by West, Tara
“I do. I have to. I’m not ready to go.” I looked at him through my fingers. Damn. He’d stepped closer to me, and I couldn’t back up another inch.
Much to my amazement and annoyance, he had the nerve to smirk. Not the everyday, average, asshole smirk, like the kind I had to deal with from my pinhead boss on a daily basis, but the devastatingly handsome, sideways smirk that could only be perfected through years of endless flirting.
This definitely had to be some sort of hallucination. No guy I’d ever met was that damn sexy.
“What?” I asked as I clenched my hands.
His eyes gleamed with mischief. “You’re cute when you pout.”
I let out a huff of air, knocking a strand of wayward frizz out of my eye. “Okay, the Grim Reaper is flirting with me. Now I know this is a dream.”
He laughed, combing a hand through his thick, dark hair. “You want proof I’m real, don’t you?”
I wagged a finger in his face. “Flirting hardly counts as proof.”
“Sorry.” He shrugged. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Then a thought came to me, a really, really wicked thought. That devil sitting on my shoulder had to have been working overtime to come up with that one. I tilted my chin, looking deep into his eyes as I gave him a challenging glare. “What about kissing?”
Grim’s face paled, and, ironically, he looked like he’d been spooked by a ghost. He backed up, holding out his hands in a defensive gesture. “I’m not going to take advantage of you.” His words were at war with the molten look in his eyes.
Though I knew my hair was a frizzy mess, and my tight black skirt might have exposed a bit too much pudge in the thigh area, I knew lust when I saw it, and this man was turned on.
Okay, since he was just a figment of my imagination, I figured I’d enjoy playing out this fantasy while it lasted. So I did what any woman in my situation would have done during an uncomfortably awkward moment of flirting gone wrong: I kept right on flirting. Ignoring the body lying between us on the floor, I stepped over my torn dress, which was definitely exposing too much pudgy thigh, and moved toward him until he was backed into a corner.
He stiffened until he was parallel to the wall. That would have been a definite sign he was not interested, except he licked his lower lip like he hadn’t eaten in a week and I was a juicy cut of prime rib. I continued my advance until there was barely a breath between us and my heavy breasts were pressing against his chest. He stood there with this deer-in-the-headlights expression, and that’s when I started to lose confidence.
His knee went up, grazing the skin between my bare thighs, and a zing shot straight to my lady parts. Holy heck! I was horny for Grim! If this really were a dream, I hoped I wouldn’t wake up for at least another ten minutes. Scratch that. Make that twenty. The way this flirting was progressing, we’d both be at home base faster than I could devour a plate of triple-chocolate chunk brownies during PMS.
“Prove to me I’m dead,” I cooed, laying a hand on his chest. The top button on his long-sleeved cotton shirt was unfastened, revealing just the right amount of dark hair and a hint of hard muscles beneath. I moved my fingers to the small patch of curls, letting the heat soak from his bare skin to mine. And then I did something naughty. I leaned up and pressed a feather-soft kiss on his tanned neck.
He groaned, cupping my shoulders in his strong grip. “What are you doing to me, woman?”
“Proving I’m not dead.” I giggled, nipping at his earlobe for good measure.
“Maybe you need some other kind of proof,” he growled before his lips came crashing down on mine in the most heat-searing, exquisite kiss imaginable.
I moaned into his mouth, welcoming his tongue’s invasion. I tasted the sweet scent of fruit, maybe apples? I wasn’t quite sure, but I knew I needed to investigate further, so I fisted his shirt collar, clutching it like a lifeline as I deepened the kiss. He pulled me against the length of his hard body until I straddled his thigh. Our tongues sparred, and our lips melded together perfectly.
At that moment, once my brain had been robbed of all coherent thought, one word popped into my mind: heaven. His kiss was pure heaven.
I released his collar, roaming the length of his body, which surely had to have been carved from granite. I didn’t care if I was pushing boundaries. This was a dream after all. When I settled on that exquisitely large and stiff protrusion between his thighs, I froze.
