“Never. But it’s very hot to see a woman pleasure herself. Go on, put your hand to your clit.”
Coming up on her knees, straddling him, she took her middle finger and delicately dipped it between her thighs, spreading the moisture she had generated just by rubbing his back all along and around her clit. He watched the motion intently, and his interest spurred her on.
“Stick your finger inside yourself.”
She closed her eyes briefly and obeyed. “I’m pretending it’s yours,” she murmured, fingering her wet, tingly passage, and suddenly he laughed and clutched her, rolling on top of her.
“You’re no fun,” he chided, as she heard the crinkle of foil and then he was pushing his cock into her, thick and pulsing and much more pleasurable than her own finger, if anybody was interested.
“You are,” she muttered.
He stretched her arms up above her head, linking his hands in hers as he started to move in her. Putting the soles of her feet flat on the mattress, she tilted her hips up to receive him.
“Open your eyes.”
She obeyed the soft command without really thinking. In fact, she hadn’t realized her eyes were closed. His heavily lashed eyes bore down on her, blue like the twilight filtering through the window. One lock of black hair fell forward, brushing her temple.
“I want you to look at me while I fuck you,” he said.
One long, slow thrust made her gasp with the shot of pleasure. Her fingers curled in his and she bit her lip, involuntarily letting her eyelids droop again as she arched against him.
“Look at me.”
The urgency of his plea as his cock set a more demanding rhythm caused her to lose herself in that blue stare again. “I am looking at you, Aaron.”
“Looking at me,” he continued to thrust hard, “while I fuck you. Say it.”
Her legs fell helplessly wider as he pushed his cock in even deeper. She sucked in a breath.
“While you…” He held her arms stretched above her, her body wide open for him below, his eyes asking something of her she couldn’t quite understand.
“While I fuck you,” he prompted, so low she almost couldn’t hear it.
“While you make love to me,” she whispered.
At her words, he let go of her hands and skimmed the back of his fingers along her jaw, staring down at her.
“While I make love to you,” he whispered.
The admission finally made her break eye contact, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder.
They came together, both of them shuddering.
Love. Such a dangerous word between them.
* * * * *
He couldn’t use the investment banker now. The man was close to useless. Once he’d found out about Samantha’s murder, the moron couldn’t stop asking about it. He’d even hinted that he knew some “people” who could arrange the same thing for Virginia Beckett.
The man was insane.
As if he would hire someone to do what he was so looking forward to doing himself.
Now, if he could just find out where that bitch and her boyfriend had flown off to. For all their silly precautions, he didn’t doubt their location would be easy enough to recover given his own facility with computers. By hacking into real estate databases, he could narrow it down to where Winston owned property. It would be a short step to checking credit card receipts to make a match. And even if they thought themselves too clever to use credit cards, he’d just discover what he needed to some other way.
There was a whole big internet out there to hack into.
It wouldn’t be long until Virginia Beckett was as dead as his poor forlorn Samantha.
* * * * *
Virginia and Aaron managed to make it out of bed the next morning, driven by hunger since they had skipped dinner the night before. They had barely finished the breakfast that was once again silently laid out for them when the phone rang. The shrill sound startled Virginia.
It wasn’t hard to get used to no sound other than the waves and her lover’s voice.
“Hey, Rye,” Aaron said when he picked up the receiver.
The call was still going on after a few minutes. Since Virginia could hear only half of Aaron’s conversation with his lawyer, she gave up trying to make sense of it and wandered out the front door. Aaron’s back was turned to her or else she would have gestured her intentions, but she was sure he’d figure it out.
It was just a few steps from the wide front porch down to the gravel path leading out to the ocean. Unless she was imagining it, the waves looked higher than they had the day of their arrival on the island. The path sloped downward for a hundred feet or so until it met the wooden steps leading down to the water’s edge. She glanced back to the house, wondering if she should tell Aaron, but shook off the impulse. God, what was she, three years old? She could certainly take a walk down to the beach by herself.
Her sneakers afforded her a steady step on what did not appear to be too steady steps. The lack of a railing and the steep angle added to the impression that this jaunt might not be for the faint-hearted. The view when she made it down to the bottom, though, was worth it. A grassy bank gave way to a thin strip of sand that traveled the length of the island as far as she could see. Lest the sand give the misimpression this was a harbor, huge boulders dotted the waves only a few feet out and Virginia knew from what Aaron had said that below the water line further rocks lurked, capable of ripping off the bottom of an unsuspecting boat.
She was perfectly safe on the island, she reminded herself. The sun beating down on her, the wind flipping her hair around, the ocean providing the rhythmic soundtrack to it all, she could just curl up right now and fall asleep. Except for the fact she’d just gotten out of bed. Time for a little exercise…other than the kind Aaron was regularly giving her every hour or so.
Except for the house up on the bluff and the wooden stairs leading thereto, the beach was empty of anything except the natural adornments. Slipping her sneakers and socks off, she trudged barefoot in one random direction. Maybe there were caves to explore or rocks to climb. Lost in her own thoughts, she at first did not hear the voice calling. When it registered, she paused and looked back in the direction she had come from, certain Aaron was following her and flagging her down to wait for him. But when she turned back, only empty sand greeted her.
