Falling Hard

by J. K. Coi

  Gabriel just glared at her. After finding out that his best friend had died in that alley, he wasn’t in the mood to laugh it off with an offhand quip.

  As everyone was filing out of his room, Sam returned, a small-figured blonde following behind him. Gabriel recognized her instantly, but he was also immediately suspicious. The woman didn’t look strong enough to work security detail at an old-age-home bake sale, much less take on the hulking figure that had attacked him and killed Larry and David.

  Yet as he met her calm blue gaze, he was tempted to revise that opinion. Looks could be deceiving. She seemed harmless enough, but her eyes told another story. Far from innocent, they were hard, brilliant sapphires that didn’t quite match her fragile-looking body and gamine features. Her gaze burned hot, singeing him with a directness he found fascinating. Those eyes said she was tough as nails and capable of just about anything. They said she’d seen and done more than anyone would think.

  Just who was this mystery woman? And what the fuck did she have to do with all of this? Somehow, he doubted it was simple coincidence that he’d seen her hiding out backstage before conveniently appearing out of nowhere to save his ass in that alley—or had that been part of the dream?

  Gabriel couldn’t trust his own memory. His recollection of that night was filled with strange dreamlike impressions. A movie montage that didn’t make any sense under the harsh reality of the hospital’s bright fluorescent lighting.

  He still found it hard to believe this slip of a girl had come up against the same guy Gabriel had, and wasn’t lying in traction in the bed next to him.

  “Hey, Gabe.” Sam closed the door. “This is Amelia. We’re real grateful to her for saving your hide—worthless as it is.” He smiled at her and took a seat at the foot of the bed.

  Amelia remained standing just inside the door, watching with an unreadable expression. Otherwise, she looked decidedly normal in a pair of softly faded blue jeans and a fuzzy white sweater that fell loosely around her slim figure. No shining silver armor. No wings. Her skin was smooth and pale, but definitely not glowing.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Not because she was beautiful—which she was, kind of. There was something about her that bothered him though. He kept trying to overlay the woman standing before him with the incredible picture he had in his mind from that night. Of course, he knew which one of them couldn’t be real, but…

  “Amelia, I—” Gabriel shifted in the uncomfortable hospital bed, pushing his back higher against the raised mattress. He needed more rest, but first he intended to get answers to some of the questions piling up.

  When Sam rose as if to help, Gabriel waved him off impatiently. He’d already endured more than enough of everyone treating him like an old man and was determined to regain his strength in record time so he could get out of this antiseptic mausoleum. Sam shook his head in disgust and sat back down.

  “I wanted to ask you a few questions, but first let me say thank you. What you did was really—”

  She shook her head as if the last thing she cared about was his gratitude. “I apologize for your friends’ deaths.” Her slightly accented voice was low and raspy, perfect for crooning old-school sexy jazz numbers.

  She said it as if it had been her fault.

  Gabriel swallowed the despair that choked him, blinking back tears that manifested despite himself. “Yeah. I’m sorry too.” I should have been able to save them. David’s and Larry’s murders were on his head. In the past two years, as Gabriel’s music had gotten more and more attention and his albums sold more and more copies, he’d also started to get more hate mail and death threats. They poured in from all over the globe. Mostly religious zealots who believed he was corrupting their youth with his explicit lyrics, but not exclusively. A large number of anonymous crazies sent him venomous, vindictive messages. People who seemed to just randomly hate him because of his success.

  He hadn’t given any of them a second thought, not for a moment thinking they could actually hurt him—that they could hurt any of them. Gabriel had stupidly believed he was invincible, never insisting extra security be provided other than whatever the concert venue had arranged for, which was usually thin and cheap.

  Now David had paid the ultimate price for Gabriel’s monumental arrogance.

  Sam cleared his throat, and Gabriel realized he’d been staring off into space for much too long. His head ached. He looked at Amelia and frowned, feeling certain he’d wanted to say something to her, but not quite able to remember…“Sorry,” he muttered, feeling like an idiot.

  “Gabe, man. I know you want to get out of here—like, now—but the doctors are saying you should probably stick around for further observation, at least another couple of days.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll only hurt yourself all over again if you push things before you’re ready.”

  “What are you, my goddamn babysitter?”

  Ever the peacemaker, Sam wisely said nothing. He didn’t have to. He’d been around long enough to know how Gabriel rolled. He understood that while Gabriel was lashing out now in a futile attempt to vent the anger and pain strangling him, in a day or two he’d be apologizing for exploding on his friend.

  “Look.” Sam sighed, rubbing a hand through his curly hair as he stole a glance at the silent Amelia. She seemed to be standing guard over them both, her back to the closed door. Lowering his voice, he continued, “I talked to Lila this afternoon and she doesn’t want you to come to Chicago. Not until you’re healed. The funeral went off today without a hitch and now she…well, I think she and Tony just need some time to figure out…”

  Gabriel understood what Sam was trying delicately not to say. Lila didn’t want him there because she blamed him for her husband’s death. She was right too. He blamed himself.

