He broke off all of a sudden, and Jo looked at him quizzically.
“Back to being – what?” she asked when he stayed silent.
“Just – just back to being nothing. Human garbage. A convicted rapist.”
“Silver. My God.”
She stared at him helplessly, so incredibly upset and angry on his behalf, she actually thought she might spit goddamn nails. But then it got just slightly worse:
“And the woman who accused me of rape?” he said. “Her name was… well. Her name was Joanne, but everyone called her Jo.”
“No!” Jo said, horrified anew. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. So you see, you being here, with our shared history and your name – it was all just too damn close to the bone, you know? It was like being in a recurring nightmare, one that I’d survived once and thought I’d woken up from and shaken off, but then here it all was again.” He sighed and shook his head. “Right down to hearing the name ‘Jo’ all around me every single day, and you working a job similar to hers, and you being so goddamn angry at me, and me not able to explain –”
“So, wait.” She took a sip of wine and gathered her thoughts. “So why did you keep making me more angry then? I mean, the logical thing to do would be to kiss my ass and keep me happy, right? Not give me any reason to go to Wolf and spill the beans?”
“I’m not the smartest guy walking the planet,” Silver said. “I stupidly thought that the better approach would be to make you so miserable, that you’d quit.” He hesitated, then decided to tell her a bit more of what he’d been up to, in the spirit of honesty and transparency. “I also tried to get you a new job, a better-paying one, so you’d quit voluntarily.”
“OK, wait. Wait.” Jo blinked at him as a few perplexing things became a bit more clear. “All those job offers out of the blue – they were because of you?”
“Yeah. I called in quite a few favors with people that I know. Legit business owners who always need money people.”
“So all those offers were bullshit?”
“No. Every one of them was genuine. I didn’t bribe anyone to actually try to hire you, Jolene. I just made sure they knew about your education, skills and experience and they decided to extend the opportunity. I swear it – I just put you firmly front and center on their radars and said that if you looked good to them, they should pounce. I also gave them a ballpark salary idea, about thirty percent more than you’re getting now. Just to sweeten the deal.”
“Jesus.” Jo shook her head. “You left no stone unturned, huh? Used the carrot and the stick approach, made my life hell so I’d quit, brokered some amazing offers so I’d quit.”
“Yeah, but what I didn’t expect was you being the most stubborn damn woman on earth, a woman who’d die before admitting defeat, especially to a jerk like me.”
She giggled a bit. “Yes well… I promised myself to never again let a man control my decisions. I wasn’t about to quit just because you kept telling me to.”
“See? Damn stubborn. I didn’t stand a chance.” He sighed, ran his hands through his hair. “And now that we’re talking openly, I need to ask: why didn’t you take any of the offers? I mean, I get not wanting to quit because of me, digging in to prove me wrong and not give me the satisfaction of leaving and me winning this messed up little game that I was playing, but those were some damn good job opportunities and you had no clue that I was behind them. Why didn’t you say yes to any of them?”
“Honestly? Because I love working for The Road Devils.”
“You are kidding me.”
“No. Not even a little bit.” Jo grinned and he admired her lush beauty all over again, loving how calm she looked now. “I’ve really come to feel at home with the guys, I like how they’ve made me feel so welcome and wanted. I like Zoe a lot, I like working with her and Scars, and I love seeing them together. He’s the kind of guy who makes you believe in the goodness of men, you know? He’s tough as hell and takes no crap, but I know that he’d lay down his life for Zoe and Keira – he already has, and he’s not even slightly sorry for it, not even after all the pain and suffering that he’s been through. I like joking with your brothers, I think that Wolf is smart as hell and a great leader, I enjoy helping your club produce a healthier bottom line. It’s a great job, with great people – well. Mostly great people. Great people… and then there’s you.”
“Yeah, there’s great people in the MC and then there’s me. Totally fair and accurate criticism of the lone club dickhead, Jolene.”
She laughed again and Silver joined her this time. Their eyes met, and they each thought how completely gorgeous the other one was right here in this moment – and they both stopped laughing at the same time.
A silence fell, then went on a while, then lengthened to almost forty seconds. The whole time, they held their mutual heated gaze, feeling like they seeing each other for the first time. And in some ways, they really were.
Well. Not completely. Not their full selves.
Jo didn’t tell Silver about how life had been with Brian. How they’d been the most perfect couple when things first started up, how they’d been that couple, that annoying one that made everyone else sick with jealousy. She didn’t tell him that from the beginning there had been a few red flags – some protectiveness that bordered on control, some ‘take charge’ moments with her clothes, hair and diet that hinted at molding her into someone else, his insistence at rushing things so she was engaged after three months, married after a year – but that the good and sweet had outweighed those slight reserves. She’d barely noticed that it had all happened so fast, she never caught her breath.
She certainly didn’t tell him that a month after getting married, things had changed. That was when Brian had introduced the mind-games, the gaslighting, the deliberate and long-term destruction of her psyche to make Jo think that she was literally going crazy.
