girl in the chair, he said, “You remember what I told you about how to take care of this, right?”
The girl nodded and slid to her feet, careful to avoid putting too much pressure on her foot right away. She winced as she rolled down the hem of her jeans. After pulling on her jacket, she headed for the door without looking back.
“Will you look at that. No thank you at all,” the artist muttered. “Good thing she paid up front, but what’s the world coming to?”
Standing, he turned, careful to avoid meeting Avery’s eyes. “Now, what do you have in mind?”
“Wings,” she said.
Speaking the word produced a flutter deep inside her chest.
The guy nodded. He would have noted the husky voice she had taken decades to perfect and the slim, leather-encased body only partially hidden by the black leather hoodie. He had to be wondering about the sunglasses.
To his credit, he merely said, “Wings are popular.”
His eyes roamed over her—not in a sexual way, but as a painter might look for the best angle with which to fully see a model’s potential. Almost strictly business now that her silent directive had calmed him down.
“Lower back?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Upper.”
That disclosure interested him. His eyebrows quirked. “Shoulders?”
“A full span.”
His gaze shifted to the counter. “I can do up a design for you or show you some pictures so I can see what you have in mind.”
“No need. I can sketch what I’m looking for if you have a pencil and paper handy.”
Avery wasn’t sure which of the two beings in this room would be affected the most when she bared her skin for the needles. Her nerves were like white-hot pulses whispering along over-strung wires.
There was also the question of whether that Blood Knight outside would leave her alone, and if the ward she had set up at the door would protect her.
“Here.” She was handed paper and a blue felt-tipped pen. “Have a go at what you mean.”
Pen in hand, she began to draw from memory a rendering of the tattoo she wanted. Tonight’s session would actually be an act of camouflage, using art and color to disguise the ridges left over from where the real pair of wings had been cruelly cut from her back.
She was going to replace one set of wings with another.
Each stroke of her pen across the paper intensified the chest flutter. Tension balled in her stomach. How long would the Knight give her before figuring those protective wards out?
The artist nodded at the image she had drawn. “I can do this. When would you like to start?”
“Now.”
His shaggy-haired head shook. “This will take a long time. Two or three sessions, at least.”
Avery pulled out a wad of folded one-hundred dollar bills and laid them on the counter. “Now,” she repeated.
He looked at the money and back to her. “No one can handle all this ink at one time, not to mention the discomfort of so much coverage. That design will reach from shoulder to shoulder?”
“All the way across. And I’ll manage.”
He shook his head again. “I’m sorry...”
His voice trailed off because she had removed the sunglasses and lowered her hood...to give him a first look, a glimpse, a mere inkling of what one of God’s angels who had fallen to the Earth centuries ago, and stayed, looked like.
The poor sod’s wheeze of surprise was audible, but he quickly got hold of himself with a little mental nudge from her bag of tricks. He hadn’t asked any of the questions that had been crowding the tip of his tongue. She also had put a damper on that.
Following him to the back room of the shop, Avery glanced twice more at the front door. Wary, dealing with the craziness of being trapped, she knew that she had only postponed getting caught with her pants down by one of the only beings on Earth who knew what to do about it.
That damn Blood Knight.
Whichever one it turned out to be.
Rhys’s anticipation had spread like wildfire. Nevertheless, he had to be careful.
At this late hour, people were coming and going, passing the entrance to the alley where he now stood. Predators of the horror movie kind hadn’t yet made an appearance, but for them the night was young.
It was 2:00 a.m.
She hadn’t come out of the tattoo parlor.
He couldn’t imagine what she was doing in there. To be touched by needles would mean exposure. An immortal’s blood would be a hefty giveaway of details no immortal could afford to let slip. His blood was black. Possibly hers was, too.
Rhys pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against, patience wearing thin.
“Time’s up,” he announced.
Three strides brought him close enough to the shop’s front door to feel the buzz of electricity outlining it. The trespassing vixen had set up a defensive ward.
“You did hear me, then,” he muttered.
Lips moving with a silent incantation, Rhys shattered the barrier she’d set in place and yanked the door open.
“Nice try,” he said aloud. “But I’m no amateur.”
Inside the shop, he waved off the burly man coming toward him from a back room with a muttered command. The female he sought wasn’t anywhere in sight, and yet her scent, already embedded in his lungs, led him to where she hid.
All those plans about what he would say to her fizzled when he stopped in the doorway of that back room. As if he’d been slammed by a battering ram, his breath hitched.
She was there, sitting on a cot with her back to him, naked from the waist up. Never once had he witnessed anything quite like this. Like her.
The woman on that bench was completely colorless. Pale to the point of being ghostly. White skin. Hair the color of freshly fallen snow. She was painfully thin, but also incredibly graceful in the way her angles converged. Slender shoulders sloped toward a spine where each bone stood out from the lean muscles surrounding it, as if they were pearls on a string.
Ethereal was the word that came to Rhys with that first glance. And breathtaking. She was also flawed. Damaged. That, too, was startling. Whitened scars covered her back and arms. Old scars, and plenty of them, proved that she had suffered abuse and had been hurt badly in the past.
She
