Page 46

"I sat through twenty minutes of Martin on permissions Friday morning," he said, his voice ragged, "thinking about exactly this."

I laughed, because I'd been in that room, and asked whether he'd heard a single word of it.

"Every one." He thrust up into me, and I lost the thread of the joke. "I'm excellent at my job."

I braced myself and moved faster, the wet slap of our bodies mixing with the bed frame's creak. He met me stroke for stroke. When I leaned toward him, Cillian sat up and wrapped both arms around me, and I locked my legs around his waist. The angle changed, slower and deeper, our chests pressed together. He took my nipple into his mouth before trailing kisses up my throat to find mine. I clutched his shoulders and ground down against him, sharing his breath. He didn't look away, and neither did I. Somehow, that made me feel more exposed than anything else we'd done.

"I want you behind me," I said, breathless.

"Thank God." He was already easing out of me. I turned onto my hands and knees and caught the headboard in both fists. Cillian knelt behind me and pushed back in with one smooth thrust that dragged a shout out of me. He drove into me with an urgency that shook the whole bed, one arm banded beneath my ribs and his mouth at my shoulder. I rocked back to meet each stroke as the sound of skin on skin filled the room.

"God, look at you," he said, rough in my ear. "I could watch you do this all night."

I let go of the headboard with one hand and slid my own fingers down between my legs to circle my clit, and he made a strangled sound into my shoulder. "I can feel that," he said. "Fuck, Everly, I can feel that."

"I'm close." My voice came out unrecognizable. "Don't stop."

He didn't. He drove into me in long, deep strokes that struck something inside me with every thrust. The second orgasm built from somewhere deeper than the first and hit harder, a fierce, rolling clench around him that went on until my arms shook and I had to lean my forehead against the headboard. Cillian groaned my name into my skin, and his rhythm broke. He pressed his forehead between my shoulder blades, drove deep, and held there, shuddering, with a sound that cracked in the middle. I felt him pour into me, hot and endless, while I pushed back to take every last bit.

We came apart slowly and toppled sideways into the wreck of the quilt, boneless and breathing hard. Cillian dragged the edge of it over our legs, then over my shoulder as well, and pulled me back against his chest.

"Your bed is too small," he said into my hair.

"It's a perfectly good bed."

"It's a wonderful bed." I could hear the grin. "The headboard has tremendous character."

I started laughing and couldn't stop, and the mattress shook with both of us, and for a while neither of us moved.

The bedroom had grown pleasantly warm, and the November wind was rattling the windowpane above the radiator. I'd been meaning to have the loose sash repaired for weeks, but lying beside Cillian beneath the quilt, I found myself considerably less interested in the apartment's maintenance problems.

He was stretched out beside me, his blond hair thoroughly disheveled and one tattooed arm resting around my waist. The bedside lamp caught the silver piercings in his ear and the dark ink along his shoulder. Without the black wings and celestial markings, he looked almost like an ordinary man enjoying a quiet evening.

Almost.

I still had a few questions about those wings, and I was beginning to suspect that spending time with a fallen angel would require me to reconsider a number of things I'd previously taken for granted.

For instance, I'd always assumed that a man couldn't fly through the air unless he was aboard an aircraft.

That particular assumption had suffered a rather spectacular defeat.

Cillian shifted beside me, drawing the quilt more comfortably over our legs.

"You're smiling," he said.

"I was thinking about how much my understanding of the world has changed in one day."

"Hopefully not all for the worse."

I turned toward him.

"Not at all. Although I may need a little time to get accustomed to the idea that the man in my bed can fly."

His mouth curved with amusement.

"I can assure you that I don't generally make a habit of flying around other people's bedrooms."

"That's reassuring. My downstairs neighbor complains when I wear heels after ten. I can't imagine she'd appreciate having an angel crash through her ceiling."