With my cheeks turning red, I hurried to hug him and buried my head in his chest.
"When she came back she was acting weird," I said. "She had this diamond ring, said these things about you."
He hugged me tight and kissed the top of my head.
"That girl, like so many others here, has her problems. I'm not saying she's trouble, I'm just saying she's a little... how do I put it politely? She's a little temperamental."
"You're telling me."
It was starting to make sense but there were still so many unanswered questions. What were Phaedra and Jet arguing about and how was Lincoln involved?
"Linx?" I looked up into his kind, intelligent eyes. "Something's going on in this house."
He glanced away and stared at the floor. "
"Like what?"
"I don't know," I replied and slid my hands beneath his jacket. "Something weird."
He smoothed the hair down on my head and squeezed me.
"It was a mistake to bring you here," he said. "You deserve better."
Rubbing the small of my back, he led me toward the front door.
"I want you to run upstairs and pack your things," he said. "You're coming home with me."
"What?" I gasped. "Like move in with you?"
"Why not?" he grinned, "If we're falling into a whirlwind romance we may as well go all the way. Come home with me. I promise you'll like it better than this place."
"Sure," I said, my heart racing as I stepped back indoors. "I'll be two minutes."
Running upstairs two at a time, I grabbed all my belongings that I'd not even packed away yet in under ten seconds and fled back down the stairs.
"Won't Phaedra be mad at me for leaving?" I asked as I flung a suitcase at him.
"Who cares," he said with a laugh.
Running across the road to his car like two teenagers sneaking away from their parents, we jumped inside, laughing and kissing with my things scattered over the backseat.
"I feel like I'm doing something really crazy," I said.
"Me too."
Taking one last look over at the house, I saw the light turn on in Phaedra's room. Slowly, her fingers curled around the curtains and I held my breath.
"Good riddance," I whispered to myself.
"Good riddance indeed," Lincoln replied.
As he twisted the key in the ignition, something caught his eye in the wing mirror.
"Wait a minute, who's this?"
A blacked out Mercedes glided into the driveway like a ghost. We watched with baited breath as a stocky man in a black suit stepped out and walked up to the front door with the gait of a cowboy. As the security light switched on, his face glistened with sweat and he tugged at the front of his shirt where his tie hung loose around his chest.
"Who the hell is that?"
The house never struck me as the sort of place to have visitors, especially not after midnight, and especially not like this man.
"I know him," said Lincoln. "He's a cop."
"A cop?"
What the hell is going on now?
I watched as he pressed the doorbell and the light upstairs went out.
"I think we need to get outta here," Lincoln said as he pressed on the accelerator. "Something tells me this isn't good news."
Chapter Nine
Franklin
This was the last place I wanted to be. After being at the office for almost eighteen hours, I only had two things on my mind, beer and bed but of course I'd never be so lucky. When the call came that a fourth body was found on the beach, I felt as though my bowels were about to flop out of me.
"Please don't tell me she's a redhead," I'd begged down the phone but of course it was.
Roberta was found with the same red spiral tattoo and puncture wounds as the others but unlike the other three, she had something else, a baby's rattle hanging from her neck by her own pantyhose. It had been over an hour since I stepped away from the crime scene but I couldn't shake the image of her blue, frozen body in the sand, naked with the rattle resting on her chest, its cheery pink plastic looking so surreal and morbid amongst the scene.
Back at Waters House, I now had to explain what happened and I dreaded every second of it. Telling someone a loved one was killed was always the worst part of the job. I could remember more than a few times when I'd walked away from a family home with tears in my own eyes. Yet, I knew this was going to be different.
The old woman who ran the place gave me the creeps. There was something about the brightness in her eyes that sent a chill down my back, something about the way she looked into my face that reminded me of old gypsy fortune tellers along the beachfront as a child. If someone told me she was a witch I wouldn't doubt them. Not that I believed in that kind of stuff but I knew people like her could with sometimes fatal consequences.
Pushing my finger into the doorbell, I pressed my shoulder into the doorway. I ached from head to toe. Someday when this was all over I'd get a day off. Not that I'd know what to do with it.
Behind me, something pricked up my ears. The sound of a car speeding away. I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing but smoke flying out the exhaust pipe of a fast disappearing sedan. A second later, the door opened.
"Detective Berger?"
"Hello, again," I said and stepped inside.
The old girl looked worse every time I saw her as though she was aging a year a day.
"Everything okay detective?" she asked, her fingers clutching her glasses.
"I'm afraid not."
Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Looking up, I saw a head of bleached blonde hair look over the banister.
"Back to bed young lady," Phaedra pointed her finger up the stairs and the blonde head shrunk away. "Please, this way."
She guided me into the lounge and gestured for me to take a seat but I remained standing. Somehow it seemed disrespectful to impart such terrible news from a position of comfort.
"Miss..."
"Collins," she reminded me.
"Miss Collins," I continued with my head bowed. "We found Roberta."
I was hoping by the tone of my voice she would guess what I meant but when I looked up, she was staring at me as though waiting for the punch line to a much anticipated joke.
