He couldn't help but notice, however, the way the change made the difference between the two halves of Mina's face less marked to him, as if she'd opened something inside herself, something far more fascinating than what was on the outside.
Macabre. Freakish. Abrasive. Those were just some of the distasteful words he'd heard other angels use to describe her. But, with one orange, he'd found a fissure through which he was getting a rare glimpse of something else.
So for the next five minutes, he remained still and silent as she removed the peel, sniffed each piece. When she had it all removed, she began to lift the whole sphere toward her mouth.
"Hold on... here." David reached forward. She was reluctant to relinquish it, as if she thought he might take it away, so instead of doing that, he put his hands over hers, guided her thumbs into the center and helped her split it open, trying not to think about how much that succulent channel was like the moist petals of a woman's sex.
Goddess, he wasn't a teenager. He'd had women before. He didn't know why being around her made him think about sex so much.
He withdrew his touch, albeit reluctantly. As she began to break off the individual slices, she laid them out in a precise fan pattern. On one piece, the outer skin had torn, and she touched the glistening teardrops layered beneath. Picking it up, she sniffed and gave him a glance.
"There's no hope of getting you to share that, is there?" he teased.
She put it down again. "I'll eat it later."
"You said you were hungry. Here." Lifting a slice, he took a bite to show her how to eat it, and then, rather than handing it back, he did what he wanted. He extended it toward her mouth.
Mina stared at him. David tried to keep his expression casual, even as he fiercely willed her to part her lips and let him place it on her tongue, demonstrate the potential for trust, acknowledge the inexplicable connection he'd felt since he'd met her. If she refused, he would release the slice, but for now he waited, made the offer.
She grazed his fingers with her mouth, such that she took a quick, jerky bite and managed to spray them both.
"Yeah, they do that." Unruffled, David extended another slice. "No point in cleaning up until you're done."
THERE were fruits in the ocean that smelled of the sea, tasted of its salt. But this was of the earth, exploding with sunlight, as if the sphere were plucked straight from the sky. And the taste. Oh, gods. The piece in her mouth was something she wanted to savor, so that she spent quite a while chewing that small bite, now that she'd gotten past her wariness at its unfamiliarity, his motives. She wasn't sure what the shiny blue squares were, but if they were anything like this, it was no wonder Anna spoke so well of the wide variety of things to eat in the human world. She'd been intensely fascinated by such stories, but, as she'd said, she'd never asked Anna to bring her anything. David had done it, without being asked.
The warmth of the fruit reached into the cold in her bones that hadn't left her since she was nine years old. She'd learned physical discomfort was an ally against her worst enemy, the dark urges she'd fought down so often. Now they couldn't get an upper hand except in her dreams. Or when she was unbalanced, out of her element, as she was with David.
But tasting his fruit, feeling his proximity, stimulated urges that had a different feeling from those that connected to her nightmares and the whisper of the Dark Ones. However, anything that suggested a loss of control wasn't to be trusted. Even so, she couldn't stop herself from tasting the tips of his fingers when she took the slice from them. As he stretched out on a hip and elbow beside her on the floor, the short kilt he wore casually inched up his thigh, revealing the inner line of muscle. The smooth ridges across his stomach tightened.
The urge to spray all of that with juice and lick it off had to be a dark compulsion. Didn't it?
When she finished chewing, he had the next slice in his hand. Instead of reaching for it, she shifted her glance to his face, then away. Such a brief moment that it might have escaped notice, but it didn't. The expression that flared in his eyes was enough to give her the courage-or foolishness-to wait and see what he would do.
He broke that second slice in half by biting it. Fed her those two pieces his lips had touched, leading with the side he'd bitten. It made her own lips vibrate more than could be explained by the tartness of the fruit.
He was focused on her face, making her realize the cowl of her cloak had fallen back. She rarely exposed her full face to another, but she realized he wasn't looking at it. He didn't latch on to the scarred half with macabre fascination, or obsess over the Venus side, as she spitefully called it. He was looking at her.
