Catherine Coulter - Eleventh Hour

He stripped her jeans down her hips, off her ankles and threw them on the floor. She was trying to bring him back to her, but he held her, looked a moment at the white panties she’d bought that were French cut, and he had those off her in a lick of time. She was beautiful, he couldn’t stand it. He was breathing hard, so hard, and he was panting. “It’s okay, Nick. Let me give you pleasure. Just hold still, no, don’t try to strangle me. Lie back and let me enjoy you.” He had her legs open, and he was between them, kissing her belly, then he gave her his mouth and within moments she screamed and went wild. God, he loved it, just loved it, and gave her all he could.

When at last she fell back, her heart pounding nearly out of her chest, breathing so hard she wondered if she would survive, he came up over her. He was harder than the floor, harder than the damned bedsprings, and he hurt. He also knew it was a good thing he had his pants on, otherwise he’d be inside her right this instant. But it just wasn’t important, at least not now. He wondered if there was a drugstore nearby. Hey, a gas station, anyplace that sold condoms.

He pulled himself over her and began kissing her, slow, easy kisses, and he knew she could feel him. It took a long time before he slowly pulled away from her and sat up on the side of the bed. He looked down at her long legs, flat white belly, and slowly laid his palm flat. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

She gave a small moan, looked surprised, then smiled up at him. “So are you.”

He grinned. It didn’t hurt quite as much. He was getting himself back together. He forced himself to concentrate on pulling her panties back up, then working on her jeans. Just before he zipped up the jeans, he leaned down and kissed her belly again. Oh God, he wanted her. No, no. He spent several minutes easing her upright, straightening her clothes.

He paused for a moment, leaned forward, and cupped her face in his palms. “This is just the beginning. You’re wonderful, Nick. But I can’t believe you were engaged to John Rothman.”

“At this moment, I can’t believe I was either,” she said, and kissed him.

She leaned forward, resting her face on his shoulder. He stroked her back, up and down. He shouldn’t be surprised, he thought, but he was, closer to floored, actually. “John Rothman is far too old for you. Why would you ever want to marry a man who’s close to the age of your father?”

His voice sounded back to normal, and so she got herself together and pulled away from him. “John Rothman is forty-seven in years, but much less in the way he looks at things, the way he feels about things. At least that’s what I thought.”

“If he paraded around naked in front of you, I can’t imagine that you’d be licking your chops, would you?”

She was so surprised by what he said that she hiccupped. She said, smiling, “I don’t know. I never saw him naked.”

“That’s good.”

“Why would you care?”

“It’s really very simple, Dr. Campion. I decided about three days ago that your next fifty years are mine. I saw that they found his wife’s body?”

“That’s right. Fifty years might not be enough.”

“He told everyone that she ran away from him? Three years ago? We’ll begin with fifty years, then renegotiate, all right?”

“Yes, he told everyone she ran away. His senior aide was gone as well, a guy named Tod Gambol, and everyone believed she ran away with him. Yes, all right, we’ll start with fifty years, then go from there.”

“Was Tod Gambol found with the dead wife?”

“Evidently not.”

Dane said slowly, “What happened? Did you find out that she didn’t leave him?”

“Oh no, Cleo left him, all right. I believed that, no doubt in my mind at all. She’d been gone three years, and he’d divorced her, although she’d never responded, couldn’t be found. Of course I accepted it. I loved him. I was going to marry him.”

“But she didn’t leave him. He killed her.”

“Nope. Fact is, she did leave him.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I also know that she was alive up to four weeks ago.”

Dane crossed his arms over his chest. “How do you know that for a fact? Did Senator Rothman assure you that she was alive and well and screwing around with his aide?”

“No. The bottom line is that Cleo Rothman wrote me a letter. She hasn’t been dead for three years-just for a month, at the most, and the tests they’ll run will prove it. No, John Rothman didn’t kill her three years ago.”

“Why did she write to you?”

“To warn me. She told me about the first girl John’d planned to marry, way back just before both of them graduated from Boston College. He killed her because Elliott Benson, a rival, had seduced her. He got away with it, she said, because he was smart, and who would ever begin to suspect a young man who was engaged to be married of suddenly killing his fiancee? The final police verdict was that it was a tragic automobile accident. She said that John cried his eyes out at her funeral, that her parents held him to comfort him.”

“How could she have found out about that? Did he talk in his sleep? Don’t tell me he confessed it to her?”

“No, she found a journal in the safe in his library. She wrote that one day she noticed that the safe wasn’t locked. She was curious and opened it.

“So when she opened it and found the journal, she read it. He wrote all about how he’d killed a girl-Melissa Gransby was her name-how he’d planned it all very carefully and gotten away with it. A simple auto accident on I-95, near Bremerton. She must have written at least a half dozen times in that letter how smart John was, how I had to be careful because I was going to be the next woman he killed. She wrote that John had come to believe that I was sleeping with Elliott Benson, too, just like Melissa did, that I was betraying him, even before we were married.”

“Who is this Elliott Benson?”

“He’s a powerhouse in Chicago, a very rich and successful businessman, an investment banker with Kleiner, Smith and Benson. He and John have been rivals for years and years.

“Cleo wrote that she didn’t know if he’d killed other women, but she knew he would have killed her if she hadn’t left and she knew he was going to kill me and I should run as far away as I could, and quickly.”

Dane, frowning, said, “Why would a man who’s supposedly so smart keep a damned journal where he actually confesses to a murder? And leave that journal in a safe in his own home, for God’s sake, and then, to top it all off, he leaves the safe open? That’s really a long way from being smart, Nick. This whole thing’s a stretch. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Nick said, “I thought the same thing at first. But listen, Dane. I knew Cleo Rothman, I knew her handwriting. The letter was from her, I’m positive about that. She told me she had the journal, that she took it with her, to keep John at bay in case he wanted to come after her. It was her only leverage.”

“Why didn’t she just go to the police with the thing? It was a confession, after all.”

“She wrote that John had many important, powerful friends, and that many of those powerful people owed him favors. She said she could just see him saying that as his wife-she knew his handwriting, of course-she had written it herself, that it was all an attempt on her part to ruin him. I could practically taste her fear in that letter, Dane, her sense that she was a coward, but that everything was against her, that she had no choice but to run. Do you think the cops would have believed her, launched an investigation?”

“They would have looked into it, of course, but it wouldn’t have helped if they believed she was vindictive, that she wanted to ruin a good man, and there was no other proof but the journal. Anyway, John Rothman wrote that he killed this Melissa Gransby because she cheated on him with this Benson character?”