Angel Unleashed Read online

  “My friend is well-used to the likes of us,” he promised.

  That remark made her glance up at him. Reading the question in her expression, he elaborated slightly. “He’s a host of another sort, and unlike you or me.”

  “Thank God,” Avery said. “Because I’ve had enough of both of us.”

  The touch came then—a light, cautious, tentative hand beneath her chin that raised her face so that she had to meet his eyes.

  Draw back.

  Pull away, fool.

  Avery tensed, ready to bolt. Running was what she had always done, so why didn’t she?

  Was it actually time to confront her cravings for him head-on? Could it be true that time healed all wounds and that she now knew this was a good guy?

  “You want this?” he asked, his voice gentle for the warrior he was, his mouth inches from hers.

  There was no use pretending she didn’t understand what he meant. Her first fleeting thought was to wonder if this was a test that would leave him laughing.

  What the hell...

  “Yes. Damn it. Damn you. Yes.”

  She waited for a kiss that didn’t come, searching the face above hers now that she had given in. He wasn’t smiling now. No glimmer of triumph lifted his features. The Blood Knight’s eyes bored into hers as if by sight alone he could drink her in. Those eyes reflected a hunger and a passion for something that, like her, he might never have had.

  Avery found herself moving without instigating that movement, swept sideways by the man she was with. Every muscle in her body tightened, preparing for God only knew what.

  Her back hit the brick wall with a resounding thud that sent sharp stinging sensations through the new tattoos stretching between both shoulders. She had forgotten about the wings.

  A hard body was pressed against hers, threatening her air supply. It was a man’s body, taut, muscled, tense and unbelievably warm.

  His body.

  Dreams were merging with reality.

  It was all too much.

  The sirens in the distance had stopped. There was no one on the street. The only sound left in this corner of the world was Avery’s soft, breathless gasp.

  Chapter 9

  He had her pinned to the wall. All thoughts of decorum and mystery had been tossed aside because of Rhys’s need to capture this beauty’s essence and hold it in his hands. The need to taste her, feel her, have her, if he was lucky, at least for a while. Whatever special mojo she had going on was like a stake to his heart.

  Her lips were closed. The sound he’d heard had passed through those lips as quickly as a sigh. She was as surprised about the suddenness of their needs as he was. In truth, he’d known this would happen the first minute he saw her in that damn shop. He had willed it to happen. The miracle was that she had obliged.

  She didn’t fight him. Her eyes were wide open, her gaze no longer averted. Those eyes taunted him. Haunted him.

  I do know you. But how?

  He stroked her face with his fingers, searching for answers to the puzzle of these feelings of familiarity. Cool skin. White. Flawless. Smooth as silk. There were hollows beneath her cheekbones and no furrow lines on her brow. She could have been any age, but looked to be in her late twenties, in terms of mortal years. Rhys supposed he looked a few years older.

  The toughness she exuded with every spoken word seemed to dissolve beneath his touch, as if her defiance had simply melted away. But he sensed that defiance ready to make a comeback at any moment.

  Although she appeared to like his soft touch, she wasn’t to be trifled with or tested, he somehow knew. Nor would she allow herself to be bested by him or anyone else on the planet. No. This one remained in control of herself, as well as how far she’d go in this odd dance of give-and-take between strangers.

  His mouth found hers...not lightly this time, but with a pressure that tilted her head back. At first, he got no response. No slap. No shove. And then he felt her lips part. Warm breath seeped into his mouth.

  Body alive with sensation, Rhys cradled her face between his hands. He held her firmly while his mouth began to devour hers. His lips explored, tested, tasted, as if by doing so he could positively identify her.

  The kiss fast became mind-numbing, far-reaching, more provocative than anything in Rhys’s experience. With this merging, Rhys was sure he had discovered traces of the sublime.

  She had to feel it. Her body softened against his, while his body hardened. Her hands clutched at his back. Her eyes were closed.

  The inside of her mouth was like velvet.

  His hands slipped to her throat, then to her shoulders. He liked the texture of her leather jacket and its worn, creaking sounds.

  Having his body pressed to hers added immeasurably to the pleasure of kissing her. They were hip to hip, and as close to chest to chest as possible since he was taller. Her mouth accepted him. Her heat was the ultimate temptation for a creature like him, who, out of necessity, was too often alone.

  In the far reaches of his mind, Rhys wondered if he should allow her some time for a breath. The idea fled as her warm, moist tongue slid between his teeth. Startled by his body’s immediate reaction, he cursed with a fiery breath that she took in. This lithe immortal was delicious, sensuous, hot.

  And yet...

  As the kiss took him over, images began to flood his mind, calling for his attention, threatening distraction. The visions were of her.

  She was sitting on the cot in the tattoo parlor with her back to him. The rawness of the colorful wings she’d had inked between her shoulder blades stood out as if outlined in bright red blood.

