She knew that she’d never even be able to look at Silver with warmth, let alone fondness. And she was certain that he’d never give her anything that she’d be able to trust, that any gift would either be a trick or a trap, a poisoned chalice or a dagger wrapped in ermine.
He wasn’t a good man. And she’d let him inside her body.
As she realized that fact, Jo started to get furious about everything, but especially about him expecting her to quit, just to make him happy.
First, just where the hell was she supposed to go? Sure, she could put out some feelers here in Denver, look for other accounting jobs – but why the actual fuck should she? She had a job now and if she walked away, Christ only knows how long it might be before something else came her way. Her money situation was pretty tight, and even though she’d definitely be able to hang on a few weeks without income, why should she deplete her entire hard-won nest egg, the one that she’d painstakingly hidden from Brian and built up over eight months, just to satisfy Silver Bennett’s monster ego? Plus, what happened if the money ran out before she had a paycheck coming in? Christmas was just around the corner, and she knew that many companies would be putting off things like staffing decisions until the New Year. Stupid, stupid move to walk away from a secure job and Jo had been stupid for too long in her life.
Second, why the hell should she be punished because he was a loser coward who fucked women in other states and then took off without a word, like a thief in the night? Jo had done what she’d done that night with honest intentions, she’d gone back to her cabin under a sort-of-fake name but with an honest heart, and if he hadn’t, well. That was on him. She had nothing to feel badly or embarrassed about – but he sure as hell did. She refused to skulk off like a woman with a scarlet ‘A’ emblazoned across her chest, her eyes lowered in shame to her bare feet as she stumbled away in the snowy night. She’d done nothing wrong. He had. He still was.
Third, what a colossal prick he was, assuming that she couldn’t be professional about things at an office just because he’d seen her naked. He was probably the type who thought that women got ‘too emotional’ when they had their periods, and that women couldn’t be trusted to be pilots or soldiers because they got ‘all hysterical’ when they broke a nail and crumbled under pressure.
Well, fuck him. She could do this, she would do this. She was perfectly capable of setting aside any hurt feelings that she had, any anger at his lies and manipulation, and get on with the job. She wasn’t going to just survive and scrape by, she was determined to thrive and excel. She’d do it because she needed this job, but she’d also do it to show this asshole just how wrong he was about her, her professionalism, her values, her grit, her abilities.
He’s wrong about everything to do with me. I might not know him, but he doesn’t know me either. Time to show him who I really am.
Jo raised her chin and met his gaze, unflinching and unbowed.
“I’m not going anywhere, jackass,” she snapped. “I’m the accountant now, I’m in charge of the club’s finances and if you don’t like it, you can quit as Treasurer this minute. I’m sure that Wolf won’t give a shit by this time tomorrow.”
There was a pause as he assessed her warrior posture, her fierce expression. He seemed to see that she meant what she said, that she was planted firmly in place in her cheap, awful shoes with a hole in the right toe. That he’d made an enemy of an angel here, in this tiny office that smelled of fresh coffee and brimstone.
“I can make things very difficult for you,” he said softly, his tone as silken silver as a blade. A warning wrapped in the softest, richest cashmere. “What do you say to that, sweet thing?”
She didn’t miss a beat, leveled him with a death stare. “I say game on, querido.”
Chapter Eight
At about seven o’clock that night, Jo pulled up to her trailer. She turned off the engine, undid her seatbelt and lowered her forehead to the steering wheel, finally allowing the crashing, crushing exhaustion of the day to wash over her, now that she was home safe.
The first day of a new job is always a challenge and a learning curve, and that’s true for everyone. But not everyone has to deal with a giant biker glaring at them balefully, dropping off endless documents in a chilly silence, and answering perfectly reasonable questions in a snarky, sneering tone – when he answers them at all.
Jo had spent the day trying to absorb a whole hell of a lot of complicated information all at once, and that was after she’d had to absorb the fact that Zeke was Silver, Silver was in The Road Devils, and Silver was a real idiot who Jo was sorry to have ever met, let alone had sex with.
