Her lips opened as her new, improved memory provided a perfect sensory recollection of his massive, beautiful chest. Flat planes of muscle that spread forever. Muscle she could sink her fingers into. Rest her cheek against. Nuzzle.
She squeezed her eyes shut and slapped a hand to her forehead. “Ugh, no!” she scolded herself. She held her breath until the unwelcome image began to have black dots pierce it. With a whoosh of air, she threw herself onto her side. She did not want to think of that creature as a sexual object. She hadn’t thought of a man in that way since she was seventeen — too young, naïve, uneducated, and hormonal to know better.
Bad. Very bad.
For perhaps the millionth time since last night, Abilene’s grave warning flitted through her head.
Grace heaved a sigh, and with her eyes squinched shut as tightly as possible, she put her right hand beneath the sheets. She began to trail it down her body slowly, giving her mind — already at the verge of panic — time to accept the inevitable: they were going to have to do this. Her fingertips passed through the valley between her breasts. Grace’s skin began to crawl. They reached her soft, rounded belly. A fine tremor settled into Grace’s arms. They reached the elastic band of her panties.
Grace’s mind bailed ship.
“Seth, this isn’t funny,” she said, clutching her hands to her breasts and eyeing her boyfriend’s best friend, Joe, where he stood silhouetted in the doorway. Whatever was going on, his addition to the private moment between Grace and her boyfriend was unwelcome.
Grace couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness of the room, but she imagined they were glowering as Joe’s dark form observed her where she lay half-naked on Seth’s bed. “Wow, you got this far,” he said to Seth with a sneer. “You sure you need my help for the rest?”
From where he sat beside her on the bed, Seth laughed the same vibrant laugh that had first gotten Grace to notice him. “Man, this is as far as she ever goes.” Seth gestured Joe into the room. “Let’s do this. I’m so ready for it to be over.”
Grace tried to snatch the sheet over her body, but Seth was sitting on it, and he didn’t budge. Dread was slowly fermenting in her stomach. “Um, I should go,” she offered timidly. Both men turned to her like hawks spotting prey. “My roommate is expecting me.”
They laughed, and then Joe entered the room, closed the door behind him, and clicked the lock into place. The snick of the gears shot through the last of Grace’s hesitation and hopeful doubt. She jumped up from the bed where she and Seth had been kissing and touching only moments before, and snatched her shirt from the floor, making a beeline for the door.
Joe easily snatched her against his chest as she tried to push past him in the small dorm room and flung her back to the bed.
That was the moment when Grace fully realized that they were going to rape her. Her vision wavered, and she turned her eyes upon Seth as he stood from the bed and began to undo his jeans. “Why would you — ” she swallowed down a panicked sob. “Seth … I love you. Don’t do this.”
Joe let out an abrupt bark of laughter. “Oh my God!” He clapped Seth on the back. “You’re good, man, you’re good. You got her to love you? That wasn’t part of the deal. Shit, not even I’m that cruel.”
Grace scrambled back on the bed and hit the wall with a thud.
“Shut the fuck up, man, and just grab her arms. Let’s get it done.” He made a noise of disgust. “Look at her. She’s such a fat cow.” He glanced down and Grace’s eyes automatically followed, landing on his flaccid penis. She turned her face into the wall with a gasp. “How am I even going to get it up?” Seth asked.
Grace moaned, wondering why, with what was about to happen, his words were what were hurting her most. Like a child, she covered her head with her arms. Light shattered her attempt at hiding as her arms were jerked over her head. Joe held her down and said, “You’ll figure something out, man. Picture someone else.”
Seth laughed. “I always do with this one.” Then he flopped himself down on top of her.
His hot breath fanned her face with the stench of cheap beer. Joe’s excited breathing echoed behind her head; his fingers dug into her skin with unforgiving force. Grace turned her face into her shoulder as tears pooled in her ears, trying to ignore the fact that her pants were being yanked down her legs.
