How could something that felt so good be so sinful.
At the first taste of her, he forgot his internal reprimand. As his tongue stroked hers he forgot all reason. His hand brushed her breast and he felt her nipple harden through her T-shirt at the first delicate caress. There was no self-control as his hand cupped her breast and the sweet, firm feel of her filled his hand.
She groaned, a soft breathy whispery sound that inflamed his blood to instant beyond-reason boiling point. He cupped her waist, crushing her to him. Her hands flew to his nape, her fingers scraped his skull. Her other hand found the towel. With a flick she’d untwined the end. It fell to the floor and pooled at his feet. Cool air brushed his skin. Heat on his chest where her body heat inflamed him, cool on his bare buttocks.
She crushed her pelvis against his ready erection, deepened the kiss, her tongue danced with his, lips suckling, caressing, stroking.
A far corner of his mind issued a warning. Don’t kiss. Don’t feel.
It was enough to slice a path through his quickly rising passion. He pulled away. Her mouth was wet from their contact. Breathlessly, she gazed up at him. Intent and passion hazed her eyes. His brain clutched at reason.
Don’t because…
“It’s not wrong. And if it is, I don’t care,” she breathed.
There was no further reasoning. She clutched him close to her, replaced her lips on his mouth, walked him to the bed. The mattress caught him behind his knees and he fell backward, hitting the middle of the bed full in his back. She stood above him. Her erect nipples were obvious beneath her T-shirt, setting his blood to boiling. The gleam in her eyes was predatory, hungry.
His appetite was more than whet. She peeled off her T-shirt. She was naked underneath. His erection quivered as he watched her naked form as she dropped the material to the floor. Desperate to touch, feel, have her around him made him edgy. Urgency claimed his veins, his mind, his want. His desire. He took her hand and pulled her to the bed.
She placed her knees on either side of his hips and rested astride him. She lowered herself onto him. Her soft, wet flesh embraced him. He kissed her, driving his tongue into her mouth at the same time tilting his hips, and enveloping himself against her ready warmth.
She edged herself on top of him sliding down to his hilt. Resting there a moment before rocking upwards on her knees and sliding downwards again. She moved so slowly he felt her simmering heat on the tip of his erection for a moment, before returning to take the full length of him in.
She broke the kiss, tossed her head backward. A guttural sigh escaped her mouth as she rode her orgasm. Muscles clenched around him, throbbing and pounding his exquisitely sensitive member.
She rocked forward, her pelvis grinding against his. He was helpless but to watch her features soften, mouth open, eyes closed in sated contentment before he reached to grasp her hips, sliding her up and back and riding his own explosive orgasm.
His eyes screwed shut, neck muscles straining, breath hissing between clenched teeth as he soared on the powerful tide of complete abandonment.
***
Sated, she lay next to him, scooped in his arms. Her head rested on his shoulder, a long leg nestled over his. Her arm lay across his chest, fingers tapered over his shoulder. Her fine, silken hair splayed over his still heated skin. He rested his chin on the top of her head, closed his eyes and thought. And silently cursed.
What a damn fool thing to do. For the second time he’d lost any sense he might have clung to that would have stopped what he’d just done. What they’d done together.
It’d been explosive. Amazing. His need overpowering. He didn’t know he possessed such depth of urgency. Didn’t know where it came from. Just knew it was there and it was something that he had to react to. To fall to his knees and cave to this blinding need she stirred within him. He had little resistance when it came to her.
She said she didn’t care what happened because of this. That had been his undoing. He’d simply believed her. Had purposely pushed away all thought so that he might feel her in his arms, feel her around him one more time only to know that it still wasn’t enough.
The need stirred. His groin pulled at the thought of making love with her again. So fast. So completely.
She seemed to have as little control as he did. But they’d only known each other for a short while. His police-detective mind ticked through possibilities of why and all came up short. Surely he wasn’t worth such risk for her to take. There seemed to be nothing to feed her interest in him.
He stroked the hair from her temple. She moved onto her elbow so that she was half on top of his chest looking down at him. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and ignored the softness in her eyes, the longing he read there.
“Angel… why?” he ground out.
Her brows moved together on either side of a small crease between them. “What do you mean?”
“Why this? Why me? You don’t know me. Why are you interested in doing this with me?”
Her brows flicked upward, he saw the hesitation in wide eyes. “Because you are you.” A shadow moved behind them. There was more. Something she wasn’t telling him.
“That’s all?”
“What else is there?”
“There’s no future. You know that.”
She took his face between her hands and sincerity replaced the shadows. “I will take it with me forever, into the eternity if I need to. I don’t regret anything we have done and neither should you. What we share isn’t a sin. It’s beautiful.” She touched her lips to his, so tenderly, so gently it almost undid him. Something about the way she touched him triggered a memory buried under memories of memories. With a great amount of self-control he pulled away and watched the play of emotions cross her face.
It was a mere feeling, a quick glimpse of much more, something that went back for months and months, a trigger of something greater than just the here and now. As though he knew her intimately. Had known her before she lay like this in his arms. Then it was washed away with a tide of confusion and regret.
