“I meant what I said,” he told her. “I mean it tonight and I’ll mean it tomorrow and—”
She placed her index finger over his lips, silencing him. “No promises, no vows, no declarations.”
“Is that what you want or is that what you think I want?”
“You have commitment issues, remember,” she told him.
“And you have control issues.” He pressed his erection against her. “But tonight we’re going to share the control. I’m going to show you that you can trust me to never make you do anything you don’t want to do. And you’re going to willingly give yourself to me, no strings attached, solely because you want me as much as I want you.”
“I guess we both have something to prove, to ourselves and to each other.”
“I’m going to start right now by proving to you that I want to make love to you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my entire life.”
“I like the sound of that.”
The moment his mouth covered her breast, her hips bucked involuntarily, lifting her lower body hard against his. He groaned deep and low as he slid his hand inside her silky panties and cupped her mound. When he inched his fingers lower until he found her clitoris, she rubbed his penis through the thin material of his briefs. He caressed her intimately, eliciting a throaty moan.
“I’ve got some condoms in my pants pocket,” he told her as he inserted two fingers inside her.
As her body gushed around his fingers, she writhed beneath him. “You came prepared? You must have been pretty sure of yourself. Or do you always carry around condoms in your pocket?”
“Blondie, I put those condoms in my pocket when I got up this morning because I knew that I couldn’t go another day without staking my claim on you.” He removed his fingers from inside her, slipped his hand out of her panties and hooked his thumbs beneath the elastic waistband. He kissed her and then lifted his head. “Before you open your pretty little mouth to protest, you should know that before tomorrow morning, I expect you will have laid claim to me, too, lock, stock and barrel.”
“You can bet your life on it,” she told him.
When he pulled her panties down and off, she cooperated fully. Once he removed his briefs, his penis sprung free. And then he grabbed his jeans off the floor and retrieved a condom from one of the pockets.
She expected him to take her then and there. A part of her wanted him now and she wouldn’t have complained if he had rushed through the preliminaries.
But he didn’t.
During the next hour, Derek loved her more thoroughly than she had ever been loved. He touched her all over, his mouth and hands familiarizing themselves with every inch of her body. He licked and sucked and caressed her breasts and teased her unmercifully until she ached with wanting. After bringing her to the brink again and again, only to draw back at the last minute each time and make her wait, he finally lifted her hips and thrust into her. Deep and hard.
She gasped for breath when he entered her, filling her completely.
They fucked in a frenzy of ravenous need and hot desire. And when Maleah came, she felt as if she had exploded into a thousand pieces.
Derek grunted and shivered as his orgasm hit.
She clung to him, kissing him, murmuring erotic sweet nothings in his ear as he collapsed on top of her.
Derek woke her sometime between midnight and dawn and they made slow, sweet love again. And then she slept in his arms, her body wrapped around his. When he woke her again, the tender light of dawn peeped through the plantation blinds on her bedroom windows.
He slid his hand between her legs and parted her thighs.” Are you sore?” he asked.
“A little,” she admitted.
He kissed her mouth, and then ran the tip of his tongue between her breasts, over her belly and dipped into her navel. “It had been a while for you, hadn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. There haven’t been that many men,” she told him honestly.
“God, Blondie, don’t you dare tell me anything about any of them.” He reached out, jerked her up and rolled her over on top of him. “The thought of another man touching you makes me a little crazy.”
She smiled. “I don’t exactly like knowing you’ve had sex with countless other women.”
He laughed. “Hardly countless women.” He stroked his open palm over her buttocks. “Besides, they were just rehearsals. You, Maleah Perdue, are the main act.”
She spread her legs, straddled him, and took him inside her. Then she tossed back her head and shook her hair. He grasped her hips.
She smiled down at him. “Just in case you don’t already know it, you, Derek Lawrence, are, as far as I’m concerned, the one and only main act.”
This time around, she was in complete control, setting the pace, deciding how far to take him near the edge before withdrawing and prolonging his agony with the promise of ecstasy.
Finally, she put him out of his misery. She climaxed first and half a second later, he grabbed her by the back of her head, tossed her over onto her back and jackhammered into her for a couple of heart-pounding minutes before he came.
Later, damp with sexual perspiration and sleepy with satisfaction, they lay together spoon fashion, his arms holding her securely against his body. He nuzzled her ear. She sighed with pleasure.
“I don’t know if you want to hear this or if this is the right time to say it, but . . . I love you, Blondie.”
She wrapped her arms around his arm that bound her to him in a possessive gesture. “I love you, too . . . so very much.”
“We need to—”
The thunderous pounding on her bedroom door stopped Derek mid-sentence.
“Maleah, wake up. Now,” Barbara Jean called to her through the closed door. “Please, come downstairs as quickly as possible. And if you know where Derek is, tell him to do the same. Shiloh Whitman has been murdered.”
Meredith had awakened Luke at 6:30 A.M.
“Get dressed immediately. We’re leaving,” she had told him.
