Hot and Haunted Read online

  Hot and Haunted

  MEGAN HART, LAUREN HAWKEYE, SARANNA DEWYLDE

  Contents

  Nothing Else Matters by Megan Hart

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Pick Me Up by Lauren Hawkeye

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Little Red’s Big Bad by Saranna DeWylde

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Author’s Note

  About the Authors

  Also by the Authors

  An Excerpt from The Forbidden Lady by Kerrelyn Sparks

  Chapter One

  An Excerpt from Turn to Darkness by Jaime Rush

  Chapter One

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

  Megan Hart

  Chapter One

  SKIN ON SKIN.

  It was what she always needed after a shift outside. Hours spent in the stink and the heat of the city. Hours spent ramped up on adrenaline, terror so constant she could no longer feel it as anything but an absence of emotion. Her neck and back and shoulders ached and burned from carrying her pack, her weapon, and, more rarely, live bodies to safety. Most often the bodies she carried were already dead when she piled and burned them.

  Too many of them were the Resurrected.

  First a hot shower, though the water always got cold too soon. Eventually, she supposed, the city water would stop pumping altogether. The generator would run out of gas, and she wouldn’t be able to get any more. But not today, Lira thought as she tipped her face to the rapidly cooling spray and rinsed away the grime. Please. Not today.

  Shower, then a quick meal of whatever the day’s cook had put together, or maybe something from one of the foil pouches they were supposed to be saving but had already begun digging into when the fresh-food supplies dwindled. Simple but necessary pleasures to wash away the day’s work and refuel her.

  But what she really needed was skin on skin. Mouths searching, hands roaming, the stroke of tongues. She needed to devour someone and be devoured—but wasn’t that just some kind of sickness? She spent her days outside doing her best not to get eaten, and when she came back in, all she could think about was consuming. Destroying and being destroyed.

  She spent her days with death; fucking made her feel alive.

  “Lira?”

  She turned at the sound of the familiar voice. The plink-plink of the water still dripping from the showerhead was loud on the concrete floor. She slicked her hair back from her face, her nipples already going tight. Heat rose between her legs.

  His name was Anthony, and he was beautiful. He wore a pair of faded jeans and had bare feet because the floor in the shower room was always damp, and when you had a good pair of shoes, you made sure to take care of it because you might not get another. His T-shirt, snug against his broad, muscled chest, had probably once been blue but had faded over many washes to become an uneven, steel gray. He held out a towel.

  Lira took it, but instead of wrapping it around herself, she hung it on a nearby hook. She put her wet hands on the front of his shirt, pushing him a step or two back against the wall. He was taller by a good few inches, but that didn’t stop her from winding her fingers in the thickness of the dark hair at the base of his neck and pulling him down to her.

  The kiss bruised, but that was the way she liked it. Their teeth clashed for a second before his mouth opened all the way, and his tongue found hers. His hands, those big, callused hands, fit to her naked waist as she worked the button and zipper on his jeans. He was already hard, his cock long and thick and lovely and in her hand within seconds. He moaned into her mouth.

  She got his jeans down as far as his knees, hobbling him. Where did he have to go, anyway, but harder against the wall? His hands tightened at her waist, lifting her. She fit against him just right, her knees gripping him, his cock trapped between them.

  Needy and greedy, Lira let go of his shoulder, confident Anthony wouldn’t let her fall. Her body had grown tight with muscle, and she’d become much thinner in these after-days, when the work was hard and finding food was harder; but also, Anthony was strong. He had the lean, muscled body of a man used to working hard, and not at the gym. She knew the taste of him and how he sounded when he came, that he didn’t like eggs but would eat just about anything else, that he’d been visiting his brother in Pittsburgh when everything began—but she didn’t know much beyond that. He’d have told her anything she wanted to know, she knew that, but Lira had always been careful not to ask. She didn’t know what he’d done in his life before, but she guessed he’d worked with his hands, building things. Anthony had been the one to make the barriers upstairs in the synagogue to protect all of them down here below in the basement shelter.

  She used her free hand to slide between them, gripping his erection to ease him inside her and settled slowly onto his cock, both of them letting out a sigh at that initial pleasure. She slanted her mouth across his, the kiss gentler this time. The soft probe of his tongue urged her to open wider for him. She thought he breathed her name, but if he did, it was lost in the low, soft moan he gave when she rocked her hips forward.

  Anthony turned them both so Lira was the one pinned against the wall; this gave him the leverage he needed to fuck into her. Slowly at first. Then, just before she thought she might break, might plead, he moved faster.

  Her fingers dug into the soft fabric of his T-shirt. In the days before everything went to hell, Lira had always made sure her nails were manicured. She’d preferred pretty French tips but had sometimes gone with a pale pink or peach. But then the freak tornados decimated the country, and people began going crazy, rioting and killing each other. And as their faces exploded into black spores that infected others with the same madness—suddenly manicures didn’t matter so much. Now her nails were ratty, broken to the quick, too often painted red, and not with polish.

  She cupped the back of his neck and dug her fingers into his hair again. Pulling, just a little. He made her crazy when he tried to take his time, when he tried to keep her on the edge for too long. When he tried to make love to her instead of fucking her.

  “Harder,” Lira murmured into Anthony’s ear, then flicked the lobe with her tongue before biting it.

  His neck was next, victim to the scrape of her teeth. She tasted him, drawing his flesh into her mouth with a gentle sucking. Not to leave a mark though it would. But because she wanted to open her mouth and take as much of him inside her as possible. Because until her body went up, up, and over into climax, her mind would keep fighting the images of gnashing teeth, people hunched over each other, tearing. Slashing. Biting.

  Someday, is that what she’d become?

  “Yes. Harder . . .” His voice had gone low and rough-edged, like sandpaper, scraping. His hips pumped.

  Her shoulders slammed against the concrete wall, but she wanted the bruises. She needed them. They would cover the ones she already had. Pain made the pleasure sweeter, both sensations twisting and tangling so tight inside her there was no way to tell them apart. She didn’t cry out with it—silence was ingrained in her by now, the habit too hard to break even when she was breaking apart. She kissed him, instead, and took in his breath with a gasp as the pleasure engulfed her. Turned her inside out. When he shuddered against her in his own release, she gripped him tight and rode the final waves of desire coursing