A Billionaire's Redemption (13 page)

“Let it go for me,” he muttered against her throbbing flesh. His tongue swirled across her, and she lurched in shock as her entire body clenched and then exploded with an electric tingle that shot from her core to every extremity on a violent spasm of pleasure.
What in the world was that?
Holy cow. Was
that
what all the fuss was about? How—in her admittedly not that frequent sexual encounters over the years—had she missed
that?

“Wow,” she gasped. “Do that again!”

Gabe laughed against her inner thigh. “My pleasure, ma’am.” His mouth closed on her again, and in mere seconds, her swollen flesh was tightening, the explosion building deep within her, growing, growing, until she cried out her release on a shudder of ecstasy that swept through her like chain lightning. She fell back against the leather, panting.

“Still with me?” Gabe asked against her belly.

“Coming back down to earth slowly,” she replied, more than a little dazed.

“Mmm. That’s how I like my women.”

“Boneless and stunned?”

“Stunned?” he questioned.

“I’ve never, umm, well, just wow,” she mumbled, abruptly embarrassed at how green she really was at this sex stuff.

“Never done that or never reacted like that?” he asked, lifting up on one elbow beside her to look down at her.

Her face exploded into fiery heat that could only be the mother of all blushes. “Neither,” she confessed.

“That was your first orgasm?” he exclaimed.

She squeezed her eyes shut in mortification. If possible, her face heated up a few more degrees Kelvin.

And then his mouth was on her forehead, kissing her face all over as his fingertips caressed her body lightly through the satin gown. “Wanna do it again?” he murmured against the corner of her mouth.

“Yes!” she blurted.

He laughed richly. “You women have all the luck. You get to have as many of those as you want until you fall unconscious of exhaustion.”

She couldn’t help but reply, “That sounds absolutely amazing.”

He laughed again. “Sex till complete exhaustion it is.”

He pushed up off the sofa and reached down for her hands, still plastered to the arm of his sofa. He lifted her to her feet, and she was shocked at how wobbly her legs were. His hands took bunches of satin at her hips and raised the gown up over her head, blatantly skimming his palms over her curves as he went.

He stepped back for a moment to stare at her standing there in just the thong. With a smile, he moved close once more to hook a finger under the lingerie and whisk it down her body, as well.

“Better,” he murmured. “The firelight looks even sexier than that dress on your skin.”

And with those words, he banished any shame or self-consciousness she might have been feeling. He was still wearing his tuxedo trousers, with a satin stripe down their sides, emphasizing the length and power of his thighs. She reached for his waistband and he grinned down at her as she hooked both pants and briefs and stripped them off him.

He was more than ready for her and she, too, stepped back to take a long look at him. The firelight made him look like a savage, strong and wild and untamed. And yet, he was beautiful, too. Someone ought to carve a statue of him and put it in a museum.

“You okay?” he murmured.

She gazed up into his eyes. “I’m fine. I keep telling you I feel perfectly safe with you.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he muttered half under his breath.

“Why not?”

He looked over his shoulder into the fire before admitting, “Because of some of the things I want to do to you, Miss Merris.”

“Show me?”

His gaze snapped back to hers, blazing more brightly than the fire. “Are you sure?”

“You promised to make me go unconscious of exhaustion,” she reminded him.

Who knew a gaze so dark could burn so bright? It seared into her, promising exhaustion and more. He stepped forward, swept her into his arms, and burned the night down around her.

* * *

Willa woke to a weight across her middle. Even in sleep, Gabe had a possessive arm thrown across her, claiming her as his. She took in the morning light in his bedroom, which was as rustic and comfortable as the rest of the bungalow. Funny how this place was as much a part of Gabe as his high-tech condo in Dallas.

She took inventory of her body, which felt unfamiliar to her. She’d had no idea it was capable of the excesses of pleasure to which Gabe had brought it last night. This morning she felt limp. A little achy here and there, but overall, glorious. No wonder women raved about him in the bedroom. Not that she planned to add to the gossip about him any time soon.

What the other women had failed to mention was how sweet and funny and considerate he could also be. Yes, he’d demanded everything she had to give to him and had not allowed her to hide any part of herself from him. But he’d never made her feel anything other than special and beautiful and sexy. He’d fundamentally changed how she viewed herself. Her body. Her sensuality. For the first time in her life, she felt like a woman.

He stirred, his arm tightening around her, pulling her closer against his side. His mouth moved lazily in her hair. “Morning,” he mumbled.

She turned into him, looping her arms around his neck. “Good morning, indeed,” she murmured back.

His eyes opened and a smile gleamed in them. “You’re even more beautiful the morning after. Women the planet over would kill to look like you with no makeup on, and their hair tousled around them like that.”

