I was about to retract my wings, but she caught the ends, and ran her fingers over the feathers where they were dark.
“Hey, you can explore me all you want later.” I smiled a smile I didn’t feel, but it seemed to cheer her up.
“Okay.”
I retracted my wings and helped her to stand.
“Where are we? Looks like the jungle.” She sighed looking around at our very green surroundings.
“I wish we were princess. I really wish we were.”
“I never read about elves. Are they like witches?”
I wished that too. That would have made life simpler. Witches and mages I knew, and I knew how to deal with. Elves on the other hand were a race of people who hated anything outside their realm.
They were part of the old world and wanted to keep it that way.
We would not be welcomed here. They would most likely consider us trespassers and kill us on sight.
“Alyssa, we have to be very careful here. Very careful. Elves are...they’re very powerful. My magic will only work within reason here. That means you too. Stay close to me.”
“I don’t plan to leave your side.” She nodded.
I took her hand and held it tight.
“We have to try and find the portal. It’s where the lavender grows. I know that could be anywhere, but we have to try and find it. I’ll use my magic as best as I can to track it.” And hope like hell our presence went unnoticed by the Elf Queen.
***
This was the fifth time we’d past the same God-awful plant with the purple tassels and bright yellow blossoms.
I growled in complete frustration.
Alyssa pressed her hand against a tree and turned to rest her back against it.
“Shit!” I snapped.
The fucking elves had for certain known that we were here and decided to toy with us. Screwing with my magic so I’d get mixed up and go around and around in circles like a fool.
Now I was tired, too.
I didn’t get tired. Ever.
That was them too.
“Can we rest? Please. I feel strange, like my legs are about to fall off.” Alyssa asked. “And hot.” She backed off her jacket to reveal a white vest top that made a great show of her breasts.
Then she loosened her dark mass of locks from the band that held it together.
“Sit down.” I told her.
She hadn’t slept yet. She’d slept a little back at Catharis, but that was over a day ago.
“You must be exhausted,” I added.
“I am,” she pulled in a withered breath and sank to the ground.
We must have been walking around for hours. We’d seen some fruit I was wary of her eating, but it seemed okay, so she ate it. It looked like a cross between a banana and an apple.
She’d said it tasted like that too.
I didn’t need to eat, but I remembered what it felt like to be hungry. I didn’t want her feeling hungry and tired and unable to continue with everything so messed up.
She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at me, worry filling her beautiful eyes.
“Dante, the alignment is tomorrow. What if we don’t make it? Those people can find us here, can’t they?”
Knowing the elf queen, she would most likely hand us over on a silver plate. I moved over to sit next to her, resting my back on the tree too.
“They can, but we just have to hope we can make it to the Shadowlands.”
“What happens when we get there?”
“Cave of Endless Night will take away your powers and nothing will be able to reach you once inside.”
“But things are different now. Now Balmora and the necromancer know where we’re going. Doesn’t that make it harder?”
I couldn’t lie to her. “It makes it a hundred times worse, but the cave is still the safest place for you. Even if you’re just inside it. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing gets to you once you’re there.” I assured her.
She thought about it, looked away then back to me.
“You’re not going inside the cave with me. Are you?”
“No Princess.” That part was something I didn’t need to be told. It made perfect sense to assume that the best strategy was for me to stay outside the cave and not lose my power.
I needed to fight Balmora and the Necromancer if they made their presence. My sketchy plan was to get Alyssa inside the cave so they couldn’t track her and then I’d deal with them on the outside.
Hopefully I would be able to do that. I’d try to fight as long as I could, even if that meant fighting until the Star of Elena had retreated again from our sight. It wasn’t long now. Not long at all.
“And I just go inside the cave and sit down?”
“I’m going to go out on the limb and say yes.”
She narrowed her eyes and blinked a few times. “I don’t think I can do that. That wouldn’t be right. If I have your power shouldn’t I do something more?”
“No.” I shook my head. “You will do nothing more than go inside the cave. You aren’t used to our world. It’s too new. Everything is too new and going in guns blazing is a very bad idea.”
I was speaking from experience.
“I just want to do something. Is there really nothing?”
“No. We get through this and I’ll teach you everything you need to know myself. I have an excellent library with books from every era and a state-of-the-art training facility in Picchus. Nothing comes close to it.”
She smiled at me, and color filled her cheeks. “You want to see me after all this? I would have thought you’d happily hand me back to my grandma or drop me back in Washington.”
She gave me a little laugh. A sound I could definitely get used to.
“I don’t think I ever gave you that impression.”
“You didn’t give me any impression.” Seduction filled her eyes as she rested her head back against the tree.
I ran my gaze against the outline of her body. Perfect and sexy in every single way.
Something had brewed in the back of my mind since the night I met her. Right from the moment I cast my eyes on her, standing by that window, terrified.
