her psyche. “Sometimes I think I’ve forgiven her, then I remember the loneliness and the fear and how I found her. I saw my mother’s body hanging from the ceiling! How could she do that to me, Raphael?”
His answer held a knowledge that not many people would ever possess. “Caliane asks herself the same question and she cannot divine an answer. It is a thing of madness that causes a mother to forget her child.”
“That’s exactly what makes me want to find her and shake her and shake her.” Elena’s voice was crushed stones and coarse sand. “Mama was so lost in her grief over Belle and Ari that she forgot me and Beth. She forgot Jeffrey.” Marguerite had been no trophy wife. She hadn’t even been the “right kind” of wife for a man of Jeffrey’s wealth and standing.
No, she’d been a beloved wife.
“I can almost understand what he’s become,” Elena said. “The way he is now.” She ran her fingers through Raphael’s hair as the two of them flew on into the night. “It’d be as if you chose to leave me. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering why you couldn’t come to me, why you couldn’t trust me with your hurt and sorrow.”
I would never leave you, Elena. A lethal edge in every word. Such a thing is an impossibility.
“I know you’d never leave me, not by choice.” The Cascade shoving him full of power, other forces in the immortal world, sought to steal him from her, but Raphael would never make the choice Marguerite had made. “I was just using it as an example.”
Find another example.
Laughter burst through the anger, shattering it into icy shards that melted in the heat between them. Sinking into the force of his love and commitment, she used her most penitent voice to say, “I apologize for even using it as a hypothetical example.”
He gave her a stern look, before nodding downward. “See there.”
Following his gaze, she spotted a jetboat scything through the water. It was a sleek black thing with what might’ve been flames licking up the sides. It was hard to see in the darkness, the only light coming from the boat itself. “Fancy.”
“Look closer.”
She squinted as he dropped lower, but it was a wisp of scent that floated into the air—chocolate and fur and champagne—that gave her the identity of the man at the helm. “Dmitri? I didn’t know he had a boat.”
“That’s the Honor, Dmitri’s new personal launch.” A pause before he said, “Shall I name something after you?”
Elena pretended to think about it. “Maybe the next time you buy a jet,” she said solemnly.
“I will call it the Hunter Angel.”
Elena threatened to punch him. He laughed until his eyes were pure light and white fire danced over his primaries and it felt like intoxication. His kiss was food to her parched soul, the angel dust that coated her lips without warning luscious and erotic, delicious and addictive.
The special blend he created only for her.
“Raphael.” She licked her tongue against his, a molten quickening at her core.
22
Body hard, her archangel speared up into the sky again and this time when he fell it was like a bullet, his wings arrowed to his back. They smashed into the water but felt no impact. A bubble of energy that arced with Raphael’s power protected them as they fell, going deeper and deeper, two bodies locked in a primal dance.
Kiss after kiss. Touch after touch.
His mouth at her throat, her fingers finding the most sensitive spot on his wings.
Elena’s need a wild thing, Raphael’s touch earthy and physical.
Skin, I need skin. She pulled at the zipper of her jacket, de—
A stab of heat in her arm, cruel enough to have her breaking their kiss. Her hair tumbled around them, her clothing askew. But her eyes were on the arm she cradled to her body. “It burns.” The shocked words slipped out past her guard . . . because this was Raphael.
Face set in brutal lines, he gently pushed up her jacket and T-shirt sleeve at once, the glow of his power lighting up the dark below the surface of the ocean. In that glow, she saw that her flesh was translucent, her bones morphing shape. A scream built inside her . . . and the illusion faded. “Did you see?” she asked through a throat gone raw. “My flesh was see-through.”
“No, I see only inflamed skin.” Raphael brushed away the piece of lint that stuck to the cut