.”
His hand on her breast, squeezing a fraction too softly. Perhaps it was shameless, but she put her hand over his, increased the pressure. Her reward for such brazenness was piercing pleasure, his lips hot and damp on her neck as he petted her breast, rubbed her nipple. Holding his head to her, she twisted against him, frustrated by the fabric that separated them. “Jason, your jeans.”
A sudden chill as he rose to get rid of his remaining clothing. The sight of him in the faint moonlight that entered the room through a high window, formed of fine designs cut into the stone itself, stole her very breath. He was a work of art, every part of him honed to a deadly edge. Raising her arm, she held out her hand, calling him back to bed.
He returned in a primal wave of heat that took her over. Kissing his way down her body, he hooked his fingers into the satin and lace of her panties to tug them off, throw them aside.
A wet, suckling kiss pressed just above her mound before he spread her thighs . . .
Mahiya arched off the bed under the stark intimacy of his next caress, his mouth tasting her most delicate flesh with lush eroticism as his hands held her open for his—their—pleasure. Her hands gripped at the sheets, her wings fluttering like creatures trapped, and her breath, it became a sob.
He deepened the kiss, one of his fingers sliding into her sheath.
The sensual intrusion tipped her over, the pleasure so intense, it stole her voice.
Moving up her quivering body with a slow attention to detail that left no inch of her skin untouched, untasted, her ni**les hard little berries for him to roll against his tongue, her br**sts left slick and wet to rub against the muscled beauty of his chest as he reached her lips at last.
First, he kissed the corners of her eyes, tasting the salt of the pleasure that shimmered over her skin still. But when she turned her lips to his, he accepted the invitation with raw hunger, one of his hands running down her waist to grip her thigh, bring it over his hip, opening her for him.
And then he was pushing into her, slow and insistent. She gasped, her flesh swollen, but there was no hurt. Only a near-painful need to have him inside her. Wrapping her other leg around his body, she pressed, urging him deeper.
“Mahiya.”
Her spymaster’s control fractured.
30
In the hours before returning to Mahiya, Jason had flown a considerable distance out from the fort to speak to an angelic couple just returned to the territory after a sojourn in the Refuge. Having received his message, they’d asked him to meet them at the lodge where they rested, as they planned to begin the second leg of their journey at first light—to their home at the other end of Neha’s territory.
He’d been lucky to locate the pair; they spent much of their time exploring the world, having earned a respite from their duties after millennia of service. Though the two were unquestionably loyal to their archangel, they also had an unhidden fondness for Raphael.
“We watched him grow from a child into an archangel. He was never too proud to talk to those of us who were weaker, even when his power eclipsed ours while he was but a babe.”
That fondness extended to the Seven, and the two had been happy to answer Jason’s questions about the vampire with scarlet hair, though he’d made the pattern of questioning such that the most important query was but one among many. He didn’t want a careless word to spook their prey. What he’d learned had been . . . interesting, until he could almost taste the answer on his tongue.
A shift against him, Mahiya’s fingers flickering on his chest. Her hair slid across his arm and shoulder at the same instant, one of her wings half on, half off his body as he lay on his back, both hands under his head.
“How long did I sleep?” she asked without lifting her head from his shoulder, her voice husky.
He glanced at the moonlight filtering through the high lattice window and said, “Not long. Perhaps an hour.” An hour as he listened to her breathe, as he traced quiet patterns on her skin and felt his heartbeat slow, lulled by the rhythm of hers. It had been an unexpected thing, and it had caused a violent response in him, a raw urging to get out, to get free.
But Jason was almost seven hundred years old, understood what drove him—he’d looked into the abyss of his soul, seen the lonely, forgotten boy looking back at him. He knew that boy trusted no one and nothing, knew he looked upon any kind of an emotional bond with suspicion, expected nothing but pain from any such relationship.
That boy, he was so afraid.
It was a truth about himself Jason had come to terms with long ago. That scared boy didn’t rule his conscious mind, but was so embedded in his subconscious that he often didn’t know why he acted as he did until the deed was done and his mind cleared again. Tonight, he’d fought the urge to leave when it hit him, because being in bed with a sleeping Mahiya was a pleasure all its own.
He liked that her scent warmed and seemed to soak into his own skin, liked that he could twine her hair lazily around his fingers and play with it as he thought, liked that she made tiny little noises and burrowed deeper into him every so often—as if she adored being with him. He almost felt real, as if he was a normal man, one capable of loving a woman and holding her close.
It was an illusion, but it was an illusion he was willing to believe in for this night.
“Hmm.” Reaching down, Mahiya tugged up the sheet tangled around her thighs to her waist, before placing her hand over his heartbeat again. Her wing rose a fraction as her mouth and jaw moved against his skin in a yawn, and the silver light of the moon kissed the feathers to jewel brightness.
Before she’d fallen asleep, those wings had shimmered in his vision as she spent an hour touching and kissing his body with unhidden pleasure. Drunk on the tactile sensations, he’d had to coax her to straddle him, his shy Mahiya, but once there, she’d used her position to caress him with sweet feminine delight.
Living in the illusion, he moved one hand to run his fingers over the sensitive arch. She shivered, her wing floating down to lie across his body once more. “You could make me agree to commit a great many sins with those fingers, Jason.”