by C. L. Wilson
He regarded her in consternation, then bent his head to clean and re-grease the waffle iron. “I am your Guardian, Katrina. Just because you never summoned me doesn’t mean I wasn’t always near.” He poured another cup of batter into the center of the waffle iron and closed the lid. “Enough talking. Eat.”
“What do you mean ‘summoned you’? Summoned you how?” she persisted.
He sighed. “Eat, Katrina. I promise I’ll answer your questions, but you must eat. Your body needs the fuel. I healed your injuries, but your body is still recovering.”
Kat, who’d been cutting off another section of waffle, lowered her fork. “My injuries?” She touched the back of her head with her free hand. “Wait. Are you telling me last night wasn’t a dream? Those men really attacked me?”
“Eat,” Micah commanded. “And, yes, they did.”
“You stopped them.”
He nodded.
“And then you healed me?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
His lips twisted in a wry smile and he lifted his hands. A bright golden light pulsed in his palms. “I’m an angel. Miraculous healing is sort of our stock in trade.”
“Oh.” Kat moistened suddenly dry lips. Well, now she knew that the glow she’d seen around him all those other times hadn’t been a trick of the light. “I could really use some water. Would you mind—oh, thank you.” She took the glass of ice water Micah held her way, gulped half of it down, then pressed the cool glass against her flushed cheeks. “Did I really see my father last night, too?”
“He thought I should be doing more and took matters into his own hands, as he has long been threatening to do.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Are you saying my father’s in heaven? And you two know each other?”
“Your father is a Lightkeeper who has passed from this world. Of course he is in Heaven. And I am your Guardian. It would be strange if I did not know him. Now, eat. Please.”
She stared at her waffle, feeling suddenly lightheaded. Maybe she wasn’t crazy after all. Maybe this was all part of some elaborate, comatose dream. She was going to wake up any minute now and find that she was in the hospital, clinging to life by a thread after last night’s brutal attack. Or maybe she was dead and didn’t know it.
“This isn’t a dream, Katrina. You aren’t comatose in the hospital. You aren’t dead. You’re at home in your apartment. I am really here. And I am really real.” Micah reached across the counter to take her hand. Solid, flesh and blood fingers closed around hers. “See?”
Shockingly, she didn’t flinch from his touch. Instead, she stared at the strong, tanned hand and felt…warmth. And with the warmth an overwhelming sense of rightness… as if some vital connection, long absent, had been renewed. As if his hand belonged beside hers, holding her.
She dragged her gaze back up and fixed it upon him. “You’re reading my mind.” She stared at him with woozy wonder as she swayed in her seat.
“I am your Guardian,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I told you, you need to eat.” He guided her hand—which still held her fork—over her plate, and speared a syrupy square of waffle. “Eat, dulcea mea. For me.”
There was magic in his voice. A gentle compulsion throbbed in the husky tones. He leaned closer and a rich, warm, intoxicating mix of aromas bathed her senses. His scent…dear God, his scent… Sandalwood and patchouli. The aromas overlapped each other, sang a mesmerizing harmony.
And Katrina Bentsen, who had never known the smallest inkling of physical attraction for any man, shuddered in shock and helpless surprise as every cell in her body abruptly and irrevocably came roaring to life. Filled with desire. For him.
###
The sudden surge of Katrina’s newly-awakened desire slammed into Micah like a tidal wave. He dropped her hand and rocked back on his heels, grabbing the countertop for support. Every muscle in his body went tight, and his heart pounded wave after wave of hot, vital blood through his veins.
A groan rose up in his throat. He trapped it there and clung to his control by a thread.
Ramiel had warned him about the Fervor. The powerful attraction that drew angels to mortals, and vice versa. According to Ramiel, it was the divine spark that thrived in human flesh that called to angelic souls. And when angels manifested in human form—when they cloaked their angelic souls in bodies of flesh and blood and bathed in the sensory wonders of this world—the Fervor became a driving hunger, all but impossible to resist.
