LITMIR.BIZ

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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 had come for tattoos. Those new tats were vivid, red and raw, adding an overlay of color that contrasted greatly with her skin. She’d chosen wings. Dark blue, light blue and gray feathers with blood-red tips spanned from one of her shoulders to the other, expertly filled in. The result was spectacular.

      Rhys stared intently at this incredible apparition.

      Strands of her white hair—long, straight, shiny—cascaded over one of her shoulders to partially cover the right side of the tattoo. Both shoulders quaked slightly, not from cold, but as if the violence of the needles used to create the wings had affected her. Her emotional turmoil was discernible from where he stood.

      Although she was aware of him, the graceful creature on that cot didn’t turn around. Maybe she waited for him to make the first move. Unfortunately, that move didn’t include any of the demands he had planned on using for getting to the root of who she was and what she was up to. What bubbled up from him instead was a show of sympathy.

      “Bloody hell,” he whispered hoarsely. “What have you done?”

      * * *

      Pain sliced through Avery’s back as her muscles stabilized; pain reminiscent of another time, only infinitely tamer by comparison and much more civilized.

      She didn’t have time to try out the feel of her surrogate wings or catch her breath. He was here in the doorway, his reflection clear in the mirror across from her. Him. Not just any Blood Knight, but the one she had secretly coveted from among the Seven. The Knight she wasn’t ever supposed to see in person, face-to-face, was less than five feet away, leaving her breathless.

      There was no mistaking this creature for any normal mortal male. No chance in hell. His incredibly handsome, aquiline-featured face had Blood Knight chiseled all over it.

      There was no use trying to play dumb, either, when they were both far from the classification of mortal and knew it.

      “What have you done?” he asked again, the deepness of his voice sending shockwaves of familiarity through Avery.

      His question seemed intimate, spoken as if he knew her well and cared about what she did, when neither of those things was true. He hadn’t known she existed until this moment. She had promised herself things would stay that way until she found the right time to change it.

      Slowly, and without answering the impertinent query, Avery reached for her shirt.

      “You’ve been hurt,” he said.

      It was too late to ask how he had found her, and the answer wouldn’t have helped. Like often called to like, and she had gotten too close. But the effect his presence had on her was as unwelcome as he was. Icy shivers crept up the back of her neck. Her insides churned. Blood Knights had been designed to lure the eye and tempt the soul, and angels weren’t immune to those things because those seven Knights carried in their souls some beauty of the heavens.

      Get out! Avery wanted to shout, studying his image in the mirror. I don’t have time for this.

      As handsome as these Knights had been as mortal men, their famous features had been further enhanced by the grace of the renewed blood in their veins and the importance of their golden Quest. They were, however, ignorant of the fact that some of the immortal blood pulsing through all of them had been hers, unwillingly shared. And that, like a butterfly, she had been captured, ensnared in a net.

      This magnificent Knight was muscled, honed, taut, elegant and rugged in equal measures. He stood well over six feet tall, his appearance formidable in every sense of the word. An aura of crackling power surrounded him, announcing that this was a man who had broken from his mortal bonds by stepping into another realm of existence.

      He spoke again. “Are you all right?”

      His throaty voice sounded like a sweep of crushed velvet, and affected her more than she’d care to let on. They were measuring each other, and she needed time to calculate what might happen next.

      She had seen this Blood Knight many times in the past, and always with the same kind of gut-clenching reaction. Frozen in the body of a twenty-something-year-old, he had matured since his inception. His face was more chiseled than she remembered. Bright blue expressive eyes were alight with a worldly, intelligent gleam.

      She knew those features well.

      In that doorway, too close for comfort, stood the sun-kissed immortal with golden streaks of light in his mane of brown hair whose piercing gaze usually saw through shadows without seeing her.

      Perceval had been his mortal name, way back in time. This was one of Arthur’s knights, a warrior champion who’d had a coveted seat at Camelot’s Round Table and been a major player in the Grail Quest. The intense heat of his observation began to melt her chills.

      “What’s it to you?” she finally asked, slipping her shirt over her head. “I don’t believe you were invited to this party.”

      Speaking calmly was a chore when this Knight’s allure bordered on the mystical. Of all the Seven, he had always been special to her. Her attraction to him had both excited and repelled her from the beginning, and from afar, further complicating the fulfillment of the personal vows she had taken.

      Because of that, he was the most dangerous Knight of them all to have found her. She had to be careful, remain calm, when her heart was thrashing. More time was necessary before she turned to face him.

      “Who are you?” he asked.

      “Who’s asking?” Avery returned.

      The energy circling the room was expanding, pressing against the walls, humming in her ears. She was trapped, and therefore had to speak to him. No alternative presented itself when he filled the doorway.

      She saw in the mirror that he was staring at her back and at the damp towel beside her.

      “What’s wrong with your blood?” he asked.

      “Nothing’s wrong with it.”

      “It has no color at all.”

      “What’s that to you?”

      “I’ve never seen anything like it, or like you.”

      “No,” Avery agreed, sliding her arms into her sleeves. “Other than your comment being incredibly rude, I’m sure you haven’t seen anything like me.”

      Glossing over her feisty comeback, he tried again to engage her. “Where do you come from?”

      She was fairly sure he didn’t mean the city or region of the world, but something deeper and

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