Read Online Archangel's Kiss by Nalini Singh - Free Book Online Page A

sudden, she turned to grip the balcony railing. “It’s none of my business if you choose to spend time with a woman who’d eat your heart and dance gleefully on your grave if it would mean she gained power.”
    “Oh, but I disagree, Elena.” Strong arms on either side of hers, big hands closing over the railing. “Tighten your wings.”
    It took her a minute to figure out how to do that neat tucking into the body thing she’d seen other angels do with their wings. “That’s harder than it looks.”
    “Takes muscle control.” Words spoken against her neck as he pressed closer, her wings trapped between them.
    It hurt . . . with a pain that made her skin shimmer in hunger, in need. Every shift of his body, every brush of his lips, it went straight to her core. But she’d been fighting her attraction to Raphael since the moment she met him—it had never made her an easy target. “What do you disagree about?” she asked, her gaze drawn to the wings she could see sweeping through the lush black of the night, heading for those isolated aeries.
    Angels going home.
    A strange thought, a strange sensation, to stand here in their most secret place when they’d always been shadows in the darkness to her.
    “I consider it very much your business if I choose to spend time with Michaela.”
    She heard a dangerous undertone in his words, one that curled her toes even as it pricked at her hunter instincts. “Do you?”
    “As I consider it very much my business that your wings are dusted with blue.”
    Eyes widening, she pushed away from the railing. Or tried to. “Raphael, let me go so I can see.”
    “No.”
    She blew out a breath. “Stop it. Illium didn’t mean anything by it.”
    “Angel dust is not an instinctive act . . . unless one is in the throes of sex.” His fingers plucked at the tight peak of her nipple, a shockingly sensual reminder that the Archangel of New York had once lost control in bed. “It’s very much premeditated.”
    “If he wasn’t down there,” she said, fighting to speak through the slamming rush of need, “I’d smack him. He’s jerking your chain.”
    Lips on her ear, his hand moving to cup her breast with devastating intimacy. “Illium has always had a wild disregard for his life.”
    She couldn’t help it. She curved her neck to give him better access. “And yet he’s one of your Seven.”
    “I think in this case, he knows he’s your favorite.” Kisses along her neck, hot and sexual in a way that told her he had only one thing in mind.
    Giving a laugh husky with need, she reached back to run the fingers of one hand over his cheek. “Do I have that much influence over you?”
    The graze of teeth. “If your Bluebell is alive tomorrow, you’ll have your answer.” His body pressed into her, hot, hard, and demanding, as his hands slid under her clothing to close over her bare breasts.
    “Raphael.”
    Finally allowing her to turn, he crowded her against the railing. Instinct drove her to spread her wings over the metal that was all that kept her from falling to the rocks below. No, she thought, on the heels of that thought. Raphael would never let her fall. And if she fell, he’d fall with her. “Kiss me, Archangel.”
    “As you wish, Guild Hunter.” His lips met hers, harshly masculine and earthy in a way that paid lie to any myths about angels being too “evolved” to indulge in such physical pleasures.
    Moaning in the back of her throat, she wrapped her arms around his neck, rising on tiptoe to meet him kiss for tangled kiss. When his hand brushed the side of her breast, she shivered from the pleasure of it. Biting at his lower lip, she opened her eyes. “Now.”
    “No.” Another hotly sexual kiss.
    Breaking it, she ran her hand down the muscled plane of his chest, lower. He gripped it before she could close her fingers over the rigid length of him. “I’m not that weak,” she protested.
    “You’re not that strong either.” Power ringed his irises. “Not