“Fuck, yes,” Silver growled, and let himself finally take his own pleasure. He pushed deep – as deep as he could go – and then held himself there. His large body strained, tensed… and he rode the undulating, pulsing waves, just let them wash over him, crash over him, over and over, before slowly relaxing.
Her strength failed her now, and she fell forward onto her elbows. Right away, he curled himself around her shaking body, just clasped her to his heaving chest. He kissed her shoulders and the back of her neck; he murmured soothing words in her ear as she slowly recovered. And when she took a deep breath and turned to look into his eyes, his heart burst wide open at the dazed sweetness he saw in her own.
“God,” she said, still panting a bit. “That was incredible.”
“It wasn’t bad,” Silver said teasingly as he pulled out of her body with nothing but regret.
“Wasn’t bad?” she echoed. “You think it can get better?”
“Is that a challenge?”
“Yeah, OK.” She gave a small laugh as his silver eyes sparked with a competitive flare. “It’s a challenge, querido.”
He turned her in his arms and got to his feet, hauling her with him as he stood. She squealed in surprise, clung to his neck. Silver wrapped her legs around his waist once more, his cock already hardening as he felt her slick softness. She smiled and rubbed herself against him, watched those incredible eyes turn hot and intense once more.
“Challenge accepted, baby,” he said roughly as he carried her to the bedroom, grabbing the bottle of rosé off the counter as he passed. He threw her on the bed, started to tear off her beautiful lingerie so he could pour the wine all over her; he was going to lick it off every inch of her fucking perfect body. “Challenge sure as hell accepted.”
Chapter Seventeen
Two weeks later
Jo turned over in bed, feeling like something wasn’t quite right. Even in the hazy half-world between sleep and wakefulness, she already knew perfectly well what was wrong. She reached out in the darkness, knowing what she’d find. Or not find.
Suer enough, her fingers touched empty air, empty mattress, empty pillow. Silver wasn’t there. Again.
She knew where she’d find him and what he’d be doing.
Jo swung her legs off the bed, padded across Silver’s bedroom in her panties and one of Silver’s huge t-shirts, opened the door. She headed down the hallway on silent feet and paused in the doorway of the living room.
There he was, doing what he so often did at 3 a.m.: standing bare-chested in his jeans, staring out the window at the quiet, empty street and drinking whiskey.
“Hey,” she said softly, not wanting to startle him. “You OK?”
Silver turned and she saw that the glass was mostly empty. Her heart sank; she wondered how many he’d already had.
“Hey,” he responded automatically. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No.” He gave her a smile that didn’t even come close to reaching his eyes. “Nothing.”
Worried and at a bit of a loss, she stared at him, remembering the three times that she’d already found him doing this, remembering how he’d said that he was fine, remembering how he’d flat-out denied that anything was wrong.
She hadn’t believed him the first three times and she sure as hell didn’t believe him now.
“Go back to bed, Jolene,” he said in the voice of a stranger. “You need your sleep.”
“So do you,” she countered. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“I’ll be there soon.”
Once again, Jo had heard this before and once again, she didn’t believe a word that he was saying. He’d fobbed her off many times with promises of being ‘right there’ – and she’d woken up four hours later still alone.
Not this time.
She walked over to him, holding his gaze as she did. He didn’t look thrilled at her approach, but when she curled up against him, he put down the glass and wrapped his large arms around her. That was when she felt like she knew him again.
“What’s wrong, Silver?” she whispered into his collarbone. “Please don’t tell me nothing.”
He didn’t deny it this time, but he didn’t say anything else, either.
“Babe?” she said. “Why do you keep waking up at three o’clock in the morning? Are you – is something upsetting you? Worrying you?”
He sighed.
She pulled back slightly so she could see his face. “You know that you can tell me anything, right?”
There was a long pause and then he said, “Not anything, baby. Not everything.”
“Yes, everything. You can trust me.”
“It’s not about trusting you. It’s about –” He stopped talking. “It’s about something else.”
Suddenly she understood: he didn’t want to talk about whatever it was, because doing that made it uncomfortable and real and called the demons out of the shadows. As someone who was deeply afraid to say certain things out loud, she got this.
She hadn’t wanted to talk to Silver about Brian, not in any detail. Now she saw that if she expected Silver to open up, then she had to as well.
She’d have to go first.
“I guess we’re both holding back, huh?” she said to him. “Both avoiding saying certain things out loud.”
He looked down at her, his expression guarded and closed – but he looked a bit more like himself again.
“I’ve never really told you what Brian did to me,” she said quietly. “Not because I don’t trust you, but because of something else.”
“Because you don’t like talking about it,” he said, his words hollow and yet still loaded and heavy with meaning. “Because you fucking hate to talk about it.”
“Yes.” She smiled, traced the curve of his lips with her finger. “You too?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded, then she began:
“Before I met Brian, I was a party girl, but in a pretty limited way. My parents gave me a very strict upbringing – they were both raised Catholic, papi in Mexico, Mom in Boston – so even though I loved socializing, I was never about boyfriends or sex. I had lots of friends, got involved in all kinds school activities, was always out after finishing my homework. I was bubbly and fun and flirty.”
