Free The Revolt (The Reapers: Book Two) by Katharine Sadler

he was bigger than me, but the idea of getting to hit him
appealed to me in a way I didn’t really want to think about too
hard. I stopped the bag and turned to look at him. For some
incomprehensible reason, he’d taken off his shirt, and he stood
before me in nothing but sweatpants. The boy was stacked and cut,
with muscles for days, and I had a hard time keeping the
appreciation out of my gaze. I focused on his face and reminded
myself how annoying he was.
    “I’m pretty sure I can take you. You keep
talking about these superpowers you have but I’m beginning to
wonder if you just made that up to impress me.”
    He didn’t move and his expression didn’t
change. I stood there waiting for him to say something, but what I
got was a forty pound plate flying past my head so close I felt a
breeze on my face. I leaned back, and fell flat on my butt as the
plate landed gently beside me.
    “Do we have a deal?” he asked.
    I was screwed and I knew it. There was no way
in hell I could beat him, but I didn’t want to give him the
satisfaction of backing down from the deal. He already had a smug,
self-satisfied look on his face that made me want to prove him
wrong. I spoke without fully considering the potential
consequences. “You’re on. But let’s up the ante.”
    He waited without a word, his eyelids low and
a slight smile tickling his lips.
    “If I win, I get to choose the music and I
get to go for a jog. Outside. With you as my bodyguard,” I added
when his expression hardened.
    “You aren’t going to win, but I don’t really
think now’s the best time for an outing.”
    I knew it was a long shot, but just knowing
that I couldn’t leave the condo was making me feel trapped and
suffocated. “What’s the worst that can happen? We get attacked by
reapers? Tucker already said they don’t want to kill me, so I would
get a real-world training experience.”
    He looked away and rubbed his chin. “It’s not
an entirely bad idea, but—”
    “Great. I’ll get my coat,” I said heading for
the stairs. Yeah, I know I said we’d fight first, but I was taking
advantage of him thinking it might be a good idea while I
could.
    Before I made it three steps, I was flat on
my face, my feet swept out from under me. I lay there, gasping,
while Jed bent one arm up behind my back. I bit my lip not to cry
out in pain.
    “That’s one for me,” he said and let go.
“We’ll talk about the jog after you manage to pin me.”
    Obviously, he wasn’t going to go easy on me.
I pulled myself up to my knees. “If you’re trying to demonstrate
why I shouldn’t leave the condo—”
    He wrapped an arm around my neck and pulled
me into his chest. “Enough talking.”
    He might be thoroughly annoying, with
terrible taste in music, and an overprotective instinct, but his
bare skin against my back, which was also bare except for a sports
bra and low-slung yoga pants, made me think of getting close to him
in an entirely different way. I took a long slow breath and tried
to remember that I didn’t want to be pressed against him, that I
didn’t want to reach back and run my hands over his hard body, that
I didn’t want to spin around in his arms and kiss him. Nope, didn’t
want to do any of that. Not at all. It had just been way too long
since I’d had a date.
    I elbowed him in the gut. The action garnered
only a small grunt from him. He didn’t loosen his grip in the
slightest. Him coming at me twice before I was prepared was
irritating, but his lack of reaction to my hit pissed me off. I
knew he wasn’t going to actually choke me and, if he’d been nicer,
I might have been gentle. He’d been rude, so I stomped hard on his
bare foot. He let go and dropped to the floor. I straddled him and
pinned his arms to his sides, feeling a tiny bit guilty about
actually hurting him.
    “That’s how you do it,” he said, with a grin,
once he’d caught his breath. “There’s not a single reaper out there
who’s going to fight fair if