Fallen Angels 01 - Covet (43 page)

Oh, wait...it wasn't singing.

Waves of energy pulsed out of the angel's palm, like heat rising on asphalt in the summer, and making a rythmic sound as they rippled through the air.

One by one there were a series of shifts as the dead bolts released, and then there was a final click and the door wafted open as if the space beyond had let out a breath.

“Nice,” Jim murmured as Eddie's hooded lids lifted. The guy took a deep breath and moved his shoulders around as if they were stiff.

“Let's be quick about this. We don't know how long she's going to be out for.”

Adrian went in first, a vicious kind of hatred burning in his expression, and Eddie was right on his tail.

“What...the...fuck...” Jim said as he entered. “Always with the collecting,” Adrian spat. “The bitch.”

Jim's first thought was that the vast, open place was like some kind of fucked-up furniture liquidator's store. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clocks, all grouped by type, but otherwise unorganized: Grandfathers stood in a messy circle in the far corner, like they had been milling around and had frozen in place as soon as the door opened. Circular wall hangers were nailed to the thick wooden support beams that ran vertically from floor to ceiling.

Mantel showpieces sat scattered on shelves and so did alarm clocks and metronomes.

But the pocket watches were the freakiest.

Suspended from the lofty I-beamed ceiling, like spiders on tendrils, pocket watches of all ages and makes dangled from black strings.

“Time keeps on...slippin'...slippin'...slippin' into the future,” Adrian drawled as he walked around.

Except actually, it didn't. Every one of the clocks and watches was stopped. Hell, more than stopped—the pendulums in those grandfathers were frozen in space, at the top of their arcs.

Jim shifted his eyes away from the time-keeping melange and found another collection.

Devina had one and only one kind of furniture: bureaus. There must have been twenty to thirty of them, and they were crowded in a disorganized huddle, like the one in the middle had called a quick meeting and they had just rushed over. As with the clocks, there were all different kinds—antique ones that looked like they belonged in museums, new ones with sleek lines, cheapos that had to have been made in China and sold at Target.

“Shit, I'll bet she put it in one of these,” Adrian said as he and Eddie went up to the jumbled assembly.

“What is that smell?” Jim asked, rubbing his nose. “You don't want to know.”

The fuck he didn't. Something was very wrong, and not just because she had some serious OCD issues when it came to decorating: The air was tainted with a scent that made Jim's flesh crawl. Sweet...way too sweet.

Leaving Eddie and Adrian to their needle-in-a-haystack routine, Jim went exploring. Like all lofts, there were no divisions of the space except for the one in the corner that had to demarcate the bathroom.

Which meant the knives in the kitchen were on full display.

On the granite counter, there were all sorts of blades: hunting ones and Swiss armies and steaks and butchers and prison-made roughies and cooks' delights and box cutters. The business ends were long and short, smooth and serrated, rusted and shiny. And like the bureaus and the clocks, they were in a hodgepodge of disorder, the handles and the tips facing all which ways.

For a man who had found himself in a lot of nasty-ass situations, this was a new one.

Jim felt as if he'd walked into All-wrong Land.

Inhaling deep he tried to clear his head, but just ended up clogging his nose. That smell...what was it? And where was it coming from? The bathroom, he realized.

“Don't go in there, Jim,” Eddie called out as he started in that direction. “Jim! No—”

Yeah, fuck that. The smell was the nostril equivalent of new pennies in your mouth, and there was only one thing that made that—

From out of nowhere, Eddie appeared in front of him, blocking the way. “No, Jim. You can't go in there.”

“Blood. That smell is blood.”

“I know.”

Jim spoke slowly, as if Eddie had lost his damn mind. “So someone's bleeding in there.”

“If you breach the seal on that door, you might as well trigger a security alarm.” Eddie pointed to the floor. “You see that.”

Jim frowned and looked down. Right in front of his boots, there was a faint line of dirt, as if it had been lightly sprinkled there by a careful hand.

“If you open this,” Eddie said, “it's going to pass over that barrier and our cover will be blown.”

