Beneath (Heven and Hell #3.5) Read Online Free Page B

skin.
     
    “You never touch me,” he rasped, wrapping his hand around mine.
     
    “I’ve wanted to,” I confided. Oh, how I had longed to see if he felt the same way he looked. I always wondered if he would be full of textures and whether his skin would be warm to the touch or cool like mine.
     
    It was more than I thought it would be.
     
    “I’ve wanted you to.” As the words left his lips, he slid his hand up to my wrist and tugged me a little closer. He reached out and ran his fingers over my hair and then trailed his thumb down my cheek. It’s a good thing I didn’t really need to breathe because I would have passed out from lack of oxygen.
     
    When his thumb trailed down along the underside of my bottom lip and then up over it, something tightened within me and a sharp feeling exploded in my chest.
     
    He moved in closer, shifting his body so he was all I saw. There was only him and nothing else. He kept coming, closer… closer still, until his lips were so close to mine that I could practically taste them.
     
    I jerked back. I might have fallen if he hadn’t caught me.
     
    I suddenly recognized that feeling in my chest.
     
    I snatched my arm away and flew up, out of his reach. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
     
    “Gemma, wait!” he called, but I didn’t turn back. I flew up into the sky as high as I could, past the clouds, until there was nothing but a sea of cerulean.
     
    Longing. I felt longing. I wanted him to touch me and I wanted him to kiss me. My heart still thundered from what almost happened. He was a human. It was wrong.
     
    It was forbidden.
     
    All these months I told myself I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. I told myself I only liked him because he was different from anything I’d ever known before.
     
    I’d been lying to myself.
     
    I might have been curious about Callum in the beginning, but now… now it was something else. Something more.
     
    It felt a lot like love.
     
    * * *
     
    I stayed away for a month and, for the only time in my life, I felt sick. How could I have allowed this to happen? When had my feelings for Callum grown and why hadn’t I stopped it?
     
    Yet, even through all my disgust with myself, deep down there was still part of me that sometimes whispered, What’s so wrong with loving him? He was a good man, a decent man. And more importantly, loving him didn’t take away any of the love I felt for my Father. If anything, I appreciated his creation even more. He was the one who created Callum, a man so incredible that even I, an angel who thought she was incapable of loving anyone but God himself, had come to develop feelings for him.
     
    I spent the entire month wrestling with myself, with that small voice inside of me that refused to quiet.
     
    But nothing could change the fact that an angel and a human together was forbidden.
     
    It was wrong to continue seeing Callum when nothing could come of our relationship. The very next day I received a new assignment which I completed and then took myself to Maine. I didn’t expect to see him waiting, I figured after all this time he would have given up.
     
    He was there.
     
    When he saw me he did a double take and when I didn’t disappear, he jumped to his feet and ran through the water, splashing everything around him and drenching his clothes. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
     
    “Yet here you sit.”
     
    He smiled, the chip in his tooth charming me. “I don’t give up that easily.”
     
    He reached for my hand, but I stepped away. “I only came to tell you I would not be back. I didn’t want you to wonder…”
     
    “What do you mean you won’t be back?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.
     
    “This…” I pointed at the air between us. “I never should’ve allowed our friendship. Angels are not supposed to interact with humans the way you and I have.”
     
    “So all I am to you is a friend?” he asked, a hint of anger in his voice.
     
     I didn’t know what