"That's great! Where is she?"
I swallowed down my nerves and reached out for her old, wrinkled hand.
"I'm so sorry," I said, pursing my lips and looking at my shoes. "This won't be easy."
Her hand began to shake.
"You're not telling me..."
She clutched her fingers around mine and began to cry.
"No..." she whimpered.
"I'm sorry."
"No!"
She shot up and strode over to the window as she sobbed. I followed her over and placed a hand on her shoulder.
"The others," she sniffed. "Was it like them?"
She spun round to face me and I suddenly saw her eyes were dry despite her sobbing. The old girl... I knew there was something wrong about her. For a moment there I almost fell for her bad acting.
"She was murdered. On the beach with two needle marks-"
"And a spiral tattoo?" she interrupted.
I nodded.
"I'm sorry. We really did try to find her."
She pulled away and righted herself. Strangely, she strode over to the trash can and leant against it, obscuring its contents with her long skirt.
"Thank you for telling me," she said, opening the door to lead me back out. "
Usually people were desperate to know who did it or would cling onto me in the hope I could help find the killer. Phaedra, on the other hand, acted as though she had grown quickly bored.
"Thank you," she said again and waited with a forced smile for me to leave.
"Don't you want to come down to the station?" I asked. "After all, it was you who filed the missing person's report."
"Oh, that won't be necessary," she said.
She moved up close to me giving me no choi
ce but to step out into the hall. Looking over her shoulder, I caught sight of the trash can. The biography of Charles Manson lay amidst the cigarette ends and soda cans, its blood red cover emblazoned with his face.
Weird.
"Okay, I do suppose it's late," I said. "How about I drop by in the morning?"
"If you must," she said, haughtily.
"Okay, goodnight."
Back outside, I slid into my car and watched as she lingered in the doorway waiting for me to leave. Looking up at the building, I saw how its crumbling sandstone had turned black from years of street pollution. Somewhere in a parallel universe, a vampire lived there with coffins stacked up inside the basement. In this dimension, Miss Collins resided here with her house of lost girls, the ones that kept getting murdered.
Chapter Ten
Lincoln
"You're quiet," I said as I slipped off the highway.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to be."
"You've gone through a lot."
"Hmmm."
She was looking out the window into the darkness, her reflection staring back at me. There was turmoil in her eyes but an excitement too. I looked back at the road toward the house that was hidden by the thick expanse of pine trees. I wondered what she'd think when she saw the house. I'd spent my teens and early twenties designing it in my head as little more than a fantasy. When I finally had the money to build it, my ideas had grown bigger and wilder until my dream house was finally created.
Now, it was in the top three biggest residential buildings in America while being one of the most private. You could live a mile away from here and no one would know a thing. Protected on one side by the mountain and on the other by a sheer drop of wilderness, the black structure lurked in the shadows with a refined elegance and a predatory position of power over the horizon. Sometimes, late at night when I sat in my study with a scotch and looked out across the mountains, I imagined myself as a shark that could reach out and bite the world away in an instant. Suddenly, I realized it wasn't much of a place for a lady like Etta.
"So... I've been trying to imagine where you live," she said, mirroring my thoughts.
"You have?"
She smiled and leaned forward.
"I mean, what kind of a man lives all the way out here? And of course you're a billionaire so that makes it even more mysterious. I bet you have a Batcave."
I laughed as I took a sharp right toward the front gates of the long drive.
"Actually, you're not far off. I do have a Batcave of sorts."
She raised her eyebrows.
"I was joking," she said.
"Well, I'm not. You'd be surprised."
Worried, she coiled her fingers round one another and shifted in her seat.
"Don't worry. I'm not Hannibal Lecter or anything."
Her face paled.
"It's weird you mentioned him," she said.
The gates glided open to reveal a further stretch of darkness that the car sunk into as though falling through velvet. Beside me, Etta shivered.
"Okay?" I asked.
"Sooner or later we're going to stumble across Hansel and Gretel out here."
"Don't worry. We're nearly there."
Chapter Eleven
Etta
When the car slowed to a halt I saw no house, no sign of life, just blackness.
“Where do you live?” I asked in a panic.
He flashed his lights precisely three time and in front of us, a camouflaged door slid open to reveal an underground complex. As we drove down into it, I realized he wasn’t joking about a Batcave.
"Woah...."
As we crept inside the cave, I soon saw the large array of supercars cars that spread out to my left and right.
"You drive these!" I gasped, somehow unable to imagine him pulling up at the hospital in a lime green Lamborghini.
"Collect," he said. "For fun."
"Like Hot Wheels for billionaires."
He smiled.
"Yeah, like Hot Wheels. Now come on, let's get you upstairs."
~
It was hard to distinguish where the building of the house began. It seemed to be chiseled into the mountain, invisible from the outside and disorientating inside. After twisting and turning round an endless system of corridors, I eventually found myself in the kitchen, a large marble covered room.
