CHAPTER 15
Sophia stopped at the front door to a gorgeous building, which was tiled in blue, green and yellow glass across the curved outer walls. Art Deco mastodons curved their thick paws along both stair railings. She lived in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower on the opposite side of the Seine from the café.
Strange, how he’d ended up so close to his muse, without suspecting.
On the other hand, Cooper was beginning to think nothing was coincidence. He’d thought to travel to Paris because it held no interest for him. It was a big city where he could get lost easily and never bump into the same person twice. And it had been a lark, like a romantic destination for lovers. That’s why he’d gone, because it hadn’t fit him.
Stupid idea, that. He’d been following an instinct all along. He’d been too preoccupied with other mortal females to notice his muse right under his nose.
“Do you want to come up for a bit?” Sophia’s perfect bow lips parted slightly to reveal a fine tease of white teeth.
“I—” Shouldn’t.
He did not want to father a vicious, blood-hungry nephilim child that would wreak chaos across the mortal land. Not to mention kill its own mother after the birth.
Man, get a hold of yourself. You’re stronger than that, yes?
“For a bit,” he answered, gripping his fists as he succumbed to instinct rather than good sense.
Lush black lashes dusted the air. The woman had a way of saying “take me” without even moving her lips.
Cooper followed her through the lobby and was relieved when she didn’t take the elevator. The enclosed space may be the thing to push him over the precipice. On the other hand, following her sexy, shifting hips up the stairs would tempt even a saint.
What in Beneath was he doing? He should be anywhere but here. Siberia, actually. Why hadn’t he chosen the subzero climes? Because once Sophia kissed him he’d lose all resistance and push her against the wall—and shift to half form.
Because she would kiss him.
He wanted her to.
She must.
He wanted to taste her. To breathe her into his pores. To walk through her essence and wrap it about his skin.
“I’m here.” She shoved a key in the door and opened it inward. Leaning against the door frame, she pursed her red lips in a sexy half smile. Her dark brown eyes gleamed with promises Cooper didn’t want to process. “You want to come in?”
“I, ah…” Cooper winced and mined his brain for an excuse to race away from her. Yet while he did so, his hand strayed up her arm and teased the ends of the black bow. “Sophia, I’m not looking for a girlfriend.”
She tugged the front of his shirt, pulling him into her living room. “Good. I’m not much for relationships. But I do have lovers. Lovers who smell alluring like you.”
Damn. She wanted him as much as he should not want her.
Could he explain things to her? Hey, you’re my muse, and I am the evil angel who fell from Above thousands of years ago to find and mate with you. And then you’ll get pregnant with my monster nephilim child. It won’t go well for you after that.
The truth should make her think him a nutcase, and perhaps she’d try to protect herself by shoving him out the door and calling the police.
Trust was in the eyes of the beholder. It was up to him to strip her of that trust.
“You want to sit down?”
Cooper opened his fingers, ready to make a gesture that would move the muse closer to him.
No. Don’t use your powers. You’ll scare her.
That’s what you want to do. Scare the wits out of her.
Cooper walked across the living room to the window. If she were not going to ask him to leave, he sure as Beneath would not.
“The view from here is amazing,” he offered, noting the mansard rooftops across the street glinted with moonlight.
Redirect. Easier than turning and eyeing up all her curves, yes? Idiot. He wasn’t going to walk out. He was here.
He wanted some muse. In his hands, at his mouth, wrapped around his body.
Her fingers spread over his hip, but inches below the sigil that had to glow right now. If he lifted his shirt she’d see it.
It was as if a butterfly had landed on his biceps. Soft lips placed quick kisses to his cool skin. His muscles tightened. His cock hardened. His glass heart may have even pulsed but he knew that was impossible.
“Sophia, I don’t know.”
“Ah, you are shy? Shy and so sexy.”
To hell with it.
He pulled her to him. The ribbon slipped to her wrist. She pressed her hands to the window behind her, opening herself to him and tilting up her breasts as if to offer them, one for each hand.
“You don’t know if you desire me? Is that it?” she asked. “I thought, from the way you looked at me at the café…”
Female breakdown coming on. It was enough to clear Cooper’s head. He released her arms and stepped back.
“It’s not that, Sophia. I need to…take things slow.” He winced. Stupid. She’d think he was an asshole.
Better that way.
No, it’s not. Take her!
“Yes, this is a little rushed, I admit.” She shrugged her fingers through her hair and sighed. That moment of readjustment worked as if she were coming up for air. “Whew! I don’t know what I am doing. This is too quick. I’m so sorry.”
“No, I am.”
“I barely know you. I just, well, I got a good vibe from you in the café. You’re such a nice man, and so handsome. Look at your eyes. I mean, they’re like the sky or something. And the way you smell. So…yummy. I don’t think you’d do anything to hurt me.”
Poor girl. Her instincts were off the map. And everyone knew when one fell off the map there be monsters.
Cooper glanced aside, fixing his gaze to the bookshelf and thinking thoughts of ice water raining over his hardened cock.
“Let’s just talk. I said I had a book to show you.” She wandered off and he couldn’t force himself to turn and walk out of the room.
