Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

a crooked dive. Catching her to stop her from crashing to the earth, he held her away from him with both hands around her waist, and scowled. “Your flight technique is faulty.”
     
    Big brown eyes with lashes the same light shade as her curls stared at him. “You’re big, Jessamy’s angel.”
     
    Jessamy’s angel.
     
    Deciding he could handle the invasion of tiny creatures—because two more had managed to land around him—he put the girl on her feet beside her friends. “Why are you here? The school is closed.”
     
    It was one of the boys who replied. “We’re allowed to play in the park.” He slid his hand into Galen’s in a trust that madesomething go hot and tight in his throat. Children were an unknown species to him—he’d spent his life with warriors, even when he was a babe himself.
     
    “Will you play with us?” the girl asked, tipping her head back in an effort to meet his gaze… so far back that the weight of her wings toppled her over.
     
    Reaching down, he tugged her up with one hand. “No, I think you all need a lesson in flight.”
     
    So it was that he spent time he didn’t have drilling three excited babes who held his hands when it wasn’t their turn to fly, and who called him Jessamy’s angel. “I’m leaving the Refuge,” he told them afterward, for to disappear without warning would be to betray their trust. “And I’m taking Jessamy with me.”
     
    Sadness blunted the shine in their bright eyes. The little girl’s lower lip wobbled. “Will you bring her back?”
     
    Hunkered down before them, he gave a solemn nod, because he understood what he was asking. “Yes, but now it’s time for Jessamy to fly.”
     
    Stalking into the library after the children assented that he could “borrow” Jessamy for a while, he felt the hush of the hall of learning attempt to cloak him. It snagged, tore. He was as out of place here as he would be in Jessamy’s bed, big brute that he was… but that mattered little. Not when she looked up from the book in which she was writing, the ink flowing gracefully across the page, and smiled. “There you are, devious man.”
     
    Fisting his hand in her hair, he claimed a kiss, the contact a raw melding of mouths. “I have something to ask you,” he said, taking another sipping taste of her mouth as she spread her fingers against the sensitive inner surface of his wings.
     
    “Hmm?”
     
    He told her of the trip they’d be making, saw her passion-dazed expression skitter between dazzling joy, disbelief, and finally despair.
     

10
     
    “I t’s impossible,” she whispered at last. “The distance… even you can’t carry me that far.”
    “I can carry you anywhere you want to go.” That was why he was so strong, so big—he’d been born for her. “But if there is need, Raphael requests you allow him to fly you, too.” Galen trusted the archangel—never would he put Jessamy’s life into the hands of a man he didn’t believe would fight to the death to protect that life.
     
    Jessamy’s throat moved as she swallowed, her fingers motionless on his wing. “No one wants a malformed angel out in the world.” The statement was bleak, the rich brown of her eyes dull. “The mortals cannot see us as weak.”
     
    He hated how she described herself, but he’d foreseen her concern, discussed the details of Raphael’s territory with thangel. “There is a mortal settlement near Raphael’s tower,” he said. “But it’s at such a distance that they would need the sight of an eagle to glimpse you. No mortals work in the Tower itself, and there is significant open land around it, so you will not be trapped within.”
     
    Jessamy’s response was a halting whisper. “I-I’ve become used to the Refuge, to the limits on my existence.” The elegant bones of her face cut against her skin as she angled her head in thought, her hair falling soft and luxuriant over her shoulder. Reaching out, he played with the strands, twining them around his finger as he would twine them around his fist when he had her beneath him.
     
    No, he wasn’t the least civilized when it came to Jessamy. The wonder of it was, he was starting to believe she didn’t care.
     

     
    J essamy wanted to bask in the wild heat of the warrior who had invaded her sanctum. His thickly muscled thigh was close enough to touch, the warmth of his wing seductive under her palm, his feathers incongruously silken. Even the terrified joy she felt at the gift