Holy shit, he was harder than a rod of steel, and as his leg ground out a torturous rhythm between my thighs, I realized I was wetter than spring in Seattle.
This was not a dream. This was real, and I had just fondled the boner of the freaking Grim Reaper.
My hands flew to my mouth as I retreated, nearly tripping over my dead body for the second time. “Omigod!”
My gaze shot to his crotch. I couldn’t help it. I had to look. Sure enough, that nice bulge looked a bit bulgier, straining against his zipper and begging for some breathing room.
Grim coughed into his fist and then turned his back, which was weird, because I didn’t think spirits needed to cough. Then again, I didn’t think spirits could get hard-ons, either.
Imagine my disappointment when he turned around and his triple-quarter-pounder of beefy bulge had shrunk to a mere cheeseburger.
“Okay, Ash. Here’s the deal,” he said, as he stared somewhere beyond my shoulder.
Great. I’d just had the best kiss of my existence, and now the guy couldn’t even look at me.
“I’ve got orders for you to go all the way to the top.” He gave me two thumbs-up. “The Penthouse is the sweetest place in all eternity. I don’t know what you did to please the Big Guy, but I can tell you living up there sure beats the life you’ve got here. Anything you want is yours. You just have to snap your fingers.”
I was trying to absorb everything he was telling me, really I was, but my lips had just been locked with that damn sensual mouth of his. Too bad his marble features betrayed not even the slightest hint of passion. As my lust started to cool, reality quickly set in.
Holy moly! Had he just said I was going to Heaven?
“The Penthouse sounds a lot like Heaven.” I exhaled, searching his gaze for any sign of the spark I’d seen moments before.
“That’s what the ascended usually call it,” he said in the most annoyingly indifferent tone imaginable. “You can label it whatever you want.”
Okay, fine. Play it off as if the kiss and your massive boner never happened. Two can play at this game.
I cocked a brow, crossing my arms. “The ascended?”
“Angels.” He waved me toward the door. “Are you ready to get your wings? Your Grandma Clara is waiting.”
Kiss and stiffy forgotten, my jaw fell open, and I let out a girly squee that could rival a cheerleader on crack. “Grandma Clara? She was the best grandma in the world!”
“Well, let’s go meet her. I bet she’s preparing your welcome home party right now.” He flashed a dimpled grin, one that stretched his jaw and showed two pearly white rows of beautiful teeth. Honestly, this guy was too gorgeous to be The Grim. Those childhood fairytales had gotten him all wrong.
In fact, he was so darned cute, I almost wanted to follow him. Almost. I turned, pointing down at my vacuous eyes. “So I’m just supposed to leave my body here? What’s going to happen to me?”
“Ash.” He heaved a sigh before jerking open the door. “You’re no longer tethered to your weak mortal body. You have ascended.”
His knuckles whitened as he clutched the handle, and I wondered how he was able to open the door when he was supposedly an apparition. Just one of the many questions about my weird afterlife I hoped to get answered. In the meantime, I didn’t feel right leaving my body like that.
“My corpse is going to rot if nobody finds me. My mom lives all the way in Portland. It will be days, maybe even weeks.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” He chuckled.
Okay, sexiness aside, what a jerk! The guy actually had the nerve
to laugh at my corpse?
“Of course it matters.” I hated the whine that slipped into my voice, but I was determined to hold my ground. My poor, poor mom. If the shock from my death didn’t kill her, then the depression would. Not trying to sound like an entitled princess, but I was literally her whole world. I might not have been as successful as my sister, but I was half the bitch she was. “My mom will be devastated,” I said with a sob as visions of her crying at my funeral swam through my mind.
“Only for a short while.”
He said this with a causal air, as if deciding between a latte or a cappuccino. I wanted to slap him.
“That’s not true.” I turned up my chin, giving him my best haughty expression. “Mom loves me.”
He shook his head, any trace of humor in his eyes doused like water over a flame. “The human lifespan is short when compared to an eternity in the afterworld.”