He held her against him, feeling his heart thumping, skin prickling with a mix of awareness and forgetfulness. However hard he tried he couldn’t pry loose that fleeting recognition. He knew it would loosen so much more buried beneath, but the more he tried, the more it was lost to him.
She knew there was no future. Had said as much. He knew it, too. It would end soon. And the knowledge only served to tighten the knot of despair that had started to tie itself around his heart from the moment he’d woken to find her draped over him in that dirty, wet alley.
***
While they waited for Pete to come back to the safe house, Daman made Angel breakfast. He watched as she ate, the feeling of familiarity niggling in the far reaches of his mind. They spoke of little things and soon Daman had lost himself in the comfortable movements of the familiar. He could get used to this, watching her eat breakfast, talking, getting lost in contented companionship.
It used to be like this with Michelle. Easy silence mingled with talk over little things. It made him take his mind off his work life, where things were tough and the people he dealt with were harsh.
He’d forgotten how human it made him feel.
The knowledge that he’d wasted years of his life wrapped up with so much hate that it had clung to him as close as a second skin made his gut lurch. Michelle would have never wanted her death to have caused him years such as those.
“Are you all right?”
He glanced into clear, blue eyes. Weak winter sunlight filtered through the window behind her, making her hair seem to glow as though it were a misty aura around her face. The face of dreams. Confused, he looked back to his plate and stabbed a chunk of egg onto the end of the fork and cleared his throat. “Just going through what we’re going to be doing today, that’s all.”
He glanced back at her to find that the look she wore was grim. “That’s not all,” she said.
He opened his mouth, and then shut it again. How could he say in words the transcendent feeling he’d had about her all morning. Instead he said, “It will all be over by this evening.”
She set her plate aside. The relaxed atmosphere was gone with his sudden change of conversation. “There must be another way.”
“You read the pages. There is no other way.”
“I’ll stay here. With you. I don’t want to go back.”
His gaze swung to hers. Their eyes locked. “You don’t want to be an angel anymore?”
She shook her head, a watery smile on her lips. “Not if it means I can’t have what we’ve found.”
He regarded her silently, not wanting to start to believe what she’d just said. “Don’t you have to go back? I mean, surely you’d be missed from doing what you do.”
“I’m here in flesh and blood. Free Will has been given to me. And this is what I choose, if, that is…if you choose it, too.”
He stumbled to his feet, the chair skidding across the tiled floor with a screech. He lurched around the table and had her in his arms, pressing his mouth to hers, fingers splayed in her hair at the back of her neck, arms crushed across her back. He pulled back, so that he could speak. “Does that tell you how much I choose it, too?”
Her glorious smile radiated a thousand suns and in an instant his mouth pulled into a grin. Like riding a bike, he remembered he could do it. The heaviness that rested on his shoulders released. He tucked her head beneath his chin, laughing, a sound that sounded rusty. But good.
God, how it felt so good.
“Do you really mean it? You want to stay here, with me?”
He felt her nod her head. “More than anything.”
“But Angel, what can I offer you?”
“You offer me so much. A life. To feel. A purpose. Love.”
He hesitated and angled his head to look at her. She looked back, face shining, eyes gleaming. “Love?”
She nodded, her breath brushed out on a breathy laugh.
“You…love me?” All he’d shown her during her short time here was darkness and the worst in humanity. “How?”
The lighthearted look she wore faded into something more serious. She glanced nervously up at his, eyelashes fluttering. “There’s more…”
He frowned. The euphoria of moments before sliding from his grasp. There were no words, he could only wait as she nervously chewed her lower lip. She slid from his grasp and he stood there, empty now without her there. She turned, a story on her lips when Pete burst through the kitchen door.
“Sorry I’m late.” He sent Angel a hesitant grin. “Wanted to spend some more time with the kids than I usually do this morning.”
There was new life in his eyes, but Daman chose to ignore it, his enthusiasm dampened by Angel’s untold story and her abrupt behavior. “You could’ve been a little bit later,” Daman mumbled.
Pete dropped some grocery supplies onto the kitchen table. “Thought I’d stop at the supermarket and pick you guys up some food. Did you say something?”
Daman shook his head. “Nothing.” Although he wanted to cuff Pete by his shirt collar and shove him back out the door, he resisted. The man was doing them a favor by having them here, and now he was back, the urgency of the situation was more demanding. He had Pete’s help at his convenience and he couldn’t shut him out. Pete was doing him the favor. He faced Angel. “Tell me later, but now you’re back, Pete, there’s something we need to do. The plan’s changed, we’ve got to get to the priest,” Daman said.
“What about Lepski?”
“He’ll come later, believe me. For now, we go to the church. Father Joseph hasn’t returned my call, which is very unlike him. We’ll get to him first, then go to my apartment for the proof we need.”
“Do you have a plan?” Pete asked.
“Yeah. By nightfall, Lepski will be in custody or dead. Whichever comes first. I’ve got more to live for now, and I don’t intend to have Lepski keep me from it for a moment longer than he has to.”
