A Civilian for Silo

by J. A. Hornbuckle

  “Where the fuck do you think, Shell?”

  I suppose it really was kind of a silly question given my position of legs around his waist and arms around his shoulders.

  “I think it’s time to stop fucking talking and start getting fucking busy,” he mumbled in a heated voice against my mouth that had somehow met his.

  And even though I didn’t say it out loud, I agreed.

  *.*.*.*.*

  Silo rolled reaching out a hand to bring Shelly closer but all his fingers encountered were cold sheets. He lifted his head and squinted. Yep. She’d gone back to her room and from the chill on the mattress, had done it some time ago.

  He shifted over onto his back and stared at the ceiling feeling empty. He knew he shouldn’t have instigated his play of the night before but he hadn’t been able to help himself. She’d just looked and smelled too fucking good to leave alone.

  And the shit that Shelly had done when he’d brought the realtor in the house, the smiling up at him and looping her arm through his had just been her way of telling the other woman that he was off-limits.

  But why had she done that?

  He’d heard her tell Lulu that he wasn’t her choice for a long term partner with his own fucking ears. So what was she fucking playing at?

  Goddamn chicks and their fucking head games!

  Yeah, he’d fallen for it. Had got all fucking caught up in her act to the point he’d forgotten his vow to keep himself away from her. Hadn’t remembered that she didn’t want him, had taken her to bed instead and loved her up more than a couple of times. Only to wake and find she’d fucking high-tailed it back to her room, leaving him to drown in his disappointment.

  He’d envisioned another round, of the morning sex variety, before they each had to start their day. Since that obviously hadn’t happened, he guessed he had no choice but to get ready for work. Sitting up on the side of the bed, he thought for a moment. Actually, it had been his intention to get her to open up about how she’d ended up in the hospital in Albuquerque—not to seduce her. Now that the club and the company were almost fully manned and ready to go, he could get back to his priority of keeping her safe.

  But he still didn’t know from whom or even fucking why!

  He’d pumped Lulu to see if Shelly had disclosed anything in one of their sisterly chats, but Lulu said Shelly never brought the subject up and closed the talk down if Lulu broached it herself. “Shelly is kind of stubborn, if you want to know the truth,” Lulu had confided. “If she doesn’t want to talk about something, a team of wild horses couldn’t drag it out of her.”

  He ran a hand over his head while trying to think how to get his girl alone without playing another round of slap-and-tickle in order to pry her secrets out.

  He glanced at the clock and decided to go in late.

  Getting to the bottom of Shelly’s shit seemed a lot more important than getting to work early.

  Pulling on his sleep pants, he went down the hall to Shelly’s room and knocked on her door. Not receiving an answer, he poked his head inside and saw just the top of her curls poking out of the covers. “Shell?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Need you to get up, baby.” He tried to keep his voice low in order to let the others sleep in peace, but it was a struggle.

  He saw a corner of the blanket move as one sleepy frosted blue eye came into view. “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?” Jay-sus, she was a pig-headed woman in the best of times and mornings seem to make it worst. A fact he’d forgotten over the course of days since he’d left before she’d awakened.

  “Because I asked you to. Now getcha ass up and dress warm,” he growled before closing the door and taking a step away to get towards his own morning ablutions. But as he started to turn the corner, it occurred to him that there was no noise coming from her room. He turned back with a sigh and again knocked on her door.

  “What!”

  He poked his head in again and saw she hadn’t moved except to re-cover her face. “I said NOW, Shell,” he ground out angrily.

  “Geez! You kept me up half the night and now you want me out of bed at the freaking crack of dawn?” The eye made another appearance only this time it was squinting.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you aren’t going to tell me why?”

  “Nope.”

  He heard a heavy sigh from underneath the shifting covers and watched as she sat up, twisting her legs until her feet were on the floor. Pushing the hair out of her face, she speared him with a glare. “Happy now?”