“So you’ve always been a sassy, social minx, huh?” he said with a grin, leading her over to the sofa and sitting her down. “Nothing new going on here?”
She smiled at that, thrilled that the teasing, sweet Silver was back again. “Yep, I’ve loved being around people all my life. I played by the rules when I lived at home and to be honest, I really absorbed everything that my parents told me about staying a virgin and being modest. I mean, my Mom loves romance in books and movies and she raised me on strong, sexy fifties heroines, but it was clear that boyfriends were not allowed. So I watched the movies and read the books and flirted wildly, but I never did a damn thing until after college.”
“You did say that I’m the third man that you’ve ever been with.”
“And that’s the truth. I lived at home until I was twenty-four, I went to college in Santa Fe to save money and I even stayed home for the first few two years of my first job with an accounting firm. After a year, I started dating a guy named Todd from the office and it only then occurred to me that, actually, I wanted my own space so I could be free to do what I wanted, when I wanted.”
“So you moved out at last?”
“Yep. The month before my twenty-sixth birthday.” She grinned. “Losing my virginity was my birthday present that year.”
“Nice.”
“Right? So Todd was a party guy too and we had some fun together. I mean, he was pretty immature in lots of ways and he never offered me anything really permanent, but I was fine with that at the time and for a while.”
“But then yo
u weren’t?”
“Then I wasn’t.” Jo shrugged and Silver dropped a soft kiss on one of her beautiful shoulders. “After a couple of years, it became pretty obvious to me that Todd was happy with casual and getting drunk every weekend and never giving me a key to his place… and I wanted more than that. I wanted to be loved, really loved. I wanted a guy who noticed when I wasn’t around, and who missed me if we were apart for days on end. You know? I wanted an adult relationship, one with a future.”
“Is that where Brian comes into the story?”
“It is.” She sighed heavily. “He did some legal work with the firm that I was at, and I was assigned to help him figure out the financials of some guy that Brian’s client was suing. I found out that the guy was hiding tons of money in a few different places, and that gave Brian some serious leverage when negotiating a settlement. He was so grateful, he showed up in my office with a huge bouquet of flowers as a thank you and asked me to dinner.”
“Straight out of a chick-flick, huh?”
“Exactly!” she said emphatically. “That’s how things were with him from the very beginning: grand gestures and romance and full-on attention. Every woman in my office was beside herself with moony jealousy because he was just so perfect, you know. We were the dream couple and Instagram-perfect, we were goals.”
“You say that like those are all bad things, baby.” He reflected. “Well, the Instagram-perfect relationship thing is bad. It’s bullshit, actually.”
“I know that they’re not bad things in themselves, but when combined with some control issues, they can be red flags.”
“Control issues?” he asked on a growl, already not liking any of this.
“Stupid little things at first.” She bit her lip. “Things like texting constantly, asking where I was and what I was doing and sometimes having to send him a picture to prove what I said. More than once, I ducked out of a meeting with an important client, just to send him a picture of me standing under the office logo.”
“You are fucking kidding me.”
“I wish. He framed it like he was being protective, you know, like he cared about me so damn much that he had to make sure that I was safe.”
“Yeah, OK. I can kinda see that.”
“I could too, so that’s why I was stupidly flattered by it. I mean, Todd had never given a crap if I got home safe from his place late at night, he’d never wanted to talk to me every day, and when Brian told me that he was checking in because he wanted to make sure that I was OK, it was a nice change. I thought that it meant that he cared.”
“What else did he do?”
“After a few weeks, he started to make suggestions about my appearance. My clothes, my hair, my makeup, my diet. He made it sound like he was trying to help me. Improve me. He said that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a professional woman, I had to ditch the colors and high heels and loose hair and had to be more conservative. Less like a party girl, more like a real accountant.”
“Asshole.”
“Yeah but… I agreed with him, in a way. I definitely went for the tighter, brighter clothes, well-cut and fitted. I’ve always, always loved the fifties silhouette and the way that I dress now is how I dressed then: pencil skirts and bright blouses and flowered dresses with tight waists and bare shoulders. I loved it then and I love it now, but he convinced me that it wasn’t appropriate for a financial setting.”
“So he chose your clothes.”
“Yes. He made me over from top to bottom, and I remember looking at myself in the mirror one day – wearing the awful stuff that I wore for the first few weeks here – and not even recognizing myself. But every day he texted me and told me what to wear and by then, I was so sure that this was how a mature, adult relationship worked and looked, that I went along with it. In fact and worse, I thought that I was better after his changes. I know now that he was molding me into something that he saw in his head but back then, I thought that he was bringing out the best of me.”
“Asshole,” Silver repeated.
“But everyone around me kept telling me how amazing he was, how he was helping me to grow and change. Even my own parents told me that Brian was so attentive and caring, how he had to be totally in love with me to make so much time out of his busy life to keep focusing on me.” Jo shrugged. “I believed them.”
