“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.
“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