  “Fucking thrilled. Now get your ass in gear and dress warm,” he repeated, his voice holding a note of warning. “You have a half-hour.”

  He didn’t think the middle finger she held up in reply was the appropriate response but since she didn’t say anything further, Silo just closed the door and went to get himself ready to meet the day.

  Coming into the living room thirty minutes later, he found Shelly sitting at the dining room table, her head down on her folded arms. “You ready, baby?”

  “Just need my jacket,” she mumbled without lifting her head. Silo stepped into the back porch and snagged both their coats from the hooks. He took hers out to the table before slipping his arms into his leather one.

  “Get your coat on, Shell.” He could see it was going to be an uphill battle until she became fully awake. Going back out onto the porch, he snagged two helmets and brought one to where she stood, wrestling with the sleeves of her wool coat. He shook his head and shifted the helmets onto the table in order to help her shrug it on, and then took the opportunity to quickly do up the buttons.

  If left to her own devices, they’d be leaving at fucking noon.

  “We’re taking the bike?” she asked, her voice a sleepy mumble in the quiet of the house.

  “What was your first clue?”

  “Geez, you’re a dick in the morning!” He glanced at her to see if she was serious. By the set frown she was wearing, she was.

  “Yeah, Shell. We’re taking my ride.” Silo was holding back a sigh as he spoke.

  “You haven’t taken me on your bike since I’ve been back.”

  Was that true? He cast his mind over the last few weeks and realized she was right. He’d been out plenty of times but every time she’d been with him, he’d used the truck. Silo helped her don the helmet before putting his own on, keeping the visor lifted. “Let’s hit it, baby.”

  First stop was at the local coffee place where he got a small cup of regular and she asked for an extra-large, triple-shot mocha or some other kind of shit thingie and a couple of sweet rolls. Allowing her three huge gulps, he replaced the lid tightly and tucked their coffees into one of the holders in the hard-sided panniers that straddled the back wheel. At her frustrated groan, he told her she’d get it back when they got to their destination.

  “Dick!”

  “Shrew!”

  She pouted all the way to their destination: Riverfront Park which was near the Hellion complex. Since he wasn’t sure how emotional she’d be when he demanded her story, he thought being away from others was his best bet in insuring she felt comfortable enough to let it all out in one fell swoop.

  Finding an empty table was the easy part since there didn’t seem to be anyone else out that wasn’t fucking jogging or doing some kind of exercise class at the farthest end. Silo straddled a bench and watched as she tucked herself onto the one opposite him.

  “Okay, you want to tell me why we are freezing our asses off at a park at o’dark early in the morning?” She looked much younger than her years without her makeup. In the morning sunlight, her beautiful skin took on a glow that was hard to look away from.

  “It’s time, baby.”

  “Time for what?” She asked, using two hands to bring the mammoth cup to her lips.

  “Time for you to fucking tell me why you were found wandering a canyon lost, sick and confused, wearing nothing but a goddamn ball gown.” He watched as she went from graceful
girl to fucking stone at his words.

  She looked away. “I’m not ready to talk about that yet.”

  “I can’t fucking help if I don’t know what I’m fighting, Shell.”

  Her eyes were looking at everything but him and he watched as she took another deep swallow of her coffee. “I don’t want to talk about it, Si’.”

  “You gotta, baby.” He kept his words, though quiet, firm and resolute. When she didn’t speak, he let out a deep sigh. “I need to know who and why.”

  Her eyes swung to his before quickly skittering away. “I don’t know.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, I don’t know.” Her voice was high and tight, almost as crisp as the chilly air around them.

  “Which part?”

  She glanced at him and he watched her eyebrows come together as she tilted her head. “I don’t know who and I don’t know why.”

  Silo pulled at the soul patch on his bottom lip. “Okay,” he began on a drawl. “What do you know then?”

  Her eyes went down to her cup but her frown remained in place. “I know that I had gone home coughing and crying after my latest event. It was an abysmal failure.”