“And you were so inexperienced,” Silver said slowly. “You honestly thought that a healthy relationship was about this.”
“I did. I mean, I had pangs of feeling claustrophobic or rebellious, like it was too much and I didn’t like it, but all the good stuff was so good. The dinners and flowers and gifts, and charming my Mom and friends, and taking me on trips and going shopping with me. So I ignored my own intuition and just told myself that I had to try harder.”
She sighed, then continued:
“The whole relationship was on speed and fast-forward in so many ways, but again, I didn’t know the first damn thing about boundaries with men, so I didn’t know that if I felt rushed and pushed, I had a say in things. I didn’t know that I had the right to say no, or slow down, or let’s take a break. So when Brian proposed after three months, I didn’t think that was fast and when we were married just over a year after first meeting, I believed everyone who told me that it was so romantic. That we were obviously ‘meant to be’, whatever the hell that even means, and it was all like a fated fairy tale and destiny. So I married him.”
“And then?”
“And then we had a perfect, picture-postcard honeymoon. Two months before we got married, he’d taken a job with a huge law firm in Minnesota so we moved within a month of marriage to a whole new life. Everyone was thrilled for me, so I tried to be thrilled for myself, but I didn’t want to leave my family or Santa Fe. I didn’t want to leave the company that I’d worked for. I just – I don’t know. I felt really unsure about everything being so new in every single way. I looked around my life and I didn’t recognize one thing, not even the person in the mirror with the baggy clothes and hair all pulled back. I was thirty years old and I felt like I had nothing secure to hold on to. I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life because I suddenly had no idea who I was.”
“That’s not surprising, baby.”
“It’s not and I know that now, but back then I believed Brian when he told me that I was being selfish and unsupportive and I had to be a better wife. He said that he had a new job with more stress and responsibility and money, and I had to suck it up.” She hesitated; this was the part that she didn’t want to talk about. “He said that I had to get my shit together and stop imagining things.”
Silver looked at her sharply. “Imagining things?”
“Have you ever heard of gaslighting?”
“Uhhh, no. If you say the word ‘gas’, I think of engines.”
“OK, well. It’s complicated but basically, if you gaslight someone then it means that you mess with their mind on purpose. It’s prolonged psychological manipulation and it’s all about destabilizing someone to the point that they question every single thing in their life. They don’t know what’s real and what’s not, and they honestly start to think they’re insane.”
“How do you do that to someone?” Silver asked, totally baffled. “Do you just lie to them constantly?”
“That’s part of it for sure, but it’s all about time, patience and consistent effort, really. The gaslighter embarks on a campaign and they’re in it for the long haul. It takes serious dedication to do what Brian did to me. It’s not something that you do just once, or just for a few weeks – it’s months if not years of disorienting a person. Brian did it to me for almost five years and he chipped away at my sanity piece by piece that whole time.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, it started almost as soon as we were married and alone in Minnesota, and it started small and with stupid things. I think he was just seeing what he coul
d convince me of, and what he could get away with. So he moved things around the house and accused me of losing them, before they just turned up somewhere that I didn’t remember putting them. Keys in the freezer, his best shirt scrunched in the bottom of my gym bag, my wallet under the bathroom sink. Crazy stuff like that, stuff that made no sense at all. At first, I laughed about it but after it went on for weeks and weeks, and Brian kept pointing out that I was the one who was home all the time because I wasn’t working, I got paranoid. Like, I couldn’t understand how I kept doing things like that. I knew that I didn’t remember doing any of it – but I had to have, right? Who else could it have been?”
“Shit. Baby, that’s cruel.”
“I started to think that – that the house was conspiring against me,” she said in a low voice. She looked at Silver and saw nothing but compassion in those eyes. That look gave her the courage to continue talking about this time in her life that she was still deeply ashamed of. “I started to think that the house itself was hiding thing from me, moving things around on me. Some days, I really and truly wondered if the place was haunted. I started to think that the only possible explanation was that there had to be a ghost and I’d go nights without sleeping, just lying there awake listening for the damn thing moving stuff around. I’d get up and wander from room to room of this massive house, maniacally memorizing the place of every single item, like some obsessive, never-ending check-list. I did that until I’d collapse from exhaustion somewhere.”
Silver took her hand, held it quietly.
“Brian was completely furious at me about all of this, all the time, and I got more and more on edge. So that was step one of the gaslighting and it was a big one: get me all insecure and disoriented, make me start to question my own memory and actions. Sleep deprivation was a nice bonus and very helpful, as it made me more vulnerable. From there, he kicked it up to things like sending me e-mails and texts – things that I’d seen and read with my own two eyes – and then he’d deny ever having sent them. I’d go back to my phone or e-mail and sure enough, they were gone. He’d tell me that I hadn’t had a cup of coffee and I’d believe him, even when I saw the clean cup sitting in the draining board. I was sure that I’d taken it out of the cupboard and just put it there, for some bizarre and incomprehensible reason. I’d find women’s lingerie or earrings in his jacket pockets, and then they’d just vanish.”
The Devil's Silver (The Road Devils MC Book 2) Page 30
