Archangel's Storm

zipper and the hard ridge beneath.
    Jason’s demanding mouth was suddenly on her own, his grip on her hair holding her in place. She didn’t know how it happened, but her pants were stripped from her seconds later, and she found herself lying on her back on the bed with Jason between her legs, the heavy denim of his jeans rubbing against her skin as he devoured her mouth.
    She hooked one leg around his hip, opened her mouth to the wet seduction of his kiss, licked her tongue against his in molten desire. Groaning, he settled more heavily against her, the cold metal of his zipper pressing into the skin of her abdomen as his wings spread above her in a caress of midnight.
    “Later.” A husky word against her lips. “You can touch all you wish later.”
    The rough promise made her melt. “I intend to.”
    His hand on her breast, squeezing a fraction too softly. Perhaps it was shameless, but she put her hand over his, increased the pressure. Her reward for such brazenness was piercing pleasure, his lips hot and damp on her neck as he petted her breast, rubbed her nipple. Holding his head to her, she twisted against him, frustrated by the fabric that separated them. “Jason, your jeans.”
    A sudden chill as he rose to get rid of his remaining clothing. The sight of him in the faint moonlight that entered the room through a high window, formed of fine designs cut into the stone itself, stole her very breath. He was a work of art, every part of him honed to a deadly edge. Raising her arm, she held out her hand, calling him back to bed.
    He returned in a primal wave of heat that took her over. Kissing his way down her body, he hooked his fingers into the satin and lace of her panties to tug them off, throw them aside.
    A wet, suckling kiss pressed just above her mound before he spread her thighs . . .
    Mahiya arched off the bed under the stark intimacy of his next caress, his mouth tasting her most delicate flesh with lush eroticism as his hands held her open for his—
their
—pleasure. Her hands gripped at the sheets, her wings fluttering like creatures trapped, and her breath, it became a sob.
    He deepened the kiss, one of his fingers sliding into her sheath.
    The sensual intrusion tipped her over, the pleasure so intense, it stole her voice.
    Moving up her quivering body with a slow attention to detail that left no inch of her skin untouched, untasted, her nipples hard little berries for him to roll against his tongue, her breasts left slick and wet to rub against the muscled beauty of his chest as he reached her lips at last.
    First, he kissed the corners of her eyes, tasting the salt of the pleasure that shimmered over her skin still. But when she turned her lips to his, he accepted the invitation with raw hunger, one of his hands running down her waist to grip her thigh, bring it over his hip, opening her for him.
    And then he was pushing into her, slow and insistent. She gasped, her flesh swollen, but there was no hurt. Only a near-painful need to have him inside her. Wrapping her other leg around his body, she pressed, urging him deeper.
    “Mahiya.”
    Her spymaster’s control fractured.

30
    I n the hours before returning to Mahiya, Jason had flown a considerable distance out from the fort to speak to an angelic couple just returned to the territory after a sojourn in the Refuge. Having received his message, they’d asked him to meet them at the lodge where they rested, as they planned to begin the second leg of their journey at first light—to their home at the other end of Neha’s territory.
    He’d been lucky to locate the pair; they spent much of their time exploring the world, having earned a respite from their duties after millennia of service. Though the two were unquestionably loyal to their archangel, they also had an unhidden fondness for Raphael.
    “We watched him grow from a child into an archangel. He was never too proud to talk to those of us who were weaker, even when his power eclipsed ours while he was but a babe.”
    That fondness extended to the Seven, and the two had been happy to answer Jason’s questions about the vampire with scarlet hair, though he’d made the pattern of questioning such that the most important query was but one among many. He didn’t want a careless word to spook their prey. What he’d learned had been . . . interesting, until he could almost taste the answer on his tongue.
    A shift against him, Mahiya’s fingers flickering on his chest. Her hair