With a confidence that was part bravado, Aisling erased the protective circle. Aziel jumped onto the front of her shirt and scrambled to her shoulder as masculine fingers wrapped around her arms and pulled her to her feet.

Molten eyes narrowed, bored into hers. “Are you hurt?”

“Not now.”

“What happened?” Zurael asked, barely able to contain the guilt-laden fury he felt for not having anticipated their enemies would strike so quickly.

Aisling told him, though he’d guessed much of the story when he saw the dropped owl fetish, the folded bills and the house keys on the floor near the body.

He stripped her assailant with barely contained violence. Other than the tattoos of a lawbreaker, there were no clues to his identity.

Aisling discovered a concealed knife and garrote in the man’s clothing, nothing more. Her hands trembled slightly as she set them aside. “There’s no way of knowing who sent him.”

Zurael stood and pulled her to him so he could bury his face in the silk of her hair. “No one is beyond suspicion.” His lips brushed the delicate shell of her ear. “I’ll dispose of him. Our dinner is next to the front door.”

“I can’t-”

“You will. By your own hand or mine. You will eat.”

He released her and knelt next to the corpse, lifted it in his arms and stood. “Open the window, then close it behind me. Lock the front door. I’ve still got your keys.”

Zurael didn’t wait for her to respond. He let his physical form dissolve, and when she opened the window he joined the night long enough to take her assailant’s remains to a deserted area.

This time when he returned to the house, he found the living room glowing with candlelight and Aisling waiting for him. She’d set the table and transferred the food into serving dishes. He laughed when he found the ferret on a chair busily eating from a saucer of food in front of him.

“Aziel couldn’t wait,” Aisling said, her soft voice winding its way through Zurael’s chest and downward to curl around his cock. In a heartbeat the hunger for food was replaced by a different hunger.

He didn’t yield to the temptation to carry her from the room, but he couldn’t stop himself from going to her. Her assailant’s possessions were on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. “The keys fit your locks?”

“Yes.”

He leaned in and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“Do you know who my father is?”

The question surprised him, made him curious. “No. Why do you ask?”

“I think… I thought he might be demon because of something Elena’s brother said in the spiritlands.”

“John is not someone to be trusted.” And because Zurael wanted to give her something more, he said, “If it eases your mind, I know your pet is something other than what he appears, but I don’t know what.”

“Neither do I,” she admitted. “The names you wrote in the dirt-”

“Are the names of my enemies,” he said, unable to keep centuries of rage out of his voice.

Wariness flickered in her eyes. She stepped away from him, but he caught her arm before she could retreat further. A small tremor passed through her, and he again fought the urge to carry her to the bedroom, to whisper that she had nothing to fear from him as he coupled with her.

“The food will be cold if we don’t eat it soon.” He brushed his knuckles across her lips, then stepped away before the temptation she presented became too great.

She settled onto a chair across from him and he hated the distance. But she ate, and as she did, the candlelight caressed her features, made the angelite blue of her eyes become violet and the gold of her hair darken to rich honey.

Zurael found it impossible to take his eyes off her. He ached to free the coil of her braid and unbind her hair, to comb his fingers through it in a rare intimacy.

Desire filled the space between them. It grew and pulsed in the air as wax-fed flames undulated in a sensuous dance of heat and light. His breath escaped in a rush when she lowered her eyelashes to shield her expression in an effort to hide from the lust.

The fantasies that had tortured him throughout the day rushed in along with new ones. Protective, possessive urges filled and overwhelmed him. She was delicate vulnerability hiding strength of character, a female created for a man’s pleasure, for his pleasure.

Zurael waited until they’d finished eating. As she cleared the table, he went into the bathroom and turned the faucets on so water began filling the large, claw-foot bathtub. From a shirt pocket he pulled several of the substance-filled beads the Djinn used for bathing and during sensual play. He set them at the edge of the tub and didn’t allow himself to wonder why he’d brought them with him when he left his father’s kingdom, professing a desire only to kill the one who’d summoned him.

Aisling stood in front of the sink, preparing to wash dishes. Zurael stopped in the doorway as he had on the first day, only instead of watching her with suspicion and fighting the desire raging through him, he said, “Disrobe, Aisling.”

Color rose to her cheeks, and a tremor in her hands served as acknowledgment she’d heard him. He read her intent to deny him in the curl of her body before she whispered, “We shouldn’t.”

The truth only inflamed him further, filled his head with the roar of lust and his cock with aching need. He pushed away from the doorway and went to her, trapped her between the sink and his hard body.

“I could take you here, now, as I did earlier today in front of the mirror. Do you remember how you begged me to fill you, Aisling? How you cried out in release when I did?”

“Yes,” she said, shivering against him, exhaling on a shaky sigh when his hands traveled up her sides and around to take possession of her breasts.

Zurael pulled her back more tightly to his front. He needed to feel her against him, wanted to feel the instant she softened and surrendered, gave herself over to him completely. He traced the shell of her ear with his tongue. “Obey me tonight, Aisling.”

Aisling closed her eyes against the desire pulsing through her, burning her from the inside out and making her cunt lips slicken and part. He was dangerous to her, more so now that she knew the depth of his rage toward her most powerful protector, the one whose sigil he’d drawn in the dirt. Yet still she was a moth to his flame, helpless against the needs of her body and the security she found in his arms.

She felt bereft, lost, when his hands dropped away from her breasts and his heat left her back. Lust swirled in her belly when he once again said, “Disrobe, Aisling.”

She didn’t understand herself when she was with him. Didn’t understand the dark cravings, the need to submit that blossomed inside her. He was beyond anything she’d thought to experience with a lover, anything she’d done previously, though the farm’s remote location and Aziel’s presence as guide and guardian hadn’t allowed for much beyond fumbling, hurried experiments with passion.

The need to obey and please him turned her nipples into hard knots and her clit into a stiffened, erect knob. Her fingers trembled as they worked to unbutton her shirt, slowing the process of disrobing as he’d ordered, but intensifying the desire burning between them.

Zurael’s sharp inhale as her shirt fell away made her heart flutter with satisfaction. His command to turn around made her cunt clench.

Aisling turned to face him. She looked at him from beneath lowered eyelashes and wanted to go to her knees like a supplicant in front of an ancient deity. In the candles’ glow he was a being made of golden light, a predator with no equal. He was raw power and invincible strength, masculine perfection almost too painful to behold.

“The rest of it, Aisling,” he said with a purring, sensual menace that made her shake with need.

His gaze scorched her when the cloth binding her breasts joined her shirt on the floor. She trembled at the hungry look in his eyes but knew instinctively that while he might demand her obedience, he was just as much a slave to desire as she was.