She looked around in confusion until a figure up on the bluff caught her attention. The cape made it hard to tell, but it didn’t look like either of the middle-aged caretakers. The figure was too slender, the blonde hair whipping around the girl too long and thick. Too far away to see who it was, Virginia started in that direction, but this time she did hear Aaron’s voice, behind her. A glance again at the deserted beach showed him now running down those rickety stairs and then at a full clip along the beach toward her. She headed back, but his speedy pace meant he met her much farther than half-way.
And he wasn’t even breathing hard. Disgusting. She’d been exercising all her life and she wouldn’t have been able to keep that pace up.
“Why the hell did you head off by yourself?” Hands on hips, intense blue eyes focused on her, he might not have been breathing hard, but he was breathing fire.
The challenge in his voice annoyed her. “I didn’t realize I was restricted in my movements. I’m not in custody or anything, am I?”
“Yeah, protective custody. It’s protecting my sanity. When I got off the phone and turned around to find you gone, my heart practically stopped.”
Hard to stay mad at a pronouncement like that. “I just went for a walk on the beach. No big deal.”
He slipped his hand into hers. “You want to go for a walk on the beach, we’ll go for a walk on the beach. Together.”
She was tempted to argue a little more, but the warm feel of his big hand in hers stopped her. She nodded shortly and they began to walk again down the beach.
“Is there anything down here?” she asked, to change the subject.
“No, not really. The Vincent’s house is up on that bluff there, but you can’t see it from the beach.”
The warm sand against her toes and the sun on her face almost lulled her into forgetting. Almost. “The Vincents? That reminds me. Do they have any kids?”
“I think they have a grown daughter. Why?”
“That must have been it. I saw her up there.”
Aaron looked in the direction she indicated. “Where?”
“She’s gone now. But she was there a minute ago. Right before you called down to me.”
“I don’t think so, Virginia. Their daughter lives in California, I believe.”
“Couldn’t she be visiting them?”
“Not without my permission. No. They know that.”
They had stopped walking and she was afraid from the look of concentration on Aaron’s face that he was about to go up and deliver a very stern lecture. Perhaps the girl had been here before they came and her parents didn’t want to risk their boss ousting her from the island because he and his girlfriend were there. That must be why she disappeared so quickly.
Unless…no, but it couldn’t be a woman after her, could it?
“Let’s go up and talk to the Vincents.” Aaron started to tug her along, but she resisted.
“Let’s not. It could have been my imagination.”
“If you saw someone, that’s not good.”
“It was probably just Mrs. Vincent.”
“Let’s see.”
The Vincents’ house was not accessible by a stairway and even though she considered herself pretty fit she would never have attempted to climb the craggy hill that led up to them. She and Aaron walked back to and up the stairs they had come down on and circled around along the bluff to the simple cape cod that housed the caretakers…both of whom claimed complete ignorance of any girl, related to them or not, in a cape or not.
“If anyone like that had come on the island, Mr. Winston, we would have heard the alarms.” Mrs. Vincent barely halted her canning of some blueberry concoction to point that out.
The cape cod’s kitchen was smaller and cozier than the one in the main house. Mr. Vincent picked up the quaint teapot on the stove and gestured toward them with it. “Tea?”
“No thanks,” Virginia responded.
“And you heard, er, saw nothing?” he asked them both.
“Nothing.”
“Do you have a picture of your, ah,” he glanced at Virginia, “your daughter?”
If the Vincents were confused by Aaron’s question, they were either too polite or too dependent on him for a job to say so. Mr. Vincent left the kitchen and came back with a picture of an Asian-looking girl. It was in a frame, but it looked more like a mug shot to Virginia than a family photo.
“That’s Melissa,” Mrs. Vincent said, adding with dignity, “she’s adopted. The day they handed that baby girl to us right off the plane from China was the best day of our lives.”
Mr. Vincent, contemplating the photo, nodded. “Truth is we’d like to have her come visit sometime soon, Mr. Winston, but she’s real busy at Berkeley. Doctorate takes so doggone long.”
Virginia shook her head no to Aaron in a mute signal.
“You go on outside for a minute, Virginia. I want to talk to the Vincents alone.”
Worried he was going to interrogate them further or worse, she resisted. “Let’s go, Aaron. We’ve taken enough of their time.”
After a moment, he nodded and they went out.
“So that wasn’t the daughter you saw,” he said grimly as he and Virginia headed back to the main house.
“At this point, I’m not so sure I even saw anybody, Aaron. Maybe it was a bush or something and a trick of the light made me think I saw a girl. It was far away.”
“I don’t know. I don’t like it.”
Once they made it back to the house, a check of the panels controlling the sensors in the harbor confirmed they were still operational and hadn’t been tripped. But no matter how Virginia tried to trivialize her sighting of the girl or acted as if it was just her imagination, the incident spooked both of them. She insisted nonetheless on heading back down the rickety stairs onto the beach and continuing their aborted walk.
