Archangel of Mercy

by Christina Ashcroft

  Chapter Five

  GABE halted in front of the woman. She was no longer issuing orders as if she was his equal, or pretending disinterest when her arousal fragranced the air with devastating consequences for his libido. Instead, she looked as if she was about to faint.

  He was used to mortals passing out in his presence. But usually they did that the second they met him, not twenty minutes later. Why would his scarred back cause her such trauma?

  “You . . . Your . . .” She appeared incapable of coherent speech, but he had the strangest certainty it wasn’t because he now scared her to death.

  “Yes?” The word was pure ice. He couldn’t figure out why her reaction affected him. He’d lived with his disability for millennia. It was who he was. And until now not a single mortal had ever dared to make even an oblique reference to his . . . lack.

  She looked as if she wished she hadn’t said anything. He would make her wish a great deal more than that before he’d finished with her.

  “I’m sorry.” The words tumbled out, and her blue eyes appealed to him for mercy. “It’s just—you must have been very fortunate to survive such a terrible accident.”

  Fortunate and survive were not usually two words he associated with the horrifying circumstances surrounding the loss of his wings. He rolled his shoulders and could still feel, even after all this time, the phantom pull of muscles and feathers that had long since ceased to exist.

  Bleak despair seeped from the fissures in his soul. He no longer possessed his wings but they would forever possess him; an intangible embrace as enduring as creation itself.

  He shoved the memories deep into the abyss. After all these years it should have got easier to suppress the past. But it never had. He knew now it never would.

  Deep in his heart he’d have it no other way. Because the alternative—to forget—chilled the essence of his being.

  “Do you have any idea,” he said, already knowing the answer, “what you’re talking about?”

  She blushed and looked suitably mortified. “No. I can’t even imagine. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Before he could respond to her half-assed apology she looked up and their eyes meshed. “I do that. Speak before I think. Just ignore me.”

  He had every intention of ignoring her. But damn, her eyes were pretty.

  “This way.” She shot him a sideways glance as she clutched a silver frame to her breasts. Her copper-tinted hair was tousled, her eyes still captivatingly innocent. She barely reached his shoulder and her slender figure enhanced the inherent fragility of her species. He realized that far from ignoring her he could hardly take his eyes off her.

  “So, um . . .” She was clearly still embarrassed by the way she’d drawn attention to his missing wings. Except, apparently, she didn’t know the significance of his scars. “What’s your name?”

  For a second he thought he’d misheard her. In all his existence he couldn’t recall a single time when he’d had to introduce himself. Damned if he’d start now.

  “What’s yours?” There was an edge in his voice. If he discovered this female was faking her innocence he’d take great pleasure in watching her brain leak out from her ears.

  “Aurora Robinson.” She shot him another glance, a questioning expression on her face. He ignored it. If she didn’t know who he was, that wasn’t his problem.

  It was novel, though. He’d often had females whose names he never knew or would forget within moments of having them. Not once had the situation been reversed.

  Yeah, it was a novel sensation. But he wasn’t sure whether he liked it.

  “You live here alone?” They were approaching a small stand of silver birches beyond which he caught glimpses of a stone-built farmhouse.

  “No.” He caught a thread of irritation in her voice, as if his refusal to answer her question grated on her nerves. “This is my family home. I already told you I’m just here for the weekend.”

  The house came fully into view, and some distance from it was an enclosure where two great wolfhounds, their bellies flattened to the ground, whined softly at their approach.

  “Hey, boys.” Alarm filled Aurora’s voice as she took off toward them. It was a couple of seconds before he realized he’d been watching her butt as she jogged. “What’s the matter?” Still clutching the silver frame in one hand, she unbolted the gate to the enclosure. The dogs didn’t move and their dark eyes still riveted on him.

  She crouched down, placed the frame on her knees and wrapped an arm around each dog. “Come on, guys, what’s up?”

  Gabe leaned against the gate jamb, crossed his arms and watched her fuss over the dogs. There was nothing special about her. And although her eyes were pretty and her hair glinted copper in the sun, as humans went she was completely average-looking.

  Although, admittedly, the freckles across the bridge of her nose were enchanting, there was nothing outstanding in her physical appearance to account for why he was still here.

  Why he still wanted her.

  Must have something to do with the way she had blocked his psychic scan.

  The dogs broke free from Aurora’s arms and crawled on their bellies toward him. He saw Aurora’s mouth open in astonishment as she toppled onto her butt, and he sent her a mocking half-smile as her dogs wrapped themselves around his calves.

  At least her dogs recognized him. He had no idea why he found that notion darkly amusing.

  Aurora huffed as she scrambled to her feet and flicked him a resentful glance. “What are you, a dog whisperer?”

  “Among other things.” It was odd, but seeing her so put out by her dogs’ behavior had extinguished his lingering anger. Now all that remained was the lust, which hadn’t diminished at all. “Are we having that whiskey or not?”

  So what if she was indigenous to Earth? He would never see her again. And after he’d fucked her to their mutual satisfaction he’d find Mephisto and knock the shit out of him.

