Archangel of Mercy (22 page)

No excuse. He could have resisted.
Except their time together was so inevitably brief.

“Nice.” She sounded half asleep. Her leg muscles flexed. “Want another go?” And then she winced and rolled her shoulders, as if she was uncomfortable.

He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her from the table. There was no earthly need, yet he kept her secured onto his cock.

“Later. You need to rest first.” He stepped over the large timber chest he’d dropped after seeing Mephisto looming over Aurora and took her into the villa. Every move he made caused her slick sheath to rub with agonizing temptation along his burgeoning erection. It was with a sense of relief he finally laid her on the bed.

She groaned. “I can’t believe I’m having an afternoon nap.” She opened one eye and peered up at him. She looked positively edible. “You having one too?”

“Sure.” He lay beside her, on top of the covers, and propped his head in his hand. With any other woman he would have given her a helping nudge into slumber. But Aurora wasn’t any other woman. And if she was, he wouldn’t be in this unbelievable position in the first place.

Silence settled, and with it an odd kind of comfort. He watched her sink into oblivion and only then did he realize their fingers were entwined. With a heavy sigh he began to free himself. Before he started work on the contents of the chest he would sort out acquiring another laptop. He couldn’t be without one in his line of work and besides Aurora needed one too. As his fingers slipped from hers she stirred, frowned, and momentarily tightened her grip on him.

“My beloved archangel.”

The words were soft but completely coherent. A shudder clawed along his spine but still her whispered endearment branded his brain and pierced his hardened heart.

My beloved archangel.
Only Eleni had ever called him that. Only Eleni had ever dared.

Only Eleni had ever possessed the right.

With a tangled sense of fascination and dread-filled hope Gabe stared at Aurora’s sleeping face. It wasn’t possible. He knew that. Eleni was dead, and dead forever. Aurora’s words meant nothing.

Meant everything.

He raked his hand through his hair, mind reeling. He couldn’t shift the feeling that somehow there was a connection between Eleni and Aurora, no matter how crazy the idea was.

There was only one other he could talk to about it. Only one other who could understand.

Zad.

Chapter Twenty-nine

A
FTER
contacting Zad it didn’t take long to track him down. He was knee deep in the latest devastating earthquake that had recently hit the Pacific.

Gabe stood on a bank of steaming rubble and watched the other archangel, second only to Mephisto in age, leave the medical team he’d been organizing and make his way across the broken buildings and shredded vegetation toward him.

Gabe could see through the glamour that rendered Zad’s wings invisible to mortal eyes, but nothing could disguise the aura of quiet authority Zad exuded without even trying. No wonder he was always roped into positions of leadership despite his reluctance.

“Is it worth it?” Gabe narrowed his eyes against the gritty atmosphere and stared across the ruined city. Zad haunted natural disasters on Earth as if they were a drug.

“Got to be worth a try.”

They’d had this conversation a million times in the past. Gabe had never been able to get over his natural inclination to let humans just get the hell on with it. Somehow or another their species always survived, no matter what the Earth or cosmos threw at them.

They survived, whether they deserved to or not.

Strange. He and Zad had both lost those who meant everything to them. Yet while Gabe had turned his back on humanity for their ignorant involvement Zad had embraced them.

Gabe would never again open his arms to the human race.

Aurora.

Her face filled his vision, obliterating the ravaged landscape. She was a human and he’d done more than open his arms to her. He’d broken ancient covenants for her.

But then, she wasn’t strictly indigenous to Earth. She was a unique, incredible hybrid who possessed the genetic material from two dimensions. He’d never lay the blame of the past on her shoulders.

Yet he’d saved her, offered her sanctuary, before he’d known her true heritage.

Her true heritage. Again the futile hope that she was so much more than she could ever be echoed through his heart. It would answer his insatiable desire and would be the reason why he hadn’t minded her irreverence. It would also explain the unacknowledged fear that he could easily have arrived too late today to save her from Mephisto’s rage.

“Gabe,” Zad said. “Is this still about the woman you rescued from the Guardians?”

There was no point denying it. Aurora was the only reason he’d sought out Zad. “Yes.”

Zad cast him a speculative look. “You aren’t pissed off by the inconvenience anymore.” It wasn’t a question. “The sex must be spectacular.”

“It’s not the—” He clamped his jaw shut. He wasn’t about to discuss his sex life with Zad, of all people. “She has a necklace, Zad. Obviously its quality is inferior but apart from that it’s an exact replica of the ones we gave our beloveds. And do you know why she has it? Because she used to dream of angel wings and rainbows as a child. She had it specially commissioned to her specific design.”

