"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 nothing 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.
28
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 th
is 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 and 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."
"Any other rules, or is that it?"
"One more," she said. "Don't fall in love."
I was silent, my finger tracing down her arm before I brought it back up to her shoulder and down between her breasts. Her nipples rose to attention at my touch, and she squirmed in front of me.
I didn't tell her that she was wrong about the swallow tattoo. Swallows might represent freedom and travel - but she was forgetting the most important part.
And that was the fact that no matter how many thousands of miles they traveled, swallows always returned home.
29
Tempest
I woke to Silas moving beside me.
"Sorry," he said. "I wasn't trying to wake you. I just had to get up to brush my teeth. And take a leak."
"Classy," I said, rolling over onto my stomach in the bed and sliding up his body until my head was on his chest, my cheek pressed up against his warm skin.
I didn't want to move from where I was laying. I wanted to stay like this for as long as I could.
That fact was frightening. Staying here for a few days was one thing, but more than that? Letting myself get used to this with Silas wasn't a good idea.
And yet, it's the only thing I wanted to do.
Silas ran his hand over my hair, the strands clinging to his hands momentarily, then falling back into place as he let them go. "How did you sleep?"
"Good," I said, the response automatic. The memory of last night was etched on my brain - Silas and I moving in sync, sweat glistening on our skin. I had fallen asleep in Silas' arms afterward, my need completely satiated. I hadn’t slept that well in years. "How did you sleep?"
"Mmm," he murmured, pulling me up to him, close, so that my breasts brushed against his chest. He kissed me lightly on the lips, but I pushed him away.
"I have morning breath," I said.
"Obviously," he said. "This is real life, not a romance novel."
I laughed. "Well, let me brush my teeth, then."
Silas squeezed the flesh of my ass cheek and pressed me against him. "Oh, you don't want to get out of bed, do you? It's all nice and warm in here. It's cold and lonely out there."
"I really have to pee," I said, pushing away from him.
He groaned loudly. "Come on, bright eyes," he said. "You know you want a piece of this."
I laughed as I walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Being here with Silas in his place felt comfortable. It wasn't like the morning after that we'd had in Las Vegas, the one where I felt awkward and tentative. This felt like being someplace familiar.
It felt like home.
I shrugged off the thought, easily distracted as soon as I opened the bathroom door. Silas lay in bed, the covers kicked off his body, stark naked, proudly displaying his erection. He grinned. "I was going to get up and go make you breakfast," he said. "But then I thought, well, I'd hate to let this perfectly good hard-on go to waste."
I rolled my eyes. "You are nothing but class," I said. "I'm realizing that you didn't learn any manners in the seven years since I've been gone, did you?"
"Manners?" he asked. "I don't understand. What are these manners things you're talking about?"
I sauntered over to the bed, enjoying Silas' eyes on me as I walked. He didn't waste any time when I reached him, his hands immediately on my waist, pulling me toward the bed. Swinging one leg over his body, I knelt with my knees on either side of him. He