Guild Hunter 01 - Angels' Blood

and find out if an archangel really was built like a man, to lick his skin, mark him with her nails, to ride him, possess him . . . be possessed by him. Nothing else mattered.
    His lips touched hers and she moaned. The hands on her hips tightened as he lifted her without apparent effort and began to kiss her in earnest. Fire traveled through the raw eroticism of the openmouthed kiss to curl her toes, coming to pool in the vee between her thighs. “Hot,” she whispered when he let her breathe. “Too hot.”
    Ice silvered the air and it was a cool mist that surrounded her, seeping into her pores in a stroke of possession. “Better?” He kissed her again before she could answer, his tongue inside her, his body hard and perfect and—
    Nothing else mattered.
    The words were wrong. The thoughts were wrong.
    Sara mattered.
    Beth mattered.
    She mattered.
    Raphael’s lips traveled down her neck and to the flesh exposed by the open buttons of her shirt. “Beautiful.”
    I have not taken a human lover in eons. But you taste . . . intriguing.
    She was a plaything.
    To be toyed with and discarded.
    Raphael could control her mind.
    Giving a scream of pure rage, she kicked off him hard enough to send herself sprawling. The shock of pain as her tailbone connected with the floor snapped the final tendrils of a desire so visceral, so addictive, it made a fool out of her even now. “You bastard! Is rape what turns you on?”
    For a single fleeting second, she thought she saw shock shadow his expression, but then that familiar arrogance looked back at her. “It was worth a try.” He shrugged. “You can’t say you didn’t enjoy it.”
    She was so mad she didn’t stop to think, to consider why she’d come here. Giving another scream, she rushed him. To her surprise, she got in a few good licks before he grabbed her arms and forced her against a wall.
    His wings spread out to block her view of the room and it wasn’t until he growled, “Leave us!” that she realized someone else had entered.
    “Yes, sire.”
    Vampire. Dmitri.
    And she’d been so fucking disoriented, so filled with manufactured lust turned into rage, that she hadn’t heard him enter. “I’m going to kill you!” Her sense of violation had her humiliatingly close to tears. She should’ve expected such tactics from Raphael but she hadn’t. Which made her an A-grade moron. “Let me go!”
    He looked down at her, the blue of his eyes suddenly dark—as if a storm had rolled in. “No. In this state, you’ll force me to hurt you.”
    For a second her heart kicked. He cared. She screamed again. “Get out of my head!”
    “I am not in your head, Guild Hunter.”
    The use of the formal title was a verbal slap, one that brought her back to her senses. Instead of responding with the blood-fury boiling inside her, she took several deep breaths and tried to go to that calm place in her mind, the same place she went to whenever the memories of Ariel—No, she couldn’t return there. Why wouldn’t the past leave her alone today?
    Another deep breath.
    The scent of the sea, cool, crisp, powerful.
    Raphael.
    She opened her eyes. “I’m fine.”
    He waited several long seconds before releasing her. “Go. We’ll discuss this later.”
    Her hand itched to go for a weapon but she simply turned on her heel and walked out. She had no intention of dying—not until she’d carved out Raphael’s lying eyes and thrown them in the deepest, dirtiest cesspool she could find.
     
     
    As soon as he heard the elevator doors close, Raphael called down to security. “Don’t lose her. Ensure she stays safe.”
    “Yes, sire,” was Dmitri’s response, but Raphael heard the edge of disbelief.
    He hung up without responding to the unasked question. Why had he allowed the hunter to live after she attacked him?
    Is rape what turns you on?
    His mouth tightened, his knuckles whitening as he fisted his hands. He’d done and been accused of many things through the ages. But never had he taken a woman against her will. Never. He hadn’t done so today either.
    But something had happened.
    It was why he’d allowed her to assault him—she’d needed to vent her rage, and his disgust with himself was such that he’d welcomed the blows. There were some taboos that should never be broken. That he’d crossed a bright line he’d laid down centuries ago made him wonder about his own mental state. He knew his bloodstream was clear—he’d been tested yesterday—so this