He spoke again. “You’re trying to work out what I said.”
“I guess… I mean if you don’t want to kill Ben then…”
Derrick put his calloused hand on my cheek. “If he were here, I wouldn’t kill him.”
“Yes, you’ve already said that.” Was it possible to get the pilot to land the plane right now? I wanted to get out.
“Because I’d wait for you to do it. I’d lock him in a basement. I’d starve him just enough that he didn’t die. And I’d wait for you to kill him.”
I sucked in a long breath. “Oh.”
Clearly, words failed me today. Derrick didn’t let go of my cheek. “That is part of what we are going to do over the next few weeks. I’m going to teach you how to kill someone.”
“I know how to use a gun.” Even as I spoke, the statement felt ridiculous.
“That’s nice. I’m going to make sure you know how to use it properly. And when we’re done, you won’t even need one. Whenever you find Ben, wherever you find him, whatever you have on you when you do, you’ll kill him. All I can hope is that when you’re done, you won’t hate me for it.” He dropped his gaze.
I grabbed his arm before he could speak again. “I love that idea.”
Derrick searched my face. I wasn’t sure what he looked for, but he must have found it. His lips pressed down on mine. I drew him closer until he covered his body with mine, pinning me to the chair beneath him. He thought I would hate him for teaching me how to kill someone like Ben? No, just the opposite. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more.
He pulled back. “Don’t get me wrong, beautiful, I’d like to kill him myself. If you asked me to do it, I’d do it. Only you won’t. I can see it in your soul. From the moment you took that gun to me, I’ve been unable to focus on anything but you. I thought… I thought if Ben killed you then I was done. Why bother with anything else? Take out as many people as possible and say fuck this shit.”
“Derrick…”
He put his finger on my mouth. “I don’t need to say a lot of shit. But I need to say this. We’ll let the others do the talking. They go on. Blah. Blah. Let me just say this.”
I nodded even as I flicked his finger away from my mouth. Lifting my eyebrows, I waited for him to finish, which he finally did.
“I don’t want to sit on a leadership council. I don’t want to lead whatever this new group is. I want you. So you keep that in your head. Whatever you want, it’s yours. Even if that means I kill Ben. But you need to be the kind of person who could do it. Because honestly, Everly, I’m not sure how anyone survives in this fucked up world if they can’t.”
He was right.
Chapter 7
We flew to Glacier Park International Airport, which was not a place I had ever heard of. The pilot took our stuff off the plane, which was part of the service that I still hadn’t gotten used to, no matter how many times I flew on their private planes. A car waited to take us to Derrick’s home. The temperature felt very similar to what it had been when we’d left Vermont, and all of it was very different from Baton Rouge that still felt like summer in September.
I actually had a suitcase filled with my own clothes. Derrick wasn’t going to have to acquire me an entire new wardrobe just so I could survive the time here. Of course, if I asked him to, he’d probably shrug and make it happen. He was right, he really wasn’t the talker, the other Letters were.
“So you grew up here? And you ended up playing for the Yankees?” I knew that much from the little bit of research I’d done on Derrick from Kade’s computer in his now destroyed underground home.
He nodded and pointed at the driver, as though to indicate he wasn’t going to talk too much in front of him. “After college. I went to school, first, so it wasn’t like I went from Montana to New York City. It was Montana to Palo Alto to New York City.”
I blinked. “Did you go to Stanford?”
“Yep.” He nodded. That was apparently all he was going to say about that.
“And you were a pitcher?”
Derrick nudged my foot. “A good one.”
We didn’t speak again until we arrived at his home, which was about forty-five minutes from the airport. I’d gotten the “I don’t want to talk” vibe from him, even about things that were public record and couldn’t possibly be an Alliance thing. Instead, I looked at the scenery. I’d never imagined being in Montana. Or that I’d be with an ex-Yankee ballplayer, heading for his Montana home.
