Page 8 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

CHAPTER SEVEN

SAWYER

I ’ve always liked making women come. It’s the next best thing to killing them, really, the way their breath gets fast and shuddery and their bodies go limp and they just lose sight of everything. Except you get to do it over and over again to the same woman.

When I was younger, Mama decided it was time for me to learn Hunter ways. She figured I’d want to kill the way she does, which is to stalk a man and cut his throat while they’re in bed together. So she brought me some girls to practice on. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill them. They didn’t do nothing to me but make me feel good, showing me all the fun you can have with a living human body. I wanted to kill people who deserved it.

So Mama stopped bringing me girls, but I sought them out myself. That was how I learned about making them come. A couple of them taught me everything I needed to know, and I got addicted to it, feeling their pussy muscles clenching around my cock, their clits throbbing against my tongue.

That’s what’s happening now. My perfect prey is coming for me, grinding her pussy up against my face, and it’s exactly like I imagined all those times when I was in the dirt .

When I brought her the head, that little token of my affection, I never thought it would actually lead to this. I hoped it would. But hope usually doesn’t mean much.

Usually.

“Oh my god,” she pants, the syllables matching the movement of her thrusts. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

I keep licking her until she stills, her thick gorgeous thighs trembling on either side of my head. Only then do I let myself look up at her. I replace my mouth with my fingers, keeping my touch gentle.

“I’m done,” she gasps, hands flailing. She’s sprawled back on the couch, her shirt hiked up to just beneath her tits. “You can stop.”

“No,” I say, dotting some kisses against the dark thatch of her pubic hair, breathing in the scent of her arousal. A little musky, a little sweet. Reminds me of the woods around the camp. I didn’t think this would really happen, but now that I’m here, I’m not letting go.

“No?” It comes out a squeak, and she picks up her head to gape at me. “You can’t—It’s too much?—”

“No,” I say again, and then I move up over her stomach, nuzzling her soft flesh. I keep one hand on her pussy, stroking it softly. I expect her to fight back, the way she did when I dragged her into the cabin, but she doesn’t, just sputters out questions at me.

“Why?” she says. I like how she’s still trying to catch her breath. “Why are you… doing this?”

I stop my trail of kisses just beneath her shirt hem and look up at her. She looks a bit like how she did the night I killed her tormentors—eyes wide, hair a mess, cheeks flushed pink. All that’s missing is blood splattered across her full chest, a thought that makes my cock throb.

“I told you.” I push up her shirt until I spot her bra. To my delight, it’s lacy and transparent and I can see the dark moons of her areolas through the fabric. “I’ve been waiting fifteen years for it.”

I pull away from her pussy so I can pull her up to sitting and reach around to get rid of this bra. She moves with me, loose and pliable, even though she keeps arguing.

“I still don’t understand how it’s you.” Her eyes glimmer. “Or why me. Why you didn’t—” She swallows and I know she was going to say, kill me . I’m glad she doesn’t ask so I don’t have to try and explain. Mostly because I don’t know how to put it into words. I just want to focus on her right now.

I snap the hooks of her bra and throw it away. Her tits are fucking gorgeous. Big and soft and trembling, and I think about the first time I saw her. She was running, jogging down one of the narrow trails in the woods. One of the pieces of shit I killed two months later had been yelling at her to go faster, but I managed to tune him out by focusing on the way her tits bounced inside her shirt. It wasn’t the only thing that drew me to her, but goddamn it if it wasn’t one of them.

“Are you really Sawyer Caldwell?” she asks for what feels like the hundredth time.

I look up at her. She gazes back at me, eyes big and searching, like she still doesn’t believe it. In a way, it’s fair; I had my mask on that night. She never saw my face. And there aren’t any pictures of me to be printed in the newspapers and the like—Mama insisted.

I stroke her cheek with the back of my hand. She jolts a little, like a frightened rabbit, but doesn’t pull away. “There were only two of us in that dining hall,” I tell her. “I told you what I remembered. What happened between us.”

She’s shaking, and I know she knows it’s me, deep down. We shared something that night, and I knew about it. A good girl like her, someone who’s not a killer, she wouldn’t have told anyone. Can’t argue with any of it.

I reach down between her legs and tease her clit again .

“Fuuuuuck,” she gasps, flopping back on the oversized couch cushions. I take that as an invitation to pull one of her nipples into my mouth. It’s a perfect little pebble on my tongue, and I suck gently on it, then pull more and more of her tit into my mouth, as much of it as I can.

She groans, a sound that sets all my nerves on fire. I slide two fingers inside her soaking wet cunt and stroke, moving around until the tenor of her moans changes, grows deeper and darker.

“Stop,” she mumbles. “It’s too much. Stop.”

I switch over to her other breast, massaging the first one with my free hand. She seems to melt beneath me, and then she’s making noises but not actually saying anything, just kind of grunting and keening and panting.

