Read Angel Eyes for Free Online

the way up her and she was filled to bursting, her heart thundering, her thighs lifting, enclosing him. Their breaths mingled; he kissed her ears, her nose, the comers of her eyes where her flesh was as thin and soft as a baby's. He inhaled the musk at the hollow of her throat, licked the swelling tops of her breasts.
    And, oh, it was good. Not only the pleasure they were creating together, but the letting go, like dancing in the rain or rushing naked into the sea. Tori's heart sighed, contented, as she was buried breathlessly toward an ending, a thunder in her soul, the sun in her eyes, the rain of their sweat flying as they ground together, the sweet collision of flesh and emotion that only making love can produce.
    Then he was gasping and heaving. She felt him shudder, arch into her, and something touched her core. Everything shattered, like walking into and through a mirror, arriving at a new reality, a plane of existence once only hinted at.
    "Oh, my God. . . Ohhh!"
    She moved-when she could gather herself to stir again-to the beat of his heart as well as her own. The feeling was so sweet, so intense, that she felt tears come again. It was something to feel like a woman once more, soft and vulnerable. It was so different from how she had been trained: she had been instructed to become as hard as a man, so she had become harder; she had been instructed to replace emotion with logic, so she had become harder; she had been instructed to replace logic with instinct, so she had become harder still, so immersed in her studies she had no time for personal considerations. An economy of movement, speech, thought had overtaken her, defining her new life.
    And everything else had withered within her. She had seen this as good, a purging, an exorcism of the toxins that had embittered her previous life, that had driven her to Japan, to a land and a philosophy that was as far as she could get from what she had once been. Up until this moment.
    Now she saw the other side: how the forging of her spirit in the crucible of her extraordinary training had distanced herself from everything-the good as well as the bad-that had dwelt inside her. And she was immensely grateful to Ariel Solares for giving her back that part of herself she knew she could not live without.
    She wanted to make love again, now, before thought crept back through her drunk mind, but her bladder was bursting, and she staggered naked off the sofa, down the hallway, into the bathroom.
    She was finished, splashing cold water on her face, when she heard the sound. Or, perhaps, felt it would be more accurate. Her first thought was that an earthquake had hit. She lurched, grabbing onto the cool porcelain of the sink. Ariel's toothbrush rattled in its holder and a bottle of cologne crashed to the tile floor.
    But dimly Tori was aware of the aftermath of a percussion. Alarm flooded through her. She pulled open the door, leaped over the shards of glass, ran down the hall.
    All her senses were alert. The air was thick. Plaster dust, smoke, and me smell of burning filled the air, choking her. She smelled the acrid chemical by-products of plastique explosives.
    "Ariel?" she called. Then more urgently, "Ariel!"
    She found him crouched on the other side of the room. The sofa on which they had been making love but moments before was demolished, charred as if in a fire. Its pieces had been thrown halfway across the floor. The doors to the balcony had exploded outward; shards of glass glittered in the city light. There was a hole in the wall behind where the doors had been, and the cruel San Francisco evening wind whipped the tattered drapes, impaling them on the iron-tipped Amazonian spears.
    Tori threw herself down beside Ariel. He was making hideous gasping sounds; he was covered in blood. She tried to hold him, but he shrugged her away, and she saw that he was desperately trying to get to something. his fingers scrabbled at a cabinet door. He fumbled it open, then seemed to lose all