Zad squinted into the distance and shoved his hands in the pockets of his dusty jeans. For long moments Gabe thought he wasn’t going to acknowledge his words. But finally the other archangel turned to him, his face an inscrutable mask.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Gabe. Children throughout the ages, throughout the universe, dream of rainbows and angels for no other reason than both are”—he shrugged and a mirthless smile tugged the corners of his mouth—“fantastical.”

Gabe forcibly relaxed his clenched fists. Buried in the back of his mind an insistent voice of logic urged him to shut up, to leave, to forget about this insanity.

Except he couldn’t let it go. Not yet.

“That’s not all. When she was asleep she said—” The words lodged in his throat. How could he repeat them, after so long? To anyone, but most of all to Zad, who had also loved Eleni?

Zad’s mahogany wings rippled in the breeze, and Gabe saw his muscles tense as if he struggled against the instinct to soar to the heavens.

“It doesn’t matter what she said.” His voice was still even but a harsh note of finality underlined every word. “She’s not Eleni, Gabe. Neither first-generation Nephilim nor their descendants have souls to return to us. We’ve always known that.”

He knew it. Had always known it. The offspring of an archangel and a human and all their descendants was eternally damned. But still the irrational hope had flared that somehow, against every possibility and despite her Nephilim heritage, his Eleni had been reborn.

It was a fool’s dream, and while he was many things, he was no longer a fool. The similarity between the necklaces was a coincidence. There was no universal convergence, no karmic confluence. Aurora was not Eleni. He would never be given the chance to love her again, hold her again. Would never have the chance to save her life the way he’d been unable to save her life so many years ago.

Aurora had never said she dreamed of
angels’
wings, after all.

He glanced at Zad. “How long must we serve penance?”

“Gabe.” Zad didn’t look at him. “Forget about the vow we made in our rash youth. It’s not a sin to love again. You’re not betraying Eleni’s memory.”

Gabe gave a harsh laugh that did nothing to ease the fathomless despair consuming his chest. Archangels rarely fell in love and when they did it was forever. “You know we can have only one beloved. Like you said”—he flung Zad a bitter glance, the words already eating into his battered heart like foul acid—“it’s only spectacular sex.”

“With the right one.” Zad finally turned to look at him, and Gabe gritted his teeth against the fleeting desolation he glimpsed in the depths of Zad’s dark eyes. “Sex heals the soul.”

—

AURORA STRETCHED, FROWNED
and opened her eyes. Unbelievable. She’d fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon. As reality came back into focus, so did a sense of unease. There was something she needed to tell Gabe. Something important. Already knowing she was alone in the bed, she still turned to see if he was beside her. But of course he wasn’t.

She sat up, propped her elbows on her knees and speared her fingers through her tangled hair. What had possessed her to seduce him? Apart from the obvious. Which was she couldn’t keep her hands to herself whenever he was near her.

A defeated groan escaped. Her number one priority was discovering a way she could return home. But, as she had feared, being with Gabe was eroding her sense of urgency.

He only had to look at her for her to forget how impossible this situation between them was. And when he looked at her with concern, when he touched her with tenderness, the thought of leaving, of never seeing him again, twisted her heart.

It was more than sex. More than lust. But she’d known that, almost from the start. And now she had to deal with the consequences of being stupid enough to fall for an archangel.

It would be so easy to simply accept her situation. She was a mortal. How could she hope to stand up to an alien species that was older than anything she could imagine?

Gabe no longer appeared to resent her presence. He had changed, too, over the last couple of days. Although she wasn’t going to delude herself that he was falling for her. But at least she could imagine, or fool herself into imagining, that a future with him wouldn’t be intolerable. She could stay on his island and be safe.

Isolated from everyone and everything she had ever loved or known. Becoming crippled with guilt over abandoning her parents. Growing old and decrepit while Gabe stayed forever in his gorgeous, irresistible prime.
And she would never have the chance of a family of her own.

It was a future, but not a future she could willingly embrace. Not when she knew how fragile a person’s sanity was; when she knew that even an overwhelming love like that of her parents for each other sometimes just wasn’t enough.

She would focus on her self-imposed mission. It was all she could do. Find a loophole in the ancient laws governing the Guardians’ rights and discover a chink in their armored protocols. Just because no one else ever had didn’t mean it was impossible. Maybe no one had ever tried before. As she pushed back the covers a half-forgotten idea glimmered in the back of her mind and she froze.

The mysterious force field—or whatever it was—that surrounded Gabe’s island repelled the Guardians. When she had sneaked into his office she’d wondered if it could be adapted to protect individuals. Unsurprisingly, after discovering his true identity, the possibility had fled her mind.

But now it glowed with renewed hope, and threaded through the vision of freedom another hope blazed.

If she was protected and free to choose her own path outside of Gabe’s jurisdiction,
would he still want to be with her?