She smiled up at him with a new confidence she’d never had before. Not until Gabe Dawson had loved her. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

His visage went surprisingly serious. “Actually, I’ve never said that to a woman before. And I meant it when I said it to you.”

Warmth unfolded low in her belly that had nothing to do with lust. “You really are a special man. Thank you so much for last night.”

A crack of laughter escaped him. “Honey, that’s my line. I’m the one who should be thanking you. Hell, I should be doing it on bended knee with dozens of roses in my arms.”

“I prefer gardenias. Roses are too sweet and overwhelming for me.”

“Duly noted.” He kissed the tip of her nose and rolled over onto his back, taking her with him by virtue of his arm around her shoulders. “What shall we do today?” he asked reflectively.

“Don’t you have an empire to run?”

He shrugged beneath her ear. “It’ll run itself for a few days.”

Since when did he blow off his company for a woman? The way she heard it, he took business calls in the middle of sex. Although, having experienced his total focus firsthand, she had to question the quality of the woman’s lovemaking who’d reported that salacious little tidbit about him. Nonetheless, he had a solid reputation as a workaholic.

She was definitely on board with the notion of spending the day in bed with him. She couldn’t get enough of him. And not just the sex. Just being skin-to-skin with him like this renewed her spirit. Healed her wounded soul. She felt like a woman again, cherished and whole. They lay there for several minutes of relaxed quiet, which was another thing she loved about him. He didn’t feel a compulsion to fill the silences with meaningless noise.

But then the ring of a telephone shattered the quiet. He reached out to pick up his cell phone and look at the incoming number. He swore quietly and put the phone to his ear. “Dawson, here.”

She snuggled against his side, relishing his heat and strength as his fingers twined lazily in her hair. All of a sudden, his entire body tensed.

“What?” he burst out. “When?” A pause. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She sat up in alarm beside him. “What’s wrong?”

“The police got a video of my wife.”

His wife.
He called Melinda his wife. Not his ex-wife. Willa rolled away from him and climbed out of his bed hastily, all but running for the living room and the scanty protection of her clothing.
He’d called her his wife.

Chapter 11

G
abe leaped into jeans and a shirt and was relieved to see Willa dressed in her gown and waiting by the door when he came out of his bedroom.

“I’ll drop you off at your place on my way to the police station,” he told her.

She nodded, and followed obediently as he rushed out the front door. He opened her door impatiently, nearly slamming it on her skirt in his haste. The short ride to her house was silent.

He pulled up to the curb out front and she said only, “I hope Melinda’s all right.”

“Me, too,” he bit out.

He peeled away from the curb without watching Willa to her front door. It was nine in the morning, after all. The bad guys were only coming after her at night.

Thankfully, Vengeance was a small town and no destination was more than a few minutes away. He pulled up outside the police department and was not surprised to see reporters camped out on the front steps. If he were the new sheriff, his first order of business would be to plug the leak in the Vengeance police force.

Girding himself to face the grilling, he stepped out of his Escalade and was immediately assaulted by a chorus of shouted questions.

He raised his voice to be heard over the cacophony. “I don’t know anything. I have no comment, and I’m sure you already know as much or more than I do.” That brought a few dry chuckles from the press. Yup, definitely an informant in the building.

He elbowed aside a newcomer to the Vengeance coverage who hadn’t learned to stay the hell out of his way yet, and jogged up the steps to city hall and the police department inside.

Officer Radebaugh met him just inside the door. The young cop struck him as clumsy but well-meaning, and not entirely incompetent at his job. Gabe nodded at the officer. “How’s Melinda? How much does the kidnapper want?”

“There’s no ransom demand. Would you like to see the video?”

Duh.
“Of course.”

“We’ve got a video set up in the conference room. An analyst from the FBI is looking at it now.”

Gabe followed the cop down a short hall to a dim room dominated by a long conference table, disordered chairs and an old-fashioned roll-down screen at one end of the room. A laptop projected a currently still image up on the wall. Gabe stopped, shocked.

Melinda sat in a wooden chair, her short blond hair disheveled, her arms restrained behind her back in some unseen manner. Although her ankles weren’t visible, her posture indicated that they were tied to the chair, as well. The collar of her blouse was torn, and she looked haggard. A lurid bruise lit up her left eye. She looked like she hadn’t bathed or slept in days.

Radebaugh spoke from behind Gabe. “This is Professor Grayson’s husband.”

An attractive brunette woman looked up briefly from her contemplation of the still image, then went right back to her study. “I’m Agent Delaney. Play the video from the beginning, Green,” the woman ordered absently.

Deputy Green made a face at the woman’s back as he hit a button on the laptop sitting in front of him on the table.

