He didn’t rush, or demand, or control. He worshipped her lips until she feared she would melt into a puddle of euphoric pleasure, and then, as if aware she once again balanced on the brink, moved his lips to the curve of her neck, her collarbone, her shoulder.
She arched beneath him and moaned, raking her nails across his back.
He groaned—the sound raw and throaty. Unlike any sound she’d heard him make so far.
Wings. Did you touch…
The nebulous thought caressed her mind, and she smoothed her palms over his back again, near his spine, between his shoulder blades.
“Billie,” he rasped, lifting his head to find her gaze. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I didn’t,” she said, “until you made that sound.”
Blue light flared in his eyes again before he closed them. “No human should be able to feel my wings unless I choose to let them do so, and yet you can.” He opened his eyes, wonderment filling them. “Nor should I ever be able to feel a human touching them without allowing it to be so, and yet with you, I can.”
She let a mischievous grin play with her lips. “You see? I am that special.”
He laughed. “You have no idea.”
He kissed her again. And then slowly removed the rest of her clothes and kissed every inch of flesh he revealed. Lingered in places Billie had once believed an angel would never linger.
Brought her to climax after climax in ways she’d once thought angels should never know.
And then, already so sated that coherent thought began to slip away, she begged him to come inside her.
He rose from the bed, removed his own clothes, and—with the tenderest, slowest thrust—Nathanial entered her.
Filled her.
Completed her.
* * * *
Nooooooooo!!
Wraif crumpled to the floor, the scream in his mind as deafening as the scream tearing from his throat.
The angel! The angel had…had—
He threw back his head and screamed again.
The angel had defiled her! Had pumped his sordid flesh into her body!
“No!” he roared.
Abhorrent impressions lashed at him, vile caresses he knew were those of the angel touching his Destiny.
He shrieked once more, blasting the burn outward, shattering the windows of the room he was in.
For hours he’d been hiding here, an abandoned building somewhere in Compton. Furious at finding the bitch-cow Adelaide gone, furious at the taint of the angel in her house, he’d sought out fresh sources of sustenance, the need to locate his Destiny beyond feverish.
But the second he’d begun to draw on the burn, invisible belts of white heat lashed at him. Crippled him.
He’d fled the whimpering man he’d chosen to feed on. Sought out a new source.
And the same thing had happened.
And again.
Weakening him every time he tried.
Something, someone, was stopping him.
Fury pummeled Wraif, and he’d fled until he’d found this derelict warehouse. The temptation to feast was nearly all-encompassing. The craving to locate his Destiny too potent. Until he could figure out how to combat the unknown pissant adversary, he had to keep away from the human cattle.
He’d hid. Aching for her. Paced. Craved.
And then the soundless voice screamed in his head at the exact second he knew the fucking angel had fucked his Destiny!
Clawing at his face, he threw back his head and screamed again. “No!”
They have consummated. Their bodies have joined. They have—
“I know!” he roared, shutting down the soundless voice. “I know! But I don’t know where she is! I don’t—”
I do. I know. Now listen to me.
And he did.
Chapter 8
Time lost all meaning. Hilarious really, given time was an abstract construct to an angel. The only quantifiable meaning time had to his kind was that measured by the activities of man.
And in this activity of man, Nathanial had lost all track of time.
Being inside Billie, moving inside her, moving with her…
Time no longer existed. Only being with her did.
In their private world, shielded from everything else, the only thing that mattered was her pleasure, her rapture.
And in tending to that, he found his own.
For the first time in all his millennia of existence, he found his true pleasure.
Her eyes held his as he rolled his hips, stroking deeper into her with each thrust. She whispered his name over and over, her fingers caressing his back, the scapulars of his wings. With every touch of her fingertips on the downy axillaries, sensations unlike any he’d ever experienced shot through him, his body thrumming with an urgency both foreign and sublime.
Wing play was common among his kind during sexual interaction, and he was no untouched novice—but nothing had ever felt like this.
Because finally, this means something. Finally, it is not only your body, but your heart and your soul being aroused.
“Nathanial,” Billie breathed again, sliding her heel up the back of his thigh, her eyes smoldering with a desire that fed his own.
The slightest of shift in position allowed him to sink deeper into her still, and molten pleasure sheared through him.
Fighting with the inevitable, knowing he was close to a release that would change everything, he cupped her face with one hand.
So close. He was so close…
He didn’t want to climax before her, and with a single gossamer thread of his influence, he could make her orgasm, but he would rather burn in Satan’s favorite chamber than flaw this transcendent moment by altering its truth.
Everything was the way it was meant to be, without celestial influence…and that was exactly as he wanted it.
Billie’s heel dug into the base of his spine as her inner muscles squeezed him tighter. Her eyes fluttered close. Her breathing quickened, grew shallow. “I’m…I’m close…”
“I am as well,” he said, the confession a tortured groan.
Her lips curled and her fingers raked over his shoulder. “G-good.”
A tight tingling began in the base of his spine, intense and heady.