Ugh! The guy was impossible. Did he not realize the tornado of emotions swirling around in my head? I’d been killed and passionately kissed within the span of an hour, and now I was supposed to abandon the body I’d been living in for the past twenty-nine years and follow a total stranger (disregard that I’d just been intimate with him) up to a place he was calling the Penthouse? This was all too weird. Too, too weird.
I threw my hands in the air. “So I’m just supposed to walk out of my apartment and follow you to Heaven?”
“Yes.”
I eyed him through slits. “How will we get there?”
“The elevator.”
“Of course.” I rolled my eyes and slapped my forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that? Silly me forgot to check if my apartment complex stretched all the way to Heaven before I signed the lease.”
“Ash, I’ve got to get to that heart attack victim. You think you’ve got it bad? This guy just died in the middle of sex. The prostitute is hysterical, and he’s been assigned to the second floor.”
“The second floor?”
“The bottom level of Purgatory, and only a few floors away from the fiery pit of doom.”
I gasped. “So there’s really a Hell?”
“You’re never going there, so don’t worry about it. Come on, Ash,” he pleaded. Damn him, that dimpled smile was back. “Your afterlife is going to be a whole lot better than the life you’re leaving behind. I promise.”
He held up a hand like a boy scout taking an oath, but this was no boy scout. This was the freaking Grim Reaper. All of the stories I’d heard about him had been pretty horrific. Now I was supposed to trust this guy? Then again, what other options did I have? It’s not like I could have crawled back into my damaged body and woken myself up.
I leaned into him, jabbing a finger in his chest. “You’d better be a man of your word.”
He placed a hand over his heart. “Ma’am, my word is my honor.”
“Stop calling me ma’am,” I growled as I stomped past him and out the bathroom.
Much to my dissatisfaction, Grim’s heavy footsteps trailed behind me. I was almost to my front door when a loud knock stopped me in my tracks.
“Omigod!” I spun around, searching Grim’s unreadable eyes for help. “That must be Roger. What do I do?”
“He can’t see you.” He walked up to me and held out his hand. “Come on.”
I hesitantly slipped my hand in his, surprised at the energy that zinged into my palm and nearly made my knees buckle. Dear God, how did this guy do that to me?
But before I could think about how he turned my blood to molten liquid, Grim was pulling me through the doorway and out into the hall.
Strange how the guy standing on the other side didn’t notice us. And then I got a good look at my blind date, all five-foot-seven and two hundred pounds of him.
Five-ten and one hundred and eighty pounds, my ass!
It looked like I’d dodged one bullet and got struck by another. Story of my life, or in this case, my afterlife.
Chapter Three
Apparently, after I’d wasted all of Grim’s time with that groping and kissing, he was now very, very late to his next appointment. Since he’d already violated protocol with me once, he said he might as well do it again, which was why, rather than taking me to “the Penthouse,” I was standing beneath the shadow of a huge, artificial palm tree near the shallow end of some guy’s condominium pool. I watched with morbid curiosity as the EMTs fished his bloated, nude body out of the Jacuzzi. His mistress of the night, whose legal age was questionable, was wrapped up in nothing but a Hello Kitty beach towel, hunched over in a wicker chair, sobbing convulsively into a strawberry margarita. A middle-aged cop sat beside her, scribbling notes into a tablet.
Dead Guy’s spirit was doing a backstroke in the deep end of the pool, refusing Grim’s numerous pleas to get out. His very round belly, nearly as round as his very bald head, protruded several inches out of the water, and his shriveled up dingle-berries were an alarming shade of blue.
“I told you I’m not dead,” Dingle-berry said to Grim for like the twentieth time.
Geez, had I been this hardheaded with Grim? Talk about a stressful job. I was almost starting to feel sorry for the guy.
“You are dead,” Grim said in a tone more frigid than the water that had shriveled the dead guy’s balls, “and you need to get out.”
Dingle-berry kicked off from the side of the pool, lazily paddling back toward the EMTs. “If you want me to come out so badly, then come and get me.”
“I told you I can’t do that.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” The dead guy paused to wave a hand behind him before continuing his slow stroke. “Those EMTs over there are about to resuscitate my body.”
