Biting back a responsive shiver, she laughed, the sound soft and intimate in the dark. “I am not the most gifted of singers, but I don’t care.”
A tug in her hair, Jason’s fingers unraveling the neat knot at her nape with exquisite patience, each golden pin put on the railing in order, until they shimmered in the dark and her hair tumbled down her back and over her wings. Mahiya trembled. She had been born in a time when a woman did not put down her hair in front of anyone but her lover, and some part of her was that girl still.
It was an intimacy they shared beneath the starlit sky.
When he slid his hand under her hair to close over her nape from behind, she expected him to tug her back for a kiss, but he just rubbed his thumb over her skin before running his knuckles down the centerline of her back and returning to lean on the balcony on his forearms, his wing lying heavily against her own. “I can sing.”
It was the last thing she’d expected to hear from him, this man who threatened to splinter her defenses until she repeated her mother’s tale of love unrequited. Yet now that he’d spoken, her mind whispered with half-remembered fragments of conversations overheard.
“A voice more beautiful than Caliane’s they say.”
“. . . made my heart break.”
“Purity, that is Jason’s voice.”
The speakers had all been more than four hundred years old. “I would hear you,” she whispered.
“I have not sung for many years.”
“Did something happen to still your song?” she asked, unwilling to back away when this was the first time he’d spontaneously offered her a glimpse into the mystery of him.
His reply was slow in coming, but she didn’t take his silence for anger, knowing Jason was a man who felt no need to clutter the air with words. Instead, tempted by the way his head was below her own as he leaned down, she reached out to undo the tie that held his hair in its usual queue. It fell like black water around his face, and he didn’t stop her when she began to smooth it back to lie over his shoulders. “You have such beautiful hair.”
“I prefer yours.”
His hand fisted in her hair, his lips on her throat.
Thighs clenching, she ran her fingers over his scalp. “Then we are well matched.”
He arched a little into her touch. “The only songs in my heart were ones that made the Refuge drown in tears. So I stopped.”
Having not expected such an unvarnished answer, she was momentarily thrown, her fingers going motionless. She had the panicked feeling of a chance slipping through her fingertips, an opportunity forever lost. “Did it hurt you to stop?” she asked, grabbing at that chance with grim determination.
“Yes,” he said at last. “It was akin to cutting off a limb, but such song was not good for me.”
Frowning, she parted her lips to ask why, then stopped. Jason was a man draped in shadows—to give voice to the darkness within . . . yes, it would not be good for him to drench himself in it. “If you ever find something worth singing for again,” she said, a silent, fierce hope in her heart for his song, “I hope you will invite me to listen.”
Jason pushed off the railing to stand at his full height, folding his wings to his back at the same time. Already, she missed the warm weight against her, but then he dipped his head and the warmth turned into a black fire that kissed her bloodstream and spread into every cell of her body.
There would be no forgetting Jason.
* * *
He’d led her into the bedroom, but when he stopped at the foot of the bed, she raised her fingers to the buttons of his shirt after undoing the strap of the sword harness across his chest. The way he’d taken control the previous night, she worried he wouldn’t accept her desire to discover what pleased him, but he played with her hair as she unbuttoned the shirt to display the beauty of his body.
Each soft tug on her scalp as he twisted a loose, heavy curl around his finger, released it, made her heart skip a beat. But it was the ridges and valleys of his body that had her sighing in feminine pleasure as she pulled the sides of the shirt apart to splay her fingers over his skin. His hand fisted in her hair, but he didn’t call a halt to her exploration.
Delighted, she shaped the heated steel of him, caressing the heavy muscle that spoke to his strength and speed. It was a quirk of angelic biology that the incredibly powerful muscles needed to support flight didn’t overwhelm the upper body. Instead they lay subtle and fiercely strong beneath the skin.
But Jason’s body, it told a different story, that of a warrior who needed to do maneuvers in the sky flight muscles alone wouldn’t accommodate. “Can you use your sword in flight?”
“I’d be useless as a fighter otherwise,” he murmured, lifting her fingers to the straps on his shoulders that helped hold the sword harness to his back.
Taking the silent instruction, she undid the sleek but strong buckle, repeated the act on the other side, the leather soft from use. “Are you ever without your sword?”
“No.” Removing harness and sword, he placed them beside the bed.
Within arm’s reach.
“It’s my primary weapon.”
“Yes, I understand.” Pushing aside his shirt, she rubbed her fingers over the light red marks created by the leather. Such a thing would be nothing to an angel of Jason’s strength, but she did not like seeing his body abused in even so small a way.
Having kicked off her sandals in the living area, where Jason had left his boots, she rose on bare toes to press her lips to one of the marks. Jason’s free arm came around her waist, but he didn’t halt her movements when she kissed her way across to the other marks. “I could do this for hours,” she said, addicted to the feel of him, the taste of him.