Feisty Heroines Romance Collection of Shorts

by D. F. Jones

  God! She ached for his touch, his lips, his body pressed to all of hers. Dane pinched the fallen collar of her shirt, rolling the fabric in his grip as he kept kissing her. “Please,” he whispered before diving back to her lips. His thumb brushed along her upper arm, sliding it down to the top of her chest.

  “Please,” he pleaded again and dragged the tip of his nose up her cheek.

  Morgan bowed her head back as she stared up at the glistening lips flushed from her touch. They begged for her, for a touch she hadn’t known since death appeared to her.

  Straining on her toes, Morgan licked along the hollow of his neck, nibbled on his lobe, and whispered in his ear, “Yes.”

  Her shirt tumbled to the floor in an instant. Dane paused only a moment to stare in wonder before he pressed his lips to her and unhooked her bra. His hot mouth nipped and licked along her jaw and down her neck as he tugged at the straps. All the while, Morgan fumbled with the buttons on his vest.

  Every attempt she made was foiled by Dane pressing her back toward the bed. She yelped in surprise as she fell to the rumpled mattress and the duvet left lingering on the floor. Her feet must have caught in it, sending her tumbling, but Dane didn’t laugh. Fire burned in his ice eyes as he stared at her topless and heaving for breath.

  Slowly, he twisted his arm and—with his hand hooked at the top—unbuttoned his vest. One by one, Morgan watched in trembling anticipation at the confident movements as he shook off both the vest and his shirt. Lean muscle clung to his thin frame as freshly shaven as his face. The skin gleamed by the cheap hotel light, beckoning her like an angel to the apocalypse.

  Morgan reached for him, tracing the tips of her fingers up the rise and fall of his abs. As she did, Dane tipped his head back and panted to the heavens. Her entire arm sparked while she trailed up to his pecs.

  “Please,” Morgan whispered, watching her fingers curl across his skin, feel the heat of his body under hers.

  Ice blue eyes whipped down to her, catching the tremor in her body. “Please…” she repeated, struggling to find sense in this senseless existence. “Tell me this is real.”

  Dane’s fists dropped beside her hips. His forehead brushed against hers as he met her eye to eye. A low growl rumbled in his throat while he pushed her legs astride. “More real than I could ever dream,” he said, his lips on hers, pushing her down onto the bed.

  He made quick work tugging off her pants, his hands caressing outside her thighs, then parting up through the inside. Morgan scrambled for his belt as Dane climbed onto the bed. When he swept across her nipple, already aroused and straining for a touch, she lost all sense of self. The bubbling electricity coursing with every touch exploded in a fast strike.

  A moan escaped from Morgan more primal than death itself while Dane caressed and stroked her breasts. He bent over, his lips pressing ecstatic kisses to her nipples. She clung to his back, savoring in the muscles flexing to bring her to the brink.

  But she wanted more. She needed more.

  Forcing herself to focus, Morgan tugged at Dane’s fly, freeing himself at last from the confines of his clothing. His cheek brushed across her sternum, a gentle laugh rolling through her ribs and to her heart. “Do you wish all of me?”

  “Yes,” she whimpered, her palms sliding up the back of his thighs to cup his buttocks. Swallowing, Morgan met him eye to eye and demanded, “Yes.”

  Dane drew his palms down her thighs and pushed them apart. As he entered her, the tears born from a lifetime of loneliness slipped from Morgan’s eyes. She forgot how it felt to be touched, wanted, loved.

  “Don’t stop,” she ordered, clinging to him as Dane gave in to the hedonism. Curling her hands around the back of his head, she pulled him to her forehead. “Don’t stop,” she repeated, her lips a breath from his.

  The throbbing electricity spun wildly inside of her, arcing pleasure through every vein in her body. She couldn’t last much longer, her toes clenching as she wrapped her legs around his back. “Give in,” Dane cried out. “Give in to me.”

  His eyes flew open, locking onto hers. With lips wet from her kiss, he pleaded, “Please.”

  Morgan cried in bliss as la petite mort swept through her. “Yes!” she screamed, her very soul electrified by the orgasm Dane succumbed to as well.