“Billie,” he rasped, his movement growing faster, erratic. “I can’t hold off any longer.”
She fisted her hand in the hair at the back of his head. “Then don’t.”
He smiled, and then moaned as she wrapped her other leg around his hip, locked her ankles at the base of his spine and squeezed him again.
His body reacted. Took over. Control abandoned him. Or perhaps he surrendered it. Surrendered to her. To the sensations she awoke in him. Not just now, but since the first moment he’d grown aware of the light that would become her.
He surrendered to Billie. To everything she was to him, to everything she’d done to him.
In that moment, with their bodies connected in the most intimate way, holding each other’s gazes, breath mingling with every panting gasp, he willingly gave himself over to her.
Just as she reached the zenith.
She cried out his name, her inner muscles contracting around him.
The world splintered. Reality shifted. He was torn apart and remade, incomprehensible pleasure rendering him his true form—a being of light—for a microsecond. Billie clawed at his back, her knuckles sliding against the root of his wings, and he was torn apart and remade yet again.
Over and over. With every constricting pulse of her inner walls around him, he was remade, his thrust wild, his breath ragged, his release a heartbeat away from eruption.
Protection.
The single word filled his head and, as he fell over the edge into a pleasure beyond him, he snatched at his last vestiges of control. Removed any chance of his release creating life.
Even as the unexpected and overwhelming longing to do so with her flooded him.
Until he, too, erupted.
And then he was little but light.
Inside her.
The light—his light—filled the room, filled Billie. She clung to him, holding him to her, taking him deeper, even as his human form disappeared in the light. She held him and cried his name, gazed up at him, saw him—truly saw him.
Billie, he said, his human voice lost.
“Nathanial,” she whispered, her legs still wrapped around a form no longer there, and yet there all the same. “Oh Nathanial…”
The world splintered again. Shattered. And he was human once more.
They rode out their pleasure together, until—long moments later, or even a lifetime—her legs slid from around his back and her breath left her on a wobbly laugh.
He smiled, still embedded inside her, reveling in the sated rapture in her eyes. “This is a good laugh, yes?”
Her smile stretched wider and she trailed her fingertips down his back to his butt. “This is an oh-my-God-where-have-you-been-all-my-life laugh.”
He chuckled himself. “I’ve been with you.”
“Then can we go back in time so you can be my first, please?”
His heart thumped faster in his chest.
She closed her eyes, still smiling. “Can you make it so you’re my only?”
He could. With a thought, he could erase every other touch she’d ever had. But he wouldn’t. Truth. He would never rob her of her truth.
“Oh God,” she groaned suddenly, slapping a hand to her face. “You’ve been with me forever? That means you’ve seen every time I picked my nose?”
He arched an eyebrow.
“No!” she groaned louder.
“Kidding.” He laughed. “I did look away often.”
She returned her hand to his hair and gave him a stern look, even as her lips twitched. “You better have.”
He chuckled again, and then sobered, brushing a knuckle along her jaw. “I did everything I could to not be aware of you, Billie.”
She held his gaze.
He brushed her jaw again. “But you do look adorable when you pick your—”
She groaned and laughed and flipped him onto his back, and—because he was an angel—he grew hard again in a second.
And he took her to the pinnacle of sexual rapture all over again.
And again.
And again.
Until they were both spent. Drained.
A shaky laugh fell from him as he finally, reluctantly, withdrew from her body. “Now there’s something I never thought could happen.”
“What’s that?” she asked, eyes closed, lips curled in a lazy smile, fingers trailing a slow pattern over her stomach.
“I’m actually exhausted.”
“Need to up your cardio, Mr. Knight. I can’t have you physically pooped every night.”
Joy bloomed through him, stealing his breath. “Are you telling me you expect this every night?”
She opened one eye and looked at him. “If it’s not too presumptuous.”
He swallowed. “For how long?”
“How long you got?”
An eternity.
He stopped the word before it could leave his lips. Until Gilbert was caught, until the fallen responsible for the man’s unnatural transformation was found and dealt with, he couldn’t allow himself the luxury of dreaming. This amazing stolen moment with Billie now was all he could afford.
For an answer, he kissed her. And then kissed her collarbone, her shoulder, her breasts, her belly, and lower…
One more time of hearing her cry out his name in pleasure. One more time…
One more time turned into two more times.
The last time, she breathlessly laughed her surrender, informing him she was in very real danger of dying from sexual rapture.
“I’m tapping out,” she part groaned, part laughed, planting her feet on his shoulders and pushing him away. “You win.”
He complied with a grin, even as his human form seemed to shake from overexertion.
He’d just inched his butt to the edge of the bed, with the intention of taking a shower, when two strong hands grabbed his shoulders and he was flattened to his back.
Billie grinned down at him, sliding her palms over his chest. “Payback.”
He lost time all over again, as she did things to his body with her mouth he couldn’t comprehend or resist.
Finally, after he cried her name more than once, he climbed off the bed, scooped up his discarded jeans and shoved his legs into them.
“Your wings are incredible, by the way.”
