Let the rest of the world label me a ‘nobody’.
He wouldn’t.
Silo had taken me back to the house and had given me a very thorough kiss before patting my butt and throwing a “see you later, Shell,” over his shoulder before he roared out of the driveway.
I then proceeded to get on with my day only with a lightness of spirit, a hope that I hadn’t had in a long, long time.
I had just sat down to start again on the fund raising ideas when there was a knock at the door. Glancing at the clock, I saw Reese wasn’t supposed to be over for another hour and I wondered who would come visiting unannounced. Checking the spyhole first, I disengaged the all the locks Silo and Mel had installed but made sure the screen door remained latched.
“Hello, Agent Moore.” I had my arms crossed and eyebrows lowered as I ungraciously greeted the man who had followed me first to Missoula and now Billings. “How did you find me this time?”
“Good morning, Michelle.” His smile seemed more predatory than usual and I caught myself tensing up. “Don’t you look lovely? May I come in?”
“Thank you, but no.” I was no longer going to mince words with the man who had put me through the wringer on more than one occasion and whose presence would not be good news to Si’. “Why are you here?”
He seemed taken aback at my lack of manners, but the agent hadn’t taken the hint back when I had tried to give him the social brushoff. “I wanted to make sure you were well and to see if I could offer any assistance.”
“Assistance with what exactly, Agent Moore? With asking me more of the same questions I’ve already answered a thousand and one times?” His smile sagged at my words. “What’s it going to take to convince you I have no more information? To get you to leave me alone?”
“Oh, I don’t believe that’s what you want, Michelle. No, I think our time in Albuquerque showed you how well we get along. How very well suited we are for one another.”
Uh…what?
He couldn’t be serious!
But his eyes had taken on a sheen that told me he absolutely was in no uncertain terms. His gaze raked over me and I found myself adjusting my arms until my breasts were hidden behind them.
His attention, which had gone from professional to more than personal in a flash, scared me down to my bones!
“I’m sorry, but you are very much mistaken. That is exactly what I want because we don’t get along in the least and we are definitely not suited. Most definitely not,” I stressed. “Now if you’ll excuse me…”
His face had twisted until it was an ugly, hideous sneer. “No, I will not excuse you, Michelle! I won’t excuse the way you choose to live with a biker and dance to rock music or laugh with people not cultured enough to lick the soles of your shoes.”
I couldn’t believe what the man was saying! “Have you been stalking me, Agent Moore?”
He adjusted his cuffs as his face settled back into its normal blandness. “Not stalking but simply keeping an eye on you.”
I didn’t know what the difference between stalking and keeping an eye on me was, nor did I want to.
“For what purpose?” I could feel my body beginning to shake with the fear that was whizzing through me.
But he didn’t answer me directly. “I know I can keep you safer than anyone.”
My mind was racing on how to get the man away from me for good! “Tell you what, why don’t I call your manager, a Mr. Gillespie, was it? And let him know how you’ve been following me around, tailing each of my activities and in general, making a complete and total nuisance of yourself when I’m not a part of any active investigation?”
Actually, that was a pretty good plan and as soon as I got my hands on a phone, it would be one of the first phone calls I was going to make. But it was obvious by the color leeching out of the bureaucrat’s face that it was not something he’d counted on me knowing to do.
“Why are you doing this?” he cried. “All I’ve ever done is treated you as the lady you are, the special, cultivated and sincerely beautiful woman I know you to be. I’ve offered myself, my time and my resources to you again and again, but you went behind my back to be with a low-life, dirty biker! Well, I’m tired of waiting and demand that you stop rolling in the mud with those beneath our status and come back to me.”
I almost stumbled with the shock at his words!
Come back to him?
When, for god’s sake, had I ever been with him?
The man was seriously unhinged and I made a special note to myself to call Mr. Gillespie just as soon as possible as well as to get word to Silo. I didn’t need a crazy person on my tail with everything else going on!
“This conversation is over, Agent Moore and I’d thank you never to darken my doorway, or any doorway I happen to inhabit, ever again.” Stepping back, I slammed the heavy wooden door and shot all the locks before going to the back door to ensure it too was barred against any unwanted entries. I wouldn’t put it past the man to crawl through a window for heaven’s sake, and went room to room making sure all the ways he could enter the house were closed and locked.