It took four burly looking EMTs to hoist the cadaver out of the water. I cringed when they accidentally dropped him on the pool deck. The corpse made a loud squishy sound, like a butcher slapping a fish onto a marble slab.
One of the medics brought out a big, black bag, and I knew what was going to happen next.
“Stan, they’re zipping you up in a body bag.”
When Grim pointed toward the scene, I thought I saw a humorous gleam in his eyes. Maybe I didn’t feel sorry for him. It seemed he took sick satisfaction in witnessing our misery.
“What?” Stan stood up and waved his hands at the medics, who paid him no notice as they hoisted his corpse into the bag and began zipping it up. “Hey, you stupid EMTs! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Stan hoisted himself out of the water and ran circles around the medics. They paid him no heed as they placed the body on a stretcher and rolled it out the side gate.
Stan punched the gate and screamed a bunch of obscenities before running up to the prostitute with arms flailing wildly above his head. “Hey, Lila, or Lilly, or whatever the fuck your name is! Stop them, Goddammit!” He pointed at the gate while jumping up and down. “I didn’t pay you a thousand fucking dollars to sit there and act like an idiot. Do something!”
But she didn’t hear him. In fact, she was too busy unbuckling the cop’s pants to worry about crazy ghosts.
“They can’t hear you, Stan,” Grim grumbled as he impatiently waved him over. “Come on, let’s go.”
Stan turned toward Grim with a wild-eyed expression. “Hell, no!” he screamed before diving back into the pool.
Disregarding Grim’s earlier command to lie low, I stepped out of the shadows. “Why don’t you go in after him?”
“I can’t.” The edge in his voice sliced through the air between us, making me feel cold, unwelcome, insignificant.
I didn’t know how this guy managed to make me feel a torrent of negative emotions with two words, but he had. He reminded me too much of my cocky, condescending law school professors, more validation for why I had to drop out of that hell hole.
I wrapped my arms around myself as I watched Stan paddle with more fervor. He was definitely not getting out of the pool anytime soon. This was going to be a long night, which sucked on so many levels. Not only
was I forced to endure the aloof company of the totally hot immortal who’d just passionately kissed me moments earlier, but I had to watch some naked, bloated guy make an ass of himself while his hooker gave a cop a blowjob. Well, at least someone was getting lucky tonight.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” Stan said haughtily after his shiny marble head popped up above the water. I recognized that tone. It was the same tone my boss, Mr. Schwartz, used whenever he tried to bully a client, another lawyer, or more often than I cared to admit, me.
Grim’s bunched shoulders were strung so tight they looked ready to crack. “You’re dead is who you are. Now get moving. I’ve got a schedule to keep.”
“Why can’t you go in? Some other protocol?” I asked in a huff. “You’ve already broken the rules twice tonight. What’s one more time?”
Grim’s stance was almost as rigid as his stiffy had been earlier, as he watched with stony features while Stan paddled through the water. Finally, he opened his mouth as if to speak.
I waited, wondering if he was going to say something.
“I can’t swim.” He’d spoken so softly, I wondered if he’d said anything at all.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” I waved a hand at Stan. “That pool is like four-feet deep. Just walk the hell in and get him.”
Grim answered with a quick shake of the head as he folded his arms across his chest, eyeing Stan with disdain. “Ain’t gonna happen.”
Well, geez, here I was thinking that my life, or afterlife, couldn’t have gotten any weirder, and my death escort turned out to be hydrophobic.
“Shouldn’t that have been a prerequisite at the Grim Reaper School of Retrieving Lost Souls, to not act like a big pussy around water?”
A fire lit beneath his eyes. For a split second, my knees weakened, and it wasn’t out of lust. I’d seriously pissed Grim off with that last comment, but I didn’t care. I’d never been very good at staying inside boundaries.
“Don’t judge me,” he ground out, sounding like a grizzly bear who’d woken up too soon.
Ignoring his scowl, I turned up my chin. “I’m trying hard not to.”