Company of Angels 02 - The Demoness of Waking Dreams

city. But Brandon didn’t need to know about that. Not now.
    The wind swept through her hair. For a moment, she almost believed her own illusion. Almost fell into her own trap. Into believing that they were a pair of star-crossed lovers, escaping the impossibility of a situation. Not angel and demon. Not sworn enemies, sent to hunt each other down.
    We can’t be both enemies and lovers, she realized. It’s one or the other. We must choose .
    “Think of how beautiful your existence could be. You could live in splendor like this all the time,” she said, trailing her fingertips down his chest. “You could travel the world. Own a pied-à-terre in London or Paris, in Hong Kong or Dubai. A Maserati or a Ferrari. The possibilities are limitless. You’re so much more than just a supervisor at the Company of Amateurs. You could be an Archdemon.”
    Beneath her fingertips, she felt his entire body tense, steel ready to blow.
    “Don’t push me. There’s nothing in this world that I want,” he ground out.
    “Isn’t there?” she said, looking up at him.
    He shook his head, but she could see the lie in those gray eyes of his.
    “ Mi arrendo —‘I give up.’ Tell me what you want. Just whisper it in my ear,” she said.
    He leaned in close, paused before whispering a single word in her ear. “Enough.”
    But he did not pull away. Instead, he drew her earlobe into his mouth. The softness of his tongue along her sensitive lobe was astonishing. She leaned toward him, the hard muscle of his chest beneath her palms. His breath warmed her ear.
    Against the side of her neck, he murmured, “No more games.”
    * * *
     
    Arielle sat outside the door to the room where Brandon slumbered.
    Sleep. The one thing Brandon had refused to do with Arielle when they had been together. While she waited for him to wake, she remembered the day he had first walked through the doors of her unit headquarters in L.A.
    A day so hot, the thermometer outside Arielle’s office window had burst.
    Brandon Clarkson had not been like any other neophyte angel. The moment he walked through the doors of the legal-aid clinic that doubled as unit headquarters, everything seemed to change. The clinic suddenly seemed impossibly small, as though it might burst like the tempered glass tube unable to contain the overheated mercury.
    “Michael sent me,” he said, knocking on the door. “I’m here to join the Company.”
    He was so different from any man she had ever seen. His shaved head, his impressively muscled physique did not intimidate her, but caught her interest immediately. Back then, he had only had one tattoo. On that first day, she had seen only the curl of a feather peeking out the neck of his T-shirt. Had figured that, like many members of the military and police, it was probably an American eagle tattooed on his shoulder.
    “The air-conditioning broke down. I’m the only one here,” she explained, sitting upright to dab the perspiration from her forehead and trying not to drool on her mountain of paperwork. “Everyone else has gone home, or they’re out on assignment. There’s a repairman coming in a few days, so we can get you started later this week.”
    She went back to work, expecting him to leave.
    Minutes later, she felt a breeze cool the back of her neck.
    He had fixed the air-conditioning.
    “I’d like to get started as soon as possible,” he said, leaning in her office doorway. “If there’s anything you need a hand with, I’d like to stick around and start learning.”
    And so she had set him to work.
    Brandon would do anything asked of him, she found, and didn’t need to be told twice.
    One week later, he had already completed his first official assignment as a Guardian, in a record amount of time for a fledgling angel.
    He came into her office and shut the door.
    “Do you mind if I show you something?” he asked, pulling down the window shade. “It’s kind of personal.”
    “Of course,” she said, trying to keep a straight face as he removed his shirt.
    And showed her the little star tattooed on his chest. A symbol of his first Assignee, a little boy with terminal cancer, whom Brandon had helped pass into the afterlife.
    “Does this happen after every assignment?” he asked her. “I got it last night. I just woke up and it was there.”
    Then he turned around to show her the massive angel, wings outstretched across the broad muscles of his back.
    “No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of another