the side of her face. She tucked her legs underneath her on the bed. "Silas," she said. "It's not what you think."
"It's hard to swallow, is what I think," I said. "Seeing all of this, paid for by innocent people."
Tempest laughed, but when I looked at her, she wasn't smiling. "Innocent," she said. "Yeah, sure."
I walked along the length of the windows that lined the walls of the bedroom from floor to ceiling, overlooking the Vegas skyline. Those lights in the houses out there were where regular people stayed, people like me and my brothers.
The kind of people she and her parents conned.
People like her parents, Tempest and her crew, they saw regular folks as marks. Chumps.
"I remember you wanted to give it all up, you know," I said. Back then, back when she’s mattered to me and I mattered to her, she wanted to leave it all behind.
"I remember a lot of things, Silas," she said.
So did I. That was the fucking problem, I thought. I remembered too much. Like the way she tasted. I couldn't forget it. Or the way she looked when she came, the expression on her face, one of unbridled pleasure.
Or like the way she had played with her hands and stared at the ground when she'd told me she loved me for the first time, as if she was too afraid to speak the words for fear that I wouldn't say the same thing.
I couldn't forget any of it.
But that was before. Before I found out who she really was.
I turned to face her. "I'm not stupid, Tempest."
"Did I give you the impression I think you're an idiot, Silas?" she asked. "You've always been one of the smartest people I know."
"All of this," I said. "You haven't exactly gotten it working a regular job. It’s not like you earned this, clean."
Tempest looked at me, her eyes flashing. Sliding off the bed, she crossed to the other side of the room and stood in front of me. "No," she said. "You know that. You knew that when you came up here. You knew that before you slid my dress up on the balcony out there and stuck your fingers inside me. If you're suddenly too chickenshit to follow through, don't cover it up with some bullshit crisis of conscience."
Anger rushed through me. Goddamn it, this girl pissed me off in a way she'd never angered me back when we were kids.
The thing is, she was right. I'd done a lot of dirty shit, betting on myself in fights. It wasn't like I'd never taken a dive in a fight before, either. Hell, I was thinking about having Coker murdered.
I didn't have room to be all moralistic.
Still. Chickenshit?
It was like she wanted to piss me off.
Her head was tilted up at me, her lips parted, breath shallow. I could hear it, even over the music playing on the stereo, Sam Smith begging a one night stand to stay. I didn't know if I wanted to tell Tempest to go screw herself, and walk away from her bullshit, or if I wanted to bend her over the bed and plunge my cock inside her until she couldn't walk straight.
"Chickenshit," I said. I put my hand at the back of her neck again, threaded my fingers through her hair. The sensation made me harden immediately, and I had to remind myself not to rip her fucking hair out of her head, I wanted to pull her to me so hard.
She made this little moaning sound and leaned into me, her hand on my chest. "You know, if it walks like a duck. Or some metaphor that works with chickens," she said. "Put up or shut up."
The corners of her mouth turned up, like she was baiting me, and yet I couldn't help myself. I wanted to take the bait.
And then she licked her bottom lip, and it was all over for me.
***
CHAPTER TWELVE
TEMPEST
Silas' jaw clenched, and the look that crossed over his face...for a minute, I couldn't be sure he didn't just hate me.
He pulled me toward him, his hand gripping my hair tightly. Bringing his mouth down on mine, he crushed my lips with his, his kiss insistent and powerful. It wasn't one of those loving, gentle kisses, the kind you'd think two reunited long-lost lovers would have.
This kiss was like a goddamn war, his tongue attacking mine, mine battling his, the two of us working out the ton of baggage we carried.
But I found myself melting into him, letting go.
I didn't want to talk to him about the past.
I didn't want to think about what had gone between us, all that had been lost.
When Silas pulled himself away from me, yanked me away from his lips by my hair, he drew in a sharp breath and opened his mouth.
I interrupted him, afraid he was going to say something else I didn't want to think about. "I don't want to fucking talk anymore," I said.
"Then you should shut the hell up," he said, yanking my hair harder, angling my face up toward his. But his voice was finally light, teasing. "Maybe you should find a better use for that smart ass mouth of yours."
He kissed me again, hard like before, and I groaned, pressing my body against his. I could feel his hardness, and I wanted him naked and inside me, the need urgent. But I pushed my hand against his chest, breaking the kiss.
"Maybe I should," I said. "Do you have any suggestions?"
Silas made a low sound in his throat, letting go of my hair. "I can think of a few things," he said.
