Yes, it was. “Is it?” She forced a teasing smile. “If I’m your mate, shouldn’t you be doing it in return then?”
He reached up to place his hand on the back of her neck, his skin warm and a little rough. Her pulse thudded at the contact, her senses lost in the silver mysteries of his eyes.
“I wouldn’t just pet your hair,” he said. “I’d stroke your wings, especially the places I’m not allowed to touch yet.”
“Naasir,” she whispered, leaning so close to him that their breaths mingled. “Why did you not find me sooner?” They could’ve had centuries together instead of mere weeks.
“I wasn’t full-grown.” He ran the fingers of his free hand over her cheek. “I didn’t yet have the understanding of what it meant to have a mate.”
Lifting her head before she closed the final distance between them and stole a kiss, she tilted her head to the side. “But you’re six hundred years old.”
Sliding his hand from her neck, he insinuated his arm behind her waist, so that he was holding her under her wing. His body heat burned into her back and the upper part of his arm brushed against the inner surface of her wings. It was a deeply intimate hold.
And it felt unmistakably right.
“I’m not like other six-hundred-year-old immortals,” Naasir said, his voice unexpectedly quiet and serious. “I’m not like anyone.”
“I know.” She ran her fingers through his hair again. “You’re unique and wild and extraordinary.”
“Sometimes I’m more animal than man.”
She shrugged. “In my experience, animals are often far better than people.” Massaging his nape when he tugged her hand down to it, she smiled. “You can’t scare me off. I’ve stood face-to-face with monsters—I know you’re the opposite.”
His gaze darkened. “I really wish I could kill Lijuan.”
Realizing he’d taken her reference to Charisemnon’s court as being to Lijuan’s, she nodded. “The mortals who seek immortality, do you think they ever consider the fact that immortality might mean being stuck with people you despise for centuries or even millennia?”
Naasir didn’t answer, his eyes closed again. “Use your nails,” he said lazily.
When she ran her nails over his nape, he purred. It made her body sing, her breath shallow. “Were you ever human or were you born as you are?” she asked when she could speak coherently, her need to know him endless.
His lashes lifted. “Most people ask who Made me.”
She could see why—being Made by an angel was the only known way to become a vampire. “But you’re not a vampire,” she said definitively. “You have enough vampiric characteristics that it’s easier for people to categorize you as a vampire than to accept the unknown, but I told you I like hunting secrets.”
Naasir’s lips curved in a playful smile. “Ellie calls me a tiger creature. It makes her crazy that Raphael won’t tell her what I am and spoil my game.”
Andromeda pulled at his hair a little. “You and your sire are clearly both as bad as one another.”
His laughter filled the cabin. When he spoke again, he said, “I was once human . . . and I was not human. Then I became me.”
She narrowed her eyes at the riddle. “I think Raphael’s consort and I should join forces.”
A grin. “It is a game.”
“Give me another clue.”
“I am a thing of more than one thing.”
“You’re not a thing,” she said with a frown. “You are Naasir, a beautiful, dangerous man.”
He sat up without warning, making her heart thud. Bracing one hand on the armrest on her left, his arm diagonally across her body and his face bare inches from hers, he said, “I am a person to you.”
It wasn’t a question but she felt compelled to reply. “You are the most fascinating, most wonderful, and most aggravating person I’ve ever met.”
Bending his head with a grin at the last, he rubbed his nose over hers. “And you, Andi, are the smartest, most sparkling, most-delicious-smelling woman I’ve ever met.”
Her thighs clenched at the memory of what he’d said he’d do to her should he ever sink his teeth into her. “I will figure out the mystery of you,” she said, throwing down the gauntlet. “When I do, will you tell me of the adventures you had in your youth?”
“I can tell you a story now.” Retaking his previous position with his head on her lap and his arm around her back, he bent one leg at the knee, the other stretched out on the seat. “When I first came to the Refuge, I was small, a boy like Sameon.”
Andromeda tried to imagine him as a child, couldn’t. To her, he was and would always be, a strong, deadly man.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to touch wings.” He rubbed the back of his hand over the inner surface of her feathers, eyes going heavy-lidded when she shivered. “Even though Raphael had told me after I yanked out one of his feathers, I still didn’t understand—I wasn’t grown like another boy of the same size, and my mind couldn’t understand things like that.”
“But you could understand other things?”
A nod. “I knew who was a good person and who was a bad person. I knew never to be alone with certain people, and I knew I could play with the other children but that I mustn’t hurt them with my fangs or my claws or I’d lose my friends. I was very careful with them—angel babies are very fragile.”