Page 111 of White Lights
She thinks again of what Yael said.To give Rafe what he deserves.
“I hope you’ll stay,” he says, so sincerely it takes her breath away.
“I thought you hated me.”
He cracks a smile, rises from the bed so that he’s facing her. “Can you understand now why I had to keep you at a distance?” He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with unexpected tenderness. “Angels and mortals … they can’t exactly …”
“Can’t exactly what?”
“They can’t exactly fuck.”
Dez laughs, actually laughs on the night she thought she’d never laugh again. And inside her, desire flickers into a flame.
“I’m serious,” Rafe says. He looks almost pained. And Dez realizes this is what desire looks like on him. He wants her and he’s fighting it.
Suddenly all she wants is for him to throw her onto the bed.
“Why can’t we?” she asks, her voice breathy and short.
The heat of his gaze thrills her as he says, “Because … your body can’t handle it. Because it’sthatgood. And if I killed you—”
“You think you can fuck me to death, Rafe? I dare you.”
He stares at her with so much longing and intensity Dez starts to wonder if these moments are her last. It would explain why kissing him is the most exquisite sexual pleasure she has ever known.
“Things are falling into place, aren’t they?” he asks.
She thinks of the night Yael dragged Simon and her away from Villains, because she didn’t trust Jet not to take things too far with Simon. Because if they’d hooked up … it would have killed her friend? Why would Jet have risked losing his protégé for one hit of pleasure? Was he like her brother, that much in need of something so dangerous?
She thinks of the snakeskin she found in her bed the first night Rafe ever kissed her. Moriah had been sending them a signal then, a caution against what she must have known they wanted to do.
“Why kiss me, then, if it’s so dangerous?” she whispers.
He takes a step closer, threading an arm around her waist. “Because I can’t help myself.” His eyes are on her lips and the way he’s staring at them, hungry, is such a turn-on. “And we’re not seventeen, Dez—kissing me won’t kill you.”
“What would kill me, then?” she gasps, eager for him.
Gently, he grips the back of her hair and tips her face up to his. His eyes light into her.
“If I gave you everything,” he growls. “What Ireallywant to give you. If I filled you up with all my glory, it’d be so good, you would die.”
“Then how—”
“You’d have to be an angel to survive it.”
Dez is hanging on every hot word out of Rafe’s mouth. She’d have to be an angel to survive getting fucked by him? Is that reason enough to stay at Acheron? She laughs at her own absurdity. To give up hermortality, her existence as she knows it? All so she can know what it’s like to have this man—this angel—inside of her?
She isn’t thinking clearly. She’s in shock, reeling from all the unbelievable things she’s heard tonight. Rafe describing her mind’s eye as uncannily powerful. She doesn’t even know what that means. And she doesn’t have to worry about any of this, because there’s no way she’ll make fifteen hundred films in six months. No way she’s even staying here. No way she’ll ever be an angel.
Such a shame for her throbbing body.
“What about oral sex?” she asks before she realizes it. Not what you should say when your brother’s just died. Or maybe it’s the only thing you can say.
“Right now?” Rafe says, sounding game.
“Right now.”
He raises an eyebrow and grins. “I’ll roll those dice if you will.”