Long ago, God had forbidden his Host from engaging in sexual congress with mortals, but Micah was a Guardian, not an angel of the Host. That particular law did not apply to him—a fact this body he currently inhabited was all too eagerly aware of. (Not that he needed the Fervor to desire Katrina. She, with her slender, fine-boned body, her ruler-straight white-blonde hair, and big Nordic blue eyes was the most beautiful woman in the world for him. The only woman in the world for him, in fact.)
But there was another law by which even Guardians—especially Guardians—were bound.
The law of Free Will.
He’d seriously bent that law just now by manifesting his angelic power in an attempt to force Katrina to eat. Of course, considering that he’d already broken that law beyond repair, a little further bending was unlikely to result in harsher consequences than he’d already called upon himself, but that was beside the point. He should not have tried to Command her. Not even to eat.
That Command was why the Fervor was rising so strongly in her now. She was a Lightkeeper, and he was her Guardian. He had been created specifically to be everything she needed, everything she would find appealing. Of course, he’d roused the Fervor when he’d flooded his voice with power.
But Katrina had spent a lifetime being brutalized. She wasn’t remotely ready for intimacy with him on any level.
And Micah would damn his own soul to Hell before taking from her what she did not offer of her own free will.
He turned away from her so he could gather his wits and enough of his tattered self-control to dampen the manifestation of his angelic radiance, drawing its power back into himself. That helped mute the call of the Fervor for both of them. He knew his efforts were successful when Katrina took a shuddering breath and flushed bright red at the wildly erotic thoughts that had tumbled through her mind. Erotic thoughts that Micah, as her Guardian, had shared in excruciating detail.
Micah was now learning Lesson One in Being Human: sexual frustration. These jeans, which he had found so surprisingly comfortable when he’d manifested them, now felt painfully tight. You deserve worse, Guardian, he chastised himself without sympathy.
“Please, Katrina, eat before you fall over. I wasn’t lying about how weak you are from the healing.” The third waffle was done. Since her second was still untouched, he forked it onto his own plate, followed her lead with the application of butter and syrup, and took his first bite. His eyes widened as flavor exploded in his mouth, birthing an unexpected Fervor of a different kind.
Lesson Two in Being Human: waffles are good. Very good.
“I think waffles are my favorite, too,” he muttered, and took a second, exquisite bite.
Katrina watched him eat for a few moments, gave a brief, small smile at his obvious appreciation for the food, then tucked into her own. For a few minutes, both were content merely to eat and enjoy the silence, but then Katrina’s need for answers rose again.
“You said my father was a Lightkeeper?”
“Yes.”
“And what does that mean? What exactly is a Lightkeeper?”
He glanced at her plate. Most of her second waffle was gone, which pleased him. He could now give her the explanations she required without fearing she would spend all her time asking questions instead of eating. “Let me start at the beginning. You are familiar with the basic hierarchy of Heaven, yes? There is God, then there is his Host, the angels who serve him and do his bidding, chief among them the archangels.”
Sh
e nodded, a little warily, and he could see the memories of those brutal years with her grandparents rearing up.
“There are also Guardians,” he said quickly. He did not want her to dwell on the horrors of her past. “Though we are not part of the Host.”
Her brow furrowed. “So you’re not an angel?”
“I am, yes, but I am not an angel of the Host. Guardians are given the spark of life from an archangel’s light, not God’s directly. And though we are angels, we were made to walk among men. To safeguard this world from the forces that would destroy it.”
###
“I see.” With food in her belly, Katrina’s mental fuzziness was beginning to fade. The woman who didn’t believe anything she didn’t see with her own eyes—and sometimes not even that—had returned. Play along with him, Katrina. So long as he isn’t getting violent, humor his delusions until you can safely get him out of the house. Yet even as she thought that, she realized, she wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of him. “And which archangel lit your spark?”
“I was created by the archangel Ramiel to be your Guardian.”
She snorted. “We’ve already established you suck at that, but for the sake of argument, what exactly is a Lightkeeper?”
