The Watchers Read online

  She knew it had! He had either … transformed himself from one form to another and back again, or he was somehow manipulating her mind to make her see what he wanted her to see. She didn’t know which, but she didn’t believe for more than those few seconds that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Her mind that had failed her.

  And it was still nearly impossible to accept that he had done what she believed he had.

  She stared at him in shock, her entire system in so much chaos there was no determining what emotion dominated. “What the fuck just happened?” she muttered hoarsely, scarcely aware that she’d spoken at all. The voice seemed detached from her, distant. “My god! What are you?”

  He didn’t respond and she whirled abruptly and fled, racing toward the only avenue of escape at breakneck speed. She’d barely begun the climb toward the surface when she heard the sound that had plagued her nights since the accident—the crackle of giant wings as they beat against the air. A split second later she was snatched from the rubble hard enough and abruptly enough to deprive her of breath for a handful of seconds. She felt her belly drop as he shot upward with her. She screamed then …. Into his mouth, because it was as if he had anticipated the very second she managed to gather enough air into her lungs to scream and he covered her mouth with his own to stifle that attempt.

  She struggled against him, briefly, trying to tear her mouth free to scream—until she realized freeing herself from him could mean falling to her death.

  And yet the moment she ceased to struggle, the second she relaxed against him and accepted his touch she felt herself falling into a drug induced haze of confused awareness. Her mind interpreted her confused perceptions as a dream, but she knew it was no dream.

  She wasn’t asleep. She hadn’t been asleep. The muscles of her body still ached and throbbed from the effort it had taken to climb down the mountain of debris into the cavern.

  It truly was dark—because it was night time—but her sight had narrowed—either because of shock or drugs of some kind or possibly both.

  She felt drugged—dizzy, a sense of floating.

  No! She was floating! Or flying, actually. She could feel the rush of the wind in her hair and on her skin. Her internal gyroscope reacted with dizziness with each movement that tilted her and threw off her center of gravity. Her belly reacted to the climb and descent.

  She wasn’t aware that they had landed and entered her apartment until she felt herself lowered to the mattress of her bed and engulfed in familiar scents. It flickered through her mind to wonder if he meant to kill her now, in her bed, maybe to make it look like she’d been murdered by a burglar or rapist.

  No! I would not harm you. Or allow you to be harmed.

  Claire touched her head, put pressure against the sudden sharp pain that blossomed there. “Don’t do that! It makes my head hurt,” she murmured a little drunkenly. “What did you do to me? What are you going to do to me?”

  “I kissed you.”

  Claire made a scoffing sound of disbelief. “That wasn’t a kiss. You did it to shut me up!”

  “No? It felt like a kiss to me,” he responded, his voice low, husky with seduction, and yet laced with amusement, as well.

  He settled against her and she could feel that he was naked ….

  Because she discovered she was naked. “How did you do that?” she murmured vaguely. “It’s like a roofie ….” Well, something like she’d heard they were.

  “Magic,” he murmured against her lips. “I am an angel ….”

  It felt like magic when he pressed his lips against hers, tested the fragile barrier with the tip of his tongue in a swipe that swept away any thought of protest she might have had, and then plunged inside to explore the ultra sensitive surfaces of the moist cavern of her mouth. Heat engulfed her almost instantaneously, swiftly enough she realized he’d already kindled a blaze with that first kiss that had felt so threatening, that had captured her will and ripped it away from her. The desire he had awakened had merely been hidden from her by the haze of confusion and fear. Now those residual emotions only seemed to enhance the blaze that flared as his taste and scent filled her with the stroke of his tongue along hers and the breath he shared with her.

  It was like nothing she had ever experienced. She was almost instantly drunk from what felt like supercharged serotonin surging through her system.

  And yet even her reaction seemed different somehow. She didn’t just feel intoxicated, a sensation she’d often felt accompany desire—at least to some degree. She felt … exhilarated. A sense of joy filled her as if she was making love to the man she adored above all others, her soul-mate. And the combination of desire and emotional love seemed to intensify her pleasure in a way nothing ever had before.

  The intensity of her feelings seemed to fire his desire, as if he could feel what she felt.

  Dante could feel what she was feeling. Beyond that, he knew the effect his touch had on her because he could ‘hear’ her thoughts and on top of that he was experiencing much the same sensations with his own nervous system. And the conjunction of all three was enough to throw him completely off kilter very quickly.

  He lost himself in her.

  He forgot why he was now with her, what had transpired to bring it about.

  It only mattered that he was with her, that she felt even better than he had imagined that she would.

  He shook with the intensity of the sensations bombarding him and his efforts to control them to prevent himself from exploding instantaneously and crashing. And yet he couldn’t seem to force himself to slow down. He couldn’t get enough of her fast enough to appease the raging need she’d evoked in him. He felt like a man dying of thirst and offered a drink of water, unable to consume fast enough to sooth the aching need.

  That desperation and his efforts to restrain himself communicated itself to Claire through his shaking hands as he stroked her and kissed her almost feverishly, exploring her in a way that made it nearly impossible for her to catch her breath, murmuring her name each time he broke contact with his lips like a prayer, a supplication, and benediction rolled together. Her heart felt as if it was beating so hard it would escape her chest. She felt weak and faint, almost ill with the effort to catch her breath.