  Sounded like a plan. He gave Aurora the benefit of his archangelic smile, the one that could dazzle even the most jaded of demi-goddesses. She squinted, as if the sun had temporarily blinded her, and stamped past him as if completely unaffected by his radiance.

  He stared at her retreating back in disbelief. Had she just ignored him? How was that even possible? He turned and followed her through the back door and into the kitchen, the dogs on either side of him, their claws clattering on the flagstone floor.

  “Make yourself at home.” She jabbed a finger at the timber table and chairs in the center of the kitchen and refused to make eye contact. He considered her remark, decided it wasn’t a demand and so hooked out a chair with his foot and sprawled on it.

  “Whiskey.” He accompanied his command with a smoldering gaze. Part of him couldn’t understand why her belligerent attitude wasn’t annoying him. Yet it wasn’t. If anything the disagreeable frown she kept shooting his way made him harder than ever.

  She put her silver frame on the workbench before turning to him. For a moment their eyes clashed and desire thudded in the air, hot and primal. He slid his hand over his thigh, a blatant invitation for her to join him. But instead of rushing to his side she folded her arms and stared at his naked chest. Within a second her gaze slid to the top of the table instead. He shifted on the chair and decided sitting had been a bad move.

  “I’ll get you a drink in a minute.” Aurora took a deep breath and he watched her breasts swell beneath the thin fabric of her tank. He flexed his fingers, recalling the feel of her cradled in the palm of his hand.

  The whiskey lost its enticement. He imagined bending her over the table, exposing her naked ass for his pleasure. Spreading her thighs and taking her from behind, while he raked his hand through her tangled chestnut hair. He could hear her erratic gasps of impending orgasm and could feel her wet sheath convulse around him. His cock was so damn hard it hurt.

  “Come here.” His whisper throbbed with promise and he hooked a finger in her direction so she was under no illusion as to what
he wanted.

  Aurora gritted her teeth and clenched her hands, fingernails digging into her palms. It would be so easy to just walk across the kitchen, plaster herself across his lap and let him seduce her knickers off.

  That was exactly what she’d wanted in those hazy, lust-drenched seconds after she’d plummeted from the astral planes. If she was brutally honest she still wanted it.

  But no way was she going to give it. Never in her life had she met such an arrogant, up-himself jerk. He didn’t even have the common decency to look her in the eye when he spoke to her.

  She conveniently ignored the times she’d given his crotch a furtive glance. She’d asked him a perfectly reasonable question, and he’d blanked her. Even after she’d told him her name, he hadn’t bothered to reciprocate.

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d then hypnotized her dogs. She shot them a black glare at their treachery but they still only had eyes for the golden one.

  “I need to know,” she said, focusing on the tabletop because despite her belated moral high ground, she had the despicable feeling that one look at his face would cause her principles to crumble. “What exactly you remember.”

  “I remember . . .” His voice was smoky with the promise of hedonistic delights. She swallowed a groan. She might not like him, but he wasn’t making it easy for her to resist him. “That we haven’t finished what we started, Aurora.”

  God, the way he said her name sent spirals of primal need through the core of her being. She resisted the urge to squirm, but it was a close thing. Instead she curled her toes, forced herself to remember he was . . . gorgeous . . . no, arrogant . . . and made the fatal error of looking up and catching his smoldering gaze.

  For long seconds she remained captivated by the stunning beauty of his eyes. All she really wanted to do was drop to her knees, crawl across the floor and worship at his feet. She was vaguely aware he spread his thighs as if in invitation, and the imperative to go to him thudded with deafening insistence inside her mind.

  She wrenched her mesmerized stare from his eyes to focus on his nose. Which was also a thing of sculpted perfection.

  “Are you . . .” Her voice was raw and scraped her throat. She swallowed, tried once more. “Are you messing with my thoughts again?”

  She didn’t think he was. But he had to be. She would never imagine behaving in such a subservient way.

  For a fleeting moment he looked nonplussed by her question. As if it was not only the last thing he had imagined her asking but also completely incomprehensible.

  “Again?” He managed to sound offended. “I’ve never messed with your thoughts. Why should I?”

  It would have been a fair question, if he hadn’t tried to enter her head earlier. That had been unforgivable and if he did it once what was to stop him from doing it again. Maybe he had an entire arsenal of mind-probing techniques at his disposal?

  The problem was, she believed him. Which meant the desire to prostrate herself before him came entirely from her own warped, frustrated psyche.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and attempted to harness her scattered thoughts.

  “Do you remember anything?” Apart from how to use his cock. She had no doubt he could remember how to use that. A hot flush crawled over her breasts and onto her face and a silent sigh echoed through her mind. It didn’t matter whether she looked at him or not. She only had to think of him to think of sex.

  “What’s your obsession with remembering? Why does it matter?”

  Her eyelids sprung open. He was still sprawled on the chair and he still looked like sin incarnate. And he didn’t look even the least bit concerned by the previous events.

  A shiver skittered over her arms as a chilling possibility surfaced.

  “Has this happened to you before?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. But it made a kind of scary sense. She had assumed, when he told her about the club, that he’d been, well, clubbing. But maybe he’d consciously entered the astral planes in Manhattan with the express goal of physically ending up somewhere else?

