It was a reminder of what might have been between us if things had been different.
Silas paused at the door, still holding me. "What's wrong?" he asked. "You have a look."
I shook my head. I wasn't sure what the hell I was feeling, only that I was sad. "Put me down, Silas," I croaked. My voice sounded hoarse.
He obliged, then reached into his pocket for his keys and unlocked the door behind me. "I know," he said.
"Know what?"
"You're terrified. I can see it in your eyes," he said. "You want to run."
"I -" I started.
"Don't," he said, his tone gruff. "I don't want to hear some bullshit, Tempest. You're not running, this time." He kissed me again, hungrily, his tongue finding mine, and every part of my body cried out for his touch.
I wanted him. Now, before I listened to that voice in my head, the one making all of the rational objections, giving me all the reasons why I shouldn't be with him.
Right now, I wanted him.
I didn't want to think about tomorrow. Only now.
"Take me, Silas," I whispered. "Now."
He made a sound under his breath, guttural in his throat, and picked me up. His hands held my ass, and I wrapped my legs tightly around his waist. He kicked the door closed behind him, still carrying me, his lips never leaving mine.
The apartment was tiny, but we didn't even make it to the bedroom. Silas set me on the counter in the kitchen, yanking my shirt over my head in one quick movement, and I unhooked my bra and tossed it to the floor. He groaned as I arched up to kiss him, my breasts pressed against his chest, and I tugged at the sides of his shirt.
"Damn shirt," he said, breaking away from me to yank his shirt over his head.
I inhaled sharply when I saw him.
"What?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Nothing," I said. "I just don't think I'll ever get tired of looking at you without clothes."
Silas kissed me, sliding his hand over my breast. My nipple hardened to his touch, and he stroked it with his thumb, moving it in circles around and around until I was nearly delirious with arousal. "Well then," he said. "Let me make your fucking day."
I watched appreciatively as he slid his jeans from his waist, stripped naked, and kicked his clothes across the tile floor. When he turned toward me, he was already rock hard. "How's that?" he asked. "Better?"
I laughed. "Come here and I'll show you how much I like it."
"How ever will I be able to tell?" he asked, his mouth close to my ear. He unbuttoned my pants and I arched my back on the counter, allowing him to slide my jeans off my hips. After he pulled them down my legs, he stood up, his eyes trailing over every inch of me.
"Are you going to just stand there?" I asked.
"Quit your nagging," Silas said, grinning. "You can let me fucking stand here and look at that sweet little body of yours if I want to look at it."
I blushed under his gaze, but it only lasted for a moment before he was touching me again.
Back where he belonged.
His fingers trailed down my sides, and he hooked a finger underneath my panties, pulling them away from my skin. "You're wearing panties this time, huh?" he asked. "I want to see how much you like it." He slipped a finger between my legs, groaning when he felt my wetness. Leaning in, he kissed me so hard I thought he would bruise my lips.
"Take them off," I whispered. "I want you now. I can't wait." I was practically begging for him. My body seemed to feel like it had been forever, not days, since he touched me
I craved him.
When Silas finally had me naked, my ass on the cool surface of the kitchen counter, he didn't waste any time. He entered me in one swift movement, and I clung to the back of his shoulders, my legs wrapped around his waist as he fucked me.
Only the first few strokes were slow.
After that, he drove into me with hard, fast strokes, and I arched into him, wanting all of him, as deeply as I could have him.
"I can't get enough of you," he said.
I pulled myself against him, tightening my legs around him and guiding him in more deeply, my head too clouded with desire to even utter a word in response. I wanted him melded against me.
I wanted everything he had.
I couldn't think of anything except how his cock felt inside me, the sensation of his skin against mine, the way his breath felt warm on my neck.
"More, Silas," I gasped. It was all I could say.
More.
My words spurred him on, and he fucked me harder, bringing me higher and higher like I was riding an ocean wave that was about to crest. I buried my head in his shoulder and clung to him, my nails digging into his skin as he drove his cock deeper inside me.
"Tempest," Silas said, his voice barely more than a growl. "Come for me before I fucking explode."
His words pushed me over the edge and I cried out his name as I came, feeling him crash into me.
Afterward, I sat with my legs wrapped around him and my head on his chest, my entire body still trembling from my orgasm. We stayed like that, nearly motionless for what seemed like an eternity as our breathing returned to normal.
My ear against his chest, I listed to the thumping of his heart. It made me feel calm. "Your heart sounds like it's going to explode," I said.
Silas stroked my hair. "You're making me feel like an old man," he said.
"What?" I looked up at him. "Neither of us are old."
"You're going to give me a damn heart attack, though," he said, smiling at me. "With what you're doing to me."
"What am I doing to you, exactly?" I asked, my voice light.
"You're killing me, bright eyes," he said, kissing the side of my neck. "I can't stop thinking about you. Or fucking you. Or thinking about fucking you."
I didn't respond. I wanted to be honest, to tell him that I felt the same way.
I was torn between my instinct to run away and my desire to stay.
Silas picked me up again. "Hang on," he said. "I'm taking you back to the bedroom. Where you belong."