He had stared at her standing there in his bedroom doorway as he roused from a deep, dreamless sleep. “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”
“Anthony Linden is definitely north of London. I keep seeing green fields. He’s out in the country somewhere. I’m pretty sure that wherever he is, he’s not far from here. And he isn’t alone.”
“He’s probably still with the female companion your woo-woo senses picked up on at the airport last night.”
Meredith had frowned. “I couldn’t sense anything about her last night, but this morning, I’m getting the distinct impression that there isn’t anything romantic between them.”
“Romantic meaning sexual?”
She hadn’t replied to his question, instead she had said, “I’ll call down and have them prepare something for breakfast that we can take with us. In the meantime, get ready. I can’t explain it, but I feel that we need to start our search immediately.”
And that was exactly what they had done. They had left in the midst of Thursday morning London traffic.
Now, more than six hours later, Luke was beginning to think of their trip as nothing more than a wild goose chase. He realized that if Meredith could pinpoint exactly where Linden was, she would do it. But as she kept explaining, she had only limited control over her visions. Knowing very little about psychically gifted people, Luke saw Meredith as a puzzle, one he needed to somehow figure out and then put together. Griff had entrusted him with her care. Babysitting a woman that Dr. Meng believed to have what she referred to as “exceptional abilities” wasn’t easy for a guy like him. Meredith needed someone patient and kind, someone who accepted her psychic talents without question, someone who didn’t find himself occasionally wanting to shake her until her teeth rattled.
Meredith was certain that Anthony Linden had landed at Heathrow last night and had left London and traveled north with a female companion.
Even if she was right about Linden, north of London covered a lot of t
erritory. He had contacted the head man of Powell’s London based headquarters, Thorndike Mitchum, before they left the hotel, given him Meredith’s info, and hoped like hell that it would help Mitchum and his team of investigators.
Once out of London that morning, Luke and Meredith had traveled sixteen miles due north to Waltham Abbey, the first stop on their psychic trek to locate Linden.
“No, this isn’t the place,” Meredith had told him as they drove through the village. “I don’t sense him anywhere nearby. Drive west.”
And so they had taken M25 to Potters Bar in Hertfordshire.
“This isn’t the right place either,” she had said after they had fully explored the small town. “Maybe we need to go farther north from here.”
Leaving Potters Bar behind, they headed to Abbots Langley and then when that also proved to be the wrong town, they had driven even father north and were now a few miles outside of St. Albans.
Luke could tell that with each subsequent disappointment, Meredith had grown weaker, as if some force she could not control was draining the energy from her body and from her mind.
“When we arrive in St. Albans, we’re staying for a while,” he told her.
“What if it’s not the right place either?”
“It doesn’t matter. We need to eat and you need to rest.” When she looked at him with gratitude in her eyes, he quickly added, “You’re no good to me if you pass out from exhaustion.”
The tenderness in her eyes faded and her gaze hardened.
Damn it, Sentell, would it have killed you to be nice to her, to let her believe that you actually give a damn about her as a human being?
“You think I’m some sort of freak, don’t you?” she said.
“I don’t think you’re a freak.”
“You do. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at me.”
“You’re an enigma to me,” he admitted. “I don’t understand how you do what you do. When I’m around you, half the time, I question my own sanity.”
“Thank you for being honest with me.” There was a hint of sadness in her voice.
“Look, Merry Berry, I’ll make a deal with you,” Luke said. “I’ll always be honest with you, even if it upsets you or hurts your feelings, if you promise you will trust me to take care of you and you won’t question me when I tell you to do something or not to do something.”
“I’m a great deal of trouble, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, you are. But most things worth a damn are a lot of trouble.”
“Oh.”
“So, do we have a deal?”
“Yes, I suppose we do.”
She remained quiet for several minutes, and then she asked, “Luke, why did you call me Merry Berry?”
“Huh?”
“You called me—”
“It’s just something that popped into my head. Your name is Meredith, so the short version is Merry. And you’re covered in a million freckles that look like tiny copper berries.”
“Oh, I see. I’ve never had a nickname before. Hmm . . . Merry Berry.” She smiled. “I think I like it.”
Luke barely stifled a groan.
“The authorities have been notified,” Griff explained. “Sheriff Fulton will handle this case personally, as a favor to me. And he’ll deal with the TVAP. Fulton has promised to keep his personnel to a minimum and I’ve promised that we will cooperate fully with his department.”
Everyone seated at the conference table remained silent and attentive. Griff had called this meeting of highly trusted personnel to share information about Shiloh Whitman’s murder and how the crime would be handled by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, the TVA police, and the Powell Agency. Griff issued orders for the agents present to deal with their subordinates.
“I expect Sheriff Fulton’s team will arrive within the hour,” Griff said. “That gives us precious little time to prepare for their investigation and to secure Griffin’s Rest. At no time will any member of our staff interfere with the sheriff’s investigation. But that doesn’t mean our people can’t ask to see everyone’s ID, which I fully expect them to do.”