My footsteps echoed like being inside a cathedral. For a long while, I just gawped at the sheer size and luxury of it. When I finally spoke, my voice bounced off the walls and I imagined him in there, cooking up some extravagant meal as he preached his culinary sermon.
"This place is... I-I don't really have the words."
He gave me a quick squeeze and moved over toward a nearby cupboard.
"Get comfortable," he said. "I'll get us some wine."
He opened the cupboard and made a contemplative noise as he labored to choose a bottle.
"Hmmm.... Do you think I should venture down into the wine cellar and pick up something exceptional for your first night?"
"I think you should stay right here with me," I replied.
He looked over his shoulder.
"Fuck, you're so beautiful," he said and walked over, discarding the idea of wine.
He kissed me hard and I fell into his arms. Soon I had forgotten all about the house, the girls, the crash, Craig. There was nothing but the kiss and the warmth of his touch.
"It's been a long day," he said, pulling away to catch his breath. "Maybe you'd like to see the bedroom."
"Maybe I would," I smiled, a smirk curling up the side of my mouth.
~
If I thought the kitchen was luxurious... With a gold leaf ceiling and a bed that was larger than most people's bedrooms, I stopped in the doorway and clutched a hand to my mouth.
"Is that a real Leonardo DaVinci?" I pointed at the painting hanging opposite the bed. "My mom used to have the print of that hanging in the hall," I said. "It's one of her favorites."
Now I found myself standing in front of the real thing and its size and splendor was making me dizzy.
"Are you much of an art lover?" he asked as he cradled me from behind, his mouth meeting my neck tenderly.
"Hmm... What was that?" I murmured with the concept of art long gone from my mind.
I leaned back into him and felt his hardness press into my back. Things were moving fast, his breath was quickening and I could feel his heart beat against me. My body was responding to him, heating up as he kissed me, lower and lower until he was making his way round to my collarbone, my chest, my breasts. He cupped them gently and kissed me with soft , caring lips.
Then his hands were sliding down me, guiding me to the bed as we stumbled back onto the plush mattress. I felt as though I was sinking into the bed, sinking into euphoria as he slipped a hand down the front of my jeans and ran his fingertips over the slickness between my legs. I let out a moan and bit teasingly into his chest. He groaned and kissed me harder.
"Slow down," I whispered in his ear as his hand moved faster. "I'm almost..."
"Shhh..."
He silenced me with a kiss and rubbed his hand even faster, inserting a finger at the critical moment. Then it came, the wave of pleasure, the vast heat that consumed me as my mind went blank. There was nothing but throbbing heat and ecstasy, nothing but love and bliss and pure heaven.
When I opened my eyes, he was situating himself between my legs, sliding his pants down over his buttocks.
I reached up to touch his stomach and closed my eyes again to savor the sensation. Leaning down to kiss me, he enveloped me in his arms and held me tight, his lips moving over my neck as he slowly, inch by inch, sank himself inside of me. Still breathless, I spread my legs wider and relaxed into his arms as he filled me up. He let out a long sigh and shook slightly as he paced himself.
"Fuck," he whispered and began to slow his movements.
Feeling protected by his muscular frame, I nuzzled into his chest. For a fleeting moment, I was so overcome by emo
tion I felt as though I was close to tears. But I reigned in my emotions and gripped my nails into the sides of his thighs as I raised my hips to meet his. He let out a groan, an almost feral grunt as he began to shake. I held him tighter, tangling my legs around his waist to bring him close to me.
"Oh, fuck...."
He shook hard as he came, his face burning red and his sweat sticking his body to mine. Then he fell loose and relaxed onto me, his breath coming hard and fast as he buried himself in my breasts.
"Why is it always so good with you?" he asked, breathlessly as he lifted his head.
He licked his lips and smiled, satisfied.
I leaned down and kissed him as I tangled my fingers in his hair. Exhausted but exhilarated, I struggled to sit up and with my eyes still struggling to focus, I delicately placed a finger beneath his chin and raised his gaze to mine.
"Didn't you say there was going to be wine?"
~
“I feel like I can trust you,” he said as he poured the velvety wine into the glass. “Which is weird because we hardly know each other. Not really. It’s only been a few days but, I dunno, there’s something about you. I feel like I can trust you with anything.”
The chilled wind was blowing over the balcony but still warm, I relished the cool breeze and relaxed back into the recliner and let the bedsheets drift open. Beside me, Lincoln loosened the belt of his silk dressing gown and put his feet up.
“I feel the same,” I said as I took a sip of wine. “Jesus this is good. Really good.”
He laughed.
“Only the best,” he smiled and raised his glass.
We both stared out into the darkness of the valley beyond. The stars shone bright above us, ready to be plucked from the sky like diamonds.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“A lot of things,” I replied. “It’s been a wild few days and now here I am…”
I spread out my arms and flopped back against the seat.
“It’s a dream, right? I’m dreaming.”
He dabbed the back of his hand against his damp forehead and said “You’re not like other girls.”
I frowned and gave him a skeptical look.
Jewels And Panties: (Book 1-15) Billionaire Romance Series Page 10