  Exhausted, the pair fell back onto the bed, their legs and arms entwined together. For the first time since her death, she felt something worth living for.

  Chapter 4

  He wished to remain entwined with her slumbering body for an eternity, but the shallow sleep she enjoyed curled against his chest was interrupted. A flinch grew across her forehead as she tumbled away from him and for the floor. Before she vanished completely, he pressed a kiss to her furrowed brow. To his delight, a smile replaced the frown, though it did not stop her reaching for her clothing.

  Twisting on his side, content to remain fully nude, Dane watched the silhouette of the woman slide panties up her strong thighs. He ached to nibble down them, to let his tongue guide him to nirvana itself. But he felt the steel eyes burn into him, Morgan no doubt noticing his rising erection no longer content to rest on the bed.

  “You’re beautiful,” he whispered, meaning the words and wishing he’d said so earlier.

  Her cheeks pinked, and she stumbled back as if in shock. “Oh, that’s…okay,” she stuttered while slipping on her bra.

  While he could luxuriate in the erotic display of the woman gliding fabric across her body all day, Dane’s mind churned with a question he couldn’t escape. “So I’m dead…?”

  “No,” Morgan said.

  “Alive?”

  She clacked her teeth and glared at the ceiling. As the silence fell, Dane rose to his feet and padded closer. He rubbed an assuring palm along her bare shoulders, the tips of his fingers plying with the recently added bra strap.

  Twisting her chin, which sent her bright red locks tumbling, Morgan said, “I wouldn’t say that either. We’re… I don’t know.”

  He pushed back her hair, letting his touch caress down her back until it found its place nestled right above her panties. A soft sigh rolled from her tongue, one which encouraged his trouser predicament immensely. “We can’t be dead,” Morgan insisted. “We eat, we sleep, we…”

  “Fuck?”

  Her golden laugh lightened the knot in his chest. “Not many dead can do that, from what I’ve seen. But…we don’t age either. We can slip in and out of places without being seen. We’re neither dead nor alive.”

  With her cold answer, she turned from him and resumed dressing. The addition of her clothing felt ritualistic, as if she’d done the exact same movements—adding in weapons, adjusting buckles, checking pockets—for years. “Do you remember anything, yet?”

  Dane shrugged, his mind as fuzzy as sea foam. “What about from when…how you died? Didn’t die, but sort of did. I think.”

  She sputtered, then plopped to the rumpled bed, her face planted in her hands. “I’m sorry,” Morgan apologized for the hundredth time. Perhaps he should feel slighted she didn’t save him from this undeath fast enough, but she did save him. And more than that, he couldn’t escape this tug inside telling him to have faith in her.

  “Do you remember how you became whatever we are?” Dane asked again.

  “A little. There was an accident on a ski lift. I can remember the falling but not hitting the ground. It’s as if my mind faded to white before the blow.” Her deep frown at the dark thoughts etched into his heart. Dane crumpled to her side, a reassuring hand wrapping around her.

  She was too knotted up for him to pull her to his shoulder, but she continued speaking. “I remember being in the hospital, the emergency room. People all talking tersely. Woman dying on the table and the most they could muster was a slow grumble about being late for dinner.”

  A bell jangled in the far corners of his memory, but he couldn’t understand it. “You watched yourself die?”

  “I think so. My body felt lighter and untethered. As
if I could float away at any moment. The room faded, the doctors, the loud machines. But I wasn’t alone.”

  Chills raced up Dane’s spine from her tone, and he pulled himself closer to her embrace. Morgan remained locked away, her hands clasped together in a strangling prayer. Swallowing, she continued, “I couldn’t see who it was, but there was a shadow with me. Lurking, watching. It didn’t speak…maybe couldn’t. But I felt it, knew it, and then…”

  “Then?” he gasped, clinging to her as if his very life rested in her palm.

  Her sweet face turned to him, and a warm hand cupped his knee. She rubbed it reassuringly and said, “Then I woke up. Alive, but not alive, with my memory nearly gone except for the shadow. Do you remember anything like that?”