  His stomach clenched into a tight ball. “Fine, I’ll be good and I’ll even rest for a few days. But at the penthouse. I’m not staying in this damn hospital one more night.”

  Sam nodded quickly, too quickly. “Okay. That’s okay. I think I can talk everyone into agreeing to that, especially since you’ve got a place nearby. Although the doctor will want you back in to check on your progress in a day or two.”

  The limey shit. Sam had played him. He’d already known there was no way Gabriel would stay at the hospital and he must have cut a deal with the doctors to have him released to his home—as long as he agreed to the rules.

  He glared at his friend. “Fine. Whatever.”

  The lines in Sam’s face lightened. Gabriel felt another surge of guilt. Goddamn, he was a bastard. Always thinking of himself. But he wasn’t the only one hurting. Sam had just lost a friend, too, a friend whose funeral he’d also missed so he could sit by Gabriel’s sorry bedside and worry.

  “Now, one more thing…”

  Gabriel lifted a brow. “Jesus, Sam—”

  “Listen to me, you stubborn shit.” It was obvious Sam was frustrated and feeling harassed, but Gabriel was too close to the end of his own rope to curb his agitation. The quiet, watchful Amelia was the only one of them who remained calm and seemingly unmoved by the riot of dark emotions clouding the air. Wisely, she kept her distance.

  Sam sighed. “They haven’t caught this guy yet. Nobody knows anything about him. Not who he is, where he is, what drove him to do what he did—”

  “He killed Larry and David. He’s going to pay. I don’t give a flying fuck what his reasons were.”

  “Not knowing means you could still be in danger.”

  “Good.” Because Gabriel had every intention of meeting up with his attacker again and he swore that when it happened, the outcome was going to be very different. “Bring it on.”

  “Screw that. Don’t be an even bigger hotheaded idiot than usual. You couldn’t take on a five-year-old, the shape you’re in right now.”

  Gabriel glanced up at Amelia. Her only outward reaction was a slim brow arched over one eye.

  Letting out a deep breath, he shook his head
. “You’re damn lucky I can’t get out of this bed to kick the shit out of you right now.”

  Sam chuckled. “I’m also bloody well right, and you know it.”

  “Which is really annoying, as usual. So what exactly are you trying so delicately to say here? What is it you want me to do?”

  “I want you to promise you’ll stay home, and I’ve hired Ms. White to make sure you do. She’s going to be your new bodyguard.”

  Chapter Three

  Gabriel plucked at the strings of his guitar without really hearing how badly he was butchering the soft notes of the familiar Irish tune. He was too busy watching his bodyguard.

  She sat across the music room from him with her pretty nose buried in a book, her body virtually swallowed up in the thick cushions of the oversized leather chair.

  Long hair fell across her shoulders, soft and thick and so blond it reminded him of Dani’s. His baby sister used to ask him to braid her hair every morning before they left for school, and Gabriel had actually gotten pretty good at it after a while. Dani’s hair hadn’t been braided the last time he saw her though. It had been brushed straight and positioned over her shoulders in an attempt to hide the cuts and bruises on her face and the marks around her slender neck that the mortician hadn’t been able to cover completely.

  The tune turned harsh with the change in his mood. Focusing on the music, he played the low notes and sang a dark refrain, closing his eyes as he banished the image of his sister back behind the heavy, locked door inside his mind. When he blinked again, Amelia wasn’t reading anymore but watching him.

  He wondered if she would ask what he was thinking, if she wondered what was wrong. But of course she didn’t ask anything. Finally, she simply turned back to her reading and Gabriel continued to pretend he was tuning his guitar.

  After a week in her constant presence, it bugged him that he was still captivated by the woman. Everything about her shouted a dare, a wall to be scaled, a mystery to be solved.

  Her purposeful movements made him want to dig his fingers into the silk of her hair and muss her up. He vowed to be the one to unsettle her. He wanted to make her pulse hammer beneath that smooth skin and force those lips to part on high gasps of unexpected pleasure.

  His fingers slipped off the guitar strings as his imagination went crazy conjuring illicit images. At the discordant sound, she looked up at him again.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. She returned her attention to the book. Gabriel’s hand tightened into a fist over the face of his instrument.

  Amelia White got under his skin and made him twitch with the burning need to figure out her secrets. He’d been watching her carefully—almost as carefully as she watched him. She didn’t seem to care about any of the things every woman he’d ever known cared about. She didn’t worry over her hair, and as far as he could tell, didn’t wear any makeup. She also seemed to have brought only two outfits to wear on this job—which she’d been washing on alternate days—both consisting of blue jeans and a lumpy sweater. She hadn’t made any telephone calls in the entire week she’d stayed with him, and she didn’t leave the house, didn’t make idle conversation.

  She also didn’t answer questions, and she had yet to reveal anything about the attack other than what she’d previously told the police. She was good. And careful. Very careful. Still, while Gabriel was almost positive she hadn’t actually been involved in the attack, he got the distinct feeling she was hiding something about how that night had gone down.

  It should have been easy to get her to open up since she stayed glued to his side twenty-four hours a day, standing at strict attention as she took careful note of every dust mote that dared float around him. But days later, he still hadn’t put a dent in the emotionally blank slate that was Amelia White, and he was becoming more and more frustrated with her silence.