Oh, Christ. It was just such a mess. This was not how she’d imagined her new job to start. She’d thought that her biggest challenges would be settling into the totally alien MC atmosphere, learning how to feel relaxed around a tight-knit group of guys with a sketchy collective past, and the actual accounting itself, in that order.
She’d never thought that her one-and-only one-night-stand from less than a week before would be thrown into the volatile mix.
Do I have the shittiest luck, or what?
Jo sighed and grabbed the three bags of groceries, a part of her still unable to believe that the random stranger that she’d slept with almost 550 miles away was now going to be in her orbit daily, hourly, and she slowly got out of the car. She swore that she’d aged twenty years in the past eleven hours, and when she looked at herself in her bathroom mirror, she was shocked that her hair hadn’t gone white and her face hadn’t erupted in deep wrinkles.
She rinsed her face in cold water, examined herself blearily once more. Yeah, she looked exhausted, but she still had a pile of paperwork to go through that night. She sighed again and changed into jeans, switched on a pot of water for pasta, poured herself a glass of white wine as she took the documents out of her battered backpack. And she sat on her sagging sofa and started reading, red pen in hand for notes.
Zoe and Scars were due back from California late the next morning, and Kansas had told her that they’d maybe show up a few hours before their welcome-back party the next evening. Zoe was eager to see the tattoo parlour (apparently the last time that she’d seen it, it had literally been a blown-out shell of nothing), and Scars was eager to get back to work at Satan’s after almost seven months of what sounded like excruciating medical treatment. Jo didn’t blame them at all for being in a rush to return to normalcy, to a predictable life, and so she wanted to get a handle on the parlor and bar finances, just to be able to hold up her end of the conversations they’d be keen to have.
She made her dinner and ate while reading, starting to see the movements of the money in both businesses. She’d learned over the years to think of money as water: it could come in trickles, in waves, in floods, in crashing waterfalls. Jo looked for patterns and flows, for times when the tides were affected by full moons and violent storms. Most businesses had high seasons and low seasons, fluctuations and dry spells as vast as a desert.
After almost a full day of looking over both Blue Dragon Ink and Satan’s Bar’s numbers, going back three years, Jo knew several things about the two places. First, that they were both very successful and profitable (though Blue Dragon was much more so since Zoe had taken over as manager). Second, they both had plenty of potential for growth. The tattoo parlor was apparently going to be much bigger after the rebuild wrapped up in a few weeks’ time, and although the fire insurance would cover most of the expenses, the expansion would go beyond that. It would mean that it would open at a loss, but looking over the parlor finances of three years and Zoe’s clear and confident ability to lead with vision shown in the numbers, Jo was sure that the parlor would be out of the red within six months, even with additional overhead and salaries. Maybe four months, if Zoe was able to come up with some marketing ideas to attract new customers.
Overall then, Jo was very optimistic about the two places’
money health – and she was confident that with time, she’d find ways to cut expenses, streamline processes and add to the bottom line.
Briefly, her thoughts turned to The Garage. Silver’s domain, under his management and thank Christ he had his own little manager office space on the floor level, because if they’d had to share the tiny office upstairs, she’d have throttled him by now. At noon, he’d dropped a towering pile of garage files on her desk, watched with supreme disinterest as they’d slid off the side and strewn all around the floor. He hadn’t made a move to retrieve them, to pick up a single piece of paper and neither had she. When she’d left at six o’clock, the mess was still sitting there, right where it had fallen.
She was damned if she’d be the one to clean things up. If he wanted her to look over the garage numbers, if he wanted her help and expertise, then he’d hand her what she needed like a gentleman and with some motherfucking manners.
She shook her head at her own bad temper, took a cooling and refreshing sip of wine. Yeah, it was a crap situation; no, she wasn’t happy.