  “Dante!” she gasped when he broke from her lips again and focused on exploring her breasts with his mouth, teeth, hands, and tongue, sending electrifying currents from her nipples to her groin as he anointed them with his passion, pulling on them with the suction of his mouth, lightly scraping the sensitive, engorged flesh with the edge of his teeth.

  She clutched at him tightly, uncertain of whether it was more pleasurable or unbearable for him to tease her breasts in such a way. She wanted it, relished it, and yet it also stirred currents all the way through her that seemed to sizzle and short-circuit her nerve endings.

  Abruptly, briefly, she almost seemed to step outside herself, to waken to a sense of unreality. What she’d been feeling, she thought abruptly, felt too intense to be real, or perhaps simply too extreme to be purely a natural reaction to is touch.

  As if she’d been drugged.

  Or her mind manipulated by other means.

  It is like that for us, too, whenever we copulate with a human, which makes it hard to resist them and far more difficult when we find a human woman we are particularly drawn to as I am to you, Claire.

  But it had never felt like this before, Dante realized, not with Nahla, the human woman he had come to love so long ago or even his mate, Juna.

  That realization unnerved him enough to give him pause—very briefly—to make him consider whether he should carry through with what he’d begun.

  Because he realized he could not feel this intensely about Claire, achieve culmination, and then turn his back on her, walk away from her as if she had touched no other part of him than his sexual appetite.

  As if he had done no more than expend himself upon a handy female.

  But he discovered he couldn’t bring himse
lf to pull away from her, to walk away. It was too late for that already. He supposed it had been too late from the moment he’d connected with her in the cavern that very first day when he’d been awakened.

  Something had happened when he’d reached inside her mind.

  She’d captured his soul, he thought in dismay and confusion.

  Dismay flickered through Claire as Dante’s thoughts merged with her own, but the most disturbing part of that was that it was the reference to other women that upset her when she knew she should have been far more disturbed by any claim that he was drawn to her.

  She shouldn’t want him to be drawn to her! She shouldn’t feel … angry and hurt that he seemed to want her mostly because she was human, and because of the effects human women had on them, and not because she was Claire.

  Those thoughts should have cooled her ardor—made her completely lose her hard-on—but reason was fighting a losing battle against sensations. It had been from the start and not even an injection of hard, cold reality was sufficient to put out the fire he’d started.

  As if he had come to a decision of his own, or maybe purely to distract her from his ‘slip’, he returned his attention to her lips. His kiss infused her with a fresh onslaught of liquid heat that wound its way through her and curled in her lower belly, creating a throbbing want that demanded appeasement. Mindless with need, she began pressing herself against him in silent demand.

  He didn’t seem to need any further prompting, although he startled her with the position he chose. He broke the kiss and leaned away from her, giving her a few scant seconds to see him astride her hips on his knees before he moved off of her and repositioned her.

  It was a magnificent view.

  He didn’t just look human in physical form. He looked like the perfectly formed male, taut and muscular all over with the classic v from wide shoulder to narrow hips and massive chest and arm muscles that were as well developed and defined as a body builder.

  At least, he looked human except for the wings, she mentally amended as he scooted off of her, caught her ankles and lifted her legs straight up, blocking her view of anything else for several moments until he positioned himself behind her and settled her heels against his chest. She felt him spear the head of his cock into her opening and then far more pressure than she’d expected given how wet she felt.

  It crossed her mind when she felt the burn and the discomfort continued to increase to wonder if she had a yeast infection and hadn’t realized it.

  As the pressure increased, however, she realized abruptly that it was his girth that was causing the burn—that and possibly something not-entirely-human about his cock. Before panic could rise up and engulf her, though, he thrust so deeply it knocked the breath from her chest and her brain from her skull as mindless ecstasy exploded inside of her. By the time she’d caught her breath again and recovered her lost marbles, he was pounding into her in jarring thrusts that almost seemed to send electric currents through her. On the third thrust she reached crisis and began to come and the racking spasms didn’t stop, let up, or peter out until he reached his own peak and began to shake and groan, ejecting heated semen into her that almost seemed to calm the fried, spasming nerves along her channel as they bathed the twitching muscles. She’d screamed herself hoarse, though, and gone well beyond what she could take in the way of ecstasy long before she reached the crescendo of the massive multi-orgasm he gave her. As she came down from the sensory overload, she lost consciousness and fell into a pit of profound and welcome darkness.

  * * * *

  Claire didn’t suppose she would have felt the pain if she hadn’t already been half awake, but she was certainly completely awake the moment an inadvertent shift in her position sent a shaft of discomfort through her. Groaning, she stopped mid turn, struggling to ignore the throb and reclaim the comforting cocoon of sleep.

  It wasn’t to be. She discovered she couldn’t return to the position she’d held before or complete the turn she’d started without more twinges.

  Gritting her teeth, she completed the turn and lay with her eyes squeezed shut until the discomfort subsided. She was cruising toward sleep again when an errant thought drove all interest in sleep from her mind.