This was dangerous. He was creating confusion in her, changing things so she couldn't anticipate her reaction. And yet, when he dipped a fingertip to her chin to catch a stream of juice and take it back up to her lips, she parted them enough to let him spread the collected juice on her bottom lip. Then she pressed them together, trying not to look at the hand too obviously, too greedily, as he took it away. No, greed wasn't the word. Need was.
It seemed that after each slice, her body was drawing tighter and tighter, like a boat anchored in a rising gale, the pressure building to the point the rope would snap.
He'd stopped, his fingers touching her cheek, a light stroke, his eyes the warm brown that could reach inside her and melt things that were far too cold, things that needed to stay cold.
The cat collapsed into a pile of bone, clattering to the metal floor of the wrecked freighter in a racket amplified by her own fear. She started up, backing away. Concentration error. She certainly couldn't afford any of those. That was it. He was wrecking her concentration.
"I'm... you need to go somewhere else now. I need to finish this potion."
He rose, and her pulse leaped high in her throat at the loose, graceful way he moved, with a still intent as focused as the charging of her potion.
"Why are you afraid of me touching you?"
"I'm not. It doesn't mean anything. I can't... You need... Stop there. I'm not..."
She stopped, unable to find any coherent words. Her throat was seizing up. She coughed, mistakenly trying to breathe out of gills that weren't there. The horses began collapsing one by one, then in increasing groups, like puppets with severed strings, toppling back into piles of bone. The deafening clatter resounded within her head and had her spinning, seeking an escape.
When he caught her arm, before she could react in defense or violence, he pulled her close and put his hands over her ears. He also wrapped his wings around her, creating a comforting buffer with his solid body. Thankfully he was still human enough that the proximity of his wings wasn't too much. It didn't hurt. But one day soon, when he matured and was no longer a fledgling, she wouldn't be able to bear his touch, its disruption, its lack of balance. Good and evil had to be equally balanced. It was important, the first priority.
When she sank down, overcome with the weight of despair, he followed her. As he went to one knee, she somehow found herself on her back, gazing up at him, holding on to his upper arms with clenched hands. The night sky she'd formed for herself on the ceiling was dissipating, going with the same spell as the horses. Glancing up, he noticed it for the first time, the mist of the clouds and the sparkle of the stars she'd created. The moon drifted away like an errant balloon, getting smaller and smaller until it popped against the side of the freighter wall and left only ugly gray metal, a crisscrossing of beams.
"How did you know about the noise?" she managed.
"You had the horses running, but without touching the floor. You prefer the deeper, quieter places of the ocean. The louder it got, the more panicked you looked. I put it together."
Still keeping one hand on her, he reached into the waterproof sack from which he'd drawn the orange and came out with a square of paper cloth. "Those oranges were juicy," he said calmly, as if nothing were amiss. "Good thing I nabbed these napkins, too."
"You stole these things?"
"Somewhat.
" He looked charmingly abashed. "It was just a small handful from a wedding reception. I didn't think they'd mind."
Wetting the napkin with his own mouth, he wiped it along her lips, removing some of the stickiness. However, the way his eyes followed his motion made her lips part, a noise coming from her throat.
"Would you like me to use my mouth to remove the juice?" he asked, low. "Tell me yes, Mina."
"No." She shook her head. "I don't want you to do that."
"I think you're afraid to kiss me," he said. His warm brown eyes were serious, discomfiting her. Easing himself back to a reclining position beside her, he turned on his hip, a slow shift. As she watched him come closer, her fingers tightened on her stomach. He propped himself up on an elbow, leaned over her, his chestnut and brown hair falling over his shoulder so it was so... touchable. She needed to move. Now.
"You think I'd fall for a childish ploy like that?" she rasped.
"No playing, Mina." He was getting closer.
