His c**k slid over her oversensitized muscles as he pulled out his entire length, only to slam back in so hard she felt him in her throat. Then he was coming inside her, the intimate wetness pushing her over the edge into a pleasure so vicious, it tore her to pieces.
• • •
“You’re still wearing all your knives.”
“I should’ve used them,” Elena muttered from her position trapped beneath Raphael’s body, his c**k still inside her, and his breath hot against her neck. “Bastard.”
“You drew blood, so I believe we’re even.”
Arms wrapped around his neck, she kissed his temple. “I’m sorry I scared you.” It wasn’t the done thing for an archangel to admit fear, but he was hers, and she’d hurt him without meaning to; it was up to her to fix her mistake.
His wings shifted, but he didn’t extricate their bodies. “I didn’t know fear until you, Elena. Use the power wisely.”
It was a punch to the heart, that na**d admission. “Well,” she said in an attempt to make him smile, “if it gets me this well f**ked . . .”
Rising onto his elbows, his hair a turbulent mess and his lower lip already healed, he pinned her with a gaze kissed with more than a touch of male arrogance. “Have I not been satisfying you?”
God, he was sexy. She wanted to tear off his clothes and drive him wild when he got that look on his face. “Given that I screamed the greenhouse down the night before last,” she said, her toes curling at the reminder of how he’d taken her from behind, her hands braced on her workbench, “I think you know exactly how well you’ve been satisfying me.” She moaned as he withdrew from her body, her tissues deliciously swollen. “Though angry sex does have something going for it.”
A faint curve of his lips at last, his head dipping to press a kiss over the bite he’d taken of her breast, the mark red yet. “Yes.” He rose, did up his pants, and dragged her to her feet. “It may become my favorite way to work out our differences.”
“Not if you do this to all my clothes,” she said, realizing the ripping and tearing sounds had been for real. “Damn it. I just changed.” Sudden panic, a glance at her watch. “I still have fifteen minutes to make the meet with Ransom.” Racing into the bedroom, she stripped off her weapons, slithered out of her clothes, and—after a quick dash into the bathroom to wash some hotly personal fluids from her body—returned to re-dress.
An insane three minutes later, and Raphael, wearing a black shirt identical to the one she’d shredded, slid her longest blade down her back again. “The hunt might run late,” she said. “So don’t send the squadrons out looking for me.”
“Either you have forgotten your prior engagement,” Raphael said as she rapidly rebraided her hair, “or you’re attempting to avoid it.”
It came to her in a rush of memory—heavy embossed paper, a polite invitation it had taken her hours to draft, a response elegant and formal but with a delicate, whimsical drawing of a lemur in one corner. “They didn’t cancel?”
“Elijah offered, but I told him we’d like to see him and Hannah at our table.” Folding his wings tightly to his back, he walked out onto the balcony, the winter air a cold blast as she followed. “I think it’s time we began to build some true friendships among the Cadre. Other alliances are already forming that may be destructive in the war to come.”
Rubbing at her bare arms, she tried to remember if she’d left spare full-length sheaths at the Tower. However, it wasn’t only the wind and the thickening cloud layer that had the hairs rising along her arms. “You’re thinking about Neha and Lijuan.” The two powerful archangels were neighbors, had always had a cordial relationship.
“It could be a lethal liaison.”
Elena thought of a Manhattan under siege from a hail of fire and ice, while the reborn fed on mortal flesh in a bloody plague across the city, and felt her gorge rise. “Jason said he’s positive Neha hasn’t been taken in by Lijuan.”
“Neha also has a twin in her territory who may yet lead her army against Neha,” Raphael pointed out. “And she blames me for the death of her child.” A reminder that no matter Neha’s acceptance of Jason into her territory in the recent past, certain wounds continued to fester. “Lijuan, meanwhile, has been very polite about keeping both her reborn and her forces away from their shared border.”
Put that way Elena could see the alliance forming in front of her eyes. “Elijah and you—you’re friends already.”
“Of a sort. He has always offered his support to me in matters of the Cadre.” Acknowledging a passing squadron led by Illium, who looked every inch the blooded fighter she so often forgot him to be, Raphael shot out a random bolt of energy.
Elena sucked in a breath as Illium gave a single command and the squadron split to avoid the bolt . . . which Illium deflected with the sword he’d pulled from his back. It hit the Tower without causing damage, and Illium saluted them with a grin before continuing onward. “That wasn’t angelfire.” An archangel killer, angelfire could shatter concrete.
“No, it was a weak strike meant to test the squadron’s alertness.” Eyes on the city, Raphael returned to their earlier topic of conversation. “If Elijah and I are to create a true friendship, an alliance that’ll hold in the fighting to come, then I must not only invite him into my territory, but trust him on a level beyond.”