Her Demonic Angel (Her Angel Romance Series Book 5) (8 page)

“Places like this sometimes... only worse. Horrible things that I don’t want to speak about.” She looked away and then closed her eyes.

“You didn’t have a nightmare when you were in my arms.” He wasn’t sure why he put that one out there. Tormenting himself? He was the big bad hero who chased away Erin’s nightmares and made everything right. Her knight in tarnished armour. Yeah, right. It didn’t matter what he did, or how alike they were beneath the surface. As soon as she realised he was one of those bastards she hated so much, it would be game over and goodbye Veiron. Kill it before it started. It was the only way to save himself.

“I didn’t. Can I sleep next to you?”

“Sure.” Way to resist and keep that all necessary distance between them. What was it about this woman that had him going against his better judgement? It was more than her beauty and how similar they were to each other. It ran deeper than that.

Erin moved closer, flashed him a tired but grateful smile, and settled on her side with her head on his thigh. Hell. He warned the part of his anatomy that she had chosen to snuggle up right next to not to get ideas. Those dirty thoughts spinning out of control in his mind were not going to happen.

Do not touch her. Do not lay a hand on that smooth but dirty slender arm of hers and stroke it to see if her skin feels as soft as it looks. Do not.

Veiron ran his fingers along the length of her arm.

“Veiron,” she whispered, his name like ambrosia to his aching soul as it fell softly from her lips. “I can’t sleep. Talk to me.”

“What about?” Any subject but himself. Keep it professional. Keep some distance. Any subject but himself.

“About you.”

“Sure.” Fuck. Why didn’t he just smash his fist through his ribcage and tear out his heart right now to save himself the inevitable pain in his future?

“Are you fallen?”

He grimaced.

“You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.” She tipped her head up, rolling slightly onto her back so she was looking at him. “Tell me if I’m being too nosy.”

He didn’t want to answer it, and she damn well was being too nosy.

“I am,” he said rather than refusing her and wished she would go to sleep. He shouldn’t have woken her. He should have tried to carry her down the slope. He might have made it to the ledge even with her extra weight rather than tumbling into a volcanic abyss.

Veiron looked down at the bubbling flame-filled plain below. Fiery painful death was beginning to look good but dying was off the menu. Not going to happen. Death meant rebirth, and rebirth meant a return to Heaven and forgetting everything until he fell again.

“Did they cut off your wings?” She glanced away when his gaze darted to meet hers. “You don’t have to answer that.”

If he didn’t have to answer any of these questions, then she should stop asking them and just go to sleep.

“How do you know my sister?”

Evidently, she had taken his silence to mean he wasn’t answering any questions about wings. If she knew he still had wings, she would ask what they looked like, and then it was a small leap to realising just what sort of creature’s thigh she was using as a pillow.

“We had a problem in common. I helped her and Marcus deal with it.”

“Is Marcus an angel too?”

“Of sorts.”

She smiled. “Are all angels of sorts? You say that every time. You don’t like to talk about angels, do you?”

He shook his head. It wasn’t his favourite topic. Just the word had his hatred bubbling to the surface and awakened his desire to unleash every drop of his rage on Heaven and Hell.

“Do angels wear robes and fly around Heaven playing harps and singing?”

Veiron laughed. “Fuck, no. We wear armour and fly around carrying out our master’s wishes with angelic weapons... and those missions often entail spilling blood in copious quantities.”

“Like warriors?” She was starting to sound sleepy.

“To the core.” He stroked her arm and then her black hair from her face, curling it behind her ear so he could see her face while she slept. She closed her eyes and sighed out her breath, resting her cheek against his thigh. Her right hand settled further up his leg, her heat burning through his black jeans and making him painfully aware of her proximity and touch, and how good she felt against him.

“I think you’re my guardian angel,” she murmured and his fingers froze against her face.

She didn’t notice. A soft snore broke the heavy silence.

A guardian angel. He hadn’t been one of those in centuries and he had no desire to ever become one again. Not a guardian angel. He was her demonic angel, a man driven by cold fury to pursue something that might end in his death and inevitable rebirth.