"Shouldn't you be afraid to kiss me?" She got the words out of a throat gone thick, as if she'd put a paralysis spell on her own voice.
He nodded. "I'm afraid you won't like it."
"I won't."
He kept coming, anyway, as her pulse leaped hard and high, lodging itself where her swallowing reflex was. It didn't matter. Her mouth had gone dry.
When his lips first brushed hers, she couldn't help it. She jerked. Her hands closed again, but nothing could stop the shudders from sweeping out from that movement as if it had been a rock thrown with force into a tide pool. Her heart felt like that thrown stone, sailing through the air, a quick, astonishing drop, the explosion of reaction around it.
And all he'd done was let that first bare touch happen. He held still, his mouth light upon hers, his gaze studying her face. Then he slid his hand into her hair, just beneath her ear, a sweep along her neck, a caress of the scarred boundary of her jaw. When his hand coursed over the roughness, he didn't act as if he was feeling ruined flesh. Nor did she feel it, for the nerve endings were electrified beneath, her body wanting to move, gravitate up toward that touch. She couldn't possibly, but if she moved her chin, maybe he wouldn't notice how it brought their lips that much closer together, increased the pressure.
"Touch me, Mina," he murmured. "Please."
"I don't know how."
His eyes didn't shift from hers as he found one of her hands, brought it up to his chest, let her fingers curl of their own volition into his skin.
"Learn."
Four
HIS words not only brought a rush of response, but the return of water to the hold. She was at least able to choke it down to a simple rematerialization, rather than a tidal wave rush from the outside. The piles of bones floated off the metal floor, separating to drift in their own patterns now.
Had she ever been so overwhelmed? Panic drowned in sheer need for something she hadn't even realized she wanted so much. The practical side of her mind, which usually dominated most of her thinking, pointed out that she was sexually mature yet inexperienced. Since she'd never been seduced, let alone by an angel, this could of course result in an aroused response. But not the waking of a hunger so intense she could only be swept along by it when he issued that one-word command.
Flattening her palm on his chest, she felt the heat of him even through the water. Most angels didn't have body hair, and so what she found was hard, sleek muscle that flowed under her touch like a powerful animal. She supposed that was what he was, which quickened her blood even further. He slid his other arm beneath her to lift her into the demand of his body. No uncertainty, no hesitating. He was reading her desires, responding to them as if she were speaking them aloud. When his fingers stroked the small of her back, caressing the top of a buttock, she strained into him. Limbs loosened to his touch, even as need made her throat tight, leaving her unable to speak a word when he reclaimed her lips. And claim was the right word, for hers parted in mindless surrender.
His tongue found hers, tasted, tangled. Taking his time, he left nothing unexplored, even tracing the scar furrows on the roof of her mouth and the moist insides of her cheeks. Rather than causing him to withdraw, those discoveries just made him slow his pace, stroke her even more languorously with his clever tongue.
His lips were so firm that she put her hand up to wondrously feel the way they fit over hers. The thin film of wet heat just inside made her fingers slip, tease the corner of his mouth. Turning his head, he captured one digit and drew it in deep. Then he was holding her wrist, just below her pulse so he could bite her palm, jolting her body like the electric shock of an eel, but far more welcome.
With the water's return, she'd automatically shifted back to her mermaid form and had one tentacle curved over his back now, holding them bound together, even as they drifted like the bones. A sensual, aimless floating. His wings spread above like the shadows of clouds. She cried out when the hard length of him pressed between the tentacles, where her sex rested, just like a human, another thing the mermaids found so odd and different about her. But she found her differences wondrous now, for she used the hypersensitive feelers on the ends of the tentacles to explore every inch of his skin. Managing to wrap them around him, she still had enough left over to rest the tip in the feathers of one wing, soft as the mother's kiss she'd never had.
