Dark and Damaged: Eight Tortured Heroes of Paranormal Romance: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set (80 page)

For time untold, the Reaper had moved in the world of humans, but rarely did he notice such mundane things as eyes or noses or lips and tongue ... On this one he did.
Her
eyes were a peculiar shade of blue and green. Startling, like the woman herself.

The female stilled and her gaze moved slowly around the room, lingering for a moment too long on the corner where he stood.

Did she sense him?

“I don’t know why I’m surprised to see you here,” she said finally.

The Reaper stilled. Did she
see
him? She wouldn’t be the first human to do so. He leaned forward eagerly.

“I think some part of me always knew.”

Her gaze moved on and an odd disappointment filled him. Now, she stared at the silent man in the bed. The bandage on his head had been changed recently, but still it seeped over the wound the bullet had left.

“It was that dangerous edge that attracted me in the first place.” She laughed. “I’m such an idiot.”

Her head hung forward, and she sniffed before reaching for her dying husband’s hand. “I want to be sad right now.” She shook her head. “I mean, I am sad. But I’m not grieving. I’m not that much of a hypocrite. Hard to believe, right? After all these months of denial. I just thought ... You know me. Always looking for the fairy tale. I never quit hoping. But you broke my heart.”

She fell silent and once again her gaze strayed, finding the Reaper in his corner. Pausing for a drawn moment before moving on.

“I hope there’s a better place for you, Sam. One where you can figure your shit out. I’d tell you not to worry about the kids, but if you’re in there, I’m pretty sure that’s not your top concern. I know they’re not my children, but I’ll take care of them if Janet will let me. Now that you’re ...” Her voice hitched. She cleared her throat. “She’ll try to take them, and I don’t know how I’ll stop her.”

The monitor beside his bed bleeped. The woman sniffed and looked up, dark brows pulled. Anxiously, her gaze shifted from the monitor to the man.

The time was near.

The machine made another strident sound and a nurse rushed in, checked something on the display, looked for a pulse, opened one of his eyes. Her expression said it all.

“I’ll get the doctor, Maggie,” she told the woman before hurrying from the room without an explanation.

Maggie
. Her name was Maggie.

Maggie stared at the man again, the blues and greens darkening in her fascinating eyes as she came to her feet.

The Reaper stepped from his corner and moved to the bed. Maggie’s gaze jerked to the corner and tracked back until it rested on him once again.

Do you see me?
he breathed.

Her nostrils flared and a breath hitched somewhere in her chest just as two men in white coats hustled into the room. A different nurse followed, this one bigger than the first and all business. No sympathetic smile was given as she took Maggie’s arm and moved her out of the way.

“Mrs. Sloan,” the nurse said, “You might want to step out.”

Maggie shook her head. “I’ll stay.”

The nurse gave a curt nod, and Maggie moved to the end of the bed where she could see without hindering their efforts. She didn’t ask what was going on. Nor did she sob the usual,
will he be okay?
Samuel Franklin Sloan was going to die. She knew it as well as the Reaper did.

The doctors conversed in sharp tones, and the nurse bustled about efficiently. Maggie simply watched with that angry, mournful stare. The Reaper moved to stand beside her. Up close, her eyes shimmered with tears she was either too proud or too hurt to shed. She had long, dark hair that fell in a silky cloud to just below her shoulder blades. He touched it, wishing for the first time that he had the same senses as humans. Wishing he could
feel
the glossy strands.

She caught her breath and looked right at him once more. Her pulse beat a hard and erratic tempo at the base of her throat. Her eyes widened, the kaleidoscope of blues and greens mixing and changing. Her skin looked like pearl, her lips so soft he wanted to touch those, too.

The machines beeped frantically, drawing her back into the unfolding drama. The doctors began administering emergency measures, and two more nurses rushed in to assist. Maggie watched it all with an impassive expression, but he saw the panic she couldn’t hide. He felt the bitter desperation, the guilt-ridden relief that it would soon be over.

