“I don’t know,” she whispered. The response was so ragged he almost had to ask her to repeat it. Part of him just wanted to hear her say it again. Leaving it alone, he moved on.
“Do you want to talk this out?” He didn’t. Whatever happened between them would be just that—between them. Period. Neither the Caste nor his past had any business in this room. This was between a man and a woman.
Dominic shivered so hard his teeth chattered.
“Dom?” Rhyan reached for him, nearly undoing him on the spot. “You’re shaking.”
“No sh-shit.” What the hell is this? “It’ll pass.”
“O-kay.” Shifting back, she flipped the covers down before looking at him through the fan of her lowered lashes. “Why don’t you slide in, let me warm you up. I’ve been told, recently in fact, that I give very good head.” A fierce blush burned her cheeks, but she didn’t look away.
He slid into bed. Had the sheets always slid against his skin with such an erotic caress? Had the recessed lighting always set a mood he’d never been aware of? Had plain light ever gilded a woman’s skin so beautifully? No. He could answer every question that raced through his mind with a definitive no.
Fingers traced his collarbone, tentative as a lover’s first touch. He leaned into Rhyan’s caress, making it firmer, gave it more substance and a great deal more heat. “Let me drive,” he said, rolling toward her and taking her mouth.
She broke the kiss. “I can’t. They’re expecting me to seduce you, not the other way around.”
“Rhyan...” He wanted to tell her that Gabriel would have already signed her Decree of Final Death. The bastard was famous for approving requests when they best served his purpose, and her death would definitely leave things nice and tidy for him. The look on his angel’s face made him withhold the information.
“What?”
A finite shake of his head preceded his answer. “Stop talking.”
Her bright grin dulled the finest artifacts in his room. Without warning, her smile faded. “What if they know I failed?”
“But you haven’t failed. You’re in bed with the very battle angel they wish to destroy. I’d call that a win.” He waggled his brows. “Now? Show me what you’ve got, beautiful, because this game is on.”
Wave after wave of discontentment wafted from her, the smell very much like burning plastic. “What’s wrong?”
“I won’t use you, Dominic.” Distress etched what had been a smooth face. “I don’t know what they want the information for, but I’m not willing to sell you out. My pardon isn’t worth that.” She looked away. “Besides, you’ve killed everyone else who’s ever come after you for the information.”
“I’m not fallen.”
Her eyes widened impossible. “What?” she croaked.
“I’m not fallen.” Dominic rolled her away from him, resting her on her good hip. Reaching low, he gripped her knee and slowly lifted at the same time he thrust forward. A gasp before the throaty moan escaped her. “Excellent.”
“Dom, I can’t.”
“Keep pleading. Your neediness turns me on.”
“I’m not needy,” she snapped.
He laughed into her hair, brushing the heavy mass of curls to the side so he could nip her neck. “No, you’re not. But if your neediness is an aphrodisiac? Your fire sends me into the stratosphere.” Dom slid further in, blowing out a hard breath that separated her hair.
She shivered, her sheath tightening around his cock.
“If I was standing, you’d have just driven me to my knees, sweetheart. Rhyan.”
“Huh?” The question was offered up in an abstract way that said she wasn’t paying attention to him but, instead, to the way his shaft pressed forward and retreated, pressed forward and retreated.
Dom drove into her with half a dozen hard shoves that had his balls slapping her clitoris in an erotic rhythm.
Rhyan’s cry rent the air.
“I said,” Dominic panted in her ear, “something profound. Unfortunately, my left and right brain have taken up resident in my nut sack and my hind brain has settled in the area around my prostate.”
Gasped giggles were auditory balm. “So that’s why the brain is split in half.”
A hard crack of hand to ass stalled the laughter as unadulterated lust roared down on both of them. Dominic pounded into the woman, his angel, without fear of hurting her this time. Tunneling his free hand under her waist, he snugged her closer as his fingers spread her sex, seeking. Finding. Stroking. The hard little bud of her clitoris was a beacon to him. Pushing the hood back and exposing that little button even more, he squeezed it and began flicking it. He reveled in the way her hips involuntarily jerked. Her reaction wasn’t strong enough, though. Not for him. He wanted it all, wanted her to come apart in his arms.