Then I secured myself in the pink bathroom, its window too tiny to fit a full-sized adult, and waited until I heard Reese’s knock. Quickly pulling her inside after glancing up and down the street, I relayed the unexpected visit from Agent Moore and asked her if I could use her phone. She handed me the shiny rectangle but only after uttering more than a few ‘oh my gods’ through my recanting.
I immediately called Hellion Construction.
“Lu? Shelly. Is Silo available?” After he picked up, I gave him the short version and told him of my plan to call Agent Moore’s boss.
But Silo wanted to do it. “I’ll give his boss the fucking skinny and then find that fucking twerp’s motherfucking ass in order to beat it into next year.” He was so loud I probably could have heard him even without the electronic connection.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. But I knew he wasn’t bluffing either. He both could, and probably would, do all that and more. “Don’t you think it’d mean more if I was the one making the call, big guy?”
He was quiet for just a moment before he began shouting again. “I’m still gonna fuck him up, Shell!”
“Great. You do that. Just don’t get caught because I don’t have access to any money to bail your ass out of jail,” I yelled back.
“I won’t!” he roared so loudly I saw Reese jump.
“Great!” I snapped back just as loud. “And I need a phone, Si’!”
My demand seemed to take some of the wind out of his sails.
“I’ll bring one with me. Give me an hour and I’ll be home!” His volume had reduced but not by much.
“Fine! I’ll see you when you get here.” Disconnecting, I handed the cell back to a wide-eyed Reese.
“Shit! Do y’all always talk to each other like that?” She tucked the phone back into a pocket as her eyes searched my face as if to determine if I was as angry as my shouting had indicated.
“Yeah, pretty much. Only usually not at that volume,” I admitted. The yelling had actually calmed me down quite a bit by allowing me to blow of some steam.
“And I thought Brand and I got loud. Sheesh! You two are worse.”
For some reason, I took that as a compliment from my new friend and smiled.
*.*.*.*.*
Silo could hear Lulu’s fancy-assed shoes clicking on the cement floor as she made a beeline for his office. Just as at the Missoula compound, the management suites were located at the front of the building but in the case of Billings, they were grouped closer together. Which meant that every fucker and their cousin could hear Silo when he got loud.
And he got loud a lot.
“Is she okay?” Lulu panted from the doorway.
“Yeah.” Silo was standing, rummaging through the messy stacks of papers that covered his desktop to try and find the keys he’d tossed on it when he had finally arrived that morning. “Gotta go take care of some shit th
ough. You know if Brand’s available?”
Lulu glanced to her right before turning back. “He’s on his cellphone.”
“Probably with his girl,” Silo mumbled. “I’ll text you a list of things I need to reschedule, what shit needs handling AS-fucking-AP by either Pagan or Hardwood and keep you up to fucking date on when I’ll be back.”
Lulu was nodding like a bobble-head but he knew she’d be on it. Unlike some of the receptionists at Hellion Construction in the past, Lulu was the cream of the crop and all the managers were secretly thankful she’d made her way to their new site. Trey and Bishop though were still pissed at the loss of her and her skills.
“Let me know if I can help,” she murmured, stepping away and glancing again at Brand’s office. “He’s off the phone.”
As Silo cleared the other man’s office doorway, Brand held up a hand. “Save your breath, brother. Reese has already apprised me of what happened. I have made a note to build up a supply of burners to have on hand but in the meantime, get your girl a phone and charge it to the company.”
Silo knew that a burner was a pay-as-you-go cellphone that could be simply tossed away when the need for it had been completed. “I’ll stay in touch through Lulu and asked her to fucking get Pagan or Hardwood to handle any of the immediate shit that flares.”
“Good.” Brand turned back to his computer which Silo took as the president’s approval to take off.
Reese was still at the house when he arrived but quickly left, leaving just him and Shelly in the quiet of the house. It took approximately zero point two seconds after the door had slammed behind Brand’s woman for Shelly to be plastered to his front, his arms around her back.
“You okay, Shell?” Unlike during their phone conversation, Silo’s voice was only a deep murmur against the top of her head.