There was something special about her. Something more than her being a syph. Something more than being told she was my soul mate. Being told something and feeling the power beneath it were two different things.
I felt that was what drew me to her. It was like a power all by itself, but so strong it was tangible.
“If you choose to stay in our world you can’t stay with the witches. They won’t know how to teach you.”
“So, I should stay with you? If I’m going to stay in this world, I should stay with you?” She raised her brows.
“Would you consider staying in this world?”
“Can I have both? I want both.” She looked like she really was considering that concept.
“Both, you’d want both?”
“My grandma is a part of this world. I was devastated when she died. She was eighty six at the time and I knew she was old and would leave me soon, but it didn’t make it any easier. No one else got me the way she did. No one else believed in me the way she did either. It was the best to see her again. How many people get that wish? To see a loved one who’s died again.”
I understood what she meant. I got that wish when I saw my parents.
They died after Malachi and I were accepted into the Knighthood. We didn’t see them again until we became sentinels.
It felt like a reward to me. Malachi too.
I definitely understood what she meant. I guess I would want both too if I had someone special in the human realm.
There were many beings that lived in the human realm. It was the way they wanted it to be. There was no reason why she couldn’t have both. The problem would lie with how she managed to live both lives.
“A lot of people have both.”
“Really? So it’s possible?”
“I’m fairly certain you�
��d be able to have both.” Talking was helping. It was stopping me from freaking out, because right now my sketchy plan was exactly that. Sketchy and uncertain.
I’d thought about what we’d do when we got to the Shadowlands, but not the technicalities of it. And I hadn’t thought about what we would do now.
If Balmora and the necromancer flew out from nowhere right now and took Alyssa I wouldn’t know what to do.
“Where is Picchus?” The smile came back to her beautiful face and her eyes twinkled with delight.
Her question cut into my thoughts and threw me. It threw me because she was asking about me.
“That’s where I live.”
“Will you give me an address?” Her gaze intensified.
“Oh so this desire to be in both worlds includes me too?” I teased.
“I need to check out your house first. See if I like it.”
“I knew when you kissed me you must have liked me. Such a waste of time to keep resisting something you want.” I knew she would be shocked by me saying that.
She gasped and straightened. “Hold on Mister, you kissed me. I just kissed you back.”
I didn’t argue because I did kiss her. “Thank God you didn’t resist. You tasted good.” Okay, that was my inner desire talking. My inner desire which had enough power to distract me for eons.
Of course it was stronger today because I was with the one woman I admittedly wanted so bad it made me ache.
I needed to find out more about this soul mate business.
“You tasted good too.” Her voice was just louder than a whisper. As she continued to stare a serious expression filled her face. “Dante.”
“Yes, Princess.”
“Why do I feel like I know you from somewhere? It’s weird. How is that even possible?”
I knew why, but I wouldn’t say. It was just as Malachi said, somethings were best unsaid. There were some things we shouldn’t know. In her case it may freak her out. I didn’t want to freak her out more than she already was.
“It must be your powers.”
“But I knew your name. That part felt different. I can feel my powers. They feel like an essence inside me. Knowing your name felt like something else.”
My heart stilled. I had assumed her knowledge of my name must have been due to her powers too but it seemed that it wasn’t.
“Maybe we were destined to meet.” Better to say that.
She lifted her shoulder into a little shrug, once again that small movement drew my attention to her breasts.
I wanted to touch her, everywhere. I wanted her now, under this tree, in the wild where I didn’t care who was watching us.
“You wouldn’t care if people were watching?” she laughed.
I straightened up. She read my mind. “You can hear me too?”
She nodded. “It started about an hour ago. Maybe before. I can’t hear everything properly but most things. I seem to only be able to hear your sexual thoughts.” She giggled. “Earlier you were checking out my ass. I guess my abilities are really coming in right. I feel different. Do I look different?”
I moved closer. “No, you look the same. I just want you more.”
A smile inched across her lips before I lowered to kiss her.
This was crazy, we needed to get a move on it. Even I knew that. Me, with my carefree attitude.
I knew time was of the essence, but I couldn’t help it.
Temptation made me crave her. I wanted to indulge on her hot, sweet mouth and make her mine.
Temptations of the flesh was something I’d succumbed to long ago. I wasn’t the angel I should have been when I first became a sentinel, and I wasn’t even close to the man I was when I’d lived as a human.
It was bitterness that made me that way.
Bitterness at being tossed aside like I meant nothing.
But...somehow, somehow even though temptation had seized me she felt different.
She felt different because it was written in the stars that she should have been mine and I never got to have her.
Soul mates.
I wanted her because I wanted to make her mine. My girl, my woman.