Seth shoved her legs apart with his knees. Horrid, gut-wrenching terror speared her at the foreign feeling of an erection pressing against her naked flesh.
“You’re nothing,” Seth whispered to her. “Nothing but a stupid bet.”
He drove into her body, and after the first searing sting, the only thing she felt was the shattering pain of his hands on her body.
With a cry that neared a scream, Grace wrenched her hand out of her panties. She rolled violently to the side, finding air and then the unforgiving floor, pain shooting up through her knees and hands as she hit concrete.
For several heart-wrenching seconds, Grace thought she had lost all of the control she’d gained over the last thirteen years. The entire rigor she’d put her mind through. All of the knowledge she’d gained. The prestige. Her work.
For a moment, she feared she had degenerated to the wallowing mess of a teenager she’d once been in the years after …
She hovered on the precipice of complete mental breakdown for a few seconds more before she was able to pull her panic back a fraction. Several more seconds saw the panic pulled back by half. Five minutes later, she was frazzled, but back to as close as she would ever get to “normal.”
She rose to her feet unsteadily, and then once she was sure she wouldn’t collapse with her first step, launched herself at her pants. She pulled them on with jerky movements, her harried breaths echoing around the room.
Once her armor of ugliness was in place, she allowed herself a deep breath.
“You’re okay,” she told herself, the words coming to her from the hidden place of daily repetition and long-term memory. “You depend on no one. You are your own person. Just make it through today.” Her voice cracked.
The words didn’t have the same effect they usually had, and she stared at the bed with longing.
Just one day, she thought fervently. Just one day in bed. I won’t let it get like it was in the beginning. When she had spent several months without once leaving her room.
With a resigned sigh, Grace returned to bed, lay down, and pulled the covers over her head. Feeling as though she had taken a giant step back through years of progress, Grace wept.
• • •
Jayden leaned back against the pile of rubble and counted silently in his head, trying desperately to block out the sounds filling the hallway.
The defilers were … having sex.
The mouthy one and the blond one were in a room in the middle of the hall. The woman was moaning her mate’s name over and over, and the blond one’s accelerated breathing was so loud it sounded like continuous groans. But even more shockingly, similar sounds were coming from the room two doors closer to where Jayden stood where the blue-eyed one and the small, pregnant delicate one slept. What they could be doing when the female was so pregnant that breathing was uncomfortable, Jayden had no idea. And he tried hard not to imagine.
Jayden wanted to be disgusted with their obvious weakness for each other, but even his jaded mind had to acknowledge that what was happening between the couples was more than sex. Their emotions were rolling through the doors and slapping him upside the mind again and again. They were so in love with each other. Every thought that reached him was dripping with unbelievable pleasure and unbelievable care for the person they were with.
Jayden was about to fly apart at the seams.
He wanted his Temptation so badly he could taste it. He was standing as close to freedom and as far from the happy couples as he could get, trying to block out all of his senses. It was not working.
He buried his face in his hand and tried to breathe evenly and block out the sounds that were severely trying his co
ntrol.
But then a sound reached him that was so distinct that he could not have blocked it out if he tried.
His Temptation wept.
Jayden straightened. His hearing narrowed, and for the first time, he was able to block the two couples out. He zoomed in on the door of his Temptation’s room and cocked his head to the side.
Her ragged breathing flew down the hall and to his ears, slamming into him like a physical blow.
He staggered back, his wings brushing the rubble he had been leaning against, before surging forward. He flew down the hall before he could stop himself, and the next he was aware, he was pressed against her door. His forehead pressed against the metal. His hands were splayed at shoulder height. Every fiber of his body strained to be on the other side of the door.
Her thoughts were so dark that the cold seeped into his bones. He saw through her eyes the abuse of a human man. A man she had trusted.
Jayden yanked himself from her mind like he had been branded by what he found. His rapid breathing echoed through the hallway, and as he looked down, he noticed his hands were shaking. He did not want to know more. Feared what would have happened if he had stayed inside her mind to find out any more details. Feared what would happen with what little he had just learned.