Pete gasped as Angel wound herself into Daman’s arms. Daman ignored the surprised look on Pete’s face as he swept Angel against his chest. He ignored the feeling that wanted to take her back to bed for the rest of the day and lose himself in her for hours. He ignored the nagging feeling that what Angel was about to tell him would change things forever.
He did his best to ignore the fact that now he had something to live for, he also had a weakness. There was the troublesome feeling that he was going to lose that, and more, by the end of the day.
Chapter Fifteen
Pete stopped the car at the front steps of the church. The shops had closed for the day, leaving the street deserted. There was a dump of a car with a flat tire parked on the opposite side of the street with numerous parking tickets stuck between the grimy window and the windscreen wiper. It looked as though the tickets were worth more than the car and the owner had left it there for the wreckers to pick up.
The wind tossed some dried leaves and loose trash into the air. An empty foam coffee cup hit the side of their car with a light, papery thump before being driven into the gutter below the car.
“Tell me why Father Joseph wants to live here again?” Pete muttered.
Daman hooked his gaze out at the church. With the front door shut, the leaves had pocketed in the alcove, leaving the entrance looking as uncared for as the car. He knew for a fact that on Saturdays, Father Joseph opened the church for a local youth group, and he would never leave the front of his church looking so unwelcome.
“To save his congregation,” Daman replied.
“Has he? Saved any of them, I mean?”
“I think he’s just saved me,” Daman muttered, before opening the door and unraveling his long legs from the front seat of Pete’s compact car. A good shoulder push at the church door had the old oak swinging on squeaking hinges.
Daman waited while his eyes adjusted to the dim interior of the church. Usually on Saturday afternoons, music would be blaring from the large hall located off to the side of the main church and every light bulb would be switched on. The only light inside was let in by the intricate stained glass windows that adorned the sides of the church.
When Pete and Angel came behind him, Daman snagged his gun from his shoulder holster and stepped cautiously inside. The church was oppressively silent. Even the wooden benches refused to tweak in the lowering temperature. Daman’s cop sixth-sense switched on. This scene was not right. He sidestepped to the right hand aisle of the church that would take him to the priest’s private quarters.
“Father?” Daman called out. His voice fell flat, as though there was no air to carry it. He remained still, listening for any slight noise. When there was no response, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The tight feel of perspiration heated and prickled his skin.
Daman kept his back to the wall, looking into the shadows. He waited for movement, anything that might catch his eye. When he was sure there was nothing to find, he maintained his course to the priest’s door.
It was half open. Daman carefully poked his head around the doorframe, half expecting to be struck or the door to smash into his face. The gun remained still and steady in his hands, finger ready on the trigger.
The inside of Father Joseph’s quarters was dark and cold. There was no fire in the fireplace, nothing to welcome anyone inside. It was uncharacteristic of the priest to leave his quarters not ready for company. Daman opened the door and stepped inside, eyes tracking around the room.
His desk was a mess. Daman went over to it and around to the chair side. The chair had been thrust backward so that it had landed on its back. Its steel legs stuck upwards like a rigid dead insect. Drawers had been upended on the floor, papers rifled through. Whoever had done this had been thorough.
The shelves behind the desk had been emptied. Books were strewn across the floor, landing half open, pages scrunched and crumpled where they
fell at odd angles. Daman felt a twinge, looking at those damaged books on the floor. Even the hard covers hadn’t been enough to keep their insides intact. Seeing books like that showed a total disrespect for knowledge as well as the owner.
“Coffee’s cold,” Pete said.
Daman jumped, forgetting for a moment that Pete had followed him into the room. He looked to where he stood and noted the partially eaten plate of toast on the table and the cold cup of coffee next to it. The wooden kitchen chair was pulled out from the table.
“Looks like he was disturbed,” Daman said.
“Someone’s done a good job in here,” Pete replied, studying the room.
Daman didn’t answer, knowing a room left like this didn’t bode well for the person who lived here.
“Where do you think he’d be?” Daman spoke aloud, more to himself, needing to hear a voice to fill in the screaming silence.
There was no trace of him in here. Daman went back into the main body of the church, looking for anything amiss amongst the shadows. The rows of pews picked up the flickering candlelight in the church’s sanctuary where people lit them for remembrance. All else was still. He moved quietly down the center aisle, keeping his senses tuned for noise or movement. Anything that would give a clue away.
He sensed Angel behind him, rather than turning to see her. His body seemed to be tuned so well to her. The heat from her body warmed his back, her now familiar, wholly feminine scent enveloped him. He stilled for a moment, closed his eyes, recognized how totally he responded, before concentrating back to the task at hand.
The altar area was in shadow. The only light came from the candles quietly burning to the side. Angel stopped abruptly, a soft gasp escaped her mouth. Daman immediately tensed, raising his gun to shoulder level. Angel came to his side, lifted a trembling finger at the altar. “He’s behind there,” she whispered. Her words hitched. Adrenaline punched his veins at the dread-tone her voice carried.
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