Veiron stared into the hazy heat filled distance.

When that rebirth came, he would make sure it was into a different world, one devoid of the Devil and God. They would both pay for the vicious game they played with his life against his will.

Veiron growled under his breath and then inhaled slowly, trying to calm the anger surging through his veins and threatening to seize control. It didn’t matter that he was in Hell right now, under the Devil’s nose, close enough to reach the bastard’s fortress and have the fight he had been itching for these past centuries.

He slid his gaze to Erin where she slept softly with one hand and her head on his thigh.

He had wanted to leave her earlier when she had voiced her hatred of his kind but he hadn’t been able to convince himself to go beyond the reach of his senses. He had needed to know that she was safe.

The Devil would have to wait.

His mission would have to wait.

Erin was what mattered.

Until he got her safely to her sister, she was his primary concern.

His anger subsided as he watched her, calm settling over him that only increased when he set his hand on her bare arm and felt her heat against his palm.

He watched over her, his fingers lightly running up and down her arm, waiting for a sign that her nightmares had come to rob her of sleep and torment her. She slept soundly, as still as she had been when he had carried her, as though his touch really could keep her bad dreams at bay. The only disturbances were a few deep sighs that could have been moans in the right situation and the odd flush that heated her cheeks.

Veiron grinned.

Looked like good dreams to him.

He inhaled slowly. Centuries of service in Hell had rendered him immune to the stench, letting him smell beyond it to the remnants of Erin’s soft warm perfume and the undeniable hint of desire.

Very good dreams indeed. The best sort.

Her lips parted and she sighed again.

He wished that he could join her but angels didn’t need to sleep when they were in their natural environment. He could close his eyes and hope that sleep would come. It wouldn’t.

Veiron watched her instead, putting every pale freckle visible on her dirty skin to memory and listening to her soft steady breathing. Minutes ticked by and slowly turned into hours. Time moved as strangely in Hell as it did in Heaven. A few minutes here was hours topside. He would have to wake her soon.

A sense that they weren’t alone prickled down his spine.

He stilled right down to his breathing.

Someone was close. He leaned further into the cave, hoping to conceal himself and Erin. Three Hell’s angels flew by, barely two hundred feet from him and staying over the basalt slope to protect their wings from the intense heat of the boiling lake beyond. They didn’t look his way but it was only a matter of time before they came back. The demon in the black plains would get their attention and tell them what she saw.

“Erin,” he whispered and nudged her arm, feeling guilty for waking her. “We have to go.”

“Just a few minutes more, Mum.”

“Mum?” He pushed her arm again and her eyes opened.

She lay there for a few seconds and then groggily looked up at him. “I was having a really good dream.”

“Tell me about it later. We have to move.”

A frown creased her dirty brow and she yawned. Veiron moved his thigh out from beneath her and her head hit the dirt.

“Ow.” She rubbed the side of her head and pushed herself up onto her knees, looking more alert now. “Did the bad guys find us?”

Veiron nodded. “They will soon. I’ll carry you. We can head for the nearest gate.”

“I thought that was a day away?” She crawled forwards and Veiron turned away so he wasn’t tempted to look down her black tank top at her breasts.

He reached the ledge, stood and offered his hand to her. “The gate we should have exited through is... but this is an emergency.”

She slipped her hand into his and he pulled her onto her feet and then straight up into his arms. He set her down again.

“You’re not carrying me?” she said with a sleepy frown.

“I am but I can’t run with you like this.” He unbuckled the straps of his scabbard and let the sword fall into the cave. Erin rubbed her eyes.

“Don’t you need that?” She nudged the discarded sword with her bandaged foot. “How are you meant to fight without it?”

“I’ll think of a way but I’m not planning on this coming down to a fight.” Because that would be a very bad idea. He didn’t want Erin anywhere near a fight with one of his kind, let alone three of them. Even if he had his sword, he would still lose control if anyone went after her and then she would see him for what he was.

Erin picked up the scabbard and struggled with it, trying to get the straps on over her arms.

