My Reaper's Daughter (4 page)

intercourse. Even the word made her blush hotly and turn her face into the cool protection of her

pillow.

Lying on her side as night turned to morning, sleepless, aching for something to which she

could put no name nor even explain, she had known there had to be more. There simply had to

be.

But she had not found it with her husband, and when he had been taken from her, she

thought never to find it.

Now it was there within her grasp, lending itself to her fantastical imaginings, willing to

satisfy her as nothing ever had, intending to give her the longed-for pleasure she so ached to find.

“What is it you want?” he repeated, and the tip of his finger insinuated itself into the

opening she discovered held as much stimulation—if not more so—than the channel between her

legs.

“I want you,” she repeated, unable to express in words what she had never experienced.

“You want this?” he asked, and wedged his finger higher inside her.

“Aye!” she gasped, squirming on that invading digit.

He withdrew but before she could complain, he thrust the fingers from his other hand into

her sheath.

“How about this?”

One finger. Two. Three.

“Oh yes!” she breathed.

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My Reaper’s Daughter

He probed her, pushed into her, went deep and twisted, making her cry out from the sheer

delight that was scalding her between her legs.

“Or this?”

He lowered his mouth to her breast and drew her nipple deep between his lips, clenching his

teeth around it, working it in counter rhythm to the thrust of his fingers between her legs,

stabbing the tip with his hot tongue.

Mystery moaned and threaded her fingers through his dark hair, held his head as he suckled

her, nibbled, licked, tasted. She felt something strange building within her but she had no way of

knowing what it was for this good girl, this good woman, had never experienced even a wet

dream in all her twenty-three years of living. She was but a woman in name only, never having

known what it truly meant to be one.

He kissed his way from one breast to the other and began to shower the same pleasure upon

it. His hand cupped her. His fingers worked her. When she was on the verge of discovering what

it was that was so electric between a man and woman, he withdrew and stepped back.

“Glyn, no!” she protested, but he stepped back even farther, well out of her reach. She

started to beg him when she saw that he was reaching for his tie. She stilled, realizing she would

now get to see the superb body that was only hinted at beneath the confines of the silk and

leather.

With exasperating slowness his hands tugged the knot of his tie down. His eyes were fused

with hers, his face so handsome it hurt to look at him. There was no expression on that face but

his eyes were smoldering, so hot she felt as though his gaze would incinerate her.

He pulled the tie from its knot then slid it sensuously from around his neck. He dropped it to

the floor and in even slower motion began to tug the tail of his shirt from his pants.

She licked her lips in anticipation, her attention drifting down to the thick bulge that

strained at the leather then snapping up to stare into his hypnotic eyes. Her breath rate increased

and she could feel the blood pounding in her head. By the time the shirt hung free and he put one

hand up to work the buttons, she was nearly panting.

Slower still those buttons came undone. Little by little the hard plain of his broad chest was

revealed—the crisp hairs of which she had caught only brief glimpses in the opened V of the silk

now coming fully into view.

The garment gaped open as he unhurriedly lifted one wrist then the other to undo the

buttons at the cuff. She could see the bunching of his pectorals and felt more moisture gathering

between her legs.

He put his hands to each side of the front and flexed his fingers gradually around the

material of the placket. He moved with the speed of a snail as he eased the shirt up and over his

shoulders, down his muscular arms then let it fall from his body, revealing the broad expanse of

that chiseled chest—the sight of which made her mouth water.

“Do you want this?” he queried.

Odell Butler had not been a tall man. He was only a fraction of an inch or so taller than his

wife. Neither had he been athletic or physically powerful. His chest had been flat, his nipples

small and barely protruding from the chest wall. There had been no bulging muscles in his arms

or thighs. Though his belly had been flat, his hipbones protruded and his knees were knobby, his

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Charlotte Boyett-Compo

waist beginning to thicken. His hair was thin and he was going bald by the time he reached his

twenty-sixth birthday.

He had not been a man endowed with either a handsome face or a sensuous nature. No

woman had ever turned on the street to give him a second look. No woman had ever flirted with

him or surely none had ever had wicked fantasies about him. He had been—well, plain. Stalwart

and reliable but as simple and basic as a man could be.

But he had been a good man, a worthy man, a deeply religious man with unshakeable morals

and unbending belief in a perfect world beyond this one. He had been a man Mystery had known

she’d marry since childhood and though she had not loved him, she had cared deeply for him. He

had been a good husband to her and a wonderful father to a daughter he simply worshipped.

“Think only of me, wench,” her new husband said, and there was jealousy in his golden

gaze.

Unable to speak, she watched Glyn sit down on the edge of the bed to take off his boots and

socks, amazed at how beautiful his feet were, how clean and well-shaped the toenails. Her first

husband’s toes had been crooked and the nails thick, the soles flat and without a discernible arch.

“Only me, wench,” the demand came again.

Mystery nodded and resolutely pushed thoughts of the other man aside.

The Reaper stood, his legs spread—a stance that somehow spoke of ravishment and the

inability to do anything but give in to the authority staring back at her.