—

BY THE TIME
she’d had a quick shower and was back in the kitchen she’d managed to convince herself it was completely possible to modify the force field to her own specifications. The only thing she couldn’t work out was why Gabe hadn’t thought of it right away.

And where had he gone
again
? She glanced outside and caught sight of a large timber chest. Frowning, she went onto the terrace and crouched beside it. It hadn’t been there earlier. Dimly she recalled a thud, just before Gabe had launched himself at Mephisto. This must have been what he’d dropped.

Well, it was none of her business. But still she remained where she was, as if the chest contained answers to unasked questions. She trailed her fingers along the top and they slid into a concealed groove. Before she quite realized what was happening the entire top folded up on itself and disappeared down the back of the box.

Great. If Gabe came back now he’d think she was prying into his personal stuff. But much as she really
didn’t
want to go through his things behind his back she held her breath and peered inside.

An eerie shiver chased over her arms, as if she had intruded into his most private of places, a sacred relic of his previous life. Whatever she’d expected to see it hadn’t been a chest filled with a child’s beloved toys and books and items of clothing.

She sat back on her heels and closed her eyes. She felt like the worse kind of voyeur. As if she’d wrenched open Gabe’s heart and was rifling through his pain, probing into his long-buried wounds.

With a sigh she propped her elbow on the edge of the chest and looked inside again. She couldn’t help herself. It didn’t matter how much it hurt to know how deeply Gabe still missed his child. She needed to dig further, to discover all she could about his past. It might, in some strange way, help her understand the man—
the archangel—
he was today.

And then he materialized in the kitchen, just feet from her. Heat swamped her and she jerked back, as if that might fool him into believing he hadn’t caught her rifling through his personal possessions.

His daughter’s personal possessions
.

He strode toward her, unsmiling and grim, and for the life of her she couldn’t think of an adequate excuse to justify her behavior. He stepped over the opened chest and placed something on the table, and then sat on the chair and faced her.

Obviously he was waiting for her to say something. Her mind was scarily blank. How pathetic would it sound to tell him she’d opened the chest without meaning to?

“I pulled some strings,” he said bizarrely. He continued to look at her as if he wasn’t even aware of the chest between them. “And we have a new laptop.”

A new laptop? She glanced at the slender package on the table, then back at him. Was he messing with her?

“Uh . . . good?” Her voice was unnaturally high and she tried clearing her throat but her heart was pounding so frantically she could hardly breathe, never mind anything else.

A frown of apparent bafflement flicked over his gorgeous features. “Yes. The last one shattered, remember?”

Aurora risked shooting the chest a doubtful glance. Gabe was acting as if it was invisible. But all
she
could see was an enormous great elephant.

“Yes.” It was no good. Even if Gabe was willing to overlook the situation she didn’t want him thinking the worst of her. “Look, I’m really sorry, Gabe. I didn’t mean to pry. I mean, I haven’t pried. I haven’t looked at anything at all.” She sounded guilty, defensive and completely pathetic. She knew a good half of her guilt was because of the time she really had gone through his things. And found the picture of his family.

Thank god he didn’t know about that.

He shrugged as if it didn’t bother him one way or the other what she’d done. “So long as you haven’t lost anything I don’t see why you’re getting so wound up over it.”

She spread her fingers across her thighs and attempted to make sense of that last odd sentence. He made it seem that the chest held no personal significance to him at all.

“Of course I haven’t lost anything.” Had she jumped to the wrong conclusion about the contents of the chest? Now that she thought about it, the stuff didn’t even look very old. “What is it?”

“Just work related.”

He said it so casually that for a moment she wondered if she had misheard him.
Work
related? He
worked
? What in the name of god would an archangel do for
work
?

“There’s no need to look so staggered.” Gabe sounded as if he couldn’t decide whether he was offended or amused by her disbelief. “What did you think I did with my time? Endless clubbing across the universe?”

Since that was horribly close to what she had imagined, she didn’t answer. But she had the feeling her red face spelled it out all too clearly.

“Thanks.” His sarcasm was palpable. “Good to know your high opinion of me.”

“Well, you can hardly blame me. And it’s not as if you’ve ever told me what you do when you leave the island, is it?”

He didn’t answer right away, and she got the distinct impression that just days ago he would have given her one of his arrogant glares for daring to question him. But the expression on his face wasn’t haughty or dismissive. Had it really never occurred to him that she might be interested in where he went or what he did?

“It’s been a while since I’ve told anyone my reasons for coming and going.” A frown creased his brow, and she had the absurd desire to curl up on his lap and give him whatever comfort she could. Would he never be able to talk to her without seeing or thinking of the dark-haired woman he had loved so long ago?