Velvet Haven

spoke, it wasn’t with his usual voice. “You don’t know what I am.”
    “Suriel, I don’t fear you.”
    “To touch me, to care about me, is the path to destruction. You wouldn’t want to follow me, Mairi. You wouldn’t want me to let you inside. What is inside me is beyond your imagining, beyond what you could endure.”
    Jesus, she couldn’t stop looking at those eyes, at the seductive light where his pupil had been. She felt her body being pulled, slowly, as if she had a rope wrapped around her, and he was pulling her in, inch by inch. “You saved me at the moment of my birth. You’ve saved me now. Stay with me. I . . . I want to know you. To have you as my guide.”
    Her gaze darted to the left side of his neck. Below his ear, branded into his flesh, was his angelic symbol, Ψ: the symbol for the Angel of Death. She stared at it, and shivered.
    “My path is not your path, Mairi.” He pressed her fist to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. He closed his eyes and just held her hand to his mouth. His lashes, long and thick, grazed the high bones of his cheeks. “Don’t follow me. Please . . .”
    “What is your path, Suriel? Why do you walk the Earth alone?”
    “My destiny is to live with my memories, my sins. My purpose on this earth is redemption.”
    Mairi felt her body being lifted, felt her breasts press against his hard chest and that strange tingling tickled her wherever her skin touched his body.
    “I will give you now to the one whose path you will follow,” he whispered against her ear.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

    Thrusting the curtain back so hard the cloth tore from the metal rings, Bran stepped into the cubicle, his Doc Martens clanging on the terrazzo floor. Female gasps registered in his brain, but he spared them no notice. Every sense he possessed was focused on the limp body of Mairi lying on the stretcher before him. Her jeans and T-shirt had been replaced with a sheet. Her black hair was fanned out on the white pillow. Sooty lashes lay still against her cheek, shielding her incredible dark eyes.
    “What the bloody hell is the meaning of this?” snapped the short, balding man holding a clipboard in his meaty fists.
    Bran looked in the corner, saw Suriel leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. Suriel was invisible to all except Bran. With a nod, he indicated Mairi.
    She was alive. His to take.
    “Don’t forget our deal,” Suriel murmured as he passed him on the way out of the cubicle.
    Like a robot set on a mission, Bran ignored the demands of the doctor and quelled the nurses with a glare as they reached for the red call light button.
    Don’t even think about it.
    Mentally, he forced the wiring to short-circuit, rendering it useless. Shutting off the power to the cardiac monitor, Bran watched as the line tracing her heart rhythm suddenly went flat. With a whine of an alarm the machine shut down, the screen growing blank.
    “Security,” the physician shouted, thrusting his round body between the stretcher and Bran. Shouldering the man aside, Bran systematically pulled off the cardiac leads. Next came the probe on her finger that was monitoring the oxygen in her blood. After that, he moved on to the IVs. With one steady tug, he had the tape and plastic tube pulled free and the bleeding staunched with the pressure of his thumb.
    In a moment of undeniable need, he bent forward, broadening his already massive back as he loomed over Mairi’s delicate hand. Shielding his actions from everyone in the cubicle, he removed his thumb from the bleeding wound and set his lips to her skin, dragging his tongue across her flesh, tasting her, drawing her into his body. Inside, his body hummed with pleasure, energy, and gratitude that she was alive.
    Next, he carefully pulled at the tapes that anchored the white plastic tube in her mouth. He pulled it slowly, freeing her from the device. A machine alarmed, but he ignored it, watching instead the sudden expansion of Mairi’s chest, followed by the slow exhalation of air.
    She stirred and moaned, and he closed his eyes in relief. She was alive.
    “You can’t just take her,” the doctor yelled as Bran straightened and lifted her limp body from the gurney. “For the love of God, we’ve just resuscitated her. She’ll die.”
    Waving his palm over the doctor, he placed the room under a spell. They were frozen, no longer able to interfere. Without a word, Bran turned around in the small space and shifted her weight in his arms,