Chapter 28
28
Lenny had spent the most glorious two hours in Mike’s company. He lived in a small apartment close to the airport and had not even flinched about asking her to go back there with him. She’d known he was a player and must hit on lots of single women in the bar. She had been pleasantly surprised by how neat his apartment was, she’d expected it to be a typical bachelor pad, all empty take-away cartons and six-packs of Bud. Not that she’d spent much time admiring his cleanliness. It had been so long since she’d felt this way about a man, she had almost forgot how it felt to be with someone who made every part of your body tingle.
He was snoring now and she was pleased that she’d managed to exhaust him. Extracting herself from under his arm and leg she crept around the bedroom, picking up her clothes. Slipping out of his room, she washed up in the bathroom and dressed. She would go home to her apartment in London for a long soak in the bath, but she had been missing for far too long already. She knew Sephy would be going out of her mind and sent her a quick text saying she’d met an old friend at the airport while waiting for her flight. But she knew her sister was a proper worrier and wouldn’t settle until she was home.
She let out a sigh and hoped that Dora was okay. At least Mike had helped to take her mind off the impending doom heading the English sisters’ way for a short while. She left his apartment and began the walk back to pick up Sephy’s van, which in all probability had been towed away. Damn it, she should have moved it.
The early evening traffic whizzed past her, and she wondered if she was going to have to pay for a cab back to Salem when she came home or if the van would be there. As she reached the pedestrian footpath, she passed the pick-up point for arriving passengers and felt a chill rattle her entire body.
She stopped in her tracks and slowly turned around. He was here or close by, he had to be. She had the same reaction every time she was within a certain distance of George Corwin.
A tall man had just got into a cab. Slamming the door shut, the driver set off just as his passenger slowly turned to stare at Lenny through the window of the back seat, his eyes locking with hers. He looked nothing like the Corwin she knew from the 1600s but her inbuilt sensor didn’t steer her wrong.
Panic filled her chest and she found herself back in 1692. She could smell the mud and the horses as she was bundled into the cart to be taken on her last journey before they hanged her.
George Corwin had always been a vile man, he absolutely thrived off causing pain and being cruel. She had witnessed his atrocious behaviour several times on her trips into Salem town. She wished that they had never set eyes on each other, but he had found her outside Ingersoll’s, attending to Goodwife Ingersoll who had gone into an early labour. He had helped her get her into the ordinary, now it would have been a bar but back then everything was more complicated, and upstairs to her bedchamber, but had been unable to draw his gaze away from Lenny, much to her embarrassment. She had to chase him out of the room, asking him, if he wanted to be of some use, to go and fetch her sisters from the cabin to bring what herbs they needed to make a tincture. She had even given him directions. Lenny shook her head. She had led that animal straight to their door and he had been like a dog with a bone, he had kept coming back again and again.
At first, he’d been charming, and Lenny had almost fallen for him, giving in to his constant requests to join him for walks, if only to stop him following her around. In today’s world she would have reported George Corwin to the police as a stalker, and he would have been served papers to leave her alone at the very least, but back then men ruled the world and women were nothing more than entertainment. Lenny shuddered.
She had promised to go to London for Dora. But time was running out.