Reaper's Justice

by Sarah McCarty

  “I was a fool.”

  “Yes.”

  His chuckle was as sweet as his growl. “But not anymore.”

  She smiled and nipped his chest through his shirt. “No. Not anymore.”

  Swearing, Isaiah stopped dead. “Do that again.”

  She did. He groaned. She smiled, power blending with desire. He was as affected by her as she was by him. She pressed a kiss against the spot she’d just bitten, holding the thought, the desire, while he carried her those last three steps into the bedroom. As soon as the door closed behind them, he let go of her legs in a controlled glide. The friction of her thighs against his was torture. The bunching of her skirts between them, unwelcome.

  His mouth bit at hers as he backed her toward the bed. “You have too many clothes on.”

  She was already unbuttoning his shirt. “So do something about it.”

  He laughed. “What happened to my shy little virgin?”

  “She’s too hungry to be shy.”

  His whole body snapped taut, and for one horrible moment, she thought she’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I don’t think sometimes.”

  “Shit. Don’t be sorry.” His fingers tunneled through her hair. “Just say it again. Now.”

  She did better than say it. She showed it, raking her fingers through his hair, tugging the leather thong out, freeing it to fall around his face. She grabbed handfuls, wrapping them around her fingers as she pulled him to her, rising up on her toes to meet him halfway, seeking his mouth with blind impatience.

  Isaiah. His name was a chant in her mind, a need in her soul. The bite on her shoulder burned, the one on her thigh seared, and between her legs, her pussy ached. Oh God, she ached.

  His mouth came down on hers. With a hungry growl, he parted her lips. On her next breath she told him what she wanted, whispering into his mouth, “I’m starving for you. Make love to me, Isaiah. I want you.”

  His hands clenched on her skull. His mouth bit at hers as he moaned and sat on the bed. She smiled against his lips. It was nice to know she could make his legs weak, too. Letting him take charge of her weight, she fell against his chest, straddling his groin. His cock pressed against her pussy. Hard. Hot. Ready. Oh God, so ready.

  Isaiah.

  He was so strong, so hot, so perfect. She’d hungered for him so long. This week. This life.

  Mine.

  The spot on her shoulder burned for attention. The spot on her thigh even more so.

  She got four more buttons undone before she lost patience. Buttons popped off and scattered on the floor as she ripped his shirt open, exposing all that hard muscle to her touch. Isaiah was such a beautiful man. Broad shouldered, lean hipped, with a stomach ridged with muscle. His chest was covered with a fine mat of hair that narrowed to a thin line that disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants. She licked her lips, tracing the line with her fingertip. There was a strange tingling in her gums and her fingers itched. She rubbed them against the rough material of his pants, finding his erection and rubbing that, too.

  He caught her hands and flipped her over, pinning them above her on the bed. “Hell, woman. Slow down.”

  Addy didn’t want to slow down. She wanted Isaiah in her, as hard and as fast as he could be. She’d been so long without him and she needed him. Just needed him. Twisting beneath him, she rubbed her groin against his. “Isaiah, please.”

  “Oh, I’ll please you, sweets, but not like this. Not with me so wild I could lose my head.”

  She didn’t care if he lost his head. The thought of him losing his head, going wild, made her moan. He let go of her arms to shrug out of his shirt. Wrapping her legs around his hips, she raked her nails down his back. He swore and twisted, grinding his cock against her pussy. Close. She was so close.

  The copper scent of blood blended with the scent of passion. She should have been repulsed. Instead, she was excited.

  Isaiah.

  “Fuck yes.” Isaiah thrust against her as her nails raked down his back again. The passion flared, taking her higher, tossing her mind against his, her heart against his. Isaiah tore at her pantaloons. Addy pulled up her skirts.

  He paused. She moaned, caught on the edge of anticipation, wanting to tumble over, needing to.

  “Are you holding on, sweets?”

  She bit her lip, nodded, and clung with her thighs, her hands. “With everything I have.”

  In more ways than one. She didn’t know how Isaiah had become so important to her, but he had. And she had to have him. Now!

  “I’m ready.”

  Remembering what he liked, she turned over. He caught her arm and eased her back. When she opened her mouth to question, he shook his head. “No, baby.”

  His thumb stroked across her cheek in a butterfly caress before his lips brushed hers. “This time, we do it right.”

  “I had no complaints before.”

  His smile was as soft as butter. “This time I want to see your face as I please you.”

  There was no hiding the shiver that went through her. It was scary, it was embarrassing. It was erotic, and when she thought about it, she’d like to watch him, too.

  “I’d like that,” she whispered right before his mouth found her breast. She expected him to go straight for her nipple. Instead, he sprinkled tantalizing kisses around the curve, kisses that felt like fire. Kisses that blossomed to nips. Nips that had her twisting with a wild impetuous need. Nips she expected to turn to one of those erotic bites. His mouth turned into her breast, opened. The moist heat of his breath caressed her. The edge of his teeth grazed her.

  She arched and waited. “Oh yes.”

  “No,” he groaned, wresting his teeth from her skin. “Damn it, no.”