Grasping the edges of his shirt, I pulled it up on the sides. He yanked it over his head, tossing it to the floor behind him. Running my hands over his chest, I let my fingers play across the expanse. I closed my eyes for a moment, recalling how he felt under my fingertips when we were seventeen, back when I used to sneak away from my parents and run off with him to hide, making love whenever we could find a place to be alone.
I fumbled with the button on his jeans, my movements clumsy, overcome with the anticipation of being with him. "Yeah?" I asked. "What kind of things?"
Silas' blue eyes were darkened with lust. He stepped away from me, and I watched as he kicked off his shoes, let his jeans drop to the floor, and slid them across the carpet. His muscles rippled with every movement, and I felt my heart race.
God, he is still so fucking beautiful. There was no other way of putting it. He was harder now than he had been when I loved him before, both physically and otherwise.
Jaded. Angry.
It made me want him more.
Reaching for the waistband of his boxers, I pulled them down, releasing his erection. "Well?" I asked. "What would you rather I did with my mouth?"
Silas gripped my arms, pulled me against his nakedness as he stepped out of the last stitch of clothing he wore. His forehead pressed against mine, he spoke close to my mouth. "You can get down on your knees and wrap that sweet, sassy little mouth of yours around my cock."
I inhaled sharply, and he kissed me, gently this time, his tongue teasing me. Running my hands over his hard chest and down his muscled abdomen, I sunk to my knees between his legs, his cock in front of me.
Moving my hands up his thighs, I paused, my mouth an inch away from him, and looked up. "Is this what you wanted?"
"Shit, Tempest," he said, his voice gravely as he threaded his hands through my hair. "You know I do. You need to stop fucking talking."
I laughed. "You're bossier than you used to be."
Silas gripped my hair, and my body responded immediately, the throbbing between my legs more insistent now. "You're mouthier than I remembered," he said.
"You have no idea," I said, wrapping my hand around the base of his dick and guiding it toward my mouth. I touched his tip to my tongue, tasting the saltiness of his pre-cum where it dripped from his head.
Silas groaned. "Fuck, Tempest."
"I haven't even gotten started," I said, licking the length of him before I took him in my mouth. Moving my hand up and down his cock, I began to suck him, harder as I worked.
He was silent, his eyes half-closed, until I cupped his balls in my hand and rubbed the sensitive area under them. Then, they fluttered open and he looked at me with hooded eyes. "You keep doing what you're doing, bright eyes, and you're going to
make me come right in that sassy little mouth of yours."
I paused at the use of his nickname for me.
No one had called me that in years.
Suddenly overwhelmed with emotions I couldn’t explain, I pulled back from him.
Silas looked down at me. “Fuck, you think I didn’t remember?”
“I don’t know.” I thought I’d forgotten. Or I’d tried to put it out of my head, the same way I’d half-heartedly tried to forget everything else about him.
He pulled me to my feet and drew me against him. "I couldn’t forget,” he said, then softly hummed a few bars of the song, the words I’d memorized a long time ago, this song about seeing someone for the first time. It was playing in this coffee shop where we’d gone on our first official date - First Day of My Life. Sitting across from him, nervous in the awkward silence, I'd said I liked the words; the band was Bright Eyes, and the nickname had stuck, just between us.
I touched my hand to my mouth, shook my head. Why the hell did a silly little nickname make me feel so damn...nostalgic?
Silas’ hand came up to mine, and he pulled my fingers away from my mouth, then drew the inside of my wrist against his lips before he dragged them up the inside of my forearm. The act made me shiver. Moving both palms up my arms to my shoulders, he hesitated at the straps on my dress, then slid his hands around my back, finding the zipper. When it stuck, he stopped, spinning me around so that my back faced him, and tugged harder. “Is this some trick chastity dress or what?” he asked.
He kissed my neck, distracting me to no end while he tried the zipper again. “I’m going to rip this goddamned dress right off you in the next two seconds if it doesn't come undone,” he said, before the zipper finally gave way and the dress dropped to the floor.
And then Silas’ hands were on me, covering me, traveling up the sides of my hips, over the flesh of my ass he’d playfully smacked before, and across my back. I couldn’t help but let out a moan at his touch.
With him standing behind me and my eyes closed, I was transported to being seventeen again, back when his touch was the most familiar thing in the world. It was like returning to the one place I’d lived that felt like a home to me. Being touched by the only person who’d ever felt like home.
“Please, Silas,” I whispered.