  He nodded to show he was listening and kept his voice on the low side as he asked, “What time was this, Shell.”

  “About on one thirty in the morning.”

  “And why was it ‘abysmal’?”

  She huffed and turned her mouth down to her large coffee again before speaking. “Because practically nobody showed! Well, no one who counted, anyway.”

  “So you went home to your condo and then what happened?”

  “I took the elevator upstairs but even from a few feet away, I saw my front door was open.”

  Silo didn’t say anything and Shelly’s eyes came back to his.

  “The interior was completely black and I always locked the front door after setting the timers for the lights when I knew I’d be home after dark.” To Silo’s mind, she appeared both conflicted and outraged as she spoke.

  He pondered his next words, trying to keep them simple and easy when every fiber of his being was demanding he push for answers. “Then what did you do?”

  She bugged her eyes out at him and he thought it was in frustration. “What the heck did you think I’d did? I went back downstairs to the greeter’s desk. But Rodney wasn’t there.”

  Okay. Now they were getting to it!

  “So the building’s security guard was missing from his post, Shell. Then what happened?”

  She looked everywhere but at him, her eyes flicking towards a jogger, a running dog and the class still working their moves at the end of the field.

  “I called the police,” she admitted in a small voice and Silo tried to make sense of her tone. “But they told me that it’d be over an hour before they could get anyone to me. Because I’d called them so often, over things they’d labeled as frivolous, they said they’d put me on the waiting list! Me, Shelly Palmer, on a flipping waiting list!”

  The outraged portion of herself couldn’t be denied in her tone. Holy fucking Christ, was she really that caught up in her Daddy’s former glory? “And you didn’t like that, right? A Palmer girl being made to wait while other people took a place in front of her?”

  “Absolutely! The woman on the other end of the phone was actually snotty when I corrected her, told her my name. I’d even spelled it out for her! And she’d laughed. Laughed, Si’, like I was a simple nobody that didn’t mean anything to anyone!”

  Silo dropped his head, mainly to hide his expression. Did she honestly believe the fucking shit she was spouting?

  “So what’d you do, Shell? What was your next step?”

  She was again looking everywhere but at him which he’d figured was one of her tells. Her way of letting him know that she wasn’t going to give because of the feelings that her recount was evoking. “I hung up. Angrily, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Because she didn’t take you seriously, princess?”

  “Well, yeah!” Haughty, princess-of-the-castle Shelly was firmly in place, furious at being treated as just one of the masses. But as Silo watched, all that imperialness quickly faded and her entire posture reflected a sweet vulnerability.

  She took another deep breath, as she tucked her hands between her thighs. “I just hung up, Si’.”

  And at her breathy voice, Silo studied her beautiful face and fully witnessed the bleakness there. She’d been ousted from the throne through no fault of her own and hadn’t even fully realized it until her conversation with the police dispatcher.

  “I couldn’t take her censure, the very tone that told me in no uncertain terms that I was nothing in the whole scheme of it all.” Her frosted blue-eyes finally met his. “I’m not nothing, Silo.”

  “Of course, you aren’t, baby,” he quickly reassured her. “And next? What’d you do next, Shell?”

  “If I couldn’t get help and couldn’t go home, I figured I could just simply check into the nearest hotel.”

  “And did you?”

  Her head quickly twisted away from him only providing him with the view of a sliver of her face as she seemed absorbed in the sight of the braying dog way out in the distance. “I was on my way.”

  Her eyes went down to the fists she had on the table.

  “Did you get there, Shelly?”

  Her gaze lifted and he got caught up in the frightened light in her eyes. “No. No I didn’t.”

  But before he could even prompt her, his girl began to speak on a low, dispassionate tone. “There were two of them. On motorcycles that followed me away from my building. And they followed me for miles, Silo. Miles! Even though I tried everything I knew to ditch them. But they just clung to my rear bumper, matching me and my speed as I drove.”

