slip it down her arm?
“Ashur?”
“Huh?”
“I asked if you liked art. Are you okay? You seem distracted.” She stopped at a door and paused to sip her coffee. “Were you looking at my ass just now?”
“No,” he said, too quickly. “Yes.”
Her smile was wicked.
Ashur fixated on her mouth, those thick lips softened with some sort of clear polish. Her teeth were so white as to sparkle. And straight. He’d never seen that before. Nowadays, he knew, it was all an illusion. Mortals spent millions on altering their appearances in an attempt to look more attractive.
Thing is, one man’s attractive may be another man’s ugly. Everything about Six fell into the attractive category.
“Are you all natural? “ he asked.
She quirked a gracefully arched brow. “You mean organic? I recycle along with the rest of them, but I will never give up my Starbucks habit.”
“No, I mean, you, your body and face. You have not altered your appearance?”
“You mean like cosmetic surgery?”
“Yes, I learned about that last night.”
“Do you think I’ve altered myself?”
He sensed an underlying challenge—which he would never refuse. “Perhaps. Your teeth are too white.”
“I’ve had them whitened.”
“And your lips are so lush.”
“They’re all mine. Everything on this body is as is, the way God intended, except my teeth.”
“Yes, you’re like an earth mother meets sex kitten, all curves and lushness.”
She bowed her head and glanced aside. He’d made her blush, which only increased her sensual appeal.
“What about you, big boy? If you’re not human, is that the way you usually look? Like a human man? A man with incredible muscles and a killer smile?”
“These muscles are lesser than my normal appearance. And yes, this is a costume.”
“Did you steal it from some real mortal man?”
“No. For all that I enjoy the sins of the flesh, and the world, I do not harm mortals. This costume is as I would appear should I have been created mortal. You do not like it?”
“Like it? I love it. Bet it’s hard as steel and. well …” She sighed. “You said you enjoy sin?”
“Devour it. Need it, actually.”
“Oh?”
“It is what makes me tick, as they say.”
“That’s weird.”
“Your opinion means little to me.”
“I realize that. Yet my appearance interests you to no end.”
“I could look all day. What about there? Are they real?” Ashur pointed to her chest and she looked down and stroked between her breasts where he imagined it would be soft.
“My breasts are real,” she said.
“Nice. And soft?”
A lift of her brow tweaked Ashur’s smile. “My God, you don’t have much of a moral compass, do you?”
“It isn’t necessary to my survival.”
She tilted her head. Soft dark curls as tight as a spring bounced over her shoulders and down to her elbows. He wanted to crush them between his fingers. “Soft? You want to touch and see?”
She was right on about his lacking moral compass.
Tracing his finger down from the base of her throat, Ashur closed his eyes as the softness of female skin tendered at his expectations. All things in his life were hard, impermeable, adamant. Yet beneath his skin glided something like fine silk. He remembered silk, slipping beneath his touch, waving in the breeze, gliding over his mouth …
“I think that’s enough.”
Six’s voice brought him up from the dive into lust. Ashur retracted from the one place he should not go until Zaqiel was dispatched. “Very soft.”
“Thanks. I didn’t expect you’d be so … well, forward.”
“You did invite the touch.”
“Yes, I did. Something about you. Anyway!”
Dismissing the intimate interlude, Six opened the door and strode into a vast room done in white marble. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced the far side of the blindingly white room.
“This is my workroom,” she explained, setting the coffee on a clear Lucite desk and pushing a button on the Macintosh computer.
“It’s different from the rest of the place,” he said. “It’s as if another person’s living in here.”
“Kind of. My artistic self is opposite from my chumming-around-with-friends self. I don’t want any distractions when I’m painting so I made it as neutral in here as possible. No music, either.”
He tilted his head, wondering.
“It’s an artist thing. Sort of like you explained the angels hearing in colors is an angel thing.”
“So what is all this stuff? I don’t see any canvas or paints.”
“CG painting is my method of choice to create. I use a spatial operating environment.”
He only understood half of what she’d said. But he wasn’t about to let on to that fact. He touched the smooth white exterior of the computer.
“Don’t touch,” she admonished sweetly. “No taking apart my computer, big boy.”
Ashur offered her a surrendering shrug, then strolled about the room, thumbs shoved in his front pockets, taking it all in.
A huge plasma screen flickered awake on one wall and he approached it, waiting to see what would appear.
Behind him, Six sat before the desk clicking away at the keyboard. Twisting at the waist, his eyes lingered where he had touched her between the curves of her breasts. Softness bound up and waiting release, or a dash of his tongue. If only the angelkiss had been placed there, and he would have had to lick it to grant her temporary relief.
Nice. Thinking about the carnal pleasures was almost as good as doing them. And when his erection tightened against his pants, he grinned. The old demon still had it. Some things were never forgotten, no matter how much torture.
Six typed rapidly.
