Angels Dance

breakfast today, my lord?” The tone was pure aristocrat, with a side dish of golden-eyed flirtation.
    “Do you let him out alone?” he asked Dmitri, already calculating the potential advantages of Illium’s skills.
    “Rarely.”

2
    I t wasn’t until the hushed time after dawn the next morning that he saw the tall, thin angel again. She walked alone along the marbled path that led to the doors of the great library in the Refuge, disappearing and appearing out of the mist as she passed on the other side of the columns that guarded the structure.
    She carried what appeared to be a heavy book in her arms, her shining chestnut brown hair braided into a long tail down her back, her gown—of some fine sky blue material that echoed the mist—swirling and whispering around her ankles like a familiar lover. Not quite understanding why he did so, he changed direction to intercept her, the wind crisp and cool against his skin as he cut through the air.
    A wordless cry, a startled gasp, as he landed in front of her.
    Folding back his wings, he said, “I’ll carry that,” and took the gilt-edged tome from her hands before she could catch her breath and demur.
    She blinked, thick, curling lashes coming down over eyes of lush brown, the color holding a warmth that reminded him of the finely mixed pigment used by an artist who’d once visited Titus’s court. “Thank you.” Her voice was even, though her pulse thudded in her throat, a delicate beat against creamy skin stroked with a hint of the sun. “Aren’t you cold?”
    He wore only a simple pair of pants made of a durable material, in which he could fight with ease, paired with sturdy boots. His sword was strapped along his spine, the leather straps crisscrossing his chest. “No,” he said, conscious he looked the barbarian Dmitri had called him—all the more so next to her ethereal beauty. “You wake early, my lady.”
    “Jessamy.” The single word brought her lips to his attention. Soft and just full enough to tempt, they would’ve dominated her face if not for those compelling eyes dark with unspoken mystery. “When did I teach you, Galen? I can’t seem to remember.”
    Curling his fingers into his hand, he fought the urge to reach out, rub away the lines that had formed between her eyebrows. She was too fine a creature for him, his touch far too rough. And yet he didn’t walk away. “Why should you have taught me anything?”
    Another blink, more lines. “I teach all our babes, have done so for millennia. You must have been one of my students—you are so very young.”
    In his two hundred and seventy-five years on this earth, he had walked in battle and bathed in blood, felt the hot kiss of a whip on his back, the cold thrust of a knife into his gut, but never had he been called an infant until this moment. “I spent my childhood in Titus’s court.” It was an unusual thing for a child to grow up outside the Refuge, but no one would have dared harm the son of two warriors, a boy Titus himself had placed under his protection. “I had a tutor,” he added, because he did not like the idea of her thinking him an unlearned savage.
    “I remember now.” Jessamy’s liquid silk voice pouring over him in an unintentional caress. “Your tutor was a former student I recommended for the post—he told me you were taught alone.”
    “Yes.” Titus had not wanted the feminine softness of his daughters to affect Galen’s development.
    “A lonely life.”
    He shrugged, because he’d survived and he’d grown up strong—he’d been a capable fighter at an age when most angels were yet considered children. Perhaps he had not had the usual playmates, but it was all he knew, and a life that had formed him into the man he was today. That man wanted to bend, sniff the scent at the curve of Jessamy’s elegant neck. “I’ll escort you the rest of the way,” he said, rather than giving in to the primitive urge.
    * * *
    J essamy fell into step beside the big—and rather physically overwhelming—angel, his wings raised up off the floor with such effortless ease, she knew it was no conscious choice, but the honed training of a warrior. No one would ever trip him up by using his wings, this male who had looked at the book he held as if at some foreign object. “Do you read?” she asked without thought.
    The incredible, exquisite red of his hair shimmered with droplets of mist that had collected on the strands as he shook his head, and she wondered if