Angels Dance

blood marred the fine blue, but her gown had otherwise escaped damage.
    “Done?” he asked when she dropped her hand, raising his own at the same time to angle her face to the light so he could examine the cut on her temple. Already healing. Good. But he borrowed her scarf to wipe away the streaks of red that enraged him, the scent of her blood a vivid thread in spite of the carnage.
    Taking the cloth when he returned it, she reached out to run it over his chest. “Do you own any shirts?”
    Enjoying the tender touch quite unlike those of other warriors who might have sewn up dangerous injuries in battle so he could continue to fight, he said, “Yes. For formal occasions.” Though in Titus’s court, even those occasions hadn’t often required a shirt.
    Jessamy laughed . . . right before her face crumpled. Gathering her into his arms, he stroked his hand over her back as she wrapped her own arms around his neck and sobbed. He was careful to avoid the sensitive area where her wings grew out of her back, the feathers there a rich, evocative magenta that faded into blush, then pure cream in the body of her wings. To steal that intimacy would be to devalue its worth—he would wait until Jessamy invited the touch.
    Her breath, ragged and hot, blew across his skin as she tried to get even closer. Nudging his way between her knees, the gossamer skirts of her gown frothing around them, he cradled her tight. So slender was her body, so terrifyingly fragile. But not bony, he now realized, for all her appearance of painful thinness. It was as if her frame itself was so very fine that the flesh upon it need only be the gentlest of layers. There was a sensual grace to her, exquisite and beautiful.
    “He can’t hurt you now,” he said in her ear when her sobs quieted, her hair as soft as fur under his hand, against his face.
    A hiccupping breath before she sat up again, drawing her dignity around herself like a shield. “Thank you.” Glancing down, she colored at the way her knees spread on either side of his thighs.
    He stepped back so she could close her legs, settle her skirts. Barbarian or not, he understood that as a warrior needed his weapon, Jessamy needed her pride. “Who was he?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, wiping away her tears until her face bore no evidence of the emotional storm that had just passed. “He came into the house while I was in the kitchen—I thought it was one of my students. They know to knock, but the littlest ones sometimes forget.”
    “Did he say anything?”
    “That I knew too much,” Jessamy said, forcing herself back into the nightmare. “They couldn’t take the chance.” The vampire had fallen on her before she’d realized the import of his words. Driven by instinct, she’d managed to cut him with the small knife in her hand before he hit her head against the edge of the door he’d ripped open, dazing her enough that he’d almost succeeded in shoving her out onto the unforgiving rocks below.
    Jessamy was more than two thousand years old, and while not the strongest of her kind, she was in no way weak—the fall wouldn’t have killed her, but it would have shattered her into so many pieces that it would’ve taken years, perhaps a decade, for her to recover. In the interim, she’d have lain mute and still as death. Plenty of time for anyone who didn’t wish his plans exposed to bring them to fruition. “You saved me from terrible pain.”
    Even as she spoke, she waited for Galen to berate her for having a clifftop residence when she couldn’t fly. How could she explain to him that she had the same soul-piercing hunger for the sky as her brethren, the same need to soar? Her house was as close as she could get to the clouds. However, the expected recrimination didn’t come from this warrior male who’d stroked her with shockingly gentle hands, his voice low and deep against her ear. Instead, he frowned, his attention on her attacker. When he pulled away from the table, she had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from begging him to stay.
    The rawness of her need rocked her. She’d been on her own for decades even before she reached the hundred-year mark that constituted adulthood among angelkind. It was highly unusual for an angel to request emancipation as an adolescent, but the constant presence of her mother’s guilt had been a shroud that threatened to suffocate Jessamy. Keir had spoken for her with Caliane—into whose section of the Refuge she had