Page 51 of Reaper's Desire

I'm a dead man walking. We both are. And all I feel is a strange, hollow calm. Like I've already accepted what's coming.Like I made my choice the moment I refused to kill her in Santorini, and everything since then has just been delaying the inevitable.

I have twenty-four hours to decide whether to kill her or die protecting her. But the truth is, I already know what I'm going to do. I'm going to die.

The only question is how many of them I can take with me first, and if I can find some way to get Isabelle safe. If I can delay this long enough to cancel her hit. It won't save me, but if I can find a pinch point, a way to whoever targeted her, maybe I can still get her out of this.

Maybe I can do one goddamned good thing in my entire rotten life so far.

I pull up maps of Croatia, calculating how long we can stay ahead of the hunters before they corner us. Days, maybe, a week if we're lucky. My hands are shaking, and I realize I'm exhausted—not just physically, but emotionally. Mentally. The constant vigilance, the endless calculations, the weight of keeping her alive while knowing I'm the reason she's in danger in the first place. It's crushing me.

But I can't stop, or we'll both die. And it will happen sooner rather than later.

If it were just me, I might get some good liquor, get good and drunk one last time, hole up with enough firepower to take out as many as I could coming through the door, and just stay here until I couldn't hold out any longer. But it's not just me.

So I keep working, searching for a solution that I'm not sure exists. I get two more emails from contacts of my own, saying they're not willing to piss off the Capetti family by tracing their accounts to try to figure out where the hit might have come from. I haven't been able to hack into anything myself.

The sun rises slowly, and I'm still sitting at the table, still staring at the screen, still trying to find a way to save her.

Twenty-three hours left.

Isabelle gets up and goes to shower. Anything she says, I respond to in short grunts, waving her off as I try to focus. Until a little while later, I hear the bathroom door click open. I look up automatically at the sound, and my brain short-circuits.

Isabelle is standing in the doorway wearing nothing but a towel—and the towels at this hotel aren't much to speak of. It's wrapped around her body, barely covering her breasts and ending high on her thighs. Her skin is flushed from the heat of the shower, water droplets clinging to her shoulders and collarbone. Her dark hair is wet and slicked back from her face, making her green eyes look even more vivid.

She looks like every fantasy I've had for the past week made flesh. And her body is the last fucking thing I need to be thinking about right now.

"I forgot to grab clean clothes," she says, her voice perfectly casual. "Do you mind?"

I mind. I mind so fucking much that I can barely form words. Because she's standing there half-naked and beautiful and alive, and all I can think about is Maddox's voice on the phone.Twenty-four hours. Kill the girl. Provide proof of death.

"Go ahead," I manage to say, my voice strained.

She moves past me to her bag, and I catch a whiff of soap and shampoo, sweet on her skin. She bends over to dig through the bag, and the towel rides up, exposing more of her thighs. I force myself to look back at my laptop screen, but the words blur together into meaningless shapes.

This is deliberate. She's testing me, pushing my boundaries, seeing how far she can go before I break. Andfuck,she's pushing me to my limit. My cock twitches and swells, and it takes everything in me not to look at her again. The way she's bent over, I could almost see…

Fuck.I'm sweating now.

"Julian?"

"What?" I snap, my teeth gritted.

"Can you help me with something?"

A breath hisses out. "What do you need?"

"There's a knot in my necklace. I can't get it undone." She turns around, lifting her wet hair off her neck. "Can you...?"

I stare at her. "Are you serious?"

She turns to look at me, her lips pouty. "I need one hand to hold up the towel. But I suppose I can manage it myself?—"

Her hand starts to move, and the towel slips.Fuck. No.If it falls off, I'm not fucking responsible for what happens next.

"I'll do it!" I snap, standing up quickly. "Just… sit still, for the love of God."

A smile twitches at the corners of her lips.Fucking brat.I want to spank her, punish her for being such a fucking cocktease, for pushing boundaries when I've already set them down in stone. But my cock is stiff as iron right now, just from our interaction so far, throbbing painfully, and if I put her across my lap, she'll be on it when I'm finished.

Fuck,just the thought of spanking her makes pre-cum leak down my shaft, leaving my cock wet and aching in my boxer briefs as I cross the room to her.