Jamila I require her presence,” he told the cloud.
How long would it take her to fly here? It would take him less than a minute to thrust Annabelle into her arms and kick them both out of his home. He was tired of thinking about Annabelle, tired of wondering how badly she hurt, if she would survive whatever sickness had struck her. Tired of reaching inside the air pocket containing his vial of water from the River of Life, only to catch himself before he made contact with it. To even consider giving her the remaining drop was ludicrous.
“More threats?” Jamila asked the moment she arrived.
At last. He whirled to meet her head-on. “You’re late.”
Golden eyes glittered with… anger? Couldn’t be. There was heat there, but nothing irate. “How can I be late? You didn’t give me a time frame.” Her wings tucked into her sides, and dark curls settled over her shoulders, falling down the smooth expanse of her arms. “Besides, I didn’t feel a need to rush to another scolding.”
“I have no intention of scolding you further. You disobeyed the night of the battle, and I proclaimed your punishment. That subject is now closed.”
She twirled one of her ringlets around her finger. “Then why am I here?”
“You are female.”
A slight quirk of her mouth. “Nice of you to notice.”
“I want you to… I need you to…” He pursed his lips, massaged his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He tried to speak again. Failed. The words refused to leave him.
If he placed Annabelle in Jamila’s care, he would not be able to see her without begging an invitation to the angel’s home. He would never know what happened to her. And Jamila was so impulsive, so often controlled by her emotions. What if Annabelle angered her? Annabelle possessed a bit of a temper, and did not always mind her words. How would Jamila react to a callous retort from a lowly human? Not well, that much he knew.
I can’t place Annabelle in her care.
A strange sort of relief crashed over him, lifting a debilitating weight from his shoulders and shining something light and bright into his heart. No, not relief. Couldn’t be. He felt irritated by this turn of events, surely. He was back to where he’d started, to where he had no desire to be.
The angel was staring at him expectantly.
“What do females require?” he asked, refusing to change his mind yet again. Annabelle stayed, and that was that.
Jamila shifted to the side, her robe rippling with the motion. “Require for what?”
“For the meeting of needs.”
Her eyes widened, her pupils flaring and gulping down all that gold. Rosy pink flushed her cheeks, her lips softening, parting. “I had no idea you had begun to experience desire, Zacharel. You should have said something sooner. I could have told you that I require only your cooperation.”
As he tried to process her words, she stepped into the line of his body, wound her arms around his neck and lifted to her tiptoes. Then she meshed her mouth into his, and forced her tongue past his teeth.
O-KAY. THE ULTRACOLD Zacharel was capable of emotion. Desire. But that didn’t make him any less of a jerk.
Annabelle had wanted to know where he was, not because she cared about the man—she didn’t—but because he’d done something to the cloud to prevent her from leaving her room. Enraged, she’d demanded that the cloud show her where he was and what he was doing, and it—he? she?—had.
A TV-like screen had appeared just in front of her, comprised of nothing but air. She’d watched, her hands fisting, her eyes narrowing, as a stunner with curling dark hair wrapped herself around Zacharel, molding the two of them together and feeding him a decadent kiss. The rise in her temper wasn’t about jealousy, but about her circumstances. She was trapped, and he was making out.
Now she watched as Zacharel jerked away from the girl. He growled, “What are you doing?”
Again the stunner conquered the distance, trying to refit her mouth over his. “I’m kissing you. Now kiss me back.”
“No.” Frowning, he set her away from him, and this time, he held her in place. His wings were tucked into his sides, though they arced backward, away from the female. Snowflakes rained from their tips, tiny crystals that formed little piles on the floor. “Why are you kissing me?”
The girl’s sensual confidence died a slow, torturous death. “Because you hunger for me as I have hungered for you these past few months?” A question when she’d probably meant it to be a statement.
“I do not hunger for you, Jamila.”
Ouch. There was such brutal honesty in his tone, even Annabelle flinched.
“But you said…” Jamila floundered. “I thought…”
Oh, honey. Just walk away before he does more than trample on your pride, Annabelle thought, sympathy for the girl momentarily superseding her anger with Zacharel.
“I said nothing to make you think I desired you,” he stated with the same coldness that always infused his words. “You simply assumed. Therefore, now I will tell you plainly. I do not want you. I have never wanted you, and I will never want you.”
Okay, so, wrong again. The man had no feelings.
A sob parted the woman’s lips, and she spun on her heel, her wings expanding in a burst of movement. Hers possessed far less gold than Zacharel’s, but they were lovely nonetheless. She shot into the air and out of the cloud.
He faced the screen Annabelle still watched, and she knew he was headed into her room. Not wanting to be caught spying, she waved the TV screen away. “Go!”
The air thinned, until only the cloud wall remained.
A second later, Zacharel stepped through that wall, seeming to appear out of a forbidden midnight dream far better than the ones she’d entertained. Thick, silken black hair tumbled down a flawless forehead and into a gaze that studied her with unwavering intensity. Though his features had been painted with a brush of youth, he appeared beyond ancient, the wintry green of his eyes seeing everything, missing nothing.
A long, white robe draped him, somehow displaying his incredible strength, and oh, oh, oh, but he had brought the chill of the Arctic with him. She drew her arms around her middle for warmth.
He looked her over. Something passed over his expression, something she couldn’t read, before he carefully blanked his features. “You are well.”
I will not be intimidated, and I absolutely will not be awed by his appearance. Annabelle forced herself to unleash the ire she’d been nursing. “And you are a douche. You made me a prisoner, after I told you I’d rather die!”
Far from intimidated, he said, “That is no way to speak to me, Annabelle. I am in a dangerous mood.”
Like she wasn’t? “Well, well, the mighty Zacharel actually feels something,” she said snippily. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”
“It is not Christmas, and I suggest you sweeten your tone. Otherwise, I might take you at your word and kill you. How about that?”
She gasped, stepped back until she hit the edge of the bed and almost fell. “You wouldn’t dare. Not after you went to so much trouble to save me.”
Stark self-loathing darkened his eyes. “I killed my own brother, Annabelle. There is no one I will not take down.”
Wait, wait, wait. He’d done what? “You’re lying.” He had to be lying.
He snapped his teeth at her, reminding her of an injured animal in too much pain to accept aid from anyone. “I do not lie. There is no need. People lie because they worry over the consequences of admitting the truth. I worry over nothing. People lie because