Read Online Reaper's Justice by Sarah McCarty - Free Book Online Page A

maybe he was growling. The man was very hard to read. “You would think.”
    “I know I am supposed to be scared by whatever it is you’re implying.” She put her hand to her chest, as if to keep her heart from pounding out through sheer force of will. A little theatrics never hurt a woman’s cause. “Well, I’m too tired to care what it is, so if you’re trying to threaten me, you’re going to have to be more direct.”
    He paused.
    Dear God, she thought he was actually considering it. She held up her hands, staving off whatever truth he felt she had to know that was worse than being with the outlaws. “Never mind. I’m not ready to hear anything.”
    He squatted beside her, before reaching out slowly, as if he expected her to flinch away.
    She met his gaze. Again there was that sense of sadness, torment, and intelligence.
    His fingers reached their destination. Hair strands shifted, as did the energy between them. It seemed to fill the air like the approach of a summer storm. She pulled her hair away. He left his hand where it was, staring at his fingers and then back at her before closing them slowly.
    “Blade’s right. You’re trouble.”
    “Now, I like that.” She pushed herself up on her elbows. “I get stolen from my house in the middle of my evening tea, get dragged halfway across the territory, get beaten, abused, freeze my butt off—”
    “I gave you my coat.”
    “Yes, well, do you see it with me now?”
    He looked oddly guilty. “We were in a hurry.”
    Oh, for God’s sake. She understood that. Couldn’t the man just let her rant in peace? “And now I am in the middle of God knows where, surrounded by God knows what, with a man whose grasp of conversation seems to be limited to grunts, snarls, and five-word sentences. Excuse me if I’m not feeling charitable.”

5
     
    ASK ME IF I CARE.
    Ten minutes later, some suicidal part of him wanted to ask that very thing. Some residual fragment of humanity also wanted to ask her why she trusted him to the point she obviously did. The trust was in the way she sparred with him. It was in the way she took his hand when he offered to help her to her feet. He wanted to ask her why. And when she finished explaining why, he wanted to ask her how. After all the things that had happened to her in her short life, how could she still trust a stranger? How could she trust him? How, when she truly hadn’t been able to get up and he’d offered to carry her, she could quip a sarcastic comment but then hold up her arms and let him?
    He wanted the answer to that as much as he wanted to understand why carrying her offered him such pleasure. He was tired, she wasn’t a lightweight, but he found carrying her provided him with a sense of connection he couldn’t ever remember feeling before. He’d been alone before he’d been taken to the darkness at the age of thirteen. He knew that. He didn’t know how he remembered that, but he knew it. He’d been alone for every second afterward. He ducked under a tree limb and glanced down at the woman in his arms. But now, he wasn’t alone. Now he was responsible for another life. At least for as long as it took for him to get her home. Shit, if he had any sense at all, he’d drop her straight in the dirt.
    Since the first time he’d seen Adelaide, Isaiah had been drawn to her like a moth to a flame. He’d felt connected. Connecting with anything was bad. It created a weakness that could be exploited. That’s what he’d been told. That’s what he’d seen. It was one of the hard-core lessons he’d learned from the time They ’d imprisoned him that carried over into his actual life. Or at least the life he was trying to build.
    The qualification put a hesitation in his conviction. He was trying to build a life. One that contained more than cold detachment and ruthless pursuit of a goal. He experimented with that connection again. And again he experienced that flicker of light through the darkness. The faint seep of