Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(77)

An overload of sensation. Crackling electricity across her skin.

Not fighting the agonizing bite of pleasure, she reclaimed his lips as he pushed them both through the clouds again, his body shifting with each wingbeat to caress her with excruciating intimacy. Clenching her fingers in his hair, she rubbed herself against the solid heat of his chest, needing, wanting, hungering.

Dance with me, Elena.

He bit at her lips when she squeezed her inner muscles in a sexual caress, kissing his way across her cheek and down her neck before he took her mouth again.

Then they fel once more.

She came apart on a scream halfway through the dive, every nerve in her body igniting with pleasure, with sensation, with the wild exhilaration of dancing with an archangel. Lights exploded behind her eyes, blue and gold and filled with the wicked, wicked glimmer of angel-dust. And all around her, she felt sleek, warm muscle, until she didn’t know where she ended and he began. With me, Archangel. A demand saturated in pleasure.

But I am not finished with you, Hunter.

He rose again, skimming so close to the water that she felt the spray cool and wet against her overheated skin.

Thigh muscles quivering like jel y, she locked her ankles at his lower back, resting her head in the curve of his neck. Too bad. I think I’m dead.

A laugh, husky and male in a way that shouted sex. It did something to her, that sound, blew air onto the embers of a passion so recently satisfied. Her skin stretched taut in anticipation, and she found herself kissing his neck again, caressing him every way she could. With her mouth, with her fingers, with the most secret parts of her body.

Elena. His hold tightened. Once more.

“Once more.” With that, she locked her mouth to his as they plummeted in a dizzying spiral awash in the erotic gold of angel-dust.

She was so focused on the male who owned her heart, her soul, that she didn’t see the sea rushing up at them until it was too late. Raphael! she screamed as they hit ... except there was no pain, and she was tumbling, tumbling down with her archangel, the water held at bay by a shield of shimmering light streaked with blue.

Heart thudding triple-time, she gripped his face. “Scaring me out of my wits is not good foreplay.”

Reaching between them as they came to a lazy stop, he touched the hot, slick bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs . . . and she threatened to fracture. Clenching her inner muscles, she met those eyes so much bluer than the Atlantic. Move.

One hand under her butt, the other on her back, the archangel decided to obey an order for once.

Then there was no more thought.




Raphael leaned on his forearm the next morning as he lay watching his consort sleep. Exhaustion had her limp, her arms curled around her pil ow as she lay on her front. He smiled, running a single finger down the centerline of her back.

She made a sound, but it wasn’t a complaint, so he continued to explore.

Last night ... She’d been magnificent. Stronger, faster, more will ing than he’d ever expected. He hadn’t meant for her introduction to that most intimate of dances to be so sensual y rough, but when she’d ridden every wave with him without flinching, he’d given in to temptation and taken her in a way he’d never have chanced with another woman.

Because immortal or not, they would’ve been terrified.

“Hey.” A sleepy grumble as she shifted closer to him, until his knee brushed against her body, her wings spreading til one lay across his hip and thighs.

He ran a hand over the sleek indigo of her primary covert feathers with proprietary pleasure. “Good morning.”

Her hand came to rest on his thigh below the sheets, perilously close to the part of him that had the most unquenchable hunger for her. “Careful, Guild Hunter.”

A drowsy curve of her lips, but her eyes were very much alert. “So, you going to tell me what happened last night?”

He’d known she’d push. That was who she was. As he’d said, it would have been easier were she mal eable—but he’d never have taken her for his consort then. “I told you my mother and I always shared a strong mental bond.” He fought the pull of memory, of a time when Caliane had been exactly that —his mother. “It seems that bond did survive. She can reach me even through the vestiges of Sleep.”

Elena stroked her hand over his thigh, anchoring him to the earth, to the present. “What did you see?”

“The past and the future.”




“Raphael.” A whisper so quiet it was almost not sound. “Raphael.”

A prick of consciousness, of awareness. “Mother?” Eyes opening, he found himself standing on a verdant green field, the sky above him the brilliant shade of a blue jay’s wings, the air perfumed with a thousand unnamed flowers.

He frowned. This place, it was hauntingly familiar . . . right down to the droplets of dew that sparkled like gemstones against the jade green stalks of grass. But his mind, it was playing games with him, refusing to divulge the name of the field where he stood.

Crouching down, he broke off one of the stalks, touched his finger to the dew.

A sigh on the wind ... and her fine, delicate feet walking across the grass, the edge of a long white gown flirting with her ankles.

His heart stopped beating as he watched her come toward him, an archangel of such piercing beauty that she’d spawned legends and caused empires to falll. Her hair was a waterfalll of ebony down her back, thick and wild with silken curls his father had loved to fist in his hands as he kissed her, her eyes a piercing hue that he saw in the mirror every single day of his life.