  “Where’d you go, pretty girl?” Yeah, he was leading her but felt he needed to in order to get the full story.

  “I don’t know,” she finally admitted after more than a few moments of silence between them. “All I know is that the road I eventually made my way to didn’t have any lights and the curves were sharp.”

  He watched her throat move as she again swallowed deeply.

  And raised stricken eyes to his.

  “All I remember is that I was going too fast for the mountainous curve and that my little Audi couldn’t hold the road.” She turned her head away again. “I flipped my car and after it settled, I scrambled out.”

  Silo stopped his perusal and lifted his gaze to the normal everyday happenings contained within the large park. “So you were in a ball gown, wandering an untraveled road when you were found. How’d that happen, baby?”

  “I ran, Si’.” Her voice was nothing but a breathy whisper and her beautiful eyes wide and unblinking. “Or at least, I tried to. I’d been feeling bad for a few days, with a slight fever and a cough that had gotten worse. But I tried to rally and ran as fast as I could, my chest burning as I struggled to both breathe and not cough, to not make a sound! I stumbled, turning my ankle badly over the rocks even as I heard the bikers, the men who’d been chasing, calling for me. I got my hair caught in a fence when I climbed under it. I hid in dirty, smelly shallow caves, constantly moving, until the sun started to come up. I even managed to find a ranch but was driven off by the owner who kept pointing a shotgun my way even when I was coughing so deep and so hard I was almost on my hands and knees in his yard.”

  Her beautiful, though stricken blue eyes raised to his. “I had nobody, Si’. Nobody who cared. No one who wanted to help, who would save me. So I walked until I eventually found a road and had the Sheriff call you after I was picked up.”

  He snaked a hand out to capture one of hers that was fisted on the table. “And you did good, baby.”

  She nodded but didn’t seem to take any comfort in his compliment.

  Her strawberry-blonde curls bounced, offering a sparkling he’d never seen before as she nodded at his praise.

  “But. I don’t feel like I did all that good, h
oney,” she said, her heart so open and visible in the blue depths of her eyes. “I ran and hid. I scared a whole family of farmers by just showing up on their doorstep in the dawn and unannounced.” When her chin dropped, Silo felt the lack of light her eyes had created within him. “I had nothing. Even my name meant zilch. So I did the only thing I knew to do. Which was to call you.”

  And as she dropped her curls over the table, over the fisted hands both of them held, Silo rested his elbows on the table and turned his face up to the sun, allowing its rays to calm him. Shelly was quiet as well and the silence between them was like a balm for the burning in his gut. With his eyes still closed he asked one last series of questions. “Did you get a good look at them, Shell? Could you pick them out in a line up or did they have any kind of scars or tats that you could describe?”

  “My memory is so fuzzy and it was so dark,” she started slowly, thoughtfully. “But I do remember seeing the men on the motorcycles wearing denim jackets. Funny now that I think about when they pulled alongside, their jackets had this thing on the back kind of like your Hellion patch.”

  Her eyes went unfocused as if she was trying hard, very fucking hard to remember. “The words were Spanish, I think because I didn’t recognize them. But the picture was of a scary looking devil holding a globe in one hand and a rifle in the other.”

  Fucking Vitas Diablos!

  Chapter Twenty

  I didn’t know that simply telling Silo all I could remember about my ordeal in Albuquerque would be freeing, but it was. Afterwards I’d felt lighter as if I’d suddenly lost a lot of weight. Like some the darkness, the shame at the loss of my prestige, my embarrassment at my change in status that had coated my insides, had been forced out.

  Of course it could’ve been the way he’d held me afterward, quickly moving to my side of the table and gathering me close. And he’d continued to cradle me against his chest for more than a few minutes. When I’d tried to pull away, all he’d said was, “this is fuckin more for me than you, baby.” I believed him because from what I’d seen both the night before and that morning was that Silo Kettering definitely valued me and wasn’t afraid to let me see it.