I laughed, but kept my arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, only stepping down when he reached the bedroom.
"Standing up?" he asked. "I was going to put you right into bed."
"Oh yeah?" I said. "You think you've got that much stamina, old man? You were just whining about how I wore you out."
Silas reached for my ass and I dodged his hand, jumping onto the soft mattress and landing with a bounce. He scrambled up onto the bed after me, pulling me onto my side facing him.
"I might need a minute to catch my breath, Tempest," he said. "But there's no chance in hell that you're going to wear me out."
I trailed my hand over his chest, my eyes taking in every inch of him, trying to memorize every ripple of his muscles, the tattoos that covered his skin. I was sure that, like mine, each picture had a story, and it made me think about how much of his life I'd missed.
How many stories he had that didn't include me.
"You know if I stayed, I'd wear you out," I said.
I wasn't talking about sex, and we both knew it.
Silas caught my wrist, holding it still. "Look at me," he said.
"Silas," I warned. But I looked in his eyes, despite my heart's rapid flutter, the fear that pumped through my veins.
The fear of being known.
"You think you've changed, Tempest," he said. "Or that the fact that what happened with your parents means that nothing is the same between us."
"Silas, you and I both know that you finding out who I was - that my parents and I were liars- changed everything."
"That's bullshit," he said. "You felt what I did in Vegas. The same heat that was there in Vegas is between us now."
"It's chemistry, Silas," I said. "That's all it is."
Silas narrowed his eyes and looked at me for a long time. I feared I had hurt him with my words and wanted to take them back.
I had to convince myself it was just chemistry between us and no
thing more. What else could there be?
"That's all you think this is?" Silas asked, clenching his jaw. "No bullshit, Tempest. For once, be honest with me. Do you truly think that's all there is between us? Good sex and nothing more?"
"This isn't a damn fairytale, Silas," I said. "I'm a con artist. My parents are con artists. There are no happy endings for people like me. This isn't a movie. There's no riding off into the sunset."
"Do you think I'm stupid?" he said, letting go of my wrist and sliding his hand around my waist, to rest on the small of my back. "I think you're lying to yourself right now, Tempest."
I suddenly felt claustrophobic, like I couldn't breathe. I put my palm to his chest and pushed him away. I wanted to run.
"Some kids play soccer and take ballet lessons," I said. "I grew up learning how to pickpocket and count cards. I lie. I cheat people. I steal from them."
"You know how to count cards?" Silas asked, the corners of his mouth turning up. "That's kind of awesome."
I slapped his chest. "I'm not fucking joking, Silas."
"Neither am I," he said. "You're not your parents. I don't believe you're someone terrible."
"Then you're naive," I said.
I didn't know why I was pushing him away, why I wanted him to think I was someone awful. I didn't think I was someone awful. I was conning bad guys - I believed in what I was doing.
The prospect of letting him in just felt so damn terrifying. I'd worn so many masks, so many identities, for so long that I didn’t know if I could let anyone see me.
Silas shook his head. "You think you can hide from me, but I damn well know who you are, Tempest. I've seen you all along."
"The grifter part of me is who I am," I said. "There's nothing more. That's all there is to it."
Silas looked at me long and hard. "You were conning Coker in Vegas, weren't you?" he asked.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SILAS
"Of course I was," she said. "But I know you already realized that. You knew I wasn't some television producer."
"I knew you weren't a TV exec, but I didn't know what exactly your angle was," I said. That much was true. Once Deborah returned the money I'd won in the fight, though, I started really wondering what Tempest was doing with Coker in Vegas.
Tempest shrugged. "You got me," she said. "I conned Coker. So? You already know I'm a grifter. It's no big surprise."
Why the hell was she being so stubborn about this? It's almost as if she wanted me to hate her.
Part of me wished I could hate her.
"You're the one who gave the money to Johnny and Deborah," I said.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," she responded quickly.
"You're so full of shit, Tempest," I said. But the fact that she was avoiding telling me that she had done this amazing thing for Johnny and his family was no longer pissing me off.
Instead, I was beginning to find it endearing.
I slid my finger under her chin and tilted her face up toward me. "You and your team stole the money from Coker and gave it to the family."
"Yes," she said. "Coker deserved it. He was an asshole."
I couldn't hide the smile that crossed my face at the idea of this girl destroying Coker. "Fucking A right he deserved it."
"You don't care, then?"
"Care that you conned that dickhead and gave the money to Johnny and his family?" I asked. "Why the hell would I care?"
"Because it's not exactly legal, Silas," she said.
I laughed at the irony of her thinking I would care about her engaging in illegal behavior, when I was the one considering having Coker taken out into the desert.
"What?" she asked. "You're laughing."
"I'm laughing because you're the one who's naive, Tempest," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Coker and I have a past," I said. "I'd have thought you grifters would do better research."
"We didn't drill down to the individual fighters," she said. "This was about Johnny. I didn't know you were one of his. I mean, we knew that he had done some real shady shit..."
"I was one of his fighters for a while," I said. "The fuckhead asked me to take a dive - he had bet against me. I was tired of his bullshit and ready to quit anyway. I was going to go with someone else. It was my last fight, and I'd bet on myself. So there's no fucking way I was taking a dive."
