Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) - By Killian McRae Page 0,18
before, and not just with his hand. But, a little magical pinch couldn’t hurt anything, he thought.
Suzette flushed and gasped. Marc, seeing the satisfied grin on Dee’s face, eyed him accusingly.
Dee shrugged. “Like you wouldn’t tap that if you weren’t celibate.”
Three days had passed since Riona had seen either of her pillars. The fact left her feeling both relaxed and, oddly, a little forlorn. It wasn’t as though they were life-long friends, but in the last several months they had very quickly become fixtures in her daily regime. Like having suddenly acquired stepbrothers in some awkward autumn marriage. Prior to the little mass exorcism at Dante’s Inferno, she had been spending hours by their side almost every night of the week. Now, the distance felt foreign, forced.
The lines of the analysis chart she was studying for the last fifteen minutes kept bleeding into indiscriminate scribbles without meaning as her eyes relaxed and her mind wandered. When her gaze turned to the wall and she saw the clock read five thirty-seven a.m., she sighed and reached out to her monitor’s power button. No use in wasting electricity on work she wasn’t getting done.
“Did you think you’d be able to endure it?”
The half-drunk cup of cold coffee splashed across her desk as she jolted. Ramiel leaned over the spill, grinning like the cat that got the cream. The archangel served as the Pure Soul’s liaison to the Council of Seven, and in the last few months, was making a habit of scaring the shit out of Riona with his random pop-ins. It didn’t help that, like all the freaking Hosts of Heaven, he was hotter than July at the equator in his human form on Earth. The first time they met, right after Dee and Marc convinced Riona of the truth about her magical endowment, she almost fell over backwards at the mere sight of him. A revered position didn’t necessarily translate into a somber personality, however. Ramiel knew his effect on women, and he was in no way demure or ashamed. Acting more like an overgrown frat boy than a celestial warrior, he employed the f-word like he was getting paid overtime for it.
“God damn it, Ramiel, would you please stop doing that!”
Riona waved her hands over the brown liquid now starting to permeate the stack of unpaid bills on the side of her desk and recalled the liquid into the cup. Magic proved surprisingly useful in everyday life. Tomorrow, she might try dry-cleaning her blazers with a chem-charm.
“God damn it?” Ramiel repeated disbelievingly, clicking his tongue. Blonde curls bounced on his head with each tsk. “Did you actually just blaspheme in my presence, Keystone?”
“Hell, yeah, I did,” she assured him, moving to the kitchen and depositing the now-chipped cup in the washbasin. “You scare the bejesus out of me when you appear out of nowhere like that. If you’re going to show up looking human, maybe you could try acting human and knock on a door for once. So, what in God’s name are you doing here?”
His devious little smile flitted across his face. “Touché. I have the details of your next assignment.”
Riona’s finger sprang up. “I thought Dee got the lowdown on bookings?”
Motioning to the couch, trying to enforce some sense of civility, Riona invited Ramiel to sit. He did, patting the spot next to him with a coy grin. With an angel, a reasonable distance was well advised. It was one thing to drool from a distance over a messenger of Heaven, it was another thing entirely to be close enough to crawl spontaneously into his lap and give him a test grind.
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
Ramiel shrugged before leaning back and stretching his whole span over the back of the sofa. “Suit yourself. And no, Riona. Dee was the go-to man, but it’s the Keystone’s job to command the troops. Now that you’ve officially been hazed — and, by the way, everyone upstairs thought you really did up Dante’s like a rock star — you’re in charge.”
“Already?”
Ramiel nodded.
“That can’t be, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
“Oh, hey there, Riona. It will come naturally. Remember, you were made for this.”
A disbelieving grunt dissolved whatever feminine grace she might have otherwise claimed. “No, I was made to do cost-analysis, find statistical means and suggest marketing campaigns based on fragmented empirical data.”
Ramiel snapped before pointing at her. “Exactly. You’re programmed to take a given goal, seek out all the available information, churn the data, then chart a course of action.