  The tattoos sprang to life as he watched. The wings began to pull away from her back, tearing the pale skin surrounding them as they stretched out to crowd the room with a tip-to-tip span of eight feet or more. Beautiful things. Magical. Each snowy-white feather had a bloodred tip.

  The wings pulsed in time with the pounding of his heart, as if somehow connected to him. One beat. Two. The woman on that cot turned to look at him over one shoulder, her face partially hidden by feathers. Her flawless features were drawn with strain. Tears glistened in her eyes.

  Those huge wings flapped, sending extraneous items in the room sailing. The shop’s walls started to topple, as if an earthquake, measuring high on the Richter scale, was passing through. Then she was in the doorway, suddenly, looking out, staring at him. The sensation of their gazes meeting was so realistic Rhys muttered, “What the hell?”

  His eyes flew open to find no battering vortex of wind. The building’s walls still stood and he was pressing the woman in his arms to the brick.

  Rhys took his mouth from hers, pulling back enough to see her face in a slanted shaft of what was left of the moonlight. That face wore the same strained expression he had seen in the vision. Her eyes were trained on him in the same way. Both of their hearts were beating way too fast.

  “What—” he began, but had to start over. “What was that?”

  Again, she didn’t feign ignorance of what he was alluding to when she might have had nothing to do with his dream and couldn’t possibly have known what he was talking about.

  But she did know.

  “That,” she said slowly, cautiously and with a slight tremor in her tone, “is why you and I were never meant to meet. Certainly not like this.”

  Leaning into her, Rhys stared hard, not quite comprehending what she was saying. “Explain.”

  No tears glistened in her eyes, so had he made that part up?

  “We are connected,” she said. “Our bond goes way back.”

  The familiarity, Rhys thought with a rush of relief, was real. The rest of what she was telling him remained hazy.

  She went on. “Now you know why I’ve come here, to London, and what I’m after. You’ve seen the
things I seek, when no one else could have.”

  “You know what I saw?”

  “What you witnessed was a wish transferred through touch—a hope, my hope, for a reunion that’s long overdue.”

  “Explain in plain English,” Rhys said. “What I saw was—”

  “Wings. My wings.”

  The moment was surreal, when surreal was also the way Rhys would have described the path through his extended life span. However, her explanation, such as it was, began to make sense. His vision was her version of what she wanted. Big wings. Real ones.

  “You believe...” he started to say.

  Before he could ask his question, she pushed him back with the strength he’d witnessed when they dealt with the vampires, a strength that defied her size. Although he didn’t have to let her do this, he complied with her demand for distance and moved back far enough for her to remove her jacket and drop it to the pavement.

  When her hands went to the front of her shirt, he wondered what she might be up to. Forgoing the buttons, she pulled the shirt over her head.

  It was, he thought, a strange time for a street-side striptease.

  She wore nothing beneath the shirt and stood in front of him partially naked, just as she had the first time he’d seen her, and also in the vision he’d had. And damn it, up close and personal, she was a true vision, one he could have reached out to touch.

  Long collarbones balanced her shoulders and a gracefully curved neck. Smooth stretches of bare, pure-white skin surrounded small rounded breasts that were as perfect as the rest of her. The tips of those breasts were pink.

  Withholding a groan, Rhys considered shutting his eyes. The moment was incredibly intimate. Painfully so. He didn’t really know her at all, and yet they were bonded, she had said. Way back.

  Why was she behaving like this?

  In full view, she stood for a few more seconds, showing no concern about being undressed in front of a stranger, before turning around to face the wall behind her. Raising both arms, she placed her hands on the brick above her head.

  Rhys’s gaze went to the tattoos, to the false wings that were unlike the pair he’d seen stretch and flap when his eyes were closed. Beneath his scrutiny, she shivered. Hell, the night was cold. But she was waiting for him to do something, say something. She was waiting for him to fully understand what she was showing him.

  Closer. Look closer.

  Gaze locked to the tattooed wings, Rhys followed the rows of feathers to where they met the curve of her spine.

  What am I supposed to see?

  She contracted her back muscles, offering him a stunning replay of the dreamlike vision. These wings were merely inked designs, however. Colorful re-creations of...

  Rhys leaned forward, focusing his attention on the spot where those wings almost met the crease of her spine. Did he see something there, almost perfectly camouflaged by an artist’s talented work?

  Two long scars, darker than the rest of her old wounds and now covered with blue ink, ran parallel to her spinal column. Six inches in length and deeply carved into her, those two terrible wounds made Rhys want to cry out in protest at whatever evil deed had made them.

  Were they important? Was the ink merely a cover-up of those old wounds?

  Chills washed over him as the unanswerable questions kept repeating. For him, chills often meant truth in the direction he was heading.

  Think.

  She had lost something, she’d said, and was searching for it. He had offered to help her find whatever that was. She was showing him her back, showing him the wings that camouflaged her wounds.