“Why?”

“Before she left, she treated the edge of the door with a specific kind of blood and that dirt's from a graveyard. One passes over the other and it releases energy she's going to sense clear as an atomic bomb going off.”

“What kind of blood is it?” Jim asked, even though he knew he wasn't going to like the answer. “And why didn't she do it to where we entered through?”

“She needs a controlled environment to pull the protection spell off.

The hall outside? She can't be sure the cleaning staff wouldn't disturb the dirt or that someone wouldn't mess it up. And all this stuff”—

Eddie swept his hand around—”is not as important as what's inside here.”

Jim stared at the closed door as if at any second he might pull a Superman and be able to see through the thing.

“Jim. Jim...you can't go in there. We need to find the ring and take off.”

There was more to this, Jim thought. As much as Adrain had revealed back at his studio, the angels had a pattern of telling him what he needed to know for the moment and not one byte of information more than that. So there was definitely shit going on here that he was unaware of...

“Jim.”

Jim focused on the doorknob that was within grabbing distance. He was kind of through with being out of the loop, and if it took a showdown with Devina to bring him up to speed, it was hard to think that was a bad thing.

“Jim.”

Warm water over her breasts and thighs...warm lips on her mouth...warm steam billowing out around her.

Marie-Terese ran her soapy hands up the massive shoulders of her lover, marveling at the difference between their bodies. He was so hard, his muscles flexing and releasing as the two of them moved against each other, shifting, rubbing, seeking, and finding. His hot erection stroked against her upper stomach, and between her legs she was just as ready for more as he was.

Vin's lips broke off from her own and nuzzled into her neck, then down to her collarbone...and he went even lower, bending to suck on her nipples before licking at the tight tips. As she sank her fingers into his slick wet hair, he knelt on the marble before her, gripping her hips and staring up at her with hot eyes. With their stares locked, his mouth went to her belly button, brushing soft as the water did before being replaced by his pink tongue.

Falling back against the marble wall between two of the showerheads, Marie-Terese widened her stance as he kissed his way over to her hip.

White teeth made a brief appearance on the bone, and then he was raking them gently across the skin of her lower belly before retracing the path with sucking lips.

Lower.

To make even more way for him, she put her foot up on the marble bench that was built into the corner, and his mouth went immediately to her inner thigh. He was urgent and he was gentle at the same time as he got closer and closer to the core that throbbed between her legs.

She was dying for him to go exactly where he was headed, and as he paused at the very top of her inner thigh, she could barely breathe.

“Please...” she said roughly.

Vin nuzzled over and licked into her with one sure stroke. As her voice keened above the sound of the falling water, his fingers sank into her thighs and he groaned against her sex. Drugging laps mixed with tugging sucks until she found herself falling down onto the bench and bracing one foot against the soap shelf on the wall and throwing the other down the far side of his back.

And then he got serious. Lifting his head from her and meeting her eyes, he brought up two of his fingers and drew them inside his mouth. As they came out all glossy from being between his lips, he leaned back down to her sex, leading with his pink tongue.

The thick penetration was compounded by a flicking tickle at the top of her sex.

Marie-Terese came hard and loud and long, and when she was finally spent, she collapsed against the hard stone, boneless as the water itself. After he slid out of her, he licked his fingers, tongue tracing in and around while he looked at her from under his brows.

He was hard. Maybe even brutally so, given the straining length at his hips.

“Vin...”

“Yeah.” His voice was nothing but gravel.

“It's really far to the bedroom, where the condoms are.”

“It is.”

She looked down at his erection. “I wouldn't want you to wait that long.” His smile was fierce. “What did you have in mind?”

“I want to watch.”

His laugh was deep and low, and he settled back against the glass wall, his thighs opening, his massive arousal running up his ribbed stomach. God, he looked spectacular against the creamy marble.

“What exactly do you want to watch?”