It was time, but suddenly the Reaper wasn’t ready to see the interlude end. One of the nurses pulled the blanket off the man, unveiling his inert, muscular body and tugging down the gown so it bunched at his waist. Even in death, he appeared strong, a big man with broad shoulders and a solid chest. Someone pushed a cart in the room, and Maggie shifted to the side to let them by.

She was almost touching him now.

The temptation to bridge that gap became a seed, a sprout, then a vine that wrapped around him and choked out any thought to resist. In the moment of reaping, when he and the reaped would be one, he might touch her. He might
feel
her.

The Reaper shrouded himself in death and moved over Samuel Sloan, seeping beneath his skin to the soul that had brought this woman such complex pain. The man’s brain still controlled his failing organs, still commanded his slowly beating heart and forced his weakened lungs to inflate, but his consciousness, that which made him the human, Sam Sloan, had long since ceased. The Reaper gathered up his soul and held tightly, emerging with just one goal.

Touch the woman.

He brushed his elusive shape against her like a dawn mist settling before a rising sun. He knew the moment—the very instant—she felt him. A fine tremble went through her body. Her lush lips parted, her breath caught.

She was warm, so very warm. So intricately alive. Flesh and blood, bone and hollow. Sensations enhanced by the eyes of the human’s memory, until she became a bright, shining thing that blinded him with beauty.

The desire to see more, to feel more, became a burning need. Her soul was so lovely, so ethereal, so
alive
that it glittered, diamond bright—just there.

The Reaper reached. The Reaper touched. Deep inside him, he felt the human he’d come for awake and protest.

Somewhere in the room a doctor said, “Clear,” and pressed paddles to the human’s chest. Warning flashed red in the Reaper’s mind a split second before searing pain sliced through the human, impaling them both.

The body on the bed jerked violently. The Reaper recoiled, and Maggie jumped back just as the doctor said, “Clear,” once more. A second volt went through the human, through the Reaper, down to a place that shouldn’t exist, galvanizing them both.

The Reaper knew the smell of fear in humans, but he’d never known it in himself until that moment when he felt the man’s soul slipping backwards, felt the claws of it sunk deep inside him, thorns in the vine he himself had planted.

One last time, the doctor said, “Clear,” and the die was cast, the fate was written.

The Reaper and Sam Sloan slammed back into the vessel from which they came.

Every part of Maggie felt numb.

She sat in the waiting room outside of the Intensive Care Unit and stared at her clenched fingers. Over and over, those moments played. The doctors rushing in. The nurse telling her to step aside. That sense of someone watching over her, reaching out ...
touching
her.

There’d been peace and promise in that moment, a sense of joy and homecoming. She’d felt Sam, the Sam she’d loved so desperately. But not only Sam, not
just
Sam. Something else had come with that touch, cool as a morning breeze, warm as a summer sun.

For that frozen second, she’d felt safe.

Until reality had crashed into her. The alarms beside his bed. The doctors and nurses trying to save him.

She’d cried out as the doctors had shocked his heart once, twice, three times. Someone had come in—the nice nurse, Leah, who always smiled and sometimes brought her coffee. She’d taken Maggie to the waiting room, asked if there was someone she could call. Promised to bring news.

Any moment now, they’d come to tell her Sam was dead. She still didn’t understand her own feelings. Still couldn’t piece together the last few days ... the last few
moments
.

Had she felt Sam’s soul leaving? Had an angel been in the room with them, ready to take Sam with it? Did she really believe in such a thing? Did it matter?

She shook her head, confusion and sorrow rolling over in waves. What she’d felt had been dark and mysterious ... seductive in ways she’d never be able to describe. And foreign—not just strange, but alien.

She covered her face with her hands. That shouldn’t surprise her. Her relationship with her husband had been a whirlwind of strange excitement. They’d met, fallen in all-consuming lust and married in the space of a month. She’d had a ring on her finger and a different last name before she knew anything about her new husband beyond the superficial. He was thirty-two, a single father and a successful engineer at a software company in Tempe, Arizona. His first disastrous marriage had ended with his ex-wife going crazy and trying to set their house on fire with his children inside it. She’d been committed to a facility for the mentally ill. Sam had taken the children and started over after the divorce.