Here before her was a powerful example of prime manhood—a gloriously handsome man

with striking amber eyes and a head full of thick coal black hair, sinfully full lips, broad

shoulders, narrow waist and a chest full of dark hair through which she longed to lace her

fingers. As he stood there before her—hands lowering to the buckle of his belt—she had the wild

urge to rush him, throw him to the floor and rip the leather from his long legs, to impale herself

on him.

“Easy, wench,” he said with a half smile. “I’ll make it worth the wait.”

She had no doubt of that.

Leisurely he tugged the belt’s tip from the first keeper, the second, and then pulled the strap

back to slip the hole from the prong. He pulled the strap free then tugged the strap from the belt

loops in one smooth, achingly measured movement. Once free of his pants, he let the belt fall to

the floor to join his tie and shirt.

Mystery swallowed hard. Her lips parted. She flicked her tongue across them for they were

as dry and parched, as devoid of moisture as her mouth and throat had suddenly become. Her

eyes crawled from his down to the strong hands that were now at the waistband of his pants, the

long, slender fingers taking hold of the first of the five onyx buttons that held his fly together.

One by one he flicked the buttons from their holes and inch by enticing inch the dark hair

beneath his deeply inset bellybutton was revealed. If the thin line of hair that ranged from the

extensive pelt covering his chest and which dipped downward to disappear into his waistband

was any indication, the mysterious triangle that had been so sparse on Odell promised to be thick

and as black as pitch on Glyn Kullen.

“Myst?”

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My Reaper’s Daughter

Her gaze jerked upward.

“One more thought of him and I’ll not be responsible for what I do,” he told her.

“Aye, my sweet milord,” she agreed.

He arched a brow.

“I swear it!”

He nodded and spread open his fly. The moment the broad head of his cock showed in the

opening of his fly, Mystery thought her knees would buckle and she would fall panting to the

floor. As he sprang free of the fly—jutting like a battering ram straight out in front of him—she

made a low, keening sound deep in her throat and was afraid she would pass out from the mere

sight of his size.

“Is this what you want, wench?” he whispered, and pushed the pants down his hips,

stepping out of them with an entirely graceful masculine ease that made her heart speed even

faster.

He was as naked before her as the day he had come from his mother’s womb and he was

absolute perfection. There wasn’t a spare ounce of fat on his lean, hard body. He was flat in all

the right places, muscles bulging in others. He had just the right amount of hair on his chest and

belly and his legs were long and beautifully formed. From the thick black hair on his handsome

head to the elegant spread of his feet, he was all any woman could want.

And he was hers.

She lifted her arms.

“I want you,” she said again, and he came to her.

His arm slid around her, behind her, the other under her knees, and he hefted her high

against his chest to carry her to the bed. He placed her there on the white silk coverlet she wished

with all her heart and being could be stained with the crimson assurance of her possession by

none other than he, but that was not to be.

“It matters not, Myst,” he said as he put a knee to the bed. “I have all I want and will ask for

no more.”

She stared up at him as he straddled her. She felt the drag of his meaty cock sliding over her

thigh then stabbing between her legs. She sighed when he laced his fingers through hers, pulled

her hands above her head, leaned his weight on them, and with unerring ease positioned

himself—that gloriously hard, achingly hot cock—at her entrance.

“Tell me what you want, wench,” he ordered one last time.

“I want your cock in me,” she said in a brazen voice she did not recognize as her own. “I

want every inch of you inside me, Glyn Kullen. I want to feel you sliding in and out of my

sheath. I want your essence oozing into my womb. I want all there is of you to be had.”

A slow smile spread over his gorgeous face and an errant curl of ebony hair fell over his

forehead. “Why didn’t you just say so, wench?” he asked.

With one powerful, sure and authoritative stroke, he pushed deep between her legs into that

warm, wet channel that longed for him and down into the very core of her, filling her so fully,

stretching her so widely she thought she could not take all of him. But he seated himself as far as

he could go and held himself there, his eyes fused with hers.

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Charlotte Boyett-Compo

“Tell me once more what you want,” he demanded.

“You,” she said breathlessly as the first ripple of pleasure began high in her belly and

spiraled down like a serpent, spreading fire as it went.

She tensed, ready to experience the joy she knew this man could give her. She held her breath

and…

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My Reaper’s Daughter

Chapter Two

“Damn!”

Mystery came awake with a start, her face as hot as if she had been staring into a

roaring oven. Her heart was hammering and she put a shaking hand to her breast.

“What?” she asked.

The stage was slowing as thunder rolled heavily and a brief flash of light pulsed

along the edges of the leather curtains.

Glyn peeled the curtain back, wincing as a streak of lightning webbed across the

sky. “Damn,” he growled again.

Mystery feared he had somehow entered her illicit dream and was angry at the

wild fantasies she had fashioned but then realized it was the bad weather that had

brought out his fury. “I don’t like storms,” she said, seeing the Reaper flinch.

“Neither do I,” Glyn admitted with a grim twitch of his full lips as the stage rolled

into a rut and jarred its passengers.

“The road must be a quagmire by now,” Mystery said just for something to say,

wishing the dream would melt away but she was still seeing the image of him—naked

and primed—in her mind’s eye. She shook her head to clear it but the image remained.

“I imagine so,” he responded.