  “Isaiah?”

  “It’s all right, sweets.” He groaned against her breast. “It’s all right.”

  She gripped his hair, holding him close. “Why?”

  He shook his head. His hair spilled over her breast in a whisper-light caress.

  “I won’t do that to you. You can trust me.”

  She did. With her life. Her passion. With herself. His hand under her back lifted her up into his kiss.

  “Isaiah.”

  “Addy.”

  She twisted closer. Arched higher. “Please.”

  His lips closed around her nipple, drawing first soft, teasing forth the fire, then harder, fanning the flames until they burned out of control. Until she burned. For him. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe, could only ride the maelstrom as it tossed her this way and that.

  He rubbed the sensitive nub with the rough edge of his tongue, delivering a torrent of sensation, awakening a flood of need, sending her racing toward the peak with a hard nip.

  “Please!” She’d never felt like this. Never knew she could be this wild, but she loved it. “I need you.”

  He was already pulling her thighs apart, lifting one over his shoulder.

  “God damn, yes!”

  Turning his head, he placed a kiss on the spot he’d bitten before. She cried out. She couldn’t help herself. He did it again, laving the sensitive spot with his tongue, tempting them both. She spread her legs wider, inviting him in. Only him.

  Isaiah!

  Sliding his hand down her other thigh, over her knee, down to her ankle, he lifted that leg over his shoulder. For a moment, vulnerability banked desire, but then his weight came over her, blocking out the light, the uncertainty. His cock fell against her clit, hot and throbbing. Another shiver whipped through her. His hips pulsed once, twice, driving that thick, hard length along the sensitive nub. Addy cried out. Isaiah laughed, holding himself high against her before settling his cock into the well of her vagina.

  For a second, she stopped breathing, digging her nails into his back. Anticipation welled along with passion. He swore. She begged, lifting with her hips.

  “Now, Isaiah. Please, now.”

  He didn’t make her wait. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe even the same passion was tearing through him
that carried her. He growled low and deep. To her surprise, she found a growl of her own. She lifted her hips for his thrust, biting his biceps to smother her scream as the perfection of his possession took over.

  This was what she’d been craving. This was what she needed. What she’d always needed. His cock speared deep, erotically gliding along her sensitive channel.

  “Shit.”

  “More,” she whispered against his arm.

  “Yes,” he groaned. “I need more.”

  He gave it to her in slow, deep thrusts that gradually gathered pleasure, gathered momentum, until he was driving into her and she was screaming into his shoulder. Her body convulsed around his cock, clenching with rhythmic entreaty, wanting, needing him to come.

  Isaiah.

  His body jerked once, twice, and her pussy was flooded with warmth. Her world shattered in an explosion of sensation. From afar, she heard him calling her name with the same sense of wonder and completion that settled over her. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pulled him down. It was good. It was very good. It was the way it was supposed to be. Burying her face against the side of his neck, she whispered, “Isaiah.”

  THE aftermath of passion was sweet tenderness. Addy snuggled into Isaiah’s side, running her fingers through the hairs on his chest as he stroked her arm with the same idle contentment.

  “Will it always be like that?”

  He kissed her forehead. “I hope so.”

  “Me, too.” When he reached back to plump his pillow, she noticed the faint white lines on his neck. She reached up. He caught her hand before she could touch them.

  “What happened?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  She believed that. The scars were flat and pale. Turning farther on her side, she asked, “How did you get them?”

  “Your cousins would say because I’m a hardheaded son of a bitch.”

  “They’d probably say more than that, but that wasn’t what I asked.”

  Bringing her fingers to his lips, he kissed the backs. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  If it was going to hurt him, neither did she. This peace was too fragile. Too new to disturb with questions about things he was trying to forget. But . . . she had to ask.

  She cupped his cheek in her hand. “How did you become a Reaper?”

  “That’s not something you need to know.”

  “Yes.” She touched her finger to a corner of his mouth where the remnants of his smile rested, entertaining the notion that she could hold it for him, them. “It is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a large part of who you are.”

  “It’s not who I want to be.”

  He was evading. “Just answer the question, Jones.”

  He gave her a fake smile designed to mislead as he came over her. “Getting awfully bossy, aren’t you.”

  She didn’t answer, didn’t smile back, just waited. He sighed and kissed her forehead.

  “It’s not a pretty story.”

  “Neither is mine, but you know it.”

  He didn’t have a counter for that. She didn’t give him one, just waited.

  “I’m not going into detail.”

  She waited. He frowned down at her. “You are one stubborn woman.”

  She nodded and switched her touch to his shoulder. And waited. An overview would do. For now.

  Holding her gaze, he gave her what she wanted. “I’m told when I was fourteen, I was kidnapped by some men who wanted to create a private team of assassins.”

  He said it so carefully the ramifications took a few seconds to catch up.

  He’d been just a boy!

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Years.”

  “How many?”

  He shrugged her hand off. “I don’t know, all right?”

  She put it right back earning a bit of his anger for herself. With that force of will she so admired he brought himself under control. The tension left his muscles first, then his mouth and lastly his eyes, but it lingered in his scent. He wasn’t nearly as calm as his next statement would imply.