Releasing his pinch-hold on her clit, he massaged it in time to his thrusts, angling himself to run over her G-spot again and again. Hard vibrations shot down her spine and left his balls tingling in anticipation. This. This is what she needed. We needed. He drove into her with unrepentant force, the sacrilegious thought privately entertaining given their predicament. About that...
Dominic leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “I’m not fallen. The Divine sent me. I’m a Sentinel.”
“Sentinel.”
“Yep. I oversee the Fallen. If ought needs to happen, violence must be carried out to keep the peace, I’m available.”
“I d-don’t want to know,” she pleaded. “Sex now, talk later.”
He didn’t stop. “I’m the Divine’s sword arm in the Realm of Mankind.”
“But Gabriel—”
“Is not unbiased enough to be fair and just. He rules with prejudice.”
“I don’t—”
“I never fell.”
“But the Caste—”
“Is on borrowed time, love.”
Love. Dom’s rhythm faltered. He didn’t love her, so why had he called her his love? Did he explain? Apologize? Leave it alone? Stop to talk? The way she began to rock against him settled his indecision. It advised him to keep going and worry about the rest later.
Rhyan’s breathing changed first. Short, hard inhales and exhales through her mouth. By all that was holy, he loved her reaction. So organic and substratal. Fingernails dug into his hip, demanding more as she drove her ass back to meet his push, impaling her on his shaft. Mewls so delicate they felt out of place here, caught up in this lovemaking, crawled out of her chest.
He doubled his attention to her clitoris.
Without warning, she arched away from him and screamed. It wasn’t the kind of scream he had hoped to hear, though. No, this spoke of terror.
Dominic grabbed her and rolled out of bed. Grabbing his 9mm from the nightstand, he fired a round under the bed the second he hit the floor.
“Shit!” The shouted expletive sounded tinny, like someone had put a ringing phone inside he skull while holding an empty soup can to his ear and shouting. Fucked. Up. He blinked rapidly, his gaze sweeping the area from the foot of the bed to the other side and back. One hand rested against the frame to sense movement if whatever scared Rhyan tried to come over the top. He half hoped it would, because right now? He needed the chance to kick some ass. No one scared his woman. No one.
His woman.
Dread, breath stealing and bitterly cold, slammed into his chest. His heart, which had been thundering in his chest, slowed to a lethargic suck...pause...push...pause rhythm as his blood turned to slush. Sensation in his fingers and toes became a memory, and he idly wondered if fear could give him frostbite. He wasn’t sure; he’d never been scared before.
Gun in one hand, he reached behind with his other and patted around. Rhyan needed to tuck up close so he could get her to safety. He’d lose his shit later. Right now he had obligations, not the least of which was pulling himself together. The longer he blindly felt around, the more convinced he became that he was alone.
He thought he’d been prepared for anything
, and he had been.
Except that.
Chapter Nine
Dominic sat at the bar and nursed the tail end of his fourth whiskey. Neat. The bottle of Dalmore had been new when he started drinking. Now more than half of it rested in his gut. The burn had spread through him but had done nothing to restore heat to his body. He didn’t care—couldn’t seem to force himself to make the emotional investment. Losing Rhyan had blown a hole in chest. It wasn’t a clean through-and-through, either. The ragged wound ached like a bitch in heat and refused to begin the healing process. Getting lost in the bottle had been a grand idea that came far too late. Fourth pour on the fourth day since she went missing. Right. “Missing.” Because he hadn’t already worked out the tidy little fact that Rhyan was dead. Or she would be soon.
Slamming his glass down, he didn’t even wince when it shattered in his hand. Again. He simply picked up the already bloody bar towel and wiped at his gashed in his hand. Another glass slid down the bar top. He closed his eyes and gave a silent nod of acknowledgement to Bailey, who watched over him as she prepped the bar for first shift. Grabbing the bottle, he filled the clear Glencairn to the rim.