We followed the driveway to a house that seemed to be out a dream. I sat forward, staring at it, my mouth hanging open like I was a landed fish.
“My father built it.” That was the extent of his response.
I needed to get a family history from him, outside of the Alliance. What had his father done that he got to build the house in front of me?
On the shore of Flathead Lake, I guessed I was looking at about a ten thousand square foot house. It was somehow both wood and stone cabin while being a mansion at the same time.
“It’s almost always empty, but I have a staff that sets it up when I’m coming home. They did it this morning.”
The driver popped the trunk and after we got out of the car, me still staring at the house, Derrick grabbed our bags.
I followed him inside. I’d been impressed with Judson’s Boston home, as well as what would always be the house they’d kidnapped me to in Vermont, but this was really something else. This looked like where movie stars or… international princes… or something lived. Hell, I was suddenly star struck.
“This way,” Derrick called over his shoulder, and I hurried to catch up with him. He closed the door behind us. “It’s just you and me here. Jud keeps staff around, but I don’t like people with me when I’m home.”
They might have interfered with his shooting in the middle of the night. The thought made me grin for a second, but Derrick didn’t see. “I’ll try to make sure to give you lots of space.”
He turned, throwing me a smirk. “I obviously don’t mean you.”
Stepping through the front door stopped me in my tracks. There was a ton of light in the giant room greeting me as I entered. And that was what it was—a giant room which seemed to take up the whole ground floor. Derrick walked ahead of me, and I took the three steps down onto the lightly colored wood floors of the place. White couches and ottomans decorated the center, surrounding a coffee table carved from some dark oak with bookshelves and a bar on all sides of the place. If I looked left, the kitchen was right there, huge, inviting and open, and to the right a fireplace next to huge glass doors. A porch beckoned, but I followed Derrick to the stairs instead.
Intimidation by a house turned out to be a very real thing. What was I supposed to do here? Could I… sit down?
“There are six bedrooms.” He told me nonchalantly. These guys were so used to wealth, and I supposed when it came down to it, my father was secretly wealthy. Still, it must really have been something to be so far up in the Alliance you didn’t have to hide it growing up.
I cleared my throat. “My house had three. I had the tiny one.”
“Why did they put you in the tiny one? It was just you and your dad after he killed your mom, right?”
I shouldn’t have smiled at how he put that, but Derrick never gave into niceties or concern for other’s feelings. My father had killed my mother, he put it out there. “My grandmother lived with us for a while. She got the bigger room.”
“If you ever got a real look at your father’s portfolio you’d be utterly shocked at just how wealthy you are, Everly.” He pointed down the hallway. “That’s where we’re staying.”
I had to digest two pieces of information right off in that statement, and the way he jumped from one to the other gave me time to do neither. Derrick had seen the portfolio—there was a portfolio I could see—and I was sharing a room with Derrick.
I supposed neither of those things should have surprised me. Trace had put me in the same hotel room so I wouldn’t ru
n away. Warden and I slept on the couch together most nights, but he’d given me my own room, that he’d then stayed with me in the few times we’d ended up in the bed. Kade invited me into his room when I complained about it being too noisy in mine and Judson had left me alone in my own room. It was somehow apropos that Derrick would skip all the bullshit and just put me in his room.
As fast as Derrick moved, he didn’t give me much of a chance to take in his decorating choices. Everything in Judson’s house had felt like Judson, every small detail accounted for. I didn’t know that the brightly painted pictures of bison and elk on the walls particularly looked like Derrick’s taste. His propensity for hunting aside, I wouldn’t have pegged him for pictures painted of dead animals in neon orange.
The bedroom was more of the same. Animal prints in bright colors surrounded carved wooden furniture. A balcony caught my attention as Derrick pointed out the bathroom to the right.
I walked toward the doorway to look at the view.
“You can see Flathead Lake, Glacier National Park, and the Swan Mountain Range from here.”
