Still, Elena admitted begrudgingly, he wasn’t a total asshole; he had always treated Beth like a princess, including after she asked for a separation. Elena could almost believe he truly was sorry now that the consequences of his selfishness had begun to dawn.

“Are you mad?”

Drawing Beth into her arms at that trembling question, Elena kissed the top of her baby sister’s head—because Beth would always be that to her, Elena’s relationship with Eve independent of the one she had with the sister who’d toddled after her as a baby. “No, I’m not mad, sweetheart.” She squeezed her tight, Beth tucking her head against Elena’s chest as she’d done since childhood. “I’m happy for you.”

Beth’s shaky smile was as sweet as her heart when she drew back. “I’ll love this baby so much, Ellie. No one will ever hurt my kid’s feelings.”

In that instant, Elena knew Beth had been far more sensitive to the tensions in the Big House than she’d ever realized. “Come on.” Heart aching, she took her sister’s hand and unlocked the storage space.

Once inside, they shut the door, the temperature-controlled room lit up by a cool white bulb, and began to go through the boxes. “This was yours.” Laughing, Elena passed Beth a battered fire engine. “You wanted to be a fireman when you were little.”

“Me?” Squeaking with laughter, Beth ran her fingers over the wooden toy. “Can I keep it? For the baby?”

“Everything here belongs to both of us, Bethie.” She touched her sister gently on the cheek, unable to believe the family’s baby was going to have a baby of her own. “You don’t have to ask.”

They spent over two hours in the room and it wasn’t until the end that Elena took out the quilt her mother had given her on her fifth birthday. Seated on one of the crates, she tried to breathe past the sorrow in her heart as she smoothed her hands over the pretty, printed cotton. “Mama used to sit in her sewing room working on her quilts while we played in the corner, designing clothes for your dolls.”

Beth squeezed onto the same crate, cuddling close as she’d always done. “Suzy and Janey.” Soft words, her fingers reverent on the flowered panels. “Those were the names of my dolls.”

“Yes.” It surprised her that Beth remembered—her sister had locked her dolls permanently away in an act of childish grief and rage the day after Ari and Belle’s funeral. When Elena asked why, she’d said Suzy and Janey had been “mean,” that they’d said Ari and Belle wouldn’t ever come back.

“Mama used to sing to us as she cut out the pieces,” Beth said, pulling the quilt across both their knees. “Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” Her voice was soft, husky as she sang the nursery rhyme. “Sonnez . . .”

“Sonnez les matines,” Elena continued when her sister faltered. “Sonnez les—”

Then they were both crying, Beth curled up in Elena’s arms, her body shaking, Elena’s own eyes blinded as their teardrops fell to the quilt in a silent symphony. She’d held Beth the day of Marguerite’s funeral, too, her sister’s body shivering in her arms, her eyes glazed with shock.

“I want Mama,” she’d kept saying. “Why did Papa put her in the ground, Ellie? She doesn’t like the cold. You have to tell him to bring her back. I want Mama. Please, Ellie.”

Today, Beth said nothing, but her heartbroken sobs told Elena her wish hadn’t changed. About to become a mother herself, Beth wanted her own by her side.

29

Raphael watched Elena sleep, not the least surprised when she began to twist restlessly, a thin sheen of perspiration on her skin. She’d come to him with pain in her eyes, what little she’d told him of her time with Beth enough that he hadn’t left her even after she fell asleep.

Wake up, Guild Hunter. He used what she called his “Archangel” tone, the words a command. It hadn’t worked when she lay silent for a year after they fell together the day Manhattan went dark, but today, her eyes opened in a flicker of silver-gray.

“Raphael.” A whisper, her fingers weaving into his hair. “I need you.”

“I am here.” Covering her body with his own, her skin clammy, he cupped the side of her face as he initiated a tender kiss that told her what she was to him. When she shivered and wrapped her arms around him, he moved his hand down to caress her breast and the line of her hip.

It was only skin he touched on her top half, his consort having come to bed without her sleep T-shirt after discovering one of the wing-slit buttons had fallen off, but she wore panties from her lusciously impractical collection. Soft peach satin edged in white lace, this pair cupped her with exquisite perfection. Breaking the kiss to run his lips along her throat, he continued to stroke her breast to hip until her skin warmed, her breath no longer unsteady.