He slid his hands around me, cupped my breasts, his erection pressed firmly against the flesh of my ass. “I knew you could say please.”
I groaned. The shithead had been waiting for me to beg him. “Stop screwing around and just fuck me already,” I said.
He made a sound that was something between a laugh and a roar. Gripping my wrists, he yanked them down to the small of my back and pushed me closer toward one of the windows that overlooked the city. He pulled my arms up roughly, pinning my palms against the window above my head.
Then he ran his hands down my arms from my fingertips to my shoulder, kissing my ear and then my neck, the roughness of his five o' clock shadow against my skin making every movement even more delicious. He reached between my legs, then drew back his fingers. “Shit, you’re wet,” he said, his voice guttural.
“Of course I am,” I said. “I’m begging you to fuck me over here.”
“Well, I’ll have mercy on you then. You won’t have to beg anymore.” He pressed his erect cock against my entrance, and then stopped. “Shit. Hang on. Condom.”
I turned to look at him over my shoulder. “I don’t have any. You have some, right?”
“I don’t - I mean...” He stopped, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Tempest, I’m not exactly having a lot of sex, all right?”
He sounded exasperated, and I couldn’t help but hide a smile. It’s not like I had sex lately. Lately meaning the last seven years since I’d last seen Silas.
I was aware that was fucking ridiculous. Ludicrous. I was a grown woman.
But it was complicated. I didn't intend to not have sex with anyone else. I just never found anyone else. I was Silas’ first, and he had ended up being my only.
It was like coming full circle.
But I didn’t tell him there’d been no one else.
“I’m on the pill, and I’m clean,” I said. “Are you?”
“I’m clean, Tempest,” he said. “And it’s been a while since I’ve had sex.”
Not as long as it had been for me.
“Well,” I said, returning my hands to where he’d put them on the window. “What are we waiting for, then?”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I arched my ass out toward him. “Stop asking questions and put your cock in me, before I shut your mouth up another way.”
“Are you threatening to shut me up by sitting on my face?" he whispered, his mouth close to my ear. I felt him tease my entrance with his cock. "I think I might like that way of shutting me up."
“Another time,” I said. “Right now, I want you inside me.”
He stopped at my entrance, taunting me with his hardness. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me how you want me, Tempest.”
My body responded with a gush of wetness at the thought. “I want to feel you,” I said.
“Like this?” he asked, sliding himself inside me inch by inch, at an excruciatingly slow pace. “You want to feel my hard cock inside you?”
I moaned at the welcome intrusion and then again when he started moving, slowly at first, then gaining momentum. He kneaded my breasts, his thumbs circling around my nipples, the sensitivity heightening my arousal. I moaned his name over and over as he built up a rhythm, plunging his bare cock inside me as deep as it could go.
We'd never done this, completely unprotected, skin against skin, even as teenagers. So I guess this was another first time with him.
“Oh God, Silas,” I called out, my body responding to his touch. I felt like he was taking me higher and higher.
He grasped a handful of hair, pulling my head back and holding me tight against him as he thrust inside me and kissed my ear. When he spoke, the warmth of his breath on my ear had me so far gone I couldn’t think about anything except being melded to him.
His touch.
His lips.
His cock.
Everything was a blur of sensation.
“You are so tight, Tempest,” he said, thrusting into me harder. Letting go of my hair, he gripped the sides of my waist, my ass pressed so tightly against him that I couldn't think about being apart from him.
"Silas," I cried out. Every cell in my body was on fire with his touch. My palms against the cool window, I closed my eyes, shutting out everything else except him and me.
Silas' touch, his breath, the heat of his body... those were the only things that mattered.
I rode the wave of pleasure higher and higher, until it flowed through my body to the tips of my fingers and toes.
Close to my ear, Silas' voice cut through everything. "Come with me, bright eyes," he said, his voice gravelly. "I want to feel you come on me."
I was already so close, but his words pushed me over the edge, and from somewhere outside myself, I heard my voice crying out his name over and over as I came, the explosion of pleasure so intense I thought I would lose my breath. Silas thrust inside me once, twice, three times, each time deeper than the last, and then crashed against me, flooding me with his seed.
Afterward, he clung to my breasts, his face nuzzled against the side of my neck, murmuring my name. We stood there like that for what seemed like forever, my heart thumping wildly. Silas' chest was pressed up against my back, rising and falling quickly as he regained his breath. After a while, he smoothed away strands of hair on the back of my neck and kissed me, the gesture sending a ripple of pleasure through my body that was almost too much to bear.