She didn’t tell Silver that she had lost her mind, literally and piece by piece, and that she’d only just started getting it back again.
From his side, Silver was as much of a sort-of-closed book: he’d told Jolene about going to prison for six years and that admission had cost him to tell her. He hated to talk about that time in his life, those six years. Partly for the reasons that he’d told her – that he’d lost everything on a false accusation that had probably been motivated by revenge – but there was far, far more to the story.
It was something about Silver’s life that only Cole knew… and he knew because he’d been in that fucking prison, and he’d seen that group of skinheads and what they’d done to Silver. The beatings, the ganging up.
The rapes.
Silver still didn’t know what might have become of him if Cole and his two cell mates hadn’t stepped in that day, and left the skinheads in broken piles on the laundry room floor. They’d had Silver’s back after that and then Cole had done more than just take care of him in prison: he’d offered to put Silver’s name as Prospect forward to Kirby Riggs, the Road Devils President at that time. When he’d done that, Cole had offered Silver a chance to pull a little bit of something out of the burning wreckage of his life.
So no, Silver hadn’t told Jolene any lies – but he sure as hell hadn’t told her anything like the whole truth. And no way he ever would.
But there were two more truths that he was holding to himself, two things that he could tell her, and they were something that he hoped would help her start to change her mind about him. He really didn’t want her to leave tomorrow, he wanted her to stay in Denver where he was sure that she’d have a dozen pairs of eyes on her, keeping her safe. But he needed to give her a reason to start to believe in him, to trust him. To have faith in what he said.
That meant putting himself out there. Being the first to be vulnerable.
He sucked at that, sucked pretty damn hard – but for Jolene, he’d give it a shot.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “You know that morning after?”
Jo knew exactly which morning after he meant. She nodded.
“I came back.”
“You came back?” she echoed. “To the cabin?”
“Yeah. I got about an hour away and realized that I’d done an utterly shitty thing and I turned around, hauled ass back to you. But by the time I got there, you were gone. Nell said that I’d missed you by about fifteen minutes and I gotta tell you, baby, I’ve had some near-misses in my life, but that one with you was one of those things that makes a man feel just how goddamn long a single minute can be.”
“Why did you come back?” she said in a hushed voice.
“Because I wanted to see you again,” he said simply. “I wanted to ask if I could see you again.”
“Oh.” Jo stared at him, stunned at the turn the conversation had suddenly taken. “Why – why did you want to see me again?”
“Because I thought our time together was amazing. Special. Something that I wanted more of.”
“Oh,” she repeated. “But then we met again in Denver and –”
“And I lost the goddamn plot,” Silver finished for her. “Because of what you could have done to me, if you’d made your mind up to hurt me. See, when I went back to the cabin that morning, I figured that you lived in New Mexico and maybe travelled out this way sometimes, and I travel all over the country anyway. I hoped that if you wanted to see me again, we could arrange something whenever possible, around life and work commitments. I kind of – I don’t know. I hoped that you’d be open to meeting me, if you could forgive me for taking off like a coward.”
“What were you going to tell me?”
“About what?”
“About you. About your life. Your real life.”
Silver paused. “Honestly?”
“Yes.” She smiled. “I think you need to carry on being honest here. I’m enjoying it very much.”
“I didn’t know exactly.” He hesitated, trying to gather his thoughts. “I wanted to tell you about The Road Devils for sure. I wanted to tell you that I’m based in Colorado. And yeah, I wanted to tell you that I don’t go by Zeke anymore – that I’m Silver now.”
“You’d have really told me all of that?”
“I swear it, Jolene.”
“Then we’d have figured out about my job interview with Wolf,” she pointed out. “We’d have found out that we’d maybe be working together.”
“Then after I picked my damn jaw up off the floor, I’d have told you about what happened to me before with a woman I worked with, and we’d have hopefully found a way to manage work and personal. If we both wanted to, I mean.”
“But your rule, the one about never mixing the two…”
“I’d have broken it for you,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Just for you.”
“You – for real?” She looked skeptical, so that’s when he told her truth number two:
“I told you my road name. That night. I told you while we were in bed, but you’d already fallen asleep.”
“What? Why did you tell me?”
“Because I fucking hated that you’d come on my fingers and my cock – and you’d come screaming the wrong name. I wanted you to know who I was, and I wanted it bad enough that I broke one of my biggest rules for you: I told you my name.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Silver felt oddly free, light, airy. It felt so amazingly good to just stop bullshitting her and himself, to just lay it all out on the table, to just let the chips fall where they may. Tell her as many truths as he felt comfortable sharing, see where her head was on the whole thing. “I might have messed it all up royally in the end knowing me, but I’d have tried. For you. I’m sorry for leaving that morning, and I’m sorry for how I’ve treated you since you got here. I’m sorry for that day in your office when I came on to you, and then sneered and said disgusting things to make you quit in humiliation. I’m sorry for all of it.”
