Robin Schone Gabriel's Woman (best pdf ebook reader for android .txt) 📖

of hair and flesh;

the back of Victoria’s head ground into his shoulder.

“Oh . . . my . . . God!” She gasped in agonized pleasure. “Gabriel. Gabriel. Please . . . don’t... stop!”

The truth would not be denied.

“I couldn’t stop it,” Gabriel said, lips sliding against her hair, her neck, cock sliding inside her body.

Crimson stained the darkness behind Gabriel’s eyelids.

He had slit the accomplice’s throat. His blood had been hot and slippery.

Like the shower water.

Like Victoria’s body.

Like sex.

“I couldn’t stop it,” he repeated.

And pumped his hips in pleasure and pain. Unable to stop the flow of memories.

Of black hair. Of violet eyes.

Of love. Of hatred.

Gabriel’s left hand blindly sought comfort, smoothing up Victoria’s water-slick waist, over sharp ribs,

curving around soft, round flesh, fingers convulsively closing over her left breast. Her heart hammered

against his fingers; her nipple stabbed his palm, passion both balm and scourge.

She could so easily be destroyed. By the second man.

By Gabriel.

He pressed his lips behind Victoria’s ear. It did not silence the words that erupted inside his chest and

exploded out of his mouth. “I... couldn’t... stop it.”

Not the pain. Not the pleasure.

Not the loss.

Love was not innocent. No matter how badly Gabriel had wanted it to be.

The second man had taught him that.

A low cry burst out of Victoria’s throat. It vibrated against Gabriel’s lips. She suddenly strained

backward, body opening, grasping, milking his flesh until Gabriel’s knees buckled with the truth and he was

slipping, falling ...

Hard copper impacted his knees.

Victoria fell with Gabriel, body gulping an angel’s release.

He had not been able to stop it.

Chapter

20

A shock of water blasted Victoria in the face, and then it was gone, the climax that had brought her to

her knees, the water that had brought her to orgasm, the internal heartbeat of the man who had taken her

into his world and shown her the pain and the pleasure of sex.

I. . . couldn’t.. . stop it, reverberated inside the copper grotto.

An angel’s cry.

The copper was hard; Victoria would have bruises on her kneecaps. Electric aftershocks danced inside

her bottom and her pelvis and her breasts. Five fingers seared her stomach; her heartbeat drummed against

the palm of a hand.

Gabriel’s hand.

Her throat tightened, remembering her pleasure, his pain. They chained me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t

fight.

In her eagerness to free an angel, Victoria had deprived Gabriel of the very choice the second man had

deprived him of: she had forced him into carnal relations.

An apology rose to her lips; “The water stopped,” came out instead.

It was too late for apologies.

“Yes,” Gabriel said tonelessly, his voice a fleeting caress against the base of her neck and her shoulder.

Victoria stared at the copper-skinned woman imprisoned inside the shower. Five copper fingers imprinted

her stomach; her left breast was protectively cupped by a copper hand. Copper-blond hair blended into

water-blackened hair.

Tears stung Victoria’s eyes. She had to know.

“What happened when they finished with you?”

“They left me.”

But not to die.

Gabriel’s words were muffled by Victoria’s hair and skin; his implication was not.

They had not wanted Gabriel to die. But he had wanted to.

“Who released you?” she asked, voice unsteady, knowing the answer.

“Michael.”

The chosen one.

A boy with hungry eyes who had not begged.

“He’s not French.” Water crawled down her cheek. “How is it that he was in Calais?”

“He had stowed away on a boat from Dover when we were thirteen.” Gabriel’s voice was distant; his

lips moved against her hair and, beneath that, the crook of her neck. The hair covering his chest and

stomach pricked her back; the wiry hair covering his groin tickled her buttocks. “I watched him steal a loaf

of bread through a baker’s window; it was obvious he had never stolen before. I pounded on the window to

distract the baker so he wouldn’t get caught; then I followed him. Michael shared the loaf of bread with me

on a road to Paris.”

And once in Paris they had both been trained to be prostitutes.

Victoria listened to what Gabriel did not say as well as that which he said. If Michael had not known how

to steal, then he had not been born on the streets.

Michael was what Gabriel was not, a boy who had not been raised in a gutter and been labeled filth.

Gabriel had named himself after an angel in order to be worthy of Michael’s friendship.

Long seconds passed; steam dispersed into wispy gray tendrils of mist. Beads of water streamed down

the copper man and woman inside the shower grotto.

Her bottom ached from Gabriel the man; her heart ached for the boy who had wanted to be an angel.

Hot breath caressed Victoria’s left ear. “I begged Michael to let me die.”

But Michael had not let him die.

Gabriel’s words seared Victoria’s skin with the truth: Michael loved Gabriel, just as Gabriel loved

Michael.

He didn’t deserve to hurt.

“You killed the first man.” Anger suddenly resonated inside the copper grotto. “Why didn’t you kill the

second man?”

Six months earlier Victoria would have been aghast at her blood-thirstiness. She had not known then how

pleasure could become a weapon.

“I couldn’t find him.”

Victoria’s heart pounded against five fingers. A man had destroyed Gabriel, and . ..

She tried to turn her head, to see Gabriel; her hair that was caught between them stayed her. “You did

not know his name?”

“No.”

“And now?”

“I still don’t know his name.”

But Gabriel knew something