  Finally, he’d offered her the use of his library if it would get her out of his face for a couple hours a day, and oddly enough, showing Amelia those books had done what nothing else had been able to do so far—bring some animation to her hauntingly beautiful face. Because while his exotic-looking new shadow was driving him crazy with wanting her, she was also cold as hell—

  No, not cold exactly, just…removed. Not really a part of this world but separate from it, looking on. It intrigued him, this wall she had around herself—much like his own walls, if he were to admit it—just like everything else about her intrigued him. Her slender body, her husky voice, her secrets.

  Gabriel wanted to know as much as possible about this stranger who had dropped out of the sky into his life. Where she was from, what she liked, why she didn’t talk about herself and kept such a tight lid on her emotions. He had an ulterior motive. Although he didn’t necessarily agree that he needed protection, he was more than willing to keep the woman around for a while if it meant a chance at getting in her pants.

  As if she could sense the lewd direction of his thoughts, Amelia glanced at him again with a delicately raised brow. He realized he wasn’t even strumming anymore. He’d just been sitting here staring at her for who knew how long.

  Getting to his feet, he put the custom-made Gibson into its rack and moved to the door. “I’m going to the kitchen for something to drink.”

  She immediately rose as well. Gabriel turned to face her with an impatient groan that got caught in his throat as he gazed into those fathomless eyes. She took a small step back, but not before he’d breathed the subtle, soft scent of her into his lungs.

  “What did I tell you about chasing me around the penthouse? Especially when it’s not in the fun way, but the crazy stalker-lady way?” Almost in spite of himself, he took another deep breath. “You know, with the new alarm system and all the reporters camped outside this building, I would have thought I’d be safe enough in my own home without your constant escort.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Finally a response? Hell, as desperate as he was for answers, when she actually spoke, he almost didn’t care what came out of her mouth. Not as long as she was talking to him in that smooth velvet voice. And the damn woman guarded her words so carefully these two were the first she’d spoken all day.

  Gabriel had already spent hours thinking about her voice, the way her husky soprano seeped into him and warmed him from the inside out. He couldn’t help but wonder if she could sing.

  “It isn’t safe for you to be alone.”

  “Why would you say that?” Amelia had hinted at something similar the last time he complained about her penchant for trailing after him. As if she knew.

  God help her if she did know something about the psycho who’d killed David and Larry, and was withholding the information.

  Standing at his side, Amelia had to crane her neck to continue her scrutiny of him. She’d done a hell of a lot of that in the past week. Examining him like a murky solution under a microscope.

  He stalked closer. She fell another cautious step back. He kept moving on her, crowding her lithe form up against the wall beside the doorway, planting his hands on either side of her face.

  “Let’s get one thing straight. I’ve been willing to give you the benefit of the doubt because it seems you maybe saved my life—”

  He paused. Leaned forward. Why was she such a temptation, her mysteries so provocative? What was it about her that drew him—besides the drop-dead perfection of her lips, the electrifying challenge in her eyes?

  He fought the urge to press his heated body to hers and take her mouth in a blistering kiss. He cleared his throat instead.

  “Just know that I’m watching you as closely as you’ve been watching me, Amelia. And if I find out you had anything to do with the attack at the concert and my friends’ deaths…I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you myself.”

  Amelia had been watching over Gabriel Gunn for thirty years, but always from afar, keeping a safe distance between them. Only once before—on the night of his birth—had she ever traveled to the human world to keep him safe.

  Until the
night of his fateful performance.

  She blamed herself for the death of Gabriel’s friends and for his injuries. She blamed herself that he continued to be in danger. If she’d done her job properly this wouldn’t have happened. She would have known he had somehow been discovered. She would have arrived sooner to stop the rogue angel’s attack. Instead, innocent people died and Donato had escaped.

  She’d been left with no other choice but to remain here and be ready for the next strike—which was easier said than done. Every moment she stayed on the earthly plane she grew exponentially weaker. In only a short time, without angel song to feed her soul, she’d already started to wither, much like a dying flower snipped from its life-giving roots.

  And now she was being threatened by the very person she’d pledged her existence to protect. If she didn’t know it was impossible, Amelia would think the strained feeling pulling at her chest was…irritation.

  She touched Gabriel’s chest, hoping to gently encourage him to give her some space. The small gold rings piercing his nipples pushed against the cotton of his shirt. Being this close to him created an odd tightening within her, an insistent tug in her belly partnered with a warm heat that spread to her breasts and between her thighs.

  More unfamiliar sensations she wasn’t equipped to interpret.

  “I can imagine you must still be very upset.” Amelia wanted to appear understanding, but wasn’t certain how to do that. She also felt the sudden, urgent need to make him back off, but he refused to move. “It has always been my pledge to protect you, not to hurt you—”

  “Your pledge?”

  She nodded.

  Gabriel’s jaw clenched. “Why don’t you explain something to me.”

  The hardened, narrow expression that darkened his face gave her warning, but she inclined her head again. “If I can.”