Like I said, it’s almost as good as killing. With her, it’s better, because it means she stays with me.

“You’re gonna come for me again.” I speak into the mound of her breasts, breathing in the salty-sweet scent of her sweat. It’s like caramel apples. Like tree sap in the spring. “Three times. Do you understand?”

“I can’t,” she gasps, which is a lie, because I can already feel it building up in her, the way her pussy’s fluttering around my fingers.

“You can.” I lift my head so I can look at her. She’s leaned back on the couch again, her eyes squeezed shut. “You’re almost there, baby.”

It slips out, calling her baby , but her lips part when I say it and she lets out this small helpless noise that almost makes me come in my jeans.

I work her a little harder, quickening the rhythm of my strokes. Her body goes rigid beneath me, and I’m tired of waiting so I slide my thumb over her clit, giving it a nice firm press. That does it. She completely dissolves, moaning and thrashing. I press into her, keeping her still so I can keep coaxing the orgasm out of her .

“That’s it,” I breathe, slowing my strokes just a little. “That’s it, baby. Keep coming for me.”

“I c-can’t,” she gasps. I pull my fingers out of her and just rub my thumb around her clit. It flutters like a dying pulse. She keens, a sound that’s half pain and half pleasure, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop touching her. Not if she’s going to make sounds like that.

Still, when she sinks back against the couch, gasping and flushed, I lighten my touch a little. I wish we were on a bed or the floor, some place where I could stretch out beside her, one hand between her legs and the other tucked under her neck like a pillow. Instead, we’re in this weird tangle, me half-sitting on her as I work her pussy. It’s making my arm tired.

“You have to s-stop,” she says, voice shuddering. “Please. That, um, the h-head—” The word comes out strangled, like she doesn’t quite want to say it. “Shouldn’t you move it?”

The question’s so unexpected from her, naked and legs spread and soft body sheened with sweat, that I laugh. “Is that what you’re thinking about right now?”

To illustrate my point, I slide a finger back into her pussy.

She gasps, her eyes going wide. “No! I just—What if someone sees it—You need to st?—”

“I’m not going to stop.” I lean over her, brush her cheeks with my lips. She doesn’t pull away from me, the way my victims will when I move in to kill them. “And no one’s gonna see the head. No one comes out here.”

I slide another finger into her, slow and easy. She quakes beneath me, making more of those little pleasure-pain noises. God, I could listen to them all day.

“Besides.” I move my mouth over to her ear, then kiss the side of her throat so I can feel her pulse beating furiously beneath her skin. When I speak, I speak to that pulse, to that wildly pumping blood. “The head was a gift for you.”

She stiffens then, clamps her thighs shut against my hand. I just laugh and sit up so I can see her confused, frightened expression.

“Gift?” she whispers.

“Mmhmm.” I pull my hand away and gently pry her thighs apart. She fights me, her quad muscles flexing beneath her skin. I like that, her strong, shapely legs. I like the idea of chasing her through the woods and then fucking her instead of killing her.

I look up at her. “You didn’t recognize him, did you?”

Something shifts in her face. That recognition she’d been missing. Understanding. And then, the best of all: dark lust. It passes over her features like a cloud moving over the sun. It’s only for a second, but I see it.

She liked her gift.

“You can’t leave that here,” she says in a small, terrified voice.

When I reach between her legs, she doesn’t try to close them.

“I won’t,” I tell her, keeping my voice soft and low as I run my fingers up and down her slit, relishing the silky petals of her cunt. “I’ll take it someplace safe for you, though.”

She whimpers at that, and although her voice is still afraid, I feel a surge of heat from her clit. “There we are,” I mutter. “Let’s get you one more orgasm.”

“That’s not going to happen.” She looks at me, lifting her shoulders. Her pupils drown out her honey-colored eyes, making them look nearly as dark as mine.

I grin, accepting the challenge.

“Then try to get away.”

She stares at me for a long moment with her lust-drowned eyes and then says, “What?”

I slip my fingers out of her pussy and press the heel of my palm against it instead. Her lips part and I see a flash of her tongue and imagine sliding my cock into her mouth, a pretty thought that I set aside. Too risky.

“You can try to get away,” I repeat, kneading her cunt a little. She’s overstimulated. I can see it in her flushed skin, her hooded expression. And I can feel it too, the wet spot spreading out on the sofa. “Make a run for it.” I lean down over her, drop my voice a little. “Make me catch you.”

For a moment, she only stares at me, breasts rising and falling as I rub between her legs.

Then she scrambles away. I fall back, watching to see what she does. If she wants to escape, really escape, she’ll go for her clothes first. Maybe the door, since her purse and keys are still lying in the dirt outside.

She does neither. Instead, she ducks into the kitchen, all opened up on the other side of the room, and snatches a knife out of the knife stand.

Then she whirls around to face me, the blade catching the bright fluorescent bulbs overhead until it gleams like the sun.