As we tumbled into the plush green grass, I took the chance to run my hands over her body. Over the flat of her stomach, across to the deep curve of her hips, up and up until I reached the part of her that I’d been craving to touch since I’d first seen her.
Her delicious breasts.
She moaned as I squeezed her right breast gently, just touching her and feeling the sharp points of her nipples turned me on. I had to see.
I needed to see what she looked like. I needed to taste her.
“Please, let me see you Alyssa.” I spoke against her sweet lips, still trying to keep kissing her.
My voice sounded desperate to my own ears.
“Yes.” She moaned against my lips. “Yes.”
Yes, was all I wanted to hear. It was enough to send me right over the edge of reasoning.
I moved back the white cotton from her tank top and the cup of her bra that covered her breasts. Seeing her gorgeous nipple harden, feeling her, and listening to her body was almost deafening. Everything screamed at me to touch, to suck. To indulge.
I lowered and closed my mouth over her little nipple, rolling it between my teeth and tongue. She arched her back into me and a hum of satisfaction fell from her lips.
I liked the sound and I wanted to hear it again, and again.
And again...
Chapter 8
Alyssa
When I first found out the truth of my life and became exposed to this hidden, secret world I thought I would lose my mind.
I really did believe that.
There were points over the last day or so when I was just waiting for it to happen.
I didn’t realize then that those feelings from the emotions that gripped me were nothing.
It was this moment. Right here and now in this place where we were lost with Dante devouring me that made me feel like I’d lose my mind.
I didn’t even kiss on the first date. I’d never had a one-night stand and I most definitely would have never normally thought to be with a man after knowing him for hardly two days.
And not just a man, an angel.
An angel who touched me like I was his. I felt his touch in my soul. Caressing my essence as he showed me how much he wanted me.
He slipped my top over my head and unclasped my bra so he could move to my other breast to suck, giving it the same attention he did the other.
I came before he finished and the truly wicked smile on his face turned me on and made me wet all over again.
“Is this a good distraction princess?” He spoke against my nipple and made a show of licking the tips back to life.
“Perfect.” I breathed and returned his smile. Only momentarily though because he moved his hands across my leg and then between my thighs so he could press against my core.
With that sinful smile he pushed up rubbing against the hard nub of my clit. At that moment I didn’t care about anything anymore.
Nothing at all besides getting more of his touch. More of his touch and this feeling.
I gasped when he picked me up, scooping my topless form up from the ground as if I were weightless. He carried me over to a thicket of vines behind the tree we’d rested against and set me down.
“I changed my mind,” he said placing his hands either side of me. “I do care if people are watching. No one gets to see you but me.”
I couldn’t help the smile that inched across my lips. I definitely didn’t have a problem with that.
He crouched down and nuzzled his face into my crotch, securing his big, strong arms around my waist.
“You smell so good.” He growled and ran his hands down to my ass.
God, when he looked at me his eyes were gold, but quickly changed back to coal.
I pulled in a breath suddenly feeling a little off balance.
Again, I forgot he knew what I wa
s thinking. He stood up and cupped my face.
He was concerned for me.
“Don’t be scared of me.” Worry filled his handsome face.
“I’m not, I’m just. It’s... different.” It just dawned on me that I was just me, and he was this magnificent being. This godlike man who’d most assuredly been with the most perfect women in his lifetime.
And... I was just Alyssa Forrester.
“No, you are not just Alyssa Forrester.” He brushed his lips over mine. “There is no one like you.”
“Or, you.” I moved my hands over his chest and tugged on his shirt.
“I’m just a man, a man who wants you.”
Had anyone ever said such a thing to me?
Definitely not, and if all we had was now, I would treasure it and seal it to my mind forever. Even if forever ended tomorrow.
“Take me,” I breathed.
“I plan to Princess. I plan to take every piece of you, but this is the taster. When this shit’s done, I’m taking you home to my bed.”
Before I could process what he said properly, his lips came crashing down on mine and then it was as if I could feel him everywhere all at once.
He didn’t waste time on my lips. He kissed his way down my body in a trail of fiery kisses that made my entire being come alive.
I giggled when he tugged on the waistband of my pants with a captivated look on his face.
He loosened the button with a quick snap and they drifted down my legs.
I kicked them off and my shoes, too. That just left me in my panties and my bare feet sinking into the grass which definitely felt like soft, plush carpet.
This was so wild...and hot.
His gaze trailed all the way down to my toes.
“You’re beautiful Alyssa,” the angel said to me, and in that moment, I felt like the most beautiful woman in the world.
I grabbed the edge of his shirt and tugged on the end.
“I’m naked.” I moved in and kissed him.
He pulled back. “Exactly the way I want you.”
“I want you naked too, Dante.”
He went to snap his fingers to remove his clothes magically, but I stopped him.
“No, no magic. I want you to take them off.” I wanted to watch him take his clothes off.
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