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The second option was as attractive as she was, and he studied her face as he mulled it over. He did miss the connection of two bodies moving together, the snug constriction of tight, wet pussy around his cock. He rarely took time for himself, because when he wasn’t skipping around the world, he was alone.
Alone grew monotonous after centuries.
It did mean he would have to take her home, where time stopped completely. There, he could spend hours fucking her, making her scream for days, without so much as a second passing in the mortal world.
“If I find out you’re lying, cheating, or just being downright rude,” he growled in warning, “there won’t be anywhere in heaven or earth you can hide. I’ll make sure of it.”
The picture of innocence, Lara drew a circle around her face. In a softly southern drawl, she batted her lashes at him. “Oh, my, Mr. Death. How could you ever believe one such as me could deceive a powerful being like yourself?”
Mmm-hmm, and that was the sort of nonsense he wouldn’t tolerate from the start, he thought. Her intentions were either genuine or not, and if she wanted to con herself into thinking she could win against him, no matter what the game, he wouldn’t stop her. But if she was under the impression she could twist him up, make him lose focus and surrender a soul he had no right to spare, she’d better think twice as hard, and seven times longer.
The warning continuing to rumble in his chest, Seth ran his tongue around his teeth. Quicker than a whip, his hand lashed out and snagged her around the throat, her skin searing his palm with heat. Grinning maliciously, wanting to scare whatever devious little schemes she had in mind into vacating her pretty head, he hauled her onto her tiptoes.
“You’ve already proven you’re not like the other mortals scurrying around on the face of the earth,” he told her, squeezing her neck until her eyes widened, realizing her predicament. “Being special isn’t always an advantage. Sometimes it paints a huge fucking target on your back.” He leaned forward, rubbing his nose slowly from side to side overs hers. “My aim is accurate, Ms. Townsend. Force me to use it, I dare you.”
It felt divine to hold a warm, breathing woman in his grasp. He wasn’t one to touch mortals—even the chosen ones he needed to reap—while they were still in their corporeal shells, and handling souls was more like molding electricity in his hands.
Touching skin, feeling warmth, smelling the natural scent of her was making him hungry. Her pulse throbbed desperately under his thumb, her heart hammering in protest against her lack of oxygen, yet her body responded to his rough treatment with aplomb.
Weird, fascinating human.
Color suffused her cheeks—pink, then red, turning almost purple as she gasped, wheezing in a breath around the constriction of his fingers. All the while, the sweetest perfume rose, binding him to her.
Goddamn it.
Letting her drop back onto her heels, he kept his hand exactly where it was, loosening his grip so that she didn’t pass out before he was done with what he had to say. “I don’t know who you think you’re playing with, but it’s the wrong fucking reaper. Be smart, rethink your options, and just let me do my job.”
Lara blinked slowly, lifting her hand to press it between her breasts as she coughed. There was a slight whistle to her inhales, but nothing that threatened her life—not in comparison to him, anyway. “I’m going to be really upset if you’ve made me look like a pug.”
“What?”
“All right, so you’re Death, not a veterinarian, but surely even you know what a pug is?” She gripped her nose between her fingers, pressing her lips together, then blew hard. It was only because he did indeed know what a pug was, that he was able to put together her odd clues and surmise she was trying to emulate the pop-eyed expression of the small dog.
Stifling a laugh that shouldn’t even be in existence, Seth knocked her hand away before she could burst the capillaries in her face. He hated seeing petechiae marring previously unblemished skin—well, any form of mark on perfect flesh—but in his line of work, he knew and had seen everything that could be done to a human body, before and after death.
“You’re not a small, irritating dog, Ms. Townsend. What you are, is trouble.”
Chapter Two
LARA
Maybe most women would faint at his feet when he purred the word trouble in that delectable voice, but she was not most women. In fact, she took great pride in being so much more than what the majority of estrogen in the world had to offer, especially when it led to opportunities like this.
Once in a lifetime, one chance only, no do-overs.
It was completely true that she’d first seen the hunk in a suit when she was just five years old. There had been no immediate sexual awakening for her because, hello, five years old. Her memories were fragments, hazy but real.
He’d been standing near her grandmother’s bed, only a few feet away as though he was waiting to talk to her. Impossibly tall, his back straight and shoulders squared, his thumbs hooked in his waistband at the hips as though his hands were weapons ready to be drawn.
Vividly blue eyes had scanned the faces around the bed, so richly, darkly blue they bordered on black in the horrible light of the room. Black hair, short and clean. Wearing, she recalled, a similar suit to the one he wore now, only in black and white.
Like some sort of angel, Lara remembered him waiting for what seemed like hours, until the family started crying and the matriarch slipped away. He’d held out his hand and, for a particularly unfocused moment, she was sure her grandmother had stepped beside him and set her hand in his before the old lady vanished with the stranger.
Of course, little girls who spoke of such things were dropkicked into therapy faster than they could tie their shoelaces, as Lara discovered for herself.
Though the therapists had almost conned her into believing it was all a trick of her mind, Lara had resisted the urge to forget him, and the mystery man became a figment of her imagination, a product of her fantastical mind, until she saw him again.
“Trouble? I assure you, I want no trouble.” She tapped two fingers on his wrist, silently requesting he let her go before she did something embarrassing, like orgasming on the spot. “I’m just asking for a chance to live my life to its full capacity by winning it, fair and square.”