I pointed toward the door. “Safe to go out?”
“Absolutely.” He opened it for me, and I stepped outside.
It really was breathtaking. There was so much to the world I’d never imagined seeing. Montana hadn’t been on my list of places I needed to get to in my lifetime. Venice, yes. Montana, no. I should have had this on the list, too. A slight breeze hit my hair, and I brushed it out of my face before I turned around. Derrick’s gaze was on me and not on the exceptional view holding my attention.
“You like it.” He didn’t phrase it as a question. It must have been obvious.
“Would be hard not to.” I stepped back until we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, his much higher than mine since he had a good five inches on me even as tall as I was. “You grew up here?”
He nodded. “I did. The old man and me, after my mother and sister died.”
There was so much I didn’t know about these guys. “When did they die?”
“When I was ten. Helicopter crash. They were trying to get on top of a glacier in Canada. Mom loved to ski. It went wrong. Took out my sister, Tori, too.”
I gaped at him. Derrick had so much tragedy in his life. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t even know you had a sister. How old was she?”
“She was nine.” He yawned. “Forever nine years old in my mind. I got older. She didn’t. It really was an accident. Not an Alliance thing. I’ve looked into it a few times. So yeah, I grew up here in this big house, just the old man and me.” He pointed to the left, and I followed where he indicated with my gaze. Next to a tennis court and deck with a Jacuzzi was a huge batting cage. “Most of the time we communicated with him throwing balls, hard, at my head.”
“Until you learned to catch them?”
He tugged me against him. Derrick smelled like soap and something spicy. I breathed him in as he laughed. “Until I learned to throw them back harder and more accurately at his head. Then he backed off doing it. The Alliance decided despite my super high grades and boards, and propensity toward engineering, that I’d be better off being out in the public as a professional ball player. They couldn’t make that happen. If I sucked, they couldn’t have gotten me drafted. But I didn’t suck. I was really good. It happened.”
Yes, I’d seen that on the videos I’d watched. “You threw the ball pretty hard. An announcer at one point said ouch when the catcher caught it.”
He nudged me. “Watched a lot of those, did you?”
I groaned. “Well, I had to know since it was expected I did.”
“I threw the ball really hard until I hurt my shoulder for the third time, that time trying to get to Ben who killed Alyssa, and I couldn’t have any more surgery on it. And now… I just am. Plenty of money but I had that before I was an ex-ball player. The kind of guy who turns up shooting bullets into the ice because he’s lost all… hope.”
I sucked in a long breath. “You loved her. It’s okay to be despondent.”
“I did. But she never loved me, and I knew it, too. I can’t even blame her. I lived the dream, and I hated it. She hated Montana and despite appearances, I never fit in New York City.” He kissed my temple. “Are we done sharing? Because I am prone to screwing everything up with one word, and I don’t want to do that the first ten minutes I have you in the house.”
Well, he had just given me a lot more personal information than I’d asked for, and I couldn’t say I was sorry. I had much more of a sense of Derrick than I’d had before.
I followed him back inside. He bolted the door behind us. “It can get windy. They used to blow open on my father.”
“Derrick.” I waited until he turned to look at me. “You are about to be the head of an international organization of people who secretly rule the world. I don’t think you need to worry about how you fill your time.”
He moved so fast it took my breath away. One second we stood facing each other and the next I pressed up against him, the wall at my back. He breathed heavy. “All I’ve wanted for so long is revenge for the death of a woman who I loved and who hated me. Now, all I want is you. You get that, right? I’m very… intense.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You think?”
He laughed for half a second before he kissed me. The lightest of caresses. I increased the pressure. If he was nuts, then so was I, but maybe any of us who spent time in the darkness that was Alliance torture came out this way. I didn’t give a fuck. I’d always wanted sex. I owned that, always had, and I wasn’t going to let six months in the dark change that about me.
I wanted fast, but Derrick’s hands were slow.