He winced a little at her dig—and damned if that didn’t make her feel guilty—then told her, “Lightkeepers are humans gifted by God with the power to strengthen the Great Seals. They are pure souls born to ancient angelic bloodlines, mortals who bear within them a light much like my own.”
She raised her brows. “You’re saying I’m an angel, too?”
“No, Katrina. You are mortal. One of your ancestors was an angel.”
“Which would make one of my ancestors a Nephilim.” Nephilim were the offspring of angels who mated with humans. She hadn’t spent ten years having Bible verses beaten into her without retaining at least some basic understanding of religious history. “Weren’t they all wiped out in the Flood?”
“Not all. Nor were all Nephilim evil. Some of those who survived dedicated their lives and the lives of their descendants to God—the Lightkeepers. Others, perhaps in vengeance for the Flood, dedicated themselves to God’s enemies and became the Darkseekers. And since the time of their creation, Lightkeepers and the Guardians have battled the Darkseekers to keep the Great Seals closed.”
“And the Great Seals are…?”
“The Great Seals are locks to the prisons that house the Plagues. And before you ask, the Plagues are dark angels, fallen from the grace of God, whose only desire is to bring about the final battle and the ultimate destruction of mankind.”
“Right, well, I’m not sure if you’ve kept up with the news on TV lately, but it looks like we’re already doing the destruction of mankind thing pretty well on our own.”
“Because the Seals are weakening. The Seal you are meant to strengthen is nearly failing. The previous Lightkeeper for that Seal failed in his task. I am here to ensure the current one doesn’t.”
“I see.” Katrina was actually starting to get a worried, and not because she had a gorgeous lunatic standing half-naked in her kitchen. Nope, she was getting worried because, although she possessed a highly developed bullshit detector, not one single crazy claim he’d made had set it off. And the “crazy!” bells should have been clanging like mad, pardon the pun.
Yet, for some reason, every word he spoke rang with truth, and her every instinct was telling her to believe him.
Which could only mean she had completely lost her mind. Just like her dad.
“No, Katrina, you haven’t lost your mind. And the only reason your father did—though, in truth, he wasn’t crazy—was because he tried to deny his need for a Guardian, as you are doing now.”
“Stop reading my mind!” She thrust her hands into her hair, then covered her face. “My God, that just proves I’m nuts. People can’t read other people’s minds.”
“Angels can.”
She jerked her head up to give him a baleful glare.
He crossed his arms and arched a brow, leaning back against her stove. “Well, they can.”
Kat drew a deep breath and tried to calm down and act rationally. “Look, even if everything you said is true, even if you are an angel”—which, honestly, wasn’t that much of a stretch to believe—”I for damn sure am no ‘Lightkeeper’. So whatever you need a Lightkeeper for, you’d better go find another one.” She hopped off the bar stool and headed for the door. It was time for this episode of the Twilight Zone to end. “Now, thanks for coming to my rescue last night, thanks for the healing and breakfast this morning, but you need to leave.”
Micah made no move to follow her. “And what will you do, Katrina, when the Darkseekers come?”
She stopped in the center of the living room, bare toes digging into the cream carpet as a shudder rippled up her spine. That truth-gong thing he had going with his voice was beyond freaky.
“Those howling dogs you heard last night? The ones that frightened you so badly? Those were Shadowhounds, or as mankind knows them better, Hell hounds. They are on your trail now. And where the Shadowhounds are, their masters, the Darkseekers, are never far behind. They will be coming for you, Katrina. If you send me away, they will find you.”
She turned to face him. He was still in her kitchen but no longer leaning leisurely against her stove. There was a tension about him that hadn’t been there a moment ago, as if he were braced for battle. His eyes bored into her. The open, friendly warmth in his face was gone, his features now seemed carved from stone, grave and strong. A warrior’s battle face. It should have terrified her—made her think Micah’s inner rapist was about to spring—but for absolutely no reason she could explain, the only thing that frightened her was his mention of the Shadowhounds and the Darkseekers.