  Not Ireland, obviously. But although he’d been clearly shaken by that bit of news he wasn’t that freaked out about it all. Was it possible he used a technique similar to the one she had intended to use to travel to her mother’s homeland?

  “Not that I remember.” And then he grinned, as if he thought he’d just cracked the world’s greatest joke.

  She needed space. Away from him so she could think rationally without every single thought becoming drenched with sexual implications.

  “Right.” She swung on her heel and battled the urge to bury her face in her hands. “I’ll get us something to drink. Won’t be long.”

  Gabe watched her all but run from the kitchen, as if she feared he might try and stop her. His grin faded into a frown. She might be only an indigenous female of Earth but she was turning out to be one of the most puzzling women he’d ever met.

  Desire heated her voice, lust darkened her eyes. Her body language told him she found him irresistible. And yet she resisted him.

  It had been a while since a woman had offered him a challenge when it came to sex. He had to admit that this strange encounter, while frustrating, was also extraordinarily arousing.

  He stood and strolled to the workbench where she’d left her silver frame. He picked it up and frowned at the pressed flower beneath the glass. Inexplicably a shudder inched along his spine. The flower was fragile and faded and something—something wasn’t right about it.

  Before he could scrutinize it further the dogs, both of which had followed him across the kitchen to lay at his feet, stiffened, their attention locked on the open kitchen door. And then, simultaneously, they leaped up, hackles raised, barking with such ferocity he reeled against the workbench and watched them hurtle into the hall.

  Gabe dropped the frame onto the workbench and was at their heels as they skidded into a living room. Then he collided into their bodies as they came to a dead standstill.

  Ancient horror hammered through his heart and spilled into his bloodstream. A jagged, violet fracture, like static lightning, split the room from ceiling to floor.

  The Guardians were coming for Aurora. And she was standing in front of the violet fracture as if mesmerized.

  “Aurora.” His voice was harsh. “Get away from there.” Even as he spoke the imperative to leave thundered through his brain. What was happening here had nothing to do with him. It was none of his concern.

  It didn’t matter if Aurora ran. The Guardians had singled her out. She would be captured. She would be taken.

  He couldn’t interfere. It was against ancient protocols. But still he couldn’t leave.

  She looked at him, and he saw raw terror clouding her eyes. “Keep back.” Her voice cracked with fear and her arm swung out, hitting his chest, an unmistakable gesture of protection.

  For a second his entire focus zeroed in on her. He forgot about the dark energy seeping from the fracture, forgot about its implications, forgot everything but the fact Aurora had just attempted to push him away from the face of danger.

  No one pushed him from the face of danger. No one imagined, let alone put into practice, the outrageous assumption they had the ability to protect him.

  She didn’t know who he was. Equally, she could have no idea what nightmare waited for her once she entered the Guardians domain. Revulsion curdled his gut and he gripped her arm and pulled her around to face him.

  “Don’t.” She pushed against him, eyes wild, breath erratic. “Let me go.”

  In his peripheral vision he saw the loathsome figures appear within the glowing violet cloud. He knew the kind of things the Guardians would do to her to satisfy their sick craving to soak in a mortal’s terror. Their species went back a billion years, to the sunrise of time itself, and their hatred of any other form of life that had evolved after them was absolute. Two million years ago the Alpha Immortals, ancestors of every immortal alive today, had emerged from the fallout of a supernova. Within a mill
ion years they had banished the marauding Guardians to the outer edges of creation, but still the creatures abducted innocent victims to feed their perverted addiction. Disgust gripped his stomach, and an ancient, long-buried instinct rose.

  He wrapped his arms around her, held her head securely against his shoulder so she couldn’t move a muscle, and without even a second’s hesitation took her to the safest place on Earth.

  His sanctuary.

  Chapter Six

  WHAT was he doing? Aurora tried to move her head, tried to see what had happened to that terrifying streak of lightning. But his fingers bit into her skull, keeping her plastered against his shoulder and not only could she not move, she could hardly breathe.

  Then she forgot about breathing, forgot about the violet lightning as a whiplash of white fire streaked through her brain, her lungs, her heart. Instinctively she tried to curl into a ball but still he held her in an iron grip, even as a scream of primal terror locked in her throat.

  And as suddenly as it began, the horrifying sensation of her every atom flying apart ceased.

  She realized her nails were digging into his naked flesh, that her mouth was squashed against his shoulder. The entire length of her body molded his and the crazy thought drifted through her mind that she should stay here, trapped in his arms, because only here was she . . . safe.

  Gingerly she unhooked her nails and saw the crescents gouged into his flesh. She pushed at his chest and lifted her head. He didn’t try and stop her and as she stumbled backward, nausea churned and sweat beaded her skin.

  No way was she going to throw up in front of him. She swallowed, tried to focus on his face but everything was blurred as if she’d been plunged under murky water.

  “Are you okay?” He didn’t sound concerned. He sounded irritated. She let out a shaky breath, tried to focus once again. It was the eeriest sensation but she could’ve sworn they were no longer in her parents’ living room.