Archangel's Storm

you, Jason.”
    “And what do you see?” He stroked his free hand up her side, rubbed his thumb gently back and forth over her nipple through her clothing.
    Her breath caught, but she didn’t break the eye contact. “A man who is a storm, who belongs to no one and who will never be tamed. To expect otherwise would be to ask for agonizing disappointment.”
    Open eyes, he thought, she had wide-open eyes. “Some might say you’re attempting to seduce me in order to lead me on a leash.”
    Laughter, warm and startled, spilled over the hilltop. “Only a fool would attempt to contain or direct a storm. I’m far too smart.”
    He took her lips in an open-mouthed kiss in an attempt to drink of her laughter, steal some of her dazzling warmth of spirit to hoard inside him. Her nails dug into his chest through his shirt, her breast pushed into his hand, and her scent, it tangled around him in an exotic wildness.
    The gut-deep sense of connection
was an intense shock that made his nerve endings burn. He had never felt more real, more a part of the world.
    Breaking the kiss only long enough that she could gasp in air, he slanted his mouth across hers again, licking and tasting and sinking into the carnal pleasure. Her nipple was a hard point beneath the fabric of her tunic, and when he squeezed it between forefinger and thumb, she jerked, pulling away from his touch.
    Folding back wings that had become fully unfurled, he watched her attempt to resettle her breathing. “Not here,” she said at last, her chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm. “Will you come to my bed?”
    It was such a polite invitation, and yet her lips were wet from his kiss, her cheeks flushed with sexual need. “Yes.”
    *  *  *
    H e’d said yes, but Jason left after escorting Mahiya back to the palace, having received a message on his phone he had to follow up on at once. Sensual frustration tearing through her veins, she decided to take care of a task of her own and headed to Vanhi’s apartments using busy internal passageways. If she was a target, it’d make it difficult for anyone to cut her from the herd.
    Vanhi was reading when she arrived. Mahiya bent down to kiss her smiling cheek before taking a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs in the vampire’s living area. “I’m disturbing you.”
    “You know you are always welcome.” Vanhi slid an intricate metal bookmark between the pages and put the book on the coffee table. “It worries me, Mahiya, the look I see in your eyes.”
    “Vanhi—”
    The vampire held up her hand. “I know you too well, my dear. I rocked you when you cried as a babe and when Arav shattered your heart as a young woman.” Sighing, she reached out to take one of Mahiya’s hands in her own, squeezed. “You’ve been waiting your whole life to love someone, my sweet girl. I don’t want you to squander the power of that beautiful heart on a man who will not value such a gift.”
    “I understand him, Vanhi.” Never would she forget the terrible sorrow she’d tasted in his tale of Nene and her Yavi, until it hurt her to imagine the cause. “I’m not expecting anything but what he can give me.”
    “You say that, but you’re deeply vulnerable to kindness, to any indication of care.”
    The emotional blow stung. “You make me sound like an abused pet.”
    Rising to her feet, Vanhi walked over to the dining area to pour two glasses of wine. “I do not begrudge you happiness.” Care in every syllable as she retook her seat, having handed Mahiya the second wineglass. “I just don’t want you hurt again.”
    Mahiya gave the other woman a crooked smile. “If the hurt is an honest one, I will survive.” Perhaps she
had
spent her life waiting for someone to love, and Jason . . . he needed to be loved, as a wildflower needed sunlight.
    Vanhi shook her head. “I bear fault in this—it is to my sorrow that I couldn’t be there for you, couldn’t give you the love every child should know.”
    “You did all you could.” What Mahiya knew of kindness and affection came from Jessamy and Vanhi. “She is an archangel.”
And your loyalty is first to her.
It was a truth Mahiya had accepted long ago.
    A bleak sadness in Vanhi’s expression. “Tell me why you come to me so late, Mahiya child.”
    Setting aside her wineglass, Mahiya spoke of the teddy bear, and the vampire with hair of scarlet and skin of porcelain. Vanhi rubbed at the furrows that had formed between her eyebrows. “Oh,