He stumbled back until his back met the wall. Someone had hurt her. Hurt his Temptation. She hurt still. And he knew nothing about helping her. Knew instinctively that if he tried, it would only make things worse.
Something he had read in the mouthy one’s mind filtered to the forefront of his thoughts. She had been hurt. Was now strong.
Jayden knew it was a bad idea before he even started walking toward the room that housed the mouthy one and her mate, but he could not stop himself. Someone needed to help his Temptation.
He hesitated for only a second before knocking twice on the door. The passionate sounds within abruptly stalled. The bed creaked, and then the door was thrown open.
The blond one glowered at Jayden from the doorway. The human was completely naked and, Jayden noticed right before immediately jerking his eyes to the ceiling, blatantly aroused. “What,” the defiler growled.
“Jericho,” the mouthy one whispered low enough she probably thought Jayden would not hear. “Win him over.”
Jayden sighed and forced himself to look into the room past the blond one’s shoulder. The mouthy one lay in bed, a sheet held up to her chin, her eyes curious. “She cries,” Jayden said, appalled at the hopeless quality to his voice. “And I do not know what — ”
Luckily, he did not have to say anymore. The woman leapt from the bed and began jerking on clothes, wrenching a curse from her mate who closed the door slightly and looked at Jayden with even more hate than the angel thought possible. “Don’t you dare look at her,” the blond one said.
Jayden was not remotely interested in seeing this man’s mate bare, but Jayden did not respond. Moments later, the woman edged past her man, kissing him quickly on the cheek, and hustled down the hall to his Temptation’s room.
“Grace?” the woman asked through the door. When there was no answer, she simply opened the door and went in.
Jayden was so focused on her actions that the brush along his forearm startled him into a defensive position. He jerked his eyes back to the blond one just in time to watch the man drop his hand from Jayden’s skin. Jayden felt his eyes narrow, and immediately, he sent probes into the man’s mind, trying to prepare for an attack of some kind.
He touched Jayden to use the gift of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil on him. What was more, the man was apparently shocked that he received both a good and an evil reading from the Knowledge.
Jayden was shocked, too. Angels were not regularly exposed to the Knowledge, but he could not imagine that they would be either good or evil. Angels just were.
The blond one looked at Jayden with a curious mix of lessening anger and increasing intrigue, and then said, “Dahlia will take care of her, angel. Don’t you worry.”
Jayden threw his shoulders back and glared. “I worry about nothing, human. You would do well to remember that.” Jayden stalked back down the hall and took up his station against the rubble again, studiously preventing himself from reaching out toward the minds in the room at the end of the hall to see if his Temptation’s hurt was abating at all.
Chapter Seven
When Grace woke the next morning, still exhausted from a night of crying, her first coherent thought was of a pleasant warmth at her back.
The warmth made her stiffen, but the pleasant delayed any immediate leap from bed. She felt her brow furrow as she tried to get her bearings, and then she realized that someone was in the bed with her.
Before panic could set in, Grace remembered that it was Dahlia. The woman had come to her rescue the night before and then sat with her all through the night, simply making sure Grace was not alone while she cried. It was the first time in her life someone had done such a thing for Grace.
Moving so slowly it could barely be called moving at all, Grace turned from her side to her back and looked at Dahlia. The woman was sitting on an impossibly small span of mattress. Her head was tossed far back, but Grace could still see her sleep-closed eyes and her slightly slack mouth. Dahlia’s back was propped against the headboard; her left hand rested on her slight baby bump, and her right hand rested on Grace’s shoulder.
Grace sucked in a breath and braced for the pain human touch always brought.
Nothing.
It didn’t hurt. Grace stared at the slim, brown hand for what seemed like an eternity before she admitted that, not only didn’t the touch hurt, but Grace didn’t necessarily mind it.