When he raised his head from her throat, it was to find her sensual eyed and lazy limbed, but she pushed at his chest, nudging him onto his back. He went, his hands on her hips as she straddled him, her wings draped behind her and her breasts lush temptation. “Would you lead the dance this night, Guild Hunter?”

Shadows yet in her eyes, she leaned forward and, bracing her arms on either side of his head, dipped her head for a wetly sexual kiss, all tongue and teeth. “Yes,” she whispered in the aftermath. “So lie back and take it.”

Raphael laughed, the masculine sound a rough caress over Elena’s skin. Shivering, she said, “Stop that,” knowing full well he’d pitched his voice to arouse.

“Stop what?” It was a purr, a thousand strands of exquisite fur.

Moaning, she kissed her way down his throat and chest, her panties having gone from damp to wet in the space of a heartbeat. “So not fair, but”—she licked her way along the fine line of hair on his navel—“this should even the stakes.”

No warning, no buildup, she took his cock into her mouth.

He jerked, his hand fisting in her hair as a groan left his chest. Whimpering at the way that sound rubbed across her intimate flesh, she swallowed deeper, pressing her tongue along the underside as she laved him with affection, the pleasure as much hers as his. Her scalp smarted when he tugged . . . so she grazed him with her teeth.

“You are playing dangerous games with your consort,” came the rough warning from the magnificent man who was her own.

Sucking hard, she drew her mouth oh-so-slowly off the long, thick length of him. “You mean you didn’t like it?” she asked as innocently as she could.

He flipped her off him and onto her front so fast, she had no idea how he’d managed it without tangling their wings. “Now”—a dark warning—“it is your turn to be good and take it.”

“Oh, God.” Hands fisted in the pillows, she bit her lower lip in anticipation of his touch and shivered when he slipped his fingers under the sides of her panties.

Hot breath, his mouth on the dip at her spine, his tongue flicking out to taste her skin before he drew her panties down over her butt and lower. Halting with them tangled around her thighs, he turned his attention to kissing her inner thighs, the panties trapping her when she tried to widen her stance.

“Raphael.”

Nipping at her thigh in retaliation for that sensual complaint, he tugged off the panties and rose up over her again, his cock rigid against her back and his weight delicious as he leaned down to murmur in her ear. As he spoke, describing the erotic pleasures to which he’d like to introduce her, his hand slipped under her body to squeeze her breast, tug at her nipple. When he asked her to let him into her mind, she didn’t hesitate, the trust between them such that she knew he’d never take advantage.

Pleasure flooded her body in slow waves, ripple after ripple, as if he’d turned a switch in her mind. “I can,” he said against her throat, “do this to you at any time.” His body shifting, the blunt head of his cock nudging at her hypersensitive entrance, her flesh creamy with welcome. “So long as I can touch your mind, I can bring you pleasure . . . even in the midst of a crowd.”

“Don’t. You. Dare,” she managed to get out between gasps as he thrust in with exquisite slowness, the hard steel of his cock relentless against her swollen flesh.

Masculine laughter, his hand continuing to squeeze and pet her breasts; his mouth shifting to the inner curve of her wings. The instant he licked directly along the edge where her wings emerged from her back, she went off like dynamite, clenching around him until he gripped her hip, pinned her down, and began to ride her, hard and deep.

Bucking up against him, her body out of control, she cried out his name as the orgasm peaked with a fury and felt him fall with her in a final, powerful thrust.

• • •

Later, as they lay tangled in bed, the near white of Elena’s hair tumbling across his skin and her head on his shoulder, he gently squeezed her nape. “What did you dream?”

She went motionless, her hand folding into a fist against his chest. “You woke me up before anything really happened.”

“You’re getting into a bad habit, Elena.” His voice was hard, the echoes of pleasure fading rapidly under a wave of anger.

Rising off his chest, his consort shoved her hair out of the way. “Don’t use that tone on me.” It was a furious command, her eyes angry and alive and beautiful. “We’re more than that.”

“If we’re more than that,” he said, his own anger honed to a deadly edge, “then why do you keep lying to me?”

White lines around her mouth, she swung away without replying. When she got out and began to dress, he did the same. His consort, he’d begun to realize, did not do well in contained areas when driven by anger and nightmare, so he’d give her the sky. The one thing he would not give her was distance.

They flew out three minutes later, heading seaward. The waves were high tonight, the sky dark once they left the lights of Manhattan behind. Elena flew and flew and he knew that, once again, she was pushing herself well beyond her limits when it came to the physical strength needed for endurance flights.