“Tell me you did not hear the hounds, Lightkeeper. Tell me they didn’t frighten you so badly you were going to pray for angelic protection for the first time in your life. If your answer is true, I will leave you in peace.”
She wanted him gone, so she opened her mouth and prepared to lie her ass off. There were no hounds, and I wasn’t going to pray for angelic protection. The words formed in her mind, but would not leave her lips. She frowned and tried again, but to no avail. She was quite literally struck mute. She put a hand to her throat. Her pulse was thundering.
“What have you done to me?” Those words spilled out with ease, filled with accusation.
Her self-proclaimed guardian angel arched a brow. “I have done nothing.” A satisfied smile curved his gorgeous mouth, and he looked so smug she wanted to punch him.
There were no hounds, and I wasn’t going to pray for angelic protection. She tried to deny the truth again, and once again, could not voice the words.
“What are you doing to me? Why can’t I speak?”
“I assure you, Katrina, I have done nothing. But you are a Lightkeeper and I am your Guardian. There can only be truth between us. Which means you did hear the hounds, and you were, in fact, going to pray in the circle of light for angelic protection. You were going to summon me to your aid.”
Her sofa was two feet away. She stumbled to it and sank down onto the cushions.
“If you’re an angel, where are your wings?” She grasped at the ridiculous argument, wanting something, anything to make him admit this was all a bad joke or an equally bad dream. “And I don’t mean the ones tattooed on your back.”
“Is that what it will take to convince you?” Micah arched a golden brow and came around her kitchen counter. He moved soundlessly and with a silken, pantherish grace. “I had thought in this age, my wings might be cause for alarm, so I did not manifest them, but if you must see them, so be it.” He spread his arms. “Will this do?”
One minute he was standing there, bare chested and more gorgeous than humanly possible with his brilliant eyes and golden hair tumbling down around well-muscled shoulders, and the next minute, his raging hottie factor quintupled, golden radiance shone from him like sunlight, and a pair
of huge, brilliant white wings flared out from his shoulders, stretching from one end of her small kitchen to the other and nearly touching the ceiling as they lifted and fluttered in the tight space.
Katrina’s jaw dropped. She stared at the gleaming, white-feathered wings threatening to knock her favorite art prints off the wall.
And then she did what any sensible woman would have done in a similar situation.
She fainted.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Kat woke, the angel—now back to his normal, inhumanly beautiful jeans-clad self—was still there. This time he was wearing a waffle-weave shirt, a long-sleeved, crew-necked blue number that clung to his muscled physique, brought out the striking color of his eyes, and ratcheted up his uber-hotness even more.
She closed her eyes, tried meditation, even tried self-hypnosis, but nothing worked. Every time she opened her eyes, the angel was still there. A new, permanent fixture in her life, exuding strength, solidity, and killer sex-appeal. Oh, joy.
On the plus side, not only could the angel could cook…he was a deft hand at tidying up.
While she was passed out, he’d taken the opportunity to put her apartment back in order. The dishes were washed, the kitchen cleaned, everything once more back in its proper, impeccably neat place. Even Grandmother would have been hard-pressed to find fault with his efforts. Not that she wouldn’t have tried.
Sloth is a sin, girl. One of the deadliest. There’ll be no such evil in my home.
Kat shuddered at the memory of Grandmother’s scraping voice and fought the urge to set something awry just to spite her. She didn’t because, in the end, Kat wouldn’t be at peace until she set it right again. Too many years and too many brutal lessons had seared the need for neatness into her soul.
She shoved the old memory aside and paced across the small apartment, moving from the couch to a padded armchair by the window to put a bit of distance between herself and the angel. Outside, the world was still and white, ice and snow coating every surface, bending the pines low until they looked like they were bowing. Ice storms were rare in Atlanta, but when they came, they were as beautiful as they could be damaging. It would be a day, or possibly two, before the city was thawed out enough to permit travel.