Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

affected him more than any gentle reassurances. “Nimra.”
     
    She looked at him with those inhuman eyes. “My wolf.”
     
    So breathtaking, he thought, so dangerous. “There are other ways to blunt the impact of memory.” It was a sudden, primal decision. Too long—he’d been hiding in the dark too long.
     
    N imra knew what Noel was asking, knew, too, that if she acquiesced, he would be no easy lover— either in the act or inhis temperament afterward. “I have not taken a lover,” she murmured, her gaze on the rough angles of his face, “for many years.”
    Noel said nothing.
     
    “Very well.”
     
    “So romantic.”
     
    There was a black edge to the words, but Nimra didn’t take it personally. Like the wolf she called him, he might yet show her his teeth. Trust was a precious commodity, one that took time to develop. Patience was something Nimra had learned long ago. “Romance,” she said, turning to head back to the house, “is a matter of interpretation.”
     
    Nothing from the man at her side, not until they were behind the closed doors of her suite. “No matter what the interpretation,” he warned, his body held with a rigid control that told her he was on the finest of edges, “it’s not what I’m going to give you tonight.”
     
    Touching her fingers to his jaw, she allowed the desire, so heavy and drugging in her veins, to show on her face. “And it’s not what I need.” What she’d done to Amariyah had been just, but it had marked her as it always did. Tonight she needed to feel like a woman, not the inhuman monster Amariyah had named her.
     
    A strong hand gripped her wrist. “Sex for sex’s sake?”
     
    Noel’s anger, his pain, was a raw blade, cutting and tearing, but Nimra was made of sterner stuff. “If I wanted that, I would’ve accepted Christian into my bence,&# ago.”
     
    Ice blue turned to midnight as his hand tightened. All at once, her pulse was in her mouth, on her skin. “You hunger,” she whispered as her blood sang to the haunting kiss of this vampire’s touch.
     
    His gaze went to the pulse that thudded in her neck, his thumb rubbing over the beat in her wrist. “I haven’t fed from the vein in months.” It was a harsh admission. “I would rip out your throat.”
     
    “I’m immortal,” she reminded him when he released his grip on her wrist to curve his fingers around that throat. “You can’t hurt me.”
     
    A laugh that sounded like broken glass. “There are ways to hurt a woman that have nothing to do with anything so simple as pain.”
     
    And she knew. Understood what she had to do. Pulling away to walk into her dressing room, she returned with a long silk scarf. “Then I,” she said, handing him the strip of peacock blue, “will have to trust you.” In saying the words, she found her humanity— it was the woman who offered him this, not a being with a terrible gift.
     
    N oel’s hand clenched around the soft fabric. It was a sym bol, nothing more, Nimra’s power more than enough to permit escape should she wish it. But that she’d given it to him meant she’d seen the broken pieces he didn’t want anyone to see… and still she looked at him with a woman’s lingering appreciation. “No bonds,” he said, letting the scarf float to the floor in a grace of blue. “Never any bonds.”
    “As you say, Noel.” Holding his gaze with the promise of her own, she reached up to the clasps on her shoulders, flicked them open. Her gown shimmered over her body to pool at her feet, knocking all the air out of him.
     
    She may have been petite, but she was lush curves and feminine invitation, the smooth brown of her skin interrupted only by a triangle of lace at the juncture of her thighs. Her breasts were full and heavy against her slender frame, her nipples dark and, at this moment, furled into tight buds. Spreading her wings in invitation, she waited.
     
    The choice was his.
     
    As you say, Noel.
     
    Such a simple statement. Such a powerful gift.
     
    Reaching out, he cupped the erotic weight of one breast, had the satisfaction of feeling a tremor race across her skin. It awakened the part of him that had gone into numb slumber when his abusers had turned him into a piece of meat, crushed and broken. Tonight, that part, the one that had made him an adventurer who’d conquered mountains, caused women to sigh in pleasure, roared to the surface.
     
    It was instinct to thrust his hand into her hair, to slant his mouth