  As he stared at those incredibly complex tattoos, a kernel of truth blossomed inside him. Was it possible that these wings were representations of the real thing?

  “Bloody hell,” he said, unable to believe the idea forming in his mind. “The image I saw was real? You actually are an...”

  “Angel,” she said.

  Can’t be...

  Fighting the urge to lay his hands on her, to feel the scars those old wounds had made and to know what the rest of an angel felt like, Rhys’s shoulders twitched with the strain of holding himself back.

  Did he believe what she was telling him?

  The half-bare woman in front of him didn’t move. It seemed to him that she couldn’t. He was mesmerized by her. What she had shown him was so personal, he had a knee-jerk reaction that spiraled through his body. So extraordinarily personal, it brought heat.

  Giving in to the need to touch this female who was so damn fine and beautiful, Rhys reached out.

  “Don’t,” she warned in a voice that defied argument.

  Rhys’s hand stopped mid-motion.

  “No one touches them,” she said. “Especially you.”

  The way she said that last part made him think they had met before, like this, and that she hadn’t liked the result. But he would have remembered that meeting. No one could have forgotten her after the briefest look.

  “I want to know about this and about what happened to you,” Rhys said, his gaze roaming over her.

  The curve of her back was seductive beyond his wildest imaginings. In his mind, Rhys ran his fingers down that graceful indentation, over each vertebra and every freshly inked feather, wanting to believe her and that she actually was an angel. If he was to accept that she was, how had she gotten here? How did an angel lose her wings?

  “True,” she said, as if reading his mind. “I promise you I am what you think I am.”

  She was shivering. Quakes rocked her entire body. Rhys pressed himself to her, careful not to touch her shoulders. With his hands on the wall and his mouth near her silky white hair, he said, “It’s a good story. Can you prove it?”

  * * *

  Prove it...

  Avery had bared her soul to a creature she couldn’t mind control into forgetting what he was seeing. His aura and presence had been too vital to fight. That first kiss had been her downfall because she had been dreaming of it forever.

  Be careful what you wish for...

  “Have faith,” she said to him. “Believe.”

  Can’t tell you everything. Not all of it.

  He was too close. Too warm. How could she think when she had secretly wanted this for so long? When she had promised herself that a moment like this one would never come to pass?

  She had no idea the Blood Knights could radiate so much heat. This one was volcanic. He held her captive with the placement of his arms and hips, and she could feel way too much of the male in him. The quakes rocking her weren’t temperature related, but indicative of so much more than being half naked in the cold night air. He was causing this reaction. He was doing this. The Blood Knight whose closeness she had always craved.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take the bait and ask how you know the wings are in London?”

  “Rumor.”

  Her right cheek rubbed against the rough brick. Rhys probably thought she couldn’t get away without his permission. Big mistake there, if that’s the direction his thoughts took.

  “We’ve already had a discussion about rumors,” he pointed out.

  “This is black market stuff. Secretive whispers in dark places.”

  “And therefore highly unstable.”

  “Not when they call to me here.”

  After being silent for a moment, the Blood Knight said, “Your wings call to you?”

  “Yes.” With her face against the brick, Avery couldn’t nod her head. She had to speak.

  “How? How do they call to you?” he persisted.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  Damn you...

  “They sing to me.”

  After another thoughtful pause, he said, “Like in a song?”


  “Like vibrations deep in my bones.”

  “I suppose you’d equate that vibration to a plucked harp string?”

  Sarcasm underscored his latest question. Everyone envisioned angels with harps, erroneously. Angels weren’t do-nothings who sat around strumming. She had been a warrior. Her instrument of choice had been a sword, but this Blood Knight didn’t need to know that.

  “How long have you been looking for the wings?” he asked.

  “Forever. Seems like forever.”

  “Then why haven’t you already located them?”

  “I think...” Avery felt a stab of panic that cut off her reply. What she had been about to say explained more than she had formerly been able to comprehend. Ideas forming in her mind now were either completely fantastical make-believe strings of thought, or downright miracles, when she had ceased to believe in miracles.

  Bond. Connection. Blood and light. Maybe, as impossible as it seemed, she’d been meant to show herself to Rhys here, where the vibration was the strongest. Maybe Rhys was part of that, and he had been the key to her success all along...when she had been either too scared or too stubborn to see it.

  She had placed her blood in his veins unwillingly, but was it possible that some good might have been born from that alliance, and that her attraction to him might have been pointing the way? There was a chance the pain of their beginnings had blinded her to what she needed most, and that her oath of vengeance against the Blood Knights and their Makers had kept her from getting what she had needed all along.

  Her breath came in rasps now. There wasn’t enough breathing space to deal with this revelation.

  Blood Knight. Will you help me?

  Can you help me?

  Rhys.

  Those words wouldn’t come out.

  The calm, throaty voice in her ear soothed a soul so wounded that it had been unable to capture the light it needed for a very long time. His light. And that idea went against the vows she had clung to. So impossible, yet so simple.