He’d seemed a tragic hero to Maggie, triumphing over the wicked witch’s curse, and she’d been so willing to believe that they were meant to be one another’s happily ever after. Sam and his children
needed
her, and Maggie, who’d been on her own since her parents had died, needed to be needed.

But there the tale turned sour. Within weeks of moving into her small house and calling it home, Sam began to distance himself and the harder Maggie tried to reach him, the more distant he became. Strange bouts of paranoia had marked the path. At times, Maggie had suspected substance abuse, though she never knew for certain. The downfall came as quickly as the honeymoon.

Soon after, he left altogether. No explanation. No note or phone call. Not even an impersonal text message. Just gone, leaving Maggie and the kids to sift through the wreckage he’d left behind.

Until he’d been found in the parking lot of his apartment with a bullet in his brain and less than ten percent chance of recovery.

Now, he was dead, or would be very soon, and she didn’t know whether to grieve, rejoice or spit on his cold body. How messed up was that?

“Maggie?” the nurse—Leah—said, coming to sit beside her on the nondescript sofa in the nondescript room. Her face was drawn, her eyes over-bright. She was shaking her head.

Maggie nodded, bracing for the inevitable. “Is he gone?”

Leah gave her a dazed smile. “No.” A soft laugh accompanied the stunned expression. “He’s awake. He’s asking for you.”

Even as Maggie pulled into the driveway six days later, she still couldn’t believe she was bringing Sam back home. Alive. Just last week, she’d imagined herself parking the car with the small box of his ashes on the passenger seat. From the moment she’d received the call that her husband had been shot, that his wounds were likely fatal, she’d seen that end. Not this.

“We’re here,” she said, stopping the SUV, but not shutting off the engine.

Sam stared through the windshield with a hard expression that didn’t quite hide the alarm she saw in his eyes. The doctors had prepared her for his memory loss, for the potential reactions he might have to it. Anger, frustration, and fear were common in victims of memory loss. Depression, equally so. But what she saw in his fleeting glance bordered on panic. For a moment, she wondered if he might bolt.

He took a deep breath and slowly let it out, turning his face away. Whatever he was feeling, he kept it to himself. Surprise, surprise.

Her many visits to the hospital had given her a small sampling of this stranger she’d brought home with her. He knew she was his wife, yet he seemed very fuzzy on what that really meant. What it entailed, being a husband. Well, that hadn’t really changed much, had it?

Give him time
... That’s what the doctors had told her.

Sam had clear recall of his childhood and early adulthood. He had a vague memory of his first wife, but nothing concrete or clear. He knew he had children—Lexi and Justin—but not their ages or anything about them. He remembered meeting Maggie, but nothing after.

Of course, she distrusted the holes in his recall. How could she not? He’d left without reason. Now, he was back, without having to provide a reason for that either.

And sometimes he referred to himself in third person. Once, he’d started to say something that began with, “This human.”

She couldn’t even guess where that had come from or where he’d intended to go with it. He’d caught himself and changed course, becoming so agitated that the nurses had hurried in and finally sedated him.

A gunshot wound to the head and a week in the hospital had hollowed out his cheeks and added a dark shadow to his jaw, but it hadn’t diminished the sharp gleam in his blue eyes or detracted from the masculine lines of his face. He was every bit as devastating as he’d ever been. She’d had plenty of reasons to fall so hard and fast for Sam Sloan.

“Are we going in?” Sam asked, shooting her a mystifying look.

Nearly a year had passed since their last curt words, longer since she’d gazed into his beautiful eyes. Yet as she did so now, an uncanny feeling filled her.

It was as if a different man stared back.

Baffled, she opened her door. She wasn’t sure if he’d need her help so she moved to his side, but he’d already stepped out before she got there. He was such a tall, commanding man. The bullet was no longer lodged in his brain, but the injury made him understandably unsteady. Even so, the doctors had been stunned by his physical recovery. He was still strong. Able ... and more than dangerous to her peace of mind. The weight he’d lost added to that perception. He looked edgy, mean,
hungry
. A street dog on the prowl.

His gaze found hers. So blue. So intense that it made her shiver.