The revelation was earth shattering.
Dahlia’s hand was warm, and comforting. Grace frowned, but still didn’t move away. Perhaps the fruit had healed more than just her physical wounds?
The door to her room was wide open, so nothing impeded the cacophonous sound of a door flinging open down the hall. Dahlia jerked awake, and Grace sat up so quickly she felt dizzy.
“Help,” a man’s distressed voice yelled out. “We need help!”
Grace and Dahlia swung into the hall, one right after the other and saw a very panicked Eli Johnson standing in the hallway.“Eli?” Dahlia asked in a voice still smothered by sleep.
Three doors down, another door opened as Jericho rushed into the hall. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Abilene’s water broke.” Eli’s blue eyes rolled around in panic. “I think she’s in labor.”
Grace felt her mouth drop open, and as one, all three of them ran down the hallway toward the rapidly unraveling Eli. Jericho and Dahlia asked questions simultaneously, ducking into the room and rushing to Abilene’s side.
Grace stopped at the doorway.
Abilene looked fine. More than fine, actually. She was propped up against the headboard quietly reading a book.
Jericho and Dahlia immediately calmed as well. Dahlia walked to Abilene’s side and began a quiet conversation with her while Jericho diverted to Eli to try to calm him — he was the only one in distress in the room.
Grace heard a noise to her left, and turned her head. The angel was at his usual post: leaning up against the rubble of the cave-in. He wasn’t looking at her, though something told Grace she had his full attention. It didn’t appear as though he had moved even one of his beautiful feathers since Eli’s announcement, but his body was thrumming with tension. His wings were cocked and ready for flight, and the feathers were shimmering.
He must have felt her eyes on him, because he lifted his head and looked at her. His eyes were so beautiful. Grace felt herself flinch as pain worse than any she had felt so far rocketed through her body.
The angel’s eyes narrowed, and his mouth opened as though he were going to speak.
She quickly dragged her gaze from the angel and back into Abilene’s room, needing to distract herself from the pain before she did something foolish. Jericho had gotten Eli to calm
a bit, and Dahlia was still talking to Abilene. Dahlia moved to one of the many monitors lining Abilene’s bed and read the feed to her.
“Wait,” Abilene said, straightening in her bed. “What?”
Dahlia repeated the feed.
The only piece of equipment Grace recognized, the heart monitor, began to speed up.
“That can’t be right,” Abilene said, shaking her head. Abilene reached a hand beneath the blankets as the room turned deadly quiet. The look of concentration on her angelic face disintegrated into absolute horror. “Oh, God, I feel like I’m ten centimeters already.”
Eli walked to her side and grabbed her hand. “Um, isn’t that a good thing, baby?”
Abilene swallowed a huge gulp of air, her ringlets bouncing vigorously as she shook her head. “But there’s no pain!” Her voice ended on a hysterical note. “Oh my God, there’s something wrong.”
Grace’s heart plummeted, and she stepped forward as everyone in the room began to lose their cool. They were severely unprepared for a complicated delivery.
Grace jumped as the angel’s voice sounded from right beside her. “Of course there is no pain, human,” he said softly.
Even though his voice had been quiet, everyone stopped mid-word and turned to him. He tsk’ed in annoyance. “She has eaten of the Tree of Eternal Life,” the angel said shortly and with an air that led Grace to believe that he thought he had just explained everything. If the others’ expressions were any indication, they were still just as confused as she was.
With a sigh, the angel continued, “Her delivery will be entirely painless. Excruciating labor is a curse of the Tree of Knowledge. That one,” he nodded unceremoniously at Dahlia, “will have a very difficult time. But you, little human,” he turned to Abilene, “will feel nothing.”
Very slowly, they all turned to look at Dahlia. Grace watched as the blood drained from her face, an ashen look spreading beneath her warm caramel skin. “E-excuse me?” Dahlia asked.
Operation Middle of the Garden 03 - Of Consuming Fire Page 6