  A shadow lingering in the dark, watching from outside hospital rooms, waiting over the spilled blood gurgling down the drain. A wave of déjà vu snapped through him, twisting Dane’s stomach into knots. He knew the shadow but couldn’t say why.

  “No,” he shook his head. “All I remember was a warm hand taking mine and turning to find your face. Everything before is…”

  “Snapped away.” Morgan groaned. “I hoped that maybe you knew who he was. It was.”

  “Do you fear this shadow? Think it is hunting you?”

  She tugged on the dagger hanging at her side, revealing an inch of it to the world. After sheathing it in and out four times, she finally spoke. “I don’t know. I’ve felt sometimes as if…as if someone’s helping me. Even how I figured out iron—” Morgan pursed her lips and shook her head. “Never mind, it’s stupid.”

  Rising to her feet, she moved to pick up his scattered shirt. “We should dress and…”

  Frost burst from her lips, the words evaporating to steam as Morgan spun to face the door. A great crack burst from the wood like a giant’s fist slammed into it. Shit! Dane jumped to his feet and yanked the shirt on while Morgan calmly unsheathed the iron sword, their only hope of survival.

  “They can’t get in that way,” she said as the door began to rattle on its hinges as if a hurricane blew outside. Every creak and pop sounded like a coffin being ripped apart from the inside. “Get dressed, now!”

  Dane leaped into his pants. The shirt dangled unbuttoned off his shoulders when the rattling stopped. He paused in shoving a shoe on without a sock to stare at the silent door. “Perhaps they’ve…” he said when the air sucked inward. Morgan grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him away just as two reapers phased through the window.

  She released a war cry, brandishing the iron. These must have been smarter, as they both reared back from the threat. “We stayed here too long.”

  “What do we do?” Dane shouted.

  “Out the door.” Morgan craned her head back even while herding him toward it. “Go, go, go!”

  He reached for the handle, prepared to run, when Morgan grabbed her container of dirt. Ripping it open with her teeth, she dumped the entire contents on the floor before her. In an instant, the reapers recoiled as if a wall appeared before them.

  Her warm hand wrapped around his, their fingers cinching into place. “Run!” she cried, dragging him out of the hotel room with only one shoe on. All around them, the air crackled with frost and death.

  Chapter 5

  Only one option remained for them—where the dead slept. Dark as pitch, a single lantern flickered at the backside of a gravestone. Light shone upon the neighbor behind, who died in the nineteenth century. Reapers didn’t care about the dead, especially ones over a hundred years in the ground. They should be safe.

  Dane rustled a hand through his hair, his lips perched in a wry grin as if he felt the need to console her. Absently, Morgan swung the sword free, slicing through the heavy fog lingering above the damp cemetery grass. Why did the reapers find them so quickly? She usually had a day, maybe two, before they’d begin to sense her movements. But this time it was as if someone sent up a beacon and called them right to her room.

  “Hey.” His warm hand curled along her shoulder. Morgan watched it trail down her arm until the fingers rolled around to entwine with hers. Her fidgeting paused, and she locked together with him. “Is something wrong?”

  I don’t want to lose you.

  The thought pounded through her skull, bringing a gasp of shock to her lungs. But there it was. After her decades of existing, of lurking on the edges, of speaking to none and living only for herself, she wanted more. She wanted him beyond a single night.

  “I…” Morgan said, about to reveal the truth, when the air snapped to a brittle cold.

  Hissing erupted from the sky. She yanked her hand away to secure it around the sword’s grip and turned to face the reapers.

  “Oh my God,” Dane gasped, both of them staring across a sea of jet-black robes hovering ten feet above. It wasn’t a small force, not even a small army. This was a multitude, as if the entire siphon turned from its ever twisting rise to the heavens straight upon them.

  “Get behind…” Morgan began when the robes surged forward. She lashed the blade out, striking five at once. There was no time to wait for their bodies to bubble away, as more flew down to take their place. Her hand moved before her brain could calculate the odds. A million reapers easily outflanked them, and her only weapon was disintegrating with each attack.

  She didn’t stand a chance, they didn’t stand a chance. But Morgan didn’t care. She wasn’t going to lay down and give up now. Not when she finally had something worth fighting for.

