Dead by Morning (33 page)
There she is. See her. She’s all alone, as if she’s waiting for you.
Slipping away had been much easier than Shiloh had thought it would be. Perhaps because she had been keeping to herself so much lately, no one really cared where she was or what she was doing. And although the guards roamed the grounds day and night, she had been able to avoid them without a problem. And even the two agents staying at the sanctuary, Ms. Allen and Mr. Redmond, had no idea she wasn’t sound asleep in her bed. After all, they assumed that all of Dr. Meng’s protégés would request permission to leave and then be given an escort.
She promised herself that she wouldn’t stay outside for very long, only long enough to clear her head and relieve the nagging restlessness keeping her on edge. Even with the bright moonlight, darkness filled the night, and only the security lights around the sanctuary kept the hovering black shadows at bay.
As she followed the clear path along the lake, one used by residents and guests alike for morning and evening jogs and leisurely walks, she paused occasionally to look out over the river. A feeling of calm began growing inside her and ever so gradually the restlessness that had forced her out into the night subsided, leaving her in peace.
She heard footsteps behind her. Had one of the guards seen her? Or had one of the others followed her?
Shiloh turned and stared into the darkness. “Hello. Is anyone there?”
Silence.
It must have been a nocturnal animal scurrying through the underbrush or perhaps it had been nothing more than the wind. She turned around, breathed in the fresh night air and looked at the moonlight dancing on the water.
Odd how bright the moonlight is. Shimmering. Intense. And very white.
Mesmerized by the unnatural radiance of light, she moved closer to the water’s edge. Fixated on the glow, she gasped as she realized what she saw was not moonlight, but the reflection of her own aura. Transcendent. Spiritual. Non-physical.
A white aura often signified a new undesignated energy in a person’s aura. Or it was a harbinger of—
There it was again. The same noise she had heard earlier. Footsteps directly behind her.
She turned, sighed heavily, and said, “It’s you. I thought I heard someone. Have you been following me?”
“Yes.”
Even in the darkness, Shiloh saw the other person’s aura, heavy swirls of gray and black smoke, dirty, muddy colors indicating dark thoughts and fear and negative energy. And in that moment, seconds before her life ended, Shiloh understood why her aura had been such an intensely bright white.
A glowing white aura was also a harbinger of death.
Chapter 33
Maleah and Derek barely made it to her room before tearing at each other’s clothes. The moment Derek kicked the door shut behind them, his mouth and hands otherwise occupied, Maleah attacked the buttons on his shirt. When she ripped open his shirt, he slid his hands up under her blouse and paused to fondle her breasts through her bra.
“Lift your arms,” he told her.
She did. He pulled her buttoned blouse over her head, yanking at the sleeves to free her arms. He threw the blouse on the floor. Repaying him in kind, she shoved his shirt off his shoulders and tossed it on the floor on top of her blouse.
Derek walked her backward toward her bed, all the while unbuttoning her slacks and lowering the zipper as she unbuckled his belt and unsnapped his jeans. When he toppled her over onto the bed, he rose up long enough to yank her slacks down her legs and then divest himself of his jeans.
She reached for him, wanting the feel of him against her, needing to touch him, kiss him, love him. He straddled her, his long, hairy legs brushing her smooth legs as he looked down at her, his gaze moving appreciatively over her from face to thighs.
“If I tell you how absolutely gorgeous you are, will you slap me?” he asked, a playful grin curving the corners of his mouth.
“Not if you don’t mind my telling you that you’re pretty gorgeous yourself, Mr. Lawrence.” She reached up and caressed his chest, loving the feel of the curly hair covering the well-defined muscles.
“I don’t mind at all. As a matter of fact, I insist you tell me.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet you make all your women feed your ego with flattery, don’t you?”
Bracing on his elbows, he lowered himself until his lips reached hers. “As far as I’m concerned, there are no other women, and there never have been. There’s only you, Blondie, only you.”
Emotion caught in her throat. Damn it, she should have known he would know the perfect thing to say. After all, he was a renowned charmer, wasn’t he?
“How many women have believed that smooth line?” she asked as she nuzzled his neck.
He kissed her ear.
She shivered.
“You’re the first one I’ve used it on, honey. How do you like it?” He circled her ear with the tip of his tongue, and then took her earlobe between his teeth and nipped playfully.
“I like it just fine,” she said. “And just for tonight, I’ll pretend you mean it.”
Gazing into her eyes, he reached under her to unhook her bra. With their gazes solidly melded, he eased the bra down her shoulders, taking his time, letting the soft material rake over her hard, sensitive nipples.
She gasped.
He smiled.
They didn’t break eye contact until he laid the bra aside and looked down at her bare breasts.
“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 insider 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
.
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 territory. 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.”
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