But if Zeke (no, not Zeke, goddammit… Silver) had taught her to be open to new situations, then Brian had taught her some pretty crucial things too, including that bad situations didn’t have to be forever, nor did they have to end you. They could be lived through and left. They didn’t have to be permanent.
So. It was bad right now, and she wasn’t happy right now.
Right now didn’t mean forever. Life was like money that way: it was fluid, it was always changing. It moved around, it moved on. Happiness came and went and then returned.
She’d walked away from Brian and no matter what nonsense and unpleasantness Silver threw at her, it would never be as bad as the living, breathing hell that Brian had subjected her to. Silver was a rude, arrogant, cowardly dickhead, but Brian was a twisted sociopath, a monster of manipulation, a nightmare that she hadn’t woken up from for almost five years.
Frankly and despite his criminal MC background, Silver was a lightweight, at least where Jo was concerned.
Ex-husband who convinced me that I was crazy and who broke my entire face, or ex-one-percenter who cops a shit attitude and drops papers?
I know which situation I’d rather be in.
No contest.
**
Silver gave the punching bag at The Rock a vicious kick, then spun and gave it another one. The force of it hurt his calf a bit, but he enjoyed the pain. If he was going to be honest with himself, he deserved it.
He hadn’t been at his best that day.
Aw, hell. He’d been a fucking jerk that day.
And not just that day – what he’d done to Jo the morning after that incredible night had been low and spineless. Unforgivable. Seeing her today out-of-the-blue was a shock – but it had reminded him of the crappiness of his actions that morning, just thrown it all square in his face with a direct hit. He’d had no choice but to look at the woman that he’d treated badly and admit that he’d been way, way in the wrong.
Then like a real winner, he’d followed up the shock and the realization and his panic with a full day of making her miserable. The woman’s first day at a new job, and he’d gone out of his way to treat her like an intruder, an inconvenience, an enemy. He wanted her gone, that was for sure, and he’d launched a fierce campaign to make that happen.
And yet, and yet…
He didn’t want her gone.
He did. He didn’t. He did.
Fuck. I’m toast.
Silver well remembered his panicked rush back to the cabin, praying the whole time that he’d get there before she woke up, well remembered the conversation with Nell about how maybe Ana (no, Jolene) could have been something special, well remembered his panic at feeling something for an almost-stranger, well remembered his aching, yearning desire to see Jolene again. None of that had changed, especially the last thing… but he hadn’t wanted to see her again like this.
This was too goddamn close to home.
Too fraught with potential dangers and pitfalls and bad memories.
God, if he’d just gotten back before Jolene had left, they could maybe have talked and figured everything out. They could have put their cards on the table and made some decisions together.
Instead, they’d both been totally sucker punched and blindsided and unlike her – who had been very calm and practical and professional after being faced by a man who’d fucked her and fucked off – he’d lashed out.
He knew he was going to keep doing it, too. He wanted her here, but she had to go.
You selfish fucking prick.
What made this whole thing worse was that she needed this job and according to Kansas, she needed it pretty badly. At The Red, she’d said something about leaving a cheating ex, nothing about being abused, but plenty about new beginnings and looking to start again. She’d come to Denver and done precisely that, just wandered on into the scary MC bar and impressed both Wolf and Kansas, shown serious backbone and smarts, gotten herself a job in a city where she knew nobody and had nothing in her corner. Jolene was a fighter, and she was winning the fight.
And here he was, conspiring to take that away from her, all because it was easier on him if she left.
You selfish selfish fucking prick.
Silver kicked viciously again, once more, then winced as his distraction made him hit with an angle that was all wrong.
“Shit,” he muttered, limping over to the bench. “Just perfect. This day keeps getting better.”
“You OK, man?”
Silver looked up from rubbing his ankle, saw Adam Pierce standing over him from his enormous height, dark eyebrow cocked. Adam owned The Rock Fighting Club with his best friend Nick Spenser, and Silver liked them both very much. Nick was a former karate champion, and Silver had been training intensively with him for five years, and those sessions were one of the best parts of his life.