Jo stared at him some more and he waited. He’d said what he had to say, and now it was her turn. If she felt comfortable saying anything, that is: Silver wasn’t interested in forcing anything out of her.
Finally, she murmured, “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything at all. But maybe just… can you try to forgive me for being such a prick to you? Can we – I don’t know. Can we start again? Get to know each other without any games or grudges? No expectations and no assumptions?”
“You mean as friends?”
“For now.”
She blinked. “Just for now? What comes later?”
“More. Hopefully.”
“You mean… friends with benefits?” She held his gaze as she challenged him to be totally honest with her again, some more. “You want to repeat that night together, but with full knowledge of who we really are and no strings attached?”
“No.” He shook his silver-blond head and dove on into the deep end without an oxygen tank. “I mean, whatever we decide that we want together. It can be casual or it can be more intense. It can be just friends and work colleagues, or it can be lovers. It can be open with the guys or we can keep it to ourselves. I don’t want to define it or us, Jolene, I don’t want to label anything or lay down expectations. I want to see how we get along when we’re both honest and fully aware of who the other is. I liked you very much that night in Omaha, I greatly admire you for what you’ve achieved since moving to Denver… I want to get to know you when I’m not being offensive and putting you on the defensive. But understand this, baby: I want more with you, and I’ll wait until you let me know if you do. I won’t make a move unless you say so and if you never say so, I’ll be happy just to be around you.” He paused. “Is that all OK with you?”
She took a big gulp of wine and thought, so he waited some more, hoping hard that she’d want some of the things that he did. Even if she just wanted one of those things – to give him a chance to show her who he really was in his heart and his soul, when he wasn’t holding all his secrets and darkness away from her and then turning around and beating her over the head with them – then he’d be fucking thrilled.
He hoped that she had a more generous and forgiving spirit than he did; he hoped that she was willing to see his goodness.
Just a chance to show her his goodness. That’s what he really hoped for.
Just that. Please God. Just a chance.
“I can agree to friends for now,” she said at last. “And I promise to not hold anything against you. To forgive and forget.”
“We’re starting again then?”
“Yes. We’re starting again, all history erased and firmly in the past.” She raised her wine glass to him, all sassy and sweet, just like he liked her the most. “To very convenient amnesia!”
He laughed, and then there was a knock at the door and a cheery call of “Room service! Two burgers and fries!”.
Bang on cue, Jo’s stomach growled and Silver gave her one of those devastating grins as he got to his feet and ambled over to the door. He looked through the peephole, then swung the door open wide.
“Perfect timing,” he said to the impeccably-dressed young man wheeling the cart. “She was about to start gnawing on the furniture, I swear it.”
Jo giggled, so relieved and surprised at the massive change between her and Silver. “That’s a fact.”
**
Two hours later, Silver looked over at Jolene. She was curled up at the other end of the sofa, so small and soft as she slept under the comforter that he’d brought in from the bedroom. She’d been so cold earlier, and he’d been worried. It had been one hell of a bad night for her, one hell of a bad shock to her system for that abusive fuck to show up in her life again. She’d insisted on staying up to watch the movie after she’d ravenously demolished her dinner – and she’d promptly dropped off
within fifteen minutes of Silver tenderly wrapping her up snug and warm.
He gazed at her now, his mind wandering back to the last time that he’d seen her sleeping: he remembered how golden and lovely she’d looked that morning, her naked curves lightly covered, her breathing deep and slow as she’d peacefully slept.
He remembered how damn hard it had been to leave her like that. To leave her at all.
And now? Well, now it looked like he might have a chance with her. He didn’t know what that meant yet or even what it looked like, but if it meant that she was staying in Denver and with the club, and if it meant that she was open to Silver being a friend, then he was nothing but grateful for the chance.
He had a chance.
Don’t screw this up, man.
She gave a small sigh, turned a bit on her side, settled again. Silver had an insane and intense desire to go over to her right there and then, pull her into his arms and kiss her until she moaned and melted against him. Turned hot and needy in his embrace, begged him to take off her robe and take off his clothes, to take her trembling body over and over until they both collapsed in breathless bliss.
But he didn’t do any of that. Instead, what Silver did was so carefully, so gently, pick her up off the sofa and carry her into the bedroom. Her head lolled against his chest and he held her closer, needing her to feel safe and secure even in her dreams. He rested her on the bed, mindful not to jostle her, and covered her perfect little toes with the comforter. Then he stood up and stood back and just looked down at her, seeing all of her beauty and all of the promise that was now before him, if she decided that he deserved it.
That he deserved her.
Silver smiled and turned off the light on the bedside table, but left the one above the bathroom sink on, in case she woke up frightened and disoriented. Then he shut her door halfway on his way out and returned to the living room. He stripped off his clothes, turned off the lights and TV, and lay down on the massive sofa. He shut his eyes and fell asleep almost immediately.
The Devil's Silver (The Road Devils MC Book 2) Page 25