  She’d had the most bizarre dream the night before!

  Frowning, she struggled to piece it together but all she could really remember was bits and pieces of a highly erotic dream … featuring Father Moreno of all men!

  Why the hell would she dream about him like that?

  Ok, well she could sort of understand why she would. The first thing she’d noticed about him was the fact that the way he moved—everything—about him was sexy. She thought he was probably the handsomest man she’d ever met, hands down, and he had an accent that made her putter flutter, but he was a priest for god’s sake! Not that she was religious or that it particularly bothered her that he was, but it seemed to her that she remembered hearing Catholic priests didn’t … uh … fornicate, didn’t marry, date … have anything to do with carnal desires. Not with females anyway. There’d been a number of scandals to hit the news connecting them to the molestation of young boys.

  So she shouldn’t be interested in him no matter how attractive he was, because it was for sure that her interest wouldn’t be reciprocated.

  Dominic was a damned fine specimen, sexy as hell—younger than Father Moreno and certainly not a religious fanatic! Why not him? Especially since Nick had been coming on to her?

  It should have been Nick.

  Maybe it had been?

  Or maybe, since dreams were weird like that, it had actually been both of them, sort of morphed together?

  She thought it over, straining to recall every detail of the dream. She managed to recall far more than she would’ve thought she would’ve been able to since her dreams had a tendency to begin to fade as soon as she woke up, but recalling didn’t clear up a misconception as she’d thought/hoped it would. Despite her certainty that she had to have been mistaken, Dante definitely had the starring role in the dream. Worse, just recalling the details was enough to make her kegels spasm!

  Opening her eyes, she sat up, threw the covers off—and stared at herself blankly for several moments.

  She was stark naked!

  She never slept naked!

  She supposed, wryly, that that might explain the dream—at least the fact that she’d had such a powerfully erotic dream. Her skin was sensitive. If she’d climbed into bed naked the brush of the bedclothes would’ve been enough to arouse her awareness.

  That still didn’t explain her partner!

  Shaking it off for the moment, she glanced at the clock and then the window to verify the clock.

  “Hell!” she grumbled, falling back against her pillows. It was too damned early to get up, particularly when she didn’t really have anything to do.

  That thought led to another, however, and before many moments passed her brain was too busy to allow her to reclaim sleep.

  She’d gone to the sinkhole the night before.

  Why didn’t she remember coming home again? Stripping down to bare assed naked, and climbing into her bed?

  Because she didn’t remember any of that! And it scared hell out of her that she didn’t.

  She sat up again and scooted toward the edge of the bed. Hooking her heels on the side-rail, she massaged her throbbing temples, trying to prod her memory.

  She remembered getting ready to go. She remembered walking there. She even remembered the long, dangerous climb down.

  She didn’t recall another damned thing after that, though!

  It was as she was staring down at her feet—her filthy bare feet—that she made a very disturbing discovery.

  There were bruises around her ankles.

  The muscles of her sex clenched at the thought. A rash of goose bumps climbed up her back to her hair line, ran up and down her arms, and across her breasts, making her nipples pucker. Her heart hammering uncomfortably in her chest, Claire lifted one foo
t and stared at the marks around her ankle. She didn’t have to match her own hand to the marks left there to know it was a handprint or that it was far too large to be her handprint.

  She didn’t have to think hard to figure out how they could’ve gotten there. She recalled, very distinctly, that in her dream Dante had caught her ankles and lifted her legs straight up, bending her nearly double as he’d entered her.

  She remembered his wings arching over the two of them as he pounded into her with the desperation of high arousal and imminent release.

  Swallowing with an effort, she covered her mouth with one hand, struggling to separate what was clearly a dream—if not a nightmare—from reality.

  She found she simply could not accept any of it as reality, however.

  Shaking her frightening thoughts, she got up decisively and headed to the bathroom. She felt the semen sliding down her legs before she’d taken more than a couple of steps.

  She’d had sex, she noted, struggling not to give in to hysteria. That certainly wasn’t from any fucking dream!

  The long, hot shower helped in many ways. She was more relaxed when she got out. Most of the residual soreness had vanished, and her mind was clearer.

  She still had disturbing gaps in her memory—some very large, very disturbing gaps—but she had recalled some of the things that had happened the night before.

  Two details really stood out.

  She’d found something in the sinkhole-turned-archeology dig.

  And Father Moreno had most definitely been there—in the sinkhole and later in her bedroom—because he’d threatened her!

  Chapter Five

  The first thing Claire did when she got out of the shower was to head into her room and search for the clothing she’d been wearing the night before. She found the articles strewn about the room—as if they’d been pulled off and thrown without regard for where they landed.

  And, to her mind, that explained how she’d gotten naked! Dante! She certainly hadn’t removed her own clothing like that!

  There was no coin in her pants pocket and for several moments Claire simply glared at the pants, fighting with the urge to scream in frustration and rage, struggling with the suspicion/certainty that Dante had known about the coin and had seduced her just to get it away from her. Shaking that temptation and the suspicions that followed after a moment with the reflection that the pants had clearly been thrown, she got down and began to search the floor.