Leave her.
It was the honorable thing to do.
But she is what you desire.
He knew it was an innate and greater consciousness talking, a consciousness that belonged to the two hundred angels who Fell. A consciousness he did not agree with now, nor had ever agreed with.
Standing here right now, Cooper had gone beyond the simple desire to seek a muse. Hell, he’d never touched that desire. When he’d Fallen it had been for one purpose only. And that purpose was personal to him.
Maybe.
Had he been fooling himself?
“I can’t seem to find it,” she called from the next room.
Cooper joined her before a fancy mahogany secretary, which spilled over with papers and assorted office ephemera. Her pinned-up hair had loosened a bit during their embrace and the effect absolutely screamed sex as she flashed her big chocolate eyes at him.
“I keep it here. It looks so messy. I’m usually much neater. Oh, here’s a page from it. I stick pages in here and there because I’ve already filled the journal and sometimes inspiration hits me so I scribble on anything I have available.”
Cooper fisted his hands behind his hips and smiled genially. He could do this. He wasn’t so out of control of his own body he would shift against his will and take the poor thing like an animal.
She handed him a sketch and he made show of looking intently at it. And suddenly, he was interested. What was on the paper moved his cold blood to his gut. Many little drawings. Of nothing in particular. Codes, devices, designs.
Yet he immediately knew what they were.
His shoulder hit the wall, unaware of Sophia’s allure for the first time since he’d fallen under the spell of her sassy red mouth at the café. Sensual smells and sensations fell away. All that mattered was the bold curving lines on the page he held.
Tracing the lines of one symbol, he shook his head. “Did you draw these, Sophia?”
“Yes, I scribble. Have ever since I was a child. Symbols, like the one on my arm. You had asked about it, so I wanted to show these to you. I know what they mean, too.”
“You do?” He scooted a few inches away from her. The front door was in sight. He wasn’t going anywhere. “Tell me.”
“They’re angel marks.” She took the page he held then handed him two more pages. “That one is mine.”
She pointed to the symbol on the page, a match to the one he wore on his lower left abdomen. It matched the sigil on her forearm. It looked like an elegant long-limbed number seven that butted heads with its twin. Two number sevens head to head.
Each angel wore a sigil unique to the angelic dominions. And for each Fallen there was a muse who matched that sigil. But humans had not this knowledge.
“Why do you call them angel marks?”
“Because they are. I just know. Sounds odd, doesn’t it?”
Like Eden Campbell had known exactly how to paint him? Did mortal muses possess such knowledge?
He stroked her forearm over the sigil. Her skin was warm and smooth. Her blood pulsed against his fingers. He could read her thoughts regarding the marks, but he was too distracted to think that would do any good right now.
“I’ve been marked by one.” She shrugged and gave a little giggle, and caught a strand of her hair and teased it across her lower lip. “Call it a silly childhood thing. But I still find myself drawing them when I’m chatting on the phone or bored. I wish I could find the journal with all of them in it.”
“You have more?”
“A whole journal full. I counted one day. Almost two hundred designs. Ah! I almost forgot about the Mona Lisa.” She skipped over to the coffee table.
He grabbed the other paper from the messy secretary desk. “Don’t you understand what you know, Sophia?”
Startled at his outburst, Sophia let the big coffee table book on the Louvre slide from her grasp and land on the sofa.
Cooper crushed the papers in a fist and she silently protested, reaching out to grab her artwork, but he slapped away her hand.
“You’re too perfect,” he growled. That his voice had lowered and rasped didn’t alert him.
He’d gone beyond control. His Fallen super-conscious had taken a step up and now it would not be ignored.
“I was a fool to think I could follow you up here and not take what is mine,” he hissed.
“I don’t understand. Your eyes…they’ve changed color. You should leave now. We probably are pushing things a little too—”
“Not fast enough for me.”
He slammed Sophia against the wall and licked his tongue up the elegant column of her neck. She struggled but did not cry out.
“An angelkiss for you,” he whispered in her ear. She truly did taste as delicious as she smelled. “I’ll always know where you are now. Doesn’t matter, we’re going to get busy now.”
“I don’t… Please, you’re too rough. Cooper!”
He ripped open the front of her blouse. A black lace bra cradled her generous breasts. So ripe for him. A lash of his tongue stirred a frightened moan from her.
“You must go!”
“Not—” he pressed a forearm across her chest to hold her against the wall, and ran his free hand down to slip under her skirt “—until I’ve had this.”
* * *
Why had he walked the waitress home? Pyx thought he was into her. Was the angel two-timing her? Why did she care?
She didn’t.
She did.
The bitch had to answer to her if she thought to steal her boyfriend.
Well, he was a male, and a weird sort of friend. The label boyfriend worked for her.
Pyx rushed up the stairs in the apartment building. She didn’t know where the waitress lived, but she sensed the Fallen was close. By the third floor she heard the female scream.
Pyx kicked down the door. Inside, the angel, half-shifted, and his stained-glass wings tearing through the Sheetrock, held the muse pinned to the wall.