“What are you doing?”

“Arming myself. I don’t have fancy powers.” She managed to get one strap around her shoulder and started on the other.

Veiron didn’t have time for this, but arguing with her would probably take longer than strapping the damn sword to her back. He tugged the straps until they were tight and the sword lay flat against her back, and buckled them. The sword was almost as tall as she was. She didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of wielding a blade this size but the steely glint in her amber eyes said that if it came to a fight, she was damn well going to try. He had to admire her tenacity.

He crouched with his back to her. The moment she lifted her right leg, he grabbed her under her thigh and swung her up onto his back. She slipped her arms around his neck, her supple body pressing into his back, and sighed right into his ear.

This was fast becoming a day full of grand mistakes. He had thought that she would wreak less havoc if he carried her on his back, not more. The way she pressed into him and the feel of her inner thighs against his hips and her arms around his neck had him thinking about her in a reversed position, against his front, and naked. He growled at the thought of sliding his cock in and out of her hot sheath, her breathy moans in his ear and body trembling with pleasure.

“Veiron?” she murmured.

Veiron struggled to clear the image of making love to her from his head.

Something shrieked in the distance.

That did it.

He bolted up the slope to the path, clutching Erin’s hot soft thighs as she clung to him for dear life. The moment he hit the flat, he broke into a sprint.

Erin moved against his back, twisting away from him.

“Veiron?” she said, a note of panic in her voice. “Can you run any faster?”

“Three of them?”

She buried her face against his back.

“No... it’s more like twenty.”

Veiron growled. Fuck it. Desperate times and all that shit. They already knew where he was. Maybe he could lose them or at least slow them down.

He released one of Erin’s thighs and held his hand out in front of him, focusing a short distance ahead. The landscape there shimmered and distorted, and then disintegrated into curling black smoke. Erin’s arms tightened to a death grip on his throat that choked him.

“What the hell is that?” she shrieked close to his ear.

Veiron grinned as the portal erupted into fierce white flames.

“Our ticket out of here.”

CHAPTER 7

E
rin had screamed at the top of her lungs from the moment Veiron had leapt headlong into a flaming vortex until they had exited it in another area of Hell. He hadn’t stopped there. He had produced another wall that had the look of a painful death if you made even the slightest mistake and leapt straight into that one. They had done the sickening jump several times and had eventually ended up next to another of the small groups of buildings that were scattered around the black and fiery landscape of Hell.

Veiron didn’t make another vortex this time. He ran with her through the village, heading up a winding wide road that led towards a plateau that had a sheer drop into the buildings on the left and a huge wall on the right.

Erin felt sick.

With all the jumping from one place to another and the fear that churned her stomach to acid, she was close to throwing up all over Veiron. She didn’t think he would appreciate it.

He set her down on the wide ledge that overlooked the village and walked towards a huge stone arch cut into the sheer black wall that rose up into the endless darkness above her.

“Is this a gate?” she said, unwilling to let herself believe that she was this close to freedom until Veiron confirmed it.

He nodded. Erin’s knees weakened. Veiron was there before they gave out, his arm around her waist, holding her steady. She cursed herself for looking so weak in front of him and clutched his biceps, breathing slowly to calm her feelings. A gate. She couldn’t believe it. She had thought her nightmare would never end and now she was on the verge of escaping Hell.

Erin slowly raised her eyes to meet Veiron’s dark ones, waiting for him to call her weak again. He didn’t. His expression remained soft but intense, edged with warmth that sent her temperature rising and tempted her to drop her gaze to his mouth, lift her lips to his and kiss him.

“It isn’t the gate we were supposed to use. Your sister isn’t on the other side.” His deep voice sent her insides trembling and increased the temptation to look at his mouth.

“Why can’t you zap us to that gate?”

He shook his head, released her waist, and a solemn look entered his eyes. “Amelia and Marcus are waiting there. If I teleport to that gate, then I’ll be leading the Devil’s army straight to her location. I came here to save you so the Devil wouldn’t find her, so he couldn’t kill her.”