Gabe watched the video of Melinda intently. Her voice was as assertive as ever as she said, or maybe read, “My name is Melinda Grayson. I am alive and being held against my will. I am unharmed as of now, and as long as the police call off their search for me, I will remain that way. Further instructions will be forthcoming that, if followed to the letter, will ultimately result in my release.”

The video stopped.

“That’s it?” Gabe exclaimed.

“Yup,” Radebaugh answered.

The FBI analyst turned abruptly. “Would you say the syntax of that speech was similar to your wife’s typical patterns of sentence construction and inflection?”

Gabe blinked, startled at the question. “Are you asking if that sounded like Melinda?”

“Yes,” Agent Delaney replied impatiently.

He considered it briefly. “That sounded exactly like Melinda. If someone told her to say that she was unharmed and instructions would follow, that would be pretty much exactly how she would say it.”

The analyst tapped a front tooth with a long, manicured fingernail. “Then why the explicit statement that she is being held against her will? It’s a strange assertion to add into this sort of communication. Of course she’s being held against her will. We can see that she’s tied to a chair.” Delaney frowned and then added, “Dr. Grayson strikes me as an extremely intelligent person who takes pride in her intellect.”

“You would be correct,” Gabe replied drily.

“Then it would not be her style to make such a blatantly obvious observation?” the analyst asked tersely.

“She’s generally scornful of people who state the obvious,” Gabe answered, frowning. Now that the agent mentioned it, that had been a weird thing for Melinda to say.

“Watch it again, Mr. Grayson. Does anything else stand out to you?”

He would have corrected Agent Delaney’s mistake about his name, but the tape started to play again. He perched on the edge of the conference table to watch it more closely.

“Again, please,” he murmured.

After about three more times through it, the analyst asked, “Anything?”

“Well,” he answered slowly, “it seems a little strange how forceful she sounds. Don’t get me wrong. She’s nothing if not an assertive woman. But I would have expected her to sound a little more...cowed...by the experience of being kidnapped and held against her will. She’s not accustomed to much of anything happening against her will.”

Of course, maybe he’d been spending too much time around sweet, gentle Willa Merris. By comparison, Melinda was about as soft and feminine as a Mack Truck. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, though, he felt bad about it. He shouldn’t compare the two women. They were as different as night and day. And he owed Melinda a certain loyalty. They’d been married once, after all.

He added, “Maybe Melinda is playing some sort of head game with her captors. It would be her style to manipulate them as much as possible. Could she be signaling us as to what she’s doing?”

Lord knew Melinda had played plenty of head games with him during their short marriage. When he’d finally gotten wise and started calling her out on it, she’d poo-pooed his anger, saying it was part of her job as a sociologist to experiment on the people around her. They’d had quite a fight over it, as he recalled, with him insisting he didn’t want to be her lab rat, and her railing that he was being oversensitive and childish.

Most of their fights had come down to that. He’d never been enough man for her, not smart enough, not mature enough, not intellectual enough to satisfy her. He’d spent their entire marriage feeling wholly inadequate, and scrambling to play catch up with the meteoric rise of her career.

Even now, when he was a billionaire for crying out loud, Melinda accused him of being a slave to the almighty dollar and of not having achieved anything of real importance. Not like her—author of multiple books, famous lecturer, professor, intellectual and sought-after commentator.

Agent Delaney tilted her head thoughtfully. “Does she have enough psychological training to attempt to manipulate her captor or captors?”

Gabe snorted. “The woman’s brilliant. And her favorite hobby is messing with people.”

“It’s an interesting theory, Mr. Grayson.”

Gabe pointedly ignored Deputy Green’s smirk as the FBI agent called him by the wrong name again.

The woman distracted Gabe by asking, “You used the plural, captors, when referring to whoever kidnapped your wife. Why is that?”

“I just assumed...” he trailed off. “You’d have to know Melinda to understand. She’s a formidable woman. The idea of a single person overwhelming her and kidnapping her just doesn’t seem plausible. It would have to be several people.”

“She’s a fighter?” Delaney asked.

“That’s one way to describe her,” Gabe replied. “Combative. Aggressive. Self-confident to a fault. She wouldn’t go down without a fight.”

“And yet,” the analyst commented speculatively, “not a thing was out of place in her home. Not a chair overturned, not a pencil on the floor. Nothing whatsoever to indicate that there was any kind of struggle.”

Gabe nodded. “I know. That part baffles me, too. It makes no sense at all that someone just walked in, knocked her out and was able to drag her out of her home without leaving a single sign behind.”

“Can you think of anyone she might have left home with willingly? Perhaps not realizing she was being kidnapped?” the agent pressed.

“I’ve been over this and over this with the police,” Gabe answered on a sigh. “I can’t think of anyone. But then, I don’t know any of her students or colleagues. I’m fairly out of touch with her life these days.”