No one had been brave enough to get too close to him. When the doors opened in an hour, he’d haul his sorry ass back to his office to cradle his wound and try again to reach the Divine. If he could just obtain permission to intervene, his Divine could get him back to the Realm of Angels. Then his currency would change from liquid gold to rivers of blood and pain caused by steel in the way of his sword. Hell of an exchange rate, he thought, grinning darkly as he stared at nothing in particular and saw nothing at all.
The ping of the elevator sounded down the vacant hall and through the doorway Bailey had left open. It would be Griff and Seth coming down to open up. Dominic shoved away from the bar, silently thrilled when the room took on a hard forty-five-degree pitch. “Better than a roller coaster.”
“A ticket would have been cheaper.” The soft feminine voice had him stumbling around.
Bailey reached out and grabbed his arm, steadying him. “What’s going on, Dom?”
He locked his jaw and shook his head. A fierce burn spread across his palm, and he looked down. The alcohol had seeped into his wound.. Glancing up, a small part of him was ashamed to see Bailey’s concern. He liked her, didn’t want her to worry. The rest of him was too irritated to give a shit. “Don’t mention this to them,” he rasped, jerking his chin toward the hallway.
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared up at him with eyes far too shrewd for someone her age. “No promises.” He opened his mouth to argue, but she shook her head and grabbed the towel, kneeling down to wipe up the floor. “Go on, Dom.”
The realization he was running from his best friends and letting a woman cover for him galled. Was this what he’d been reduced to by a different woman? Sure, that woman might be dead. But she might not be. “Not this again,” he moaned, slamming his office door behind him. Dropping the bottle in his chair, he took a long pull from his glass before setting it aside. His temples pounded. Pressing the heels of his hands against the sides of his head, he pushed. And pushed some more. No doubt he would fracture his skull if he didn’t stop. Maybe it would be easier that way. He’d stop missing her. Could even pretend he’d handled things infinitely better. But he hadn’t. He’d given her what all the others had come for before taking her back to bed and—
A firm knock at his door had him glancing at the monitors on the wall. Ah, hell. He grabbed the whiskey bottle and dropped into his chair, topping off his glass as he yelled, “Not now, ladies.” He smelled the sulfur dioxide a split second before Seth materialized and unlocked the door so Griff could enter. “You know, if you’re going to do that smoke thing and enter locked rooms uninvited, we should just take the knobs off all the doors. That way you won’t be fucking intruding.” Spinning his chair around, he hurled the glass at the wall. It hit hard enough to explode in tiny fragments. Rainbow-hued silica rained down, casting reflective grit across the floor.
Neither of his friends said anything. Instead, they crossed their arms and watched him through narrowed eyes.
“What?” The word was harsh, supersaturated with more emotion than he would have owned up to ninety-six hours ago. Now? There was no denying it. “When did you guys get into team shaming? Or is it paired shaming? Because I have to admit I’m hurt you left me out of the teambuilding exercise.”
“You’ve been chapping my ass for four days. It’s getting hard to sit down, so I thought I’d give you a chance to kiss it better.” Seth looked back at Griff and grinned, dark and humorless. “And our boy here has had his pants down for weeks now. Bailey alone knows what’s chapped on him, though I doubt it’s his sorry ass.”
Griff arched a brow. “Rubbed raw and loving it, you jealous prick.”
“You suck,” Seth said, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah, well, you suck more and for less.”
Dominic shook his head. “Someone hand me a new glass before I start sucking it straight from the bottle.”
Seth looked him over, and Dom knew what the man saw. Bedraggled hair that hadn’t been washed in days, rumpled clothes he hadn’t changed and dark half-circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. There were legitimate reasons, though. Rhyan had been the last one to run her fingers through his hair. His clothes still, barely, smelled like her, all lemony sunshine. And his lack of sleep? He couldn’t close his eyes without imagining what she’d told the Caste. Or what that body of seven angels was doing to her. At first he’d been pissed about the chances of being dealt a deathblow once they realized what he was—the first Sentinel in thousands of years. Because if the Divine had seen fit to appoint a Sentinel, something major was going to go down. Dominic would need to be around to intervene and ensure the power structure of the Others didn’t become superimposed over mankind. Man would never survive.
