Raphael dropped her lightly on the bed.
"Nice." She sighed at the decadent feel of the sheets against her skin, her eyes locked with those of an archangel. His gaze was so hotly male, so proprietal that she wondered, for a fleeting second, if she'd made a mistake. What if he wanted to keep her? "Did you ever have a slave?" she asked.
His lips curved slightly, but it was an amusement tempered with sensual demand. "Many." He gripped her ankles, spread her legs. "All very eager to serve-in every possible manner."
She tried to kick out but he hauled her closer, face drawn in a way that was intrinsically sexual. "Some of them had spent years learning to drive a man to ecstasy. The vampires had had hundreds of years to practice."
"Bastard." A cutting denunciation, but her stomach was tight with anticipation, her breasts hot.
"However"-he pulled her up to meet his thrust as he buried himself inside her in one powerful stroke-"none of them did I forbid from taking other lovers."
Her back arched as she tried to assimilate the impact of his entry into her body, the extreme fullness, the stretched ecstasy. When she could finally draw breath, she found him in the same position, as if he, too, was fighting for control. "You don't strike me as the sharing type." Her voice was raw.
"No. If one went to another man"-he began to pull out with slow deliberation-"there were dozens ready to take her place. It mattered little to me."
She was almost beyond thought now, her entire being focused on the point where their bodies joined. What reason remained collapsed under the heady, seductive force of his words.
"If you take another lover, Elena"-he thrust back in, making her gasp-"what I do to him will become a nightmare etched in human memory." And then there were no more words, only movement-the slick motion of body against body, the thrust and parry of male and female, the lush, erotic explosion into ecstasy.
The last thing Elena remembered was thinking that maybe she'd underestimated the force of their combined hunger.
She woke to the realization that she was sleeping on something warm, soft, and silky. Spreading her fingers, she found herself petting-"Oh!" She jerked upright, horrified. A heavy male arm pushed her back down.
"Your wings," she whispered, stroking her hand down the splendor of one.
"They're strong." A lazy masculine statement, full of . . . something.
She was about to turn and look at him when she saw the state of her body. "Oh, no, you didn't!" She glittered from head to toe, angel dust in her pores, on her eyelashes, in her mouth. The special blend.
He caressed his hand over her hip, along the dip of her waist, over her breast. "It was . . . not on purpose."
Was that embarrassment she heard in his voice? Frowning, she licked some of the glittery stuff off her lips. It made her body all warm and tingly-as if she wasn't already burning up from the inside out. "Is this like-um-being a little quick off the mark?"
He squeezed the arm he had around her midsection. "Any complaints?"
She smiled, realizing she was right-the archangel had lost control. "Hell, no." Twisting in his arms, she wiggled up to look into his face. Her smile faded. "You look . . . different." Nothing she could explain, nothing she could touch. But . . .
His expression grew shadowed. "You've made me a little more human."
Flashes of memory. Raphael bleeding out from a gunshot wound. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know." His kiss was a fever and he was inside her before she knew it, their coupling fast, furious, and utterly magnificent.
Much, much later, as they faced the promise of a new day, she tried to wash off the angel dust, with only marginal success. Her skin continued to shine but it wasn't as noticeable. And thankfully, the stuff didn't, in fact, glow in the dark. "If someone tastes this," she said to Raphael as he watched her dress from his relaxed position by the fireplace, "will they want to jump my bones?"
"Yes." Those eyes gleamed. "So don't let them taste."
She stilled at the menace in his command. "Don't go around killing people on my account, Raphael."
"You made your choice."
To sleep with an archangel.
"I think the sexual high is starting to wear off," she muttered, pulling on a new pair of cargos in dark khaki, and a black T-shirt. She threw on a black sweater as well. It was early morning and still dark outside, the temperature having dropped along with the rain. "I mean it, Raphael, you go around killing innocent people, I'll hunt you." She didn't bother to hide her weapons-including the special gun-from him as she pulled them out of the overnight bag and concealed them on her body.
His face was expressionless as he watched her, his wings backlit by the flames, his magnificent body naked but for a pair of black pants. "The honeymoon is over?"
She walked across the carpet to stare up into a face she knew she'd see in her dreams the rest of her life. "Nope." Fisting her hands on his naked chest, she waited for him to lower his head, and then took a kiss. "Here's a tip-you want to call me your toy, go ahead. Just don't expect me to be one."