Derek watched and listened, his gaze moving from a haggard Griff to his equally fatigued wife. To a person, everyone in the room understood the significance of Shiloh Whitman’s death. Someone from the outside being able to break into Griffin’s Rest would be the equivalent of someone breaking into Fort Knox. The possibility of that happening seemed highly improbable. How could the Copycat Carver have gotten through security? How could a stranger have penetrated the seemingly foolproof protection surrounding the compound?
“I don’t think I have to tell y’all how Nic and I feel about Shiloh’s death.” Griff reached out to Nic, who immediately stood up and took his hand. “And you’ve all undoubtedly asked yourselves the same questions we did, and no doubt came to the same conclusions.”
“Since the copycat has murdered three Powell Agency employees and three members of employees’ families, it would be reasonable to assume the copycat killed Shiloh,” Nic told the group. “We are not ruling out that possibility. However, there are two very good reasons to consider an alternate possibility—that the copycat did not kill Shiloh.”
As if they were a tag team supporting each other through this ordeal, Griff took over again from Nic. “One: It would have been virtually impossible for a stranger to have gotten inside Griffin’s Rest. Two: Whoever killed Shiloh did not slit her throat nor did he mutilate her body in any way.”
“How was she killed?” Michelle Allen asked, her voice quivering slightly.
“From what we can tell—and an autopsy will no doubt reveal—Shiloh was attacked, subdued, and her head held under the water at the edge of the lake until she drowned. There is bruising on Shiloh’s body and upper arms.”
“So you can see that the killer’s MO does not match that of the copycat,” Nic explained. “But that does not necessarily mean the copycat didn’t kill her. If the Copycat Carver is, as we believe he is, a professional assassin, it would have been easy enough for him to alter his method.”
“But if the odds of the copycat breaching Powell security are slim to none, then we have to broaden our search and accept the possibility that someone on the Powell staff killed Shiloh,” Maleah said aloud what she knew everyone there was thinking.
Luke drove down Chequers Street until he reached St. Peters at the southern end of the main street in St. Albans. Then he headed down Hollywell and turned onto Sopwell Lane.
“There it is,” Meredith said. “The Goat Inn. It looks like a nice place.”
“There’s no point in going back to London tonight,” Luke told her. “I’ll see if they have a couple of rooms here. If they do, you can rest for a while after we eat lunch and maybe even take a nap.”
When she opened her mouth to argue, he held up his hand in a Stop gesture. “Remember our deal. You’re going to trust me to take care of you.”
She nodded.
After parking the rental car, they got out and walked into the Goat Inn in the old centre of St. Albans. The former coaching inn was now a bed and breakfast that also provided home-cooked meals.
When Luke tried to book two rooms, he was told that only one was available. “It’s a nice sunny room,” the proprietor told him. “And it has two beds.”
Luke booked the room, explained the situation to Meredith, and much to his surprise, she didn’t complain.
“I trust you,” she told him.
After lunch—hot baguettes, with ale for him and bottled water for her—they went upstairs to the nice sunny room. As it turned out their room was small and neat with white walls, blue curtains at the single window, and two beds with white and blue coverlets and blue throw pillows. One bed was a double and the other a twin.
“Lie down and rest,” Luke told her. “I’ll run out and see if I can pick up a few necessities like toothbrushes, deodorant and—” he ran his fingers across his jaw “—a razor.”
“You won’t
go far, will you?”
“No, I won’t go far. Just lock the door when I leave and don’t let anyone in while I’m gone.”
When Luke returned with a small bag of toiletries that he had purchased at a local drugstore called Boots on St. Peters Street, he had checked on Meredith. After he found her sleeping soundly, he went back downstairs, drank a bottled lager beer and telephoned Griff.
“Meredith thinks she can find Linden,” Luke told Griff. “We’ve traveled north of London and have been eliminating village after village.”
“Linden may not be in the UK after all,” Griff said.
“What makes you think he might not be here? Meredith seems pretty certain that she is slowly but surely zeroing in on him.”
“Someone killed Shiloh Whitman last night,” Griff told him. “One of the guards patrolling the grounds found her body a little after daybreak this morning.”
“And you think it was the Copycat Carver. Was her throat slit?”
“No. She was attacked and held down in the lake until she drowned.”
“Then it may not have been the copycat.”
“Yeah, my gut tells me it wasn’t.”
“I believe Linden is in England. Between Meredith’s weird sixth sense and Mitchum’s team of experts, it’s only a matter of time until we find him.”
“Even if Linden is in England and you can track him down and eliminate him, doing that will solve only one of our problems. If Linden didn’t kill Shiloh that means someone inside Griffin’s Rest killed her, possibly someone employed by York.” Griff paused for a brief moment. “And then there’s York himself. Until we find the man masquerading as Malcolm York, no one I care about, no one I employ and no member of their family will be safe.”
Chapter 34
He would not depend on underlings to make this very important telephone call, as he had originally planned. No, he had decided that he wanted the pleasure of issuing this specific order himself. As he placed the call, he thought about Griffin Powell, a man he hated with every fiber of his being.
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