Someone snapped fingers in his face and he almost snapped his teeth at them. Turned out it was Seth. Good thing he’d refrained because the man was absolute hell with a sword and, even worse, his element, fire. Dom could fend off one, but rarely both, when they sparred. He’d never seen Seth in serious action before, but he’d heard through the Others’ grapevine that it was either impressive or terrifying. Just depended whether Seth was playing for your team or the opposition.
Dominic shoved out of his chair. It rocketed across the room and hit the solid wall. Two wheels, one lever and an arm fell off. Dom leaped up, turning and kicking the chair until the insentient object of his former affection seemed to cringe. “Son of a bitch,” he bellowed.
“You need to take a deep breath, Dom.” Seth stepped in close. “Tell us what’s going on. I’m going to go out on a damned limb and risk a guess. Whatever’s going on has something to do with the woman you left with the other night.”
Dominic stared at him with dead eyes. “Deep breath, huh?” His lungs worked, raising and lowering his chest with every breath. His kidneys still worked because he had to piss. His stomach worked because it was keeping the whiskey down. His liver worked but had filed a protest with his brain due to excess alcohol consumption. His heart, though? He reached up and laid two fingers against his neck. The telltale thump-thump of his pulse was still there. Traitor. “There’s not a lot to tell.”
“Uh-huh.” Griff moved around him, avoiding the shattered glass and bypassing the mangled chair. “You’re normally this crazed.”
Seth stepped between Griff and him, calling to the former, “Find a way to shove the blood still occupying your beaver pistol back into your actual brain, would you?” At the same time, he parked a hand on Dominic’s chest and pushed, encouraging him to stop.
Dominic stared at Griff through narrowed eyes. Only when Seth’s hand heated did he actually realize he’d started for the man. His boss. His friend. A fine tremor ran through him. No doubt Seth felt it, but the djinn said nothing.
“I’m firing a high-caliber rifle.�
� Griff stepped around Seth and looked up at Dominic. “I know what it’s like to watch the woman you love walk out, man.”
“I don’t. Love. Her.” The words were ripped from his throat and spoken through gritted teeth.
“Uh, okay?” Griff looked around. “Why the hell haven’t I bought you more chairs?”
“Because I don’t like to encourage people to stay.”
“Bullshit.” Seth gauged his reaction before pressing on. “You complained it gave you less room to stretch willing women out on your rug, and you didn’t want your love life cramped by Griff’s pithy sense of ‘style.’”
Griff’s brows shot toward his hairline. “Man, you’ve got to stop this love affair you have with air quotes. And while you’re at it? Stop using words like pithy. You’re more author-ish and less badass when you do stupid shit like that.”
“Bullshit. You’re just pissed because I’m getting wickedly hot tail every...” Seth grinned. “Nah. Your woman’s pretty damn hot.”
Griff lobbed the red Swingline stapler at Seth’s head. “Stop looking at Bailey.”
“I’ve imagined her naked too.”
Griff spun, looking for something bigger to hurl. Only Seth’s burst of laughter stopped him. He grinned and shook his head, reaching over to tag Seth’s arm. “Jackass.”
“Whatever.”
“I don’t mean to be the bitch in this relationship, but do you think you guys could split before the kumbayas and campfire songs get started? Because if you try roasting marshmallows from your fingertips, I’m not covering for your sorry ass when the fire alarms go off and the club’s vacated. Again.”
The other men laughed, ready to reminisce until they turned back to Dom and realized he wasn’t smiling. They sobered and had the good grace to look a bit abashed.
Griff started for the office door. “Why don’t you take the night off? Maybe... I don’t know. Eat pie.”
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