He pulled back to stare at my face. “Easy. Lots and lots of time.”
I shook my head. “There’s always the possibility that you’re going to put me out on the street, right?”
The guys had taunted him with that the last night I’d been with him before I got taken.
He shook his head. “Not going to happen, Everly. The days I watched you before I took you, I didn’t really see you—truly see you—until that night on the lake. You’re fearless. You can put me on the street sooner than I’d put you.”
“Derrick.” I smoothed my hands down the sides of his shirt. “That’s twisted. You did stalk me for days and kidnap me and yet here I am. I might not be fearless, I’m terrified of a lot of things, I might be dumb. That might be the truth.”
He pinched my chin. “Like finds like. There are laws of attraction. There was darkness in you before Ben put you in that basement. It saw the darkness in me; it saw it in the others. We felt it in you, too. But there’s more to it. There’s light inside of you, Everly. And even as I make you strong enough to end Ben, the one thing I’ve wanted to do for years that I am going to let you do instead, we’ve got to find a way to preserve your light inside. It would be a damn tragedy for that to go out. Epic.”
I didn’t know about any of that. His lips beckoned, and I took them. This time I didn’t push him for fast. Derrick didn’t so much kiss me as make love to my lips.
I wasn’t used to it. Not at all. He laid me on the bed without separating our mouths, and while he held his much bigger than mine body over me on his elbows so he could caress my face, my ridiculous heart gave itself to him. Oh sure, it had been taken a few times now. Trace yanked it and then smoothed it. Kade kept it running in circles. Warden kept it aching for more. Judson may not have wanted it. But Derrick took it and loved it until I had no chance of protecting my heart from him.
He might have been crazed. But he was my crazy.
Maybe he was right. Maybe like found like in the darkness.
He undressed me slowly, and my only complaint was that he pulled away from me to do so. I reached up and undid his man bun. I’d never seen his hair down, and it fell past his shoulders.
Soft and silky, he looked like something out of a movie, or another time. “I’m jealous. I don’t have anywhere near that much.”
“It’l
l grow back. And it’s beautiful like this, too.” He kissed my chin and around my face. “If you want to get it fixed, we’ll go tomorrow when I take you to the doctor.”
“Sounds good.”
Derrick pulled at my shirt, finally removing it. I liked this position. Having him over me made me feel safe, protected. His big body was between me and the door. Maybe he knew that. Maybe he just liked to be on top.
I didn’t really care. It worked for me.
He bent over, leaving tender kisses on my shoulders, my neck, while I fumbled through taking off his shirt. I managed to finally discard it when he took control of my mouth again. I could hardly fit my arms around his back, but I managed to caress him while he once again slowed us down.
Derrick linked our hands. I didn’t know why that was so sweet, but it was.
I loved it.
I pulled my hands back so I could run them over his strong abs. He clearly hadn’t let go of his workouts after baseball ended. His arms were defined. There was no part of Derrick that wasn’t hard, except maybe his heart. Whether he’d admit that or not, it was soft.
I wasn’t going to tell anyone.
Derrick caressed my breasts, sending jolts of pleasure through me, but he didn’t just touch them; he seemed to really want to spend time stroking them. I wasn’t even sure what to do. One of his hands still held my own and his other made love to my breasts. I could manage to grasp the side of his face or run my hand through the patches of hair on his well-defined chest.
He was right. There was no need to rush this. The sheer sensory overload of being this close, of having this time, was not a gift I’d thought to have. The thought must have brought tears to my eyes. I realized too late before I could suck them back.
I bit down on my lip. Damn it, this was going to kill the mood.
Derrick lifted his lids, meeting my gaze, before he gently kissed the tears off my face.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. It’s not…”
“Everly, look at me. It’s okay. Cry, if you need to. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to make you feel so good those tears won’t be from sad thoughts.”
Dark Truths: Kiss Her Goodbye #2 Page 8