As they walked on the sand, hand in hand, Aaron thoughtfully looked out to the waves that were cresting much higher than she’d ever seen them.
She prompted, “So what did Rye say?”
“He said the dead girl’s name was Samantha Mallory.”
“So have the police found out what she was doing at the funeral home?”
“No, not yet. But they’re sure now she was killed elsewhere and then dumped there.”
Virginia shivered. “The poor girl.”
“Apparently, she was just scraping by in the city on a waitress salary. She’d moved there recently from Boston, but the police are still trying to piece it all together. One of her neighbors claimed she’d moved there for a man, but didn’t know his name. Said he looked like a druggie from what she saw of him, though apparently a well-dressed druggie. The police artist is working with the neighbor on a sketch and maybe that will lead to something.”
“Is there any connection they can find between this Samantha and either of us?”
“Not yet. Other than her resemblance to you, of course. They speculate she might have been mistaken for you.”
“But why bring her body to the funeral home where we were locked in, then?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to make sense of it all. But there’s something else. I asked Rye to look into your brother-in-law.”
“Brian?”
“Yes. It turns out he owes a lot of the wrong people a lot of money. Maybe your death is his way of trying to get access to the funds he needs to pay them back.”
“I can’t believe that Brian could be behind something like this.”
“I’m not saying he is. Not without further evidence, but it bears keeping in mind. People aren’t always in their right mind when they’re hooked on drugs.”
She looked out at the waves, horrified to think of what the effect on Nora and the kids would be if Brian were involved. Lost in her thoughts, she felt Aaron’s light kiss on the top of her head. “For all I kid about you being a goody-two-shoes, Virginia, even I have to admit there are some lines you can’t cross. It’s too hard to come back. Drugs is one of them.”
“Are you speaking from personal experience?”
He grinned. “Sure, let’s get all my dirty underwear out here.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I never took drugs, Virginia, but I saw a lot of people around me lose their souls to the stuff.”
She shouldn’t want to know all this about him. She shouldn’t feel as if she wanted to crawl into his skin. It was too much. Too needy. He would probably only push her away.
The arms that pulled her closer surprised her. When he buried his head in the crook of her shoulder, her arms reciprocated. He kissed her cheek and lifted his head. “I want to share everything with you, Virginia. But I’m afraid it’ll scare you. And I couldn’t bear to see you turn away from me now.”
“I wouldn’t, Aaron.” And she knew it was true. “But we have plenty of time to get to know each other. You tell me when you’re ready.”
The kiss they shared registered as sweet rather than sexual.
By the time they made it round a winding bend in the beach, Virginia noticed a tall white structure on a strip of land jutting into the ocean. “Your island has its very own lighthouse? How cool.”
“Faux lighthouse. Another of Captain Seabridge’s conceits. He had it built, but it was never operational, which didn’t exactly matter since there was no need for one out here anyway.”
As they got closer to the structure, Virginia saw that it was smaller than a real lighthouse, but still at least two stories. The weathered exterior could have used a coat of paint. Otherwise, it looked sturdy. “Is there anything inside?”
“Not much.
Actually, I haven’t been inside in years.”
“Can I see?”
Chapter Nine
When they got inside the little lighthouse, the first thing they saw was a winding wrought-iron staircase that disappeared up into the ceiling. No windows on the first floor, just the staircase and a dusty wood floor.
“Oh, let’s go up, Aaron.”
“If you like. Let me go first, though. I’m not too sure how sturdy this staircase is.”
It held both their weight as they made it to the top, but that was the most that could be said for the sturdiness of the staircase. It shook and creaked the whole way up, almost making Virginia regret the impulse to explore. The top floor was worth getting to, though. Circular in nature, of course, the room sported huge windows looking out to the sea, with assorted implements that seemed vaguely nautical strategically placed on tables in between.
“It’s lovely,” Virginia said.
Aaron looked around and then shrugged. “It’s deserted, at least.” He perched one shoulder against the interior stone wall of the lighthouse, folding his arms across his chest and considering her. “Do you ever play games, Virginia?”
“What kind of games?” she asked suspiciously, peering out the window at what she suddenly noticed were dark storm clouds outside. If they didn’t head back soon, they were likely to get caught here in a rainstorm.
“Well, what if I played Captain Seabridge and you were the jilted lover tempting me into one last tumultuous round of sex before you fling yourself out of the lighthouse window?”
She jerked back from her contemplation of the storm clouds. “My God, is that how she did it?”
“No clue. It’s just a game.”
Games which involved preludes to her own demise did not have an inviting ring to them. She was living them. No need to play. “I have a better idea. I can go with you pretending to be Captain Seabridge, but instead of making me the jilted lover, or the demented bride for that matter, let’s dial back to an earlier Captain Seabridge adventure.”
“What one would that be?”
“The one where his ship gets overrun with pirates and he’s captured.”
Executive Perks Page 21