Charmed (Death Escorts) (26 page)

 Every part of my body began to tremble until I couldn’t even hold myself still. I lay there under his gaze, beneath his feather-light teasing touch, and did nothing but shake and thrust myself closer to him.

He pulled up, placing an open palm on each knee, and spread my legs as wide as they would go, holding them there before lowering himself between me, pressing his very hard erection right at my core.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed him.

“Olly,” I said, knowing it was exactly the right word to say to get what I wanted.

He didn’t even pause to remove the lace. Instead, he pushed it aside and entered me.

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I’m pretty sure everything inside me splintered apart and then found its way back together again. All I could do was hold on. I wrapped my hands around his biceps and let sensation after sensation take me for a ride.

The contrast of the lace against the smoothness of his flesh was almost my undoing. But what truly pushed me over the edge was when he stopped. He pulled back slightly and looked down. Dark hair fell into his eyes and his arms trembled slightly.

I thought he might say something, but no words left his lips and then suddenly he pushed forward, filling me so deep that my eyes fluttered closed. He lowered himself so every inch of our bodies was in contact and he brought his lips to my ear.

It was then he whispered.

“I’ve been dead for so long that I forgot what it was like to live. I forgot what it was like to feel. Even still, I’m pretty sure nothing I had experienced was ever like this. You brought me back to life, Frankie. You make me want to live.”

I whispered his name again, gripped his butt, and pulled him closer, pushing him as far inside me as he could possibly go. And then I ground myself down on him, grinding so deep that not even air could come between us. A low groan ripped from his throat as he hunched down over me, his body going stiff and convulsing over mine. All at once I felt like a firecracker went off inside me. Bright white pleasure burst in my center and spread out until my limbs were completely boneless and I collapsed against the floor, unable to move. I felt the beads of sweat slipping over my skin and I heard the rasping breaths he sucked in as he leveraged himself over me on shaking limbs, but beyond that I was completely senseless.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Truth -
a statement proven to be or accepted as true.”

Charming

My skin was tingling. My lungs expanded with air. I could feel the erratic beating of my heart against my ribs. I was lying on my back, collapsed on the mat, feeling things I hadn’t felt in so long, things I thought for sure I would never feel again.

I turned my head to the side, looking at the person who started it all. Looking at the girl who practically dared me to live. Her blond hair was wild, her skin flushed, and every inch of her dangerously soft curves was exposed.

Something inside me yawned.

Something stretched and moved…

I was waking up.

Over ninety years of being dead—of being consumed by death… I was waking up.

Nothing had done it before. Not money, not power, not killing or having no consequences for anything I did or took. Up until now, I was asleep; I was completely dead.

But then Frankie came along. This woman who never shut up, annoyed the hell out of me, and ate way too much candy.

I loved her.

I loved her completely.

And it was because of her I wanted more. I was tired of death. I wanted to live.

“You told me your name,” she said from beside me, her voice slipping into my thoughts and wrapping around my mind.

I’m not quite sure what possessed me to tell her the one thing I guarded so close. I had many names over the years, more than I could count, more than I cared to remember. But only one had meant anything. The one I was born with. The one that my mother gave me, the one that someone truly wanted me to have. My name was the only connection I had left of my past, of my life. It was the only part of me that I thought I had left.

I turned my head, looking over at her once more. She was watching me tentatively, almost warily… like she wasn’t sure what to expect. She probably wondered if I’d even told her the truth and now that we’d slept together, if I was going to morph back into the man I’d always been with her.

I walked my fingers between the space between us, and her laugh was throaty as my fingers neared hers. Instead of linking them together, I wrapped my hand around her wrist and tugged, pulling her closer.

She came willingly, fitting herself against my side and resting her cheek on my shoulder. The toes on her right foot found their way between my calves and I smiled up at the ceiling.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever told my real name since I’ve been dead.”

“How did you die?” she asked quietly.

This was something I’d never told anyone either.

“I was a boxer. I died in a dirty fight.”

“Did it hurt?” she asked, sorrow lacing her voice.

“I don’t really remember,” I lied, but I was tired of lying so I told her the truth. “Yeah, for a moment, but it didn’t hurt very long.”

“And then what happened?
He
came for you?”

He
being the Grim Reaper.

I nodded. The movement of my head caused a couple strands of her blond hair to stick in my stubble and tickle my chin. I reached up to untangle the silky strands and smooth my palm over them. “Next thing I knew I was in his office. Nothing but a cloud of red—basically just a soul—and he was offering me a job as an Escort.”

“Did you know what an Escort was when you took the job?”

I knew eventually she would ask me this. It was a natural question—
did you know you were going to be a killer? Did you actually choose it?

“Yes,” I answered. “He told me what I would be doing.”

We both lay there for long moments, quiet. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking, if the realization—the knowledge that I actually chose this life—would be something she could ever accept.

And if she didn’t?
my brain asked me.

But I think the real question was
What if she did?