“And why’s that?”

Deputy Green snorted behind Gabe.
Jackass.
“Because we’ve been divorced for nearly ten years.”

Agent Delaney, to her credit, looked chagrined. “My mistake. You seemed so invested in her safety when you came in here....” The woman turned back to the screen without finishing the observation. Uncomfortable silence filled the room.

Deputy Green commented snidely, “Guess we know who wore the pants in that relationship.”

Gabe’s jaw tightened until he thought he was going to crack a molar. He had no illusions that Melinda had tried to wear the pants in the marriage and that had been one of the reasons it broke up. He’d wanted a partnership with her, not to follow her around like a pet puppy.

But it wasn’t as simple as walking away from her. She knew exactly how to get her hooks into people, and she’d buried hers deep in his psyche. Hell, it was part of why he refused to remarry. He never wanted to be that vulnerable to—or victimized by—another human being again.

Gabe turned his back on Green and murmured to Officer Radebaugh, “Keep me in the loop, okay?”

“Of course,” the young officer replied, startled.

Gabe beat a retreat before he put his fist through Deputy Green’s smirk.

He scowled his way through the reporters who, for once, seemed to catch a clue to leave him the hell alone. Either that, or their source inside the police station was so good, they didn’t need to bother him for details about Melinda’s tape.

When he got home, he took an overdue shower, which finally cooled down his temper. He wasn’t normally a particularly volatile person, but with both Willa and Melinda under serious threat, the strain had put him on edge.

Melinda had insisted that they have an amicable divorce, which in her world meant the two of them stayed in touch and occasionally went out to some event or other together. Given how vicious she could turn in an instant, it was easier to go out with her a few times a year than to make an active enemy of her.

And it wasn’t like he’d been a perfect husband. He’d been the one to go haring off to the far corners of the world in search of oil. She might have traveled a lot, but at least she’d stayed mostly on the same continent. Although truth be told, it was easy to be in the same room with Melinda and feel a million miles away from her. When she was working on an academic project, she’d never had time or attention for anything or anyone else.

He made himself a bite to eat, and strolled out into his living room at loose ends since he’d planned to spend the day with Willa. But the phone call from the police had put a kink in that plan. He called her, but Willa’s cell phone went immediately to voice mail.

He sighed. As a senator, she might not necessarily pick up her own messages. Hence, he left a generic message thanking her for last night and hoping they could do it again soon. It wasn’t the one he’d have liked to leave for her, telling her that she’d blown him away, he couldn’t get enough of her and would she please consent to spending many, many nights in his bed forthwith.

He watched the news, returned a few phone calls from the office and found himself pacing his living room impatiently in under an hour. He tried Willa’s number again. Still no answer. Damn. Sometimes he really hated dating busy women with careers that took precedence over him.

His rational self rolled its eyes at his selfishness, but his emotional side acknowledged that Melinda had done a number on him that he was now taking out on Willa. It wasn’t Will’s fault she’d been named to her father’s senate seat.

He would like to call again, but he didn’t want to make her feel like he was stalking her. She’d already had one too many creeps in her life. He glanced at his watch, frustrated. How much longer until he could reasonably call her again?

* * *

Willa stared at her cell phone in dismay. That was the fifth call today from Gabe. He was now calling her every hour on the hour, and his messages were getting steadily more urgent and taking on a tone of worry for her safety. She couldn’t avoid him forever, although she’d really love to. When Louise called, a strange note in her voice, and asked if Willa could swing by the big house, she jumped on the request.

The mansion was in an uproar when she arrived. Her mother was sobbing at the kitchen table, Louise was hovering over Minnie and wringing her hands, Louise’s son, Marcus, was striding around the garden with a shotgun and George was nowhere to be seen.

Willa couldn’t get a straight answer out of either of the women in the kitchen as to what was going on, other than it was just horrible and who would do such a thing? At a loss, Willa headed out for the backyard. Marcus wasn’t in view, but she caught sight of George’s broad-brimmed straw hat and headed for it.

“What’s going on?” she asked the older man.

“Never seen anything like it, ma’am. Dead animals keep showing up in the garden. First it was that rabbit. Then a cat, and today a deer. All of them have their heads cut off. Or more accurately, torn off.”

“Have you called the police?” Willa gasped.

“They think it’s a bobcat or a coyote.”

“A coyote wouldn’t take down a deer and tear its head off.”

“That’s what I told the cops, but they wouldn’t listen to me. City slickers don’t know nuthin’ about coyotes. It would take a pack of ’em to bring down a buck, and they’d eat it if they killed it. And there wasn’t a single mark on the rest of the carcass. Coyote would’ve hamstringed something big like that. Torn out its throat maybe, but not taken its entire head.”