  “They were very good at what they did. End of story.”

  She shook her head. Not the end, but a beginning. Cupping his cheek in her palm, she placed her thumb against the firmness of his lips, and gave him the “I’m sorry” he so deserved.

  “Don’t be sorry, just run.”

  She pushed him over onto his back.

  “I spent a good portion of my life running. I’ve discovered unless you’re running to something, there’s no point in it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The graze of his fingers down her cheek was tender, the cast to his smile sad. “And you think running to me, a broken-down assassin, is a good idea?”

  “Yes.” She thought of the tintype tucked among his belongings. “Unless you’ve got a reason I shouldn’t.”

  “Other than the ones you’ve already heard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like what?”

  “The woman in the tintype you keep in that box.”

  “I wondered if you saw that.”

  “I did. And that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “There are a hundred reasons I should send you packing, but she’s not one of them.”

  “Who is she?”

  She held her breath, hoping for an answer of sister, mother, cousin.

  “Someone I met a long time ago.”

  Her heart sank. “And she just happened to give you the tintype?”

  “In a way.”

  Tears burned her eyes. It wasn’t like Isaiah to be evasive. She was more to him than an acquaintance.

  “I see.”

  “No you don’t.” His finger caught her chin and drew her gaze back to his. “I don’t want her.”

  “Of course not. You just carry her image with you everywhere.”

  In a quick move, which left her blinking, he swapped their positions, dominating the moment as his fingers tunneled through her hair, not letting her look away as he gave her the brutal truth. “I was supposed to kill her.”

  Shock held her still. She’d known he was a killer, but she’d had a naive belief that he’d only killed those who deserved it. Bad men. Evil men. Never women. Never children. She took a cautious breath. “‘Supposed to’ would imply that you didn’t.”

  He shook his head. His hair fell over his shoulders, casting his face in shadows. “No, I didn’t.”

  Thank God. “What did she do?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “And that’s why you couldn’t kill her?”

  “No. I’d killed plenty of others with no second-guessing.”

  He wanted her to see him at his worst. She caught his hair in her hand and secured it at the nape of his neck. She needed to see his eyes and he needed to see hers.

  “But you couldn’t kill her.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No. She looked at me with such innocent eyes and I thought, ‘Why?’”

  “Why did she need to die?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I wasn’t trained to think. Just kill.”

  “Oh.” It was hard to think of Isaiah functioning with mindless obedience.

  “What was the penalty for not completing your . . . job?” It galled her to realize she didn’t know what else to call it.

  “Torture and eventually death.”

  That “eventually” was said so matter-of-factly, it made her shiver. The Reapers had been assassins. They’d delivered death and they expected it as part of their day-to-day lives. Isaiah had expected it. Dear heavens, how much pain did it take to change a boy into a cold-blooded killer? Her gaze fell to the faint scars on Isaiah’s neck. How much torture did it take to keep him that way?

  She touched the marks, rage simmering inside. For the boy he’d been. The man he was. “What did they do to you when they found out?”


  “They never found out. I came back and they just assumed I’d completed the job.”

  Because he’d always had before then. “They never expected you to find your humanity, did they?”

  He paused as if rolling the description around his mind. “No. They didn’t.”

  “What happened to the woman in the picture?”

  “I don’t know. I like to think she’s happy and doing fine.”

  But the not knowing haunted him. There was more than he was telling her. “And the picture?”

  “I kept it as a reminder.”

  Addy shifted beneath Isaiah, hooking her calves over the backs of his thighs, holding him to her. “Of who you wanted to be.”

  “Of who I could have been,” he corrected.

  “Of who you are,” she countered, pulling him down, getting nowhere when he tightened his muscles against her. No wonder he thought she wouldn’t want him. No wonder he stayed in the shadows. He couldn’t forgive himself. She knew about that kind of guilt. But she also knew Isaiah. No matter what they’d done to him, Isaiah was more than a soulless killer. Of that she was convinced. He might have lost who he was for a time, but somewhere in the middle of hell, he’d found himself. She knew that as surely as she knew her name.

  “Don’t go making fairy-tale endings, sweets.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” This time when she tugged him down, he went. She waited until his lips were just a breath from hers before confessing, “I was thinking more along the lines of beginnings.”

  “Shit.” His mouth bit at hers. “You are crazy.”

  “I know.” She trailed her nails down his nape and kissed him softly, feeling his desire, his hesitation, matching it with the reckless conviction inside her. Isaiah was hers. “However, the only man I want to be crazy with is you.”

  “Damn it, it can’t work. There are things you don’t know—”

  “But someday it will.” She bit his shoulder, his chest, arching her hips so her pussy aligned with his cock. A single pulse of her hips enticed him in that first delicious bite. “But until then, I’m willing to take it day by day. How about you?”

  His growl rumbled against her neck, his teeth grazed but didn’t bite. His cock surged deep, stealing her breath, her voice. She clung to his shoulders, absorbing the impact, the beauty as they became one, rejoicing when he finally, finally, gave her what she wanted.