“Yeah.” Silver shrugged, reminding himself to stop by the drug store on the way home and pick up some painkillers. “Stupid move. Wasn’t thinking, really.”
“Not surprising that you hurt yourself,” Adam said crisply. “I was watching you and your head wasn’t in it tonight. You were pretty unfocused. I was waiting for you to give up early, call it a night.”
“Yeah, I know and I should have stopped. Idiotic.”
“What’s up?”
“Aw, Jesus, man.” Silver shook his head. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Adam’s hard blue eyes gazed at him. “Trouble with The Road Devils?”
“Nah. Well, kind of. But not really.”
Adam grinned at that vague and non-committal response. Typical Silver, all tight-lipped and intense and glowering. The man was a black-belt in karate and epitomized the whole ‘strong silent type’ thing perfectly; the fact that he had a damn shady past just made him more elusive, mysterious, taciturn.
Silver ignored Adam’s x-ray scrutiny, noticed for about the thousandth time just how huge the other man was. Nick had been the karate guy, Adam had been the pro boxer – and he was still built like a goddamn tank, even all these years into retirement. Oh, he still boxed and he taught classes and coached some pros, but he wasn’t anywhere as big as he had been at his peak… and Silver was astonished by that, still. The thought that Adam had once actually carried an additional thirty pounds of muscle on that hulking frame seemed humanly impossible.
“OK, then.” As usual, Adam’s voice could practically crush concrete. “Ice pack?”
“Hell, yeah. Thanks.”
“Sit tight. I’ll grab one for you.”
Silver nodded, dropped his eyes to his ankle now, saw the bruise blossoming already. He groaned, dreading having to work on the cars and bikes tomorrow. His job required lots of crouching, kneeling, bending, lifting a
nd climbing – all of which had just gotten a bit harder.
Christ, the woman was turning his life into a disaster zone at the speed of light.
OK, well. To be strictly fair, Jolene wasn’t ruining his whole life. It just felt like it.
Silver shut his eyes briefly, wondering how the hell to handle things the next day. Seeing as that day had been an unmitigated clusterfuck, he didn’t think that a repeat performance was the best move. Also, he needed her to go over the numbers from The Garage and offer ideas and insight; he was in over his head as Treasurer and he knew it. If Jolene Angeles could make some things clear, he should let her do that.
But he knew that she couldn’t stay long. He knew that she had to leave.
So… how to do that?
Find her another job. A better one.
The solution popped into his head like divine intervention, and he immediately felt both relieved and torn. OK, more relieved (more torn?). But this was win-win for everyone, wasn’t it? Jolene got a better job away from the asshole who’d snuck out after an amazing night, and who couldn’t utter a civil word to her because of his demons; he got away from the woman who made him feel terrified and small, and then he’d stop feeling such shame and fear.
Silver knew that there was, in reality, a third solution and that it was, in reality, the best one of all: he should take Jolene somewhere private and quiet, buy her a Margarita and apologize, ask her if they could just pretend that that night in Nebraska hadn’t happened. If they could just start again with a clean slate, like two adults who had lives to get on with.
In the ideal scenario, he’d ask her to forgive him his cowardice at the cabin and his disgusting behavior at the office – but not to understand them, because understanding would require him to tell her everything about those six years in hell that he’d barely gotten through in one discernible piece. It would mean telling her that even though he’d survived what those five guys had done to him, for years after, he’d wished that he hadn’t. He’d also have to tell Jolene that he’d worked damn hard to die because for a long time, he hadn’t been able to live with the memories of what happened – not until he formally patched into The Road Devils and truly found outlets for his rage and self-loathing. Not the healthiest outlets to be sure, but they’d been the only ones that he’d been interested in at the time.
The Devil's Silver (The Road Devils MC Book 2) Page 13