Even when she tightened her hold in her passion, he showed no fear. In fact, he even dropped his hand from her face to slide his palm along the black serpentine length of one, following it over his hip, learning the way of her, her unique anatomy. The smooth, firm texture of a sea creature in her element. When he explored beneath, finding the feelers, their joining point with her flesh, he detonated sensitive nerve centers so that she gasped and constricted farther around him.
"Easy, baby," he said quietly, against her mouth, soothing. "You can't harm me, but I don't want you too wound up."
Baby. An endearment, one that human males used, according to her books, reminding her that he was probably as much mortal in his mind as he was angel. She didn't mind that. It soothed, comforted even. Though she couldn't believe her nerves quivered at him calling her baby, it made her believe he wanted to give her a name that belonged to this type of intimacy only, so it couldn't be mistaken for anything less.
Taking her other tentacle up the inside of his ankle, she felt the shape of his foot, the fine line of calf, the backs of his knees, the muscled thighs, and then, as he shifted, the curve of tight, perfect buttocks. The vulnerable small of the back, where so many organs could be crushed, punctured... Swallowing, she began to turn her face away, her fingers clutching at his shoulders in ironic contrast, sending them spinning in an uneven circle and causing the nearest sets of floating bones to imitate the chaotic spiral. She couldn't do this. She couldn't control her reaction, stop the images from pouring in, and she didn't want them to ruin it.
"No, don't leave me yet. We'll stop in just a second. Let me just have this one... sweet... taste." His lips passed under her ear, finding the tiny dolphin bauble she hung from the lobe of her unscarred ear, usually well hidden by her hair. He teased it, then pressed his mouth against the side of her throat, sending things inside of her ricocheting. His other hand linked with her fingers, stretching out her arm and pressing it down, letting her feel his weight resting half across her, as he took them in a stomach-swirling descent to the bottom of the ship. That angel ability to adjust his gravity as he desired, even in the water, so that he was protective and dangerous, in all the right ways.
She could see their blurred, distorted reflection in the metal side of the ship as she turned her head. A strange, fantastical creature of white wings and sinuous black legs, pale flesh, black and brown hair, all of it emitting a soft glow because of his wings. It looked real, perfect, all twined together like that. The reality of it twisted inside her, painful and sharp. It was a lie.
He lifted his head then, reluctantly, his mouth moist from hers. "All right?" he asked.
"Why are yo
u stopping?" she demanded. "Seducing me is okay, but fucking's not? Jonah's rules?"
He traced her lips. His sudden silence made her words feel like garbage flung from the back of a careless human's boat. When his gaze lifted, met hers, the annoyance was all too obvious in the hard flint of his eyes.
She'd faced all manner of anger in her life. Most of it she'd never allowed this close when she could help it, because it was likely to take a physical form. But she didn't feel that from David. In fact, she suspected if his temper toward her did take a physical form, she might welcome the way he chose to express it. Some part of her wanted to know how deeply rage could plumb inside him, if his usual quiet tranquility hid a fury that might consume him, as hers often did her.
"Let me go," she whispered, despite her betraying thoughts. Or probably because of them.
"I won't let that viper tongue of yours push me away, Mina. But be careful. I may just say to hell with being a gentleman." He brought his face close to hers until she couldn't pull away any farther. "Fucking you would be easy. Easy as sliding into a hot spring."
Mina gasped, crying out as he unerringly found her with two fingers, sinking into wetness as her tentacles contracted on him farther, her hands clutching as fierce satisfaction and frustration warred in his face.
"But what I want is your trust. I'll have that first, so what we do after won't be easy." His eyes flickered with ominous intent. "And it will be far more than fucking."
"Fine, I trust you now," she managed. "Can we get on with whatever you want to call it?"
Surprise disrupted his irritated look. His startled snort was close to a chuckle. The sound of it eased her heart, even as it did nothing for the pounding demand of what was happening inside her. When he withdrew his fingers, it made her squeeze as if he were still there, particularly as he tasted his fingers.