Because if she didn’t, I would understand. I could go on exactly as I had been before. Okay, not exactly as before because this had changed me—
she
had changed me. But I would go on, and I would continue to do exactly what I’d been doing for over ninety years.

But if she did… if she somehow found a way to accept me, I knew things—
life
—as it was now would have to change. Irrevocably and forever.

She lifted her head off my shoulder and propped her arm and chin on top my chest. Her blue eyes studied me and her wild hair was tangled around her chin. “So how come you agreed? Why do any of you agree?”

“I can’t say for sure about the others, but I do know that when you’ve just suffered some kind of violent or sudden death, you’re in shock. You find yourself basically a cloud of color standing in a room with a man and his closets full of bodies.” At this she lifted both her eyebrows and stared at me in disbelief, but she said nothing else as I continued.

“It isn’t really much of a choice. You can stay dead and be tossed into some kind of void that is a fate worse than hell for all of eternity, or you can take his offer, get a new body, a new life, and a shit-ton of money. Considering most people are still shocked that they’re actually dead, choosing to live isn’t that hard.”

“But it’s not living,” she said softly.

“No. It’s not.” I took a minute to brush some of the wayward hair out her face. “But usually by the time you realize that, it’s much too late. Once you make the deal, once you take on the title of Death Escort, there is no getting out.”

“Like Dex,” she whispered.

“Yeah, like Dex. You do the job or get Recalled, sent off to a place worse than hell.”

“When did you realize you weren’t really living?”

I brushed my thumb along the bare skin of her collarbone, back and forth, back and forth. Goosebumps broke out along her skin and I smiled. “Today.”

I caught the skepticism in her eyes. “Don’t try that charm on me,” she warned.

“Are you saying you’re immune to my charm?” I lifted a single brow.

“Oh yes,” she said, her lips curving secretly. “It’s your other, shall I say, gifts that I’m partial too.” As she spoke her finger trailed across my chest and down my stomach.

I laughed. But then I sobered up. I wanted her to know this stuff. “For several months now I’ve been feeling restless. I always completed the jobs I was assigned, but sometimes things fell through the cracks.”

“Money, you mean,” she replied.

“Mostly,” I rasped and rubbed a hand over my face. “It gets old… working for a man who can be as ruthless and cunning as he wants. He can play with your life, make threats, and withhold things that are rightfully yours.” I paused and glanced at her. She nodded and so I went on. “And then Dex came along… He figured out a way to get around G.R.’s game. I did nothing to stop him.”

“You
helped
Dex?” she said, her eyes going wide and her shoulders straightening.

“I didn’t save your friend.” I could see in her eyes that she was trying to make me into the hero. I wasn’t a hero. I never would be. I was the bad guy. The killer. “All I did was look the other way and maybe keep G.R. busy while Dex did his thing.”

She shivered.

“Are you cold?”

“A little.”

“Come on,” I said, starting to rise, but she made a sound deep in her throat.

“In a minute.” She pushed me back down and pressed herself closer against me. “There’s something else I want to know.”

“Hmmm?” I asked, paying more attention to the way her body felt against mine than what she was saying.

“Did you take the job because you were angry you died?”

“You ask the hard questions,” I murmured.

“Because those are the ones that tell me the most.”

“Does it really matter?” I asked then. “The reason I became what I am? The reason I became a killer? Because it won’t change the fact that I’ve killed over and over again for over ninety years.”

“It matters to me.”

I hesitated again. Was I really ready after all these years to tell my story to someone?

“Olly,” she whispered.

I wasn’t sure that I would ever get used to hearing her call me that. It brought a rush of emotion every single time she said it. “My sister used to call me that.”

“Tell me about her.”

I nodded. “Her name was Sarah.” It was another name, another emotion… another blast from the past.

And then it was like I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The words, the past came tumbling out of me.

“I died in nineteen twenty. The world was different back then. It wasn’t as free—as liberal as it is now. Women’s rights were on their way, but even still, women weren’t regarded the way they are now. They still needed the protection of a man, the income of a man. They were vulnerable, easily exploited and taken advantage of.”

I was aware of Frankie’s fingers moving lightly over my chest, giving me courage to talk.

“My father wasn’t much of a man. He left us when I was ten years old. Sarah was only five. A baby. My mother did what she could for us. She worked herself until she had circles beneath her eyes and holes in the bottom of her shoes. Still, she always smiled at us, always told us how much we meant to her. It would have been easy, I think, to blame us, to be angry and make us the target for that anger. But she never once let us see her cry. I heard her sometimes, at night, when I was supposed to be in bed.”

Instead of saying she was sorry for what obviously had been something hard, she still said nothing. Instead, she kissed me just beneath my jaw and then pressed her face in the crook of my neck.

“I got my first job when I was twelve. I was bigger than most boys that age, so I lied and took on as many jobs as I could. It helped some and gave my mother more time with Sarah. When I was fifteen, I quit school to work fulltime. I brought home enough for us to live, but I wanted more for them. Mother was always there for us, and Sarah… Sarah was…” I swallowed past the lump that had formed in my throat. Thinking about my sister was something I tried to never do.