His heart smashed up into his throat at her statement. Tingling, he turned and looked at her.
“I can see them.” She smiled, her gaze focused on the space behind him. “They’re beautiful. Majestic and amazing.”
He cast a quick glance over his shoulder and flexed his wings.
“Wow,” she breathed.
“I still don’t understand how you can see them,” he said, frowning at her with a smile. “But I’m glad you can.”
“Me too.” She crossed her legs, hugged a pillow to her chest, and rested her chin on its soft edge. “They do it for me.”
He flexed them again.
She grinned.
“I am going to make you some food,” he said. If he didn’t, he would climb back on the bed and make love to her again.
“And I will eat it.” She cocked an eyebrow. “For some reason, I’m famished.”
Laughing himself, he removed the barrier protecting them from the outside world.
BROTHER! I’ve found him! Brother!
He slammed his hands to his ears, Erah’s shout smashing through his head at the very second James materialized in the room in front of him.
“It’s happened again,” James said, stare locked on him. “In Compton. Maybe. Somewhere near there. Nim detected a massive blast of dark—Shit, Feathers, did I interrupt a—”
Brother, I’ve found him!
An awareness of a location sheared through Nathanial’s existence—Compton.
Get here! Get here now!
“Nathanial?” Billie’s voice battled Erah’s.
Worry filled James’s face and he stepped forward, reaching out for Nathanial. “What’s going on, Feath—”
NOW! Erah boomed.
He swung to Billie, the location Erah kept planting in his head clouding his vision. A warehouse. Abandoned. Derelict.
“Nathanial?” She still sat on the bed, hugging the pillow tighter to her chest, worry eating up her face. “What’s wrong?”
“I know where he is,” he said.
She gasped.
He destroyed the distance between them in a blur, cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. “I’ll be back.”
“I—”
He snapped back to James. “Protect her.”
“Done.” James nodded. “She’ll be safe. I promise.”
BROTHER! Erah bellowed. Get here NOW!
Nathanial translocated to the warehouse.
Silence wrapped around him. Cold. Crypt-like.
He scanned the empty space, fists bunched.
Crumbling, graffiti-covered concrete pillars surrounded him. Debris covered the filthy floor. The acrid stench of human and animal defecation hung heavy in the motionless air.
Erah?
Nothing.
Erah? he called again, pivoting. This was the location Erah had shared with him. Every molecule in his being recognized it. So where was Gilbert? Where was his brother? Why couldn’t he detect a sign of either of them?
“Erah?” he called aloud.
His voice echoed around the dark warehouse, deteriorating into a wordless sound.
Nothing.
“Brother?” he called louder, turning.
Still nothing.
No, it was more than nothing. It was a void. As if he suddenly ceased to exist to anyone or anything. Even his shout no longer echoed.
Something is wrong.
The icy air pressed down on him.
Gut churning, he curled his fists tighter. It wasn’t right. This wasn’t right. Gilbert wasn’t here, and neither was Erah.
Get back to Billie. Now.
He flexed his wings.
Ice enveloped him in a suffocating embrace.
What was going on? He strained against it. Fought to open his wings.
They couldn’t move. Wouldn’t move.
Erah!
His shout fell into nothingness. Into the void.
“Fuck,” he murmured, a sickening realization sinking into his gut. “No. No…no.”
He squinted at the floor, searching for—
“Fuck!”
The angel’s snare was large, its diameter so massive it almost contained the warehouse’s entire floor. So wide, he hadn’t detected it until he’d tried to open his wings. Painted onto the floor with dark, thick blood, it had done exactly what it was meant to do—incarcerate an angel the precise moment he used his power.
If he hadn’t tried to open his wings…
The void imprisoned him. Immobilized him. Rendered him powerless and crushed down on him.
“Fuck!”
How…who had done this? Gilbert? Where was Erah? Was he harmed? Had Gilbert trapped him as well? Was the unknown fallen responsible?
“Erah?” he roared, fighting against the invisible imprison.
Silence. No echo. No sound. Just the void of the angel’s snare.
Until the snare was destroyed, he was trapped. And with every passing second, the snare drained him of his force. Leeched it from him, until he would be nothing but an empty shell.
A weapon against angels devised by the darkest of demons.
“Fuck,” he snarled again.
He had no way of reaching Billie, or Erah, or James. No way of reaching beyond the snare. All he could hope was for Erah to come looking for him.
If Gilbert hasn’t gotten to him first.
No. It was impossible. Gilbert—or whatever Gilbert had become—was strong, but unlike Nathanial, Erah was an angel at full power. Not fallen. Not cut off from his brethren, his nourishment and sustenance.
How do you know how strong Gilbert is now? You refused to snag his threads, his wisps, for anything longer than a second. Too scared of what his lust for Billie would do to you. Too scared to do your job properly.
Scrunching up his face, he tried to move.
Ice crushed him. Crippled him.
Destiny's Knight: A Fallen Angel Protector Paranormal Romantic Suspense Book (Guarded Souls 1) Page 14