  Screaming, she leaped into the fray, whipping the sword back and forth to the shrieks of the reapers touched by iron. It cleared a small path and…there! A mausoleum they could fortify and hide in.

  “Dane,” she shouted and turned just as a reaper dove for him. Morgan tried to spin to catch it, but she was too far away. He pivoted, staring in shock at the creature about to rip his life away. Out of nowhere, a dirt clod flew through the air, smashing through the reaper’s hood and sending it skittering.

  “How did…?” Morgan stuttered, locking her hand around Dane’s shoulders when he opened his palm to reveal a fist of freshly dug grave dirt. “Good. Keep doing that. If we can reach there…”

  She only had to point to the plan for him to nod in agreement. The reapers weren’t going to make it easy. They swarmed above, circling in vulture formation and risking one or two to attack. Morgan swiped at them from the left and right, each touch of the sword knocking another to the ground. Behind, she felt Dane’s back knock into hers. He continued his dirt assault, clawing up as much as he could to shield their flank.

  “Gah!” Morgan screamed, claws slicing against her arm. The sword lowered, the tip nearly bounding into the ground. But she gritted her teeth and swung up. A reaper, its cloak nearly reaching the ground, reached its bloodied claws for her. It wanted to finish the job it started, but she wouldn’t have it. They were so close, the mausoleum only a stone’s throw.

  Thrusting up, her sword sliced through where the heart of the creature would be. Its bloodied hands reared back, but not in time. Quickly, the robes peeled back, the bones melted, and it shrieked in horror. But, as the reaper dissolved, it lashed out one last time at her sword. The first foot of the blade exploded, shooting shards of rusted and aged metal at them like shrapnel.

  Morgan tried to rear away, but a slice cut across her cheek. Her blade shattered until only a ragged edge remained sticking out of the hilt. “Dane!” she shouted, turning to ask him for more dirt, when she saw it.

  A reaper, its hood glowing a terrifying red, slipped from the horde. Her heart slowed to a standstill, Morgan trying to put all her energy into running for him. She managed a step, watching Dane turn to her, wonder why she yelled for him.

  Skeletal fingers pierced clear through his chest.

  “No!” she screamed, watching in horror as the entire reaper flew out of his body and up into the sky. “Dane!”

  He didn’t fall to his knees or cup his chest as his heart dissolved away. Only his chin tumbled down, and a sl
ow breath rolled off his lips. “I remember,” he said softly.

  “You’re not dead. Why aren’t you dead?”

  Eyes bluer than cobalt whipped up at her, and she froze. “Morgan.” Dane extended his hand to her, the palm still covered in the dirt of the dead. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. We have to run.”

  The hand remained waiting for her to take it. He quirked his head to the side and in a soft voice, asked, “Do you trust me?”

  Her frantic waving of the sword at the reapers hovering out of range froze. She stared anew at the man who should be gone, who should have fallen like all the other humans who couldn’t survive the reapers. But he did. He still spoke. He still lived.

  Nodding slowly, she placed her fingers along his palm. The broken sword tumbled, and Dane locked his fingers around her palm.

  Cold as insurmountable as the arctic ripped through her heart. Morgan’s entire body fell numb as a reaper burst through her chest and flew off into the night.

  Betrayal!

  Panic and pain tried to stare in shock at the man who stabbed her in the back, but black swarmed her vision.

  “I will explain,” Dane’s voice carried her through the darkness of death. She opened her eyes to find herself in the same hospital room where she did and didn’t die.

  That was her body in the bed, the doctors seemingly frozen in place as they struggled to revive her. “I was here,” Dane said. “I watched you and waited.”

  “Waited for what?”

  He turned his head to the monitors announcing her end, the whine piercing the room. Carefully, he stepped around the immobile people. “I wanted to tell you it was okay. That I was here to help, but when I took your hand…”

  As he wrapped his fingers over hers, a zap of electricity overtook them both and Morgan watched as the copy of herself rose from the bed. The monitors said she was dead, but the woman turned her head and stared in the corner where the other Morgan waited in the shadows.