"So he made sure you lost," Tempest said. I felt her palm, warm on my chest, and she looked at me, anger in her eyes.
"He knew I didn't trust him," I said. "But I was seeing someone..." I watched Tempest's expression change, and I could feel her stiffen in my arms.
"I don't want to hear about someone -"
"Not someone important to me," I said. But I had to hide a smile. The fact that she was bothered that I mentioned another woman was charming. I liked this little jealous streak that Tempest had going. "The girl I was seeing slipped me something before the fight. She put something in my water, and...well...shit happened."
"Jesus, Silas," Tempest said. "They - my crew - said that Coker had a history of that kind of thing. I didn't know that he had hurt you, though."
"I'm fine," I said. "Now. But I got the shit kicked out of me something fierce. "So after that, I got the hell out of Vegas and came back to West Bend."
"Why were you in Vegas, fighting again?" she asked, shaking her head.
"I was just doing a favor to a friend," I said. "He wanted me in his corner at a fight. I was the only person he trusted. And then he got mowed down in a hit and run. It was a one-time deal – my doctor said I wasn’t supposed to fight again, after what Coker did to me, because of the head injury. But I couldn’t say no."
Tempest nodded. "That was our fault, Silas," she said. "We were roping Coker, but we didn't think he'd go that far."
"Roping him?"
"Roping him in," she explained. "Hooking him. We started rumors about the television show at some of the other gyms, knowing Coker would want to impress us. We figured that he would want the fight to at least look somewhat real, so he wouldn't go as far as slipping someone a roofie, you know? Nothing in his past indicated he had ever taken anyone out in a hit and run."
"The fighter that got hit, Abel, is fine," I said. "I mean, he wouldn't have been fine if he didn't have insurance. But he's fine."
Tempest shook her head. "I'm sorry it happened that way."
"Is all of that - what you did with Coker - is that the way you do things in general, or was he some exception to the rule?" I asked.
That was the burning question.
I could live with her conning assholes and giving the money to the people they'd wronged. Hell, I couldn't just live with that, I could get behind it. There was something downright noble about that, at least in my books.
But if she was just conning people to con them, taking money from good people, honest hard-working people...well, that was an entirely different thing.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Is this what you do," I said. "Con dickheads? Or was Coker some kind of exception to the rule?"
Tempest exhaled heavily. "When my parents kicked me out, I swore I would do things differently," she said. "I was in Vegas, and I thought I could get a real job, one with a regular paycheck, you know? But it's not who I was. I was a grifter. So I did short cons - card tricks, pickpocketing, that kind of thing, to survive. Then, when I pulled my first long con without my parents, I knew I wanted to do it different - so I picked someone dirty, someone who deserved what he got."
"And that's what you're doing now," I said, my sense of relief palpable. I knew Tempest wasn't the same as her parents, no matter what she thought. I knew she was different from them.
"We grift people who are bad guys," she said. "Murderers, pedophiles, corporate executives who are responsible for stealing their employees' pensions. We make them pay. And then we take care of the victims, the people who were hurt by them. Before, there was no justice for Johnny an
d Deborah and their daughter. Now they'll be taken care of, for a long time, at least. It's enough to get them back on their feet."
"It's different from what your parents did," I noted.
"My parents conned indiscriminately - it didn't matter to them if you were honest or dishonest. They would have had me pickpocket a nun if they thought she was carrying cash. That's how I was raised. My father used to say that everyone was a potential mark. It just so happened that it's easier to pull a long con on a bad guy, because, well, they tend to be dishonest and greedy, so that's how a lot of their games played out."
"Is that how it played out in West Bend?" I asked. I ran my hand down her back, feeling the softness of her skin under my fingers. I lingered on her tattoos, tracing the outline of one of the birds on her shoulder.
Tempest raised her eyebrows. "Well, the people they grifted here never turned them in. They didn't pursue them in any way. So what does that tell you?"
"That they were dishonest," I said, my fingers lingering on the wings of the bird tattoo. I peered at the feathers, the purples and blues that swirled together. "What's the bird tattoo?"
"They were dishonest," she answered. She paused, glancing at her shoulder before responding to my question. "It's a swallow."
I traced over the edges. "It's beautiful," I said. "Really nice ink. What does it mean?"
Tempest looked at me and flicked her tongue over her lower lip, and for a moment, I was distracted by what she was doing. "Travelers get them a lot," she said. "In old times, sailors got tattoos of swallows to mark the number of miles they'd traveled. So it's just a symbol of freedom, you know? Being on the road. Never looking back."
"Is that what you've been doing?" I asked, tracing my finger around and around the tattoo, raising goose bumps on her skin. "Walking away and never looking back?"
She exhaled heavily. Wearily, I thought. "It's what I do, Silas," she said. "One of the rules."
"What rules?" I asked.
"Grifter rules," she said. "My rules. Never stop moving. Don't look back."
"Those are the two rules you live by, then?" I asked. "Some kind of grifter's code?"
She shook her head. "They're just mine."
Luke: A West Bend Saints Romance Page 51