She blushed. God help her, she actually blushed. But then, he was sprawled out on the floor of the shower, glistening from head to toe, ready for sex...and looking for direction. “What do you want me to show you,” he drawled. “I want you...to put your hand—”

“Here?” he said, laying one over his pec. “Lower,” she whispered.

“Hmm...” His broad palm drifted down across his ribs to the top of his six-pack. “Here?”

“Lower...”

He bypassed the head of his erection and went over to his hip. “Lower still?”

“To your left. And higher.”

“Oh, you mean”—as his palm found his arousal, he arched and his eyes squeezed shut—
“here?”

“God, yes...”

Rolling his hips, he kept his hand still and she got exactly what she wanted: a stunning view of his blunt head piercing through his grip and disappearing, piercing through, disappearing. His heavy chest rose and fell, his lips parting as he pleasured himself.

“Vin...you're so beautiful.”

His lids lifted slowly and he stared up at her, his gleaming eyes pulling her into him. “I love that you' re watching me....”

With that his other hand went between his thighs and captured his potent sac. As he squeezed himself, he worked his arousal in long strokes and moaned.

“I don't know how long I'm going to last....”

Good...Lord. The entire building could have been on fire and she would not have been able to move as he squeezed his sac again and then focused on the head of his erection. After he pinched himself with his thumb, he went two-handed, his breath coming in punches.

He stayed locked on her eyes as he worked himself.

He was so sensual, so...unfurled in front of her, hiding nothing, both vulnerable and powerful. “Are you going...to make...me hold it...?” he groaned between gulping inhales. Her greedy stare roamed over him, and she committed the erotic sight of him to permanent memory as surely as if she had carved the images out of stone. “I have...to...”

“Come for me,” she said. She wanted it to last forever, but she knew it was going to start to hurt in earnest soon.

Now his chest really got to pumping and so did his hands—faster and hard enough so that the muscles in his arms strained.

When he orgasmed, he came all over his stomach and his thigh because he couldn't seem to stop. And his eyes never left hers even as his palms finally came to rest and then released and flopped to the side.

As his breathing eased, she smiled and went to him, capturing his face, kissing him softly. “Thank you.”

“Anytime you have a hankering for that kind of show, just let me know?”

“You can bet on it.”

When they finally rinsed off and stepped out of the shower, they had identical ahhh-lovely smiles on their faces, and Vin got her a monogrammed towel from one of the warming racks. The white terry-cloth expanse was so big it covered her from breast to ankle, and by the time she'd turbaned her hair with a second one, she felt as if she'd been slip-covered in velvety softness.

Vin picked up a third, dried his hair until it sat straight in spikes, and covered his hips. “I like you in my towels.”

“I like being in them.”

He came over and kissed her, and in the pause that followed, her breath stopped in her throat.

She knew what he wanted to say. And agreed it was far, far, far too early for it.

“You want something to eat?” he asked.

“I...probably should head off.” She had a lot of packing to do.

“Okay...all right.”

Sadness thickened the steamy air as they slipped their arms around each other and left the bathroom—

“Am I intruding?”

Marie-Terese froze and so did Vin.

The woman he'd shown up with at the Iron Mask was standing just inside the bedroom, her hands hanging loosely at her sides, her long glossy hair down over her shoulders, her black coat belted tight around her tiny waist.

In her resonant stillness, she looked exactly as any model-chic female would on the surface, but there was something way off about her.

Way. Off.

First of all, if she'd been badly beaten the night before, her face wasn't showing any signs of it; her features and skin were as smooth and pristine as fresh-cut marble. Second, she looked perfectly capable of killing someone as she stared at the two of them.

Oh...God. Her eyes. There wasn't a white rim around her black iris, her glaring gaze nothing but a pair of pits that were as dark and bottomless as sinkholes.

Could that be right, though?

As the skin across the back of Marie-Terese's neck tightened, the woman focused on her and smiled like an axe murderer who was looking at his next victim. “I saw your purse down on the dining room table, darling. Given how much money was next to it, I'd say your prices have gone through the roof. Congratulations.”

Vin's hard voice sliced through the air. “How did you get in. I locked everything—”