“He scared me, Si’,” she admitted and tightened the arms she had around his waist. “Moore was acting way weird and kept talking like we’d been a couple before or something.”
Giving her a few moments of comfort, Silo thought about what she said before speaking. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell when just being fucking nice to someone is taken the wrong way. Like you’re flirting with them or some shit. Seems like Agent Moore has Mrs. Colton’s way of thinking in that arena.”
Pulling back to stare up at him, Shelly seemed to be lost in thought. “Carly made mention that his interest might be because of the missing money.”
“Could be,” Silo granted. “Or it could just be that you’re the best thing on two legs and he knows it.”
Giving him an incredulous look, she burst out laughing. “Yeah, right.”
He smiled back realizing that she didn’t really understand how beautiful she was, which was a good thing because combined with her snarky attitude and stubborn streak, adding a layer of self-absorption would’ve been just dead wrong on every level. “Think about it. The realtor got the hots for me only after she’d fucking got wind of my money sitch. When did that fucking little twerp start coming on to you?”
Shelly’s frosted blue eyes went big. “Just about the time he started pressing for info on other accounts that he kept saying were probably secreted away.”
“See?” Silo said with a smile. “Some fucking dudes get hard for the green, too.”
Shelly rolled her eyes and stepped away, leaving Silo’s arms feeling empty. “Do we need to charge this or anything?” She was holding up the box that held her new phone.
“Yeah. We’ll use my phone to get it set up online while it’s gaining some juice.”
The next couple of hours were spent in companionable peace with him on his laptop or phone and Shelly writing in her notebook before setting it aside to put together something for lunch. Silo watched her surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye, trying to determine the change between them.
In the past, it seemed like they had very few moments when they hadn’t been taking pot-shots at one another, little remarks made to get the other one riled. But right then, it was just…good. Right in some kind of way that he didn’t want to define so much as enjoy.
And yet he somehow knew that their new closeness was the result of their talk that morning. One that had been both hard for her to give and harder for him to hear. But she seemed calmer than she had been since he’d brought her to Montana, more open to him.
‘Wished I’d fucking forced her to spill her secrets sooner’, he thought on a silent chuckle.
“What are you grinning about?” she asked, sitting a plate piled high with sandwiches on the table before handing him an empty dish. Which was so totally ‘her’ with going all fucking fancy over nothing but damn sandwiches and chips. If it’d been him by himself, he’d either use a fucking paper towel or have eaten over the sink in order not to have any goddamn dishes to clean.
He reached out an arm and snagged her around her hips. “How you feeling, baby? I mean, after our time at the park.”
She ran a hand over the top of his head in a gentle caress that was so sweet it made him want to close his eyes in order to savor it. “Better, big guy. A whole lot better.”
He twisted in the chair after shoving his laptop off to the side. Opening his knees, he pulled her between them and ran his hands over her curvy ass, feeling her fingers on his shoulders as if to maintain their contact. “Wanna hear how I bought Nike at $52 back in 2007?”
“Wh-what?”
“Just was wondering if fucking telling you about some of my better deals would get you in the mood.”
Her laughter, the beautiful rolling musical sound of her mirth, echoed within the front rooms of the house. “You’re using your portfolio as foreplay?”
“Is it working?”
“I don’t know, Si. What’s it worth now?” Her face was glowing and her cheeks a beautiful pink.
“$75.” He could feel his cock getting steadily harder the more they bantered. “I have over 5,000 fucking shares if that helps.”
She leaned down a bit and placed a soft kiss on his mouth before pulling back just enough to gaze into his eyes before whispering fervently, “my panties get wet for the dude, not the green”.
“Good to know, Shell,” he murmured in between their kisses that left him throbbing. “Good to fucking know.”
*.*.*.*.*
In my mind, there was nothing more decadent than having sex when the sun was up. When it was streaming in the mini-blinds giving the room a sunshiny glow that made everything take on a golden hue. Sure, night was sexy with its dark secrets. But somehow being naked and sweaty in the middle of the day was so much more…primal in some way.
And that’s exactly how Silo had taken me.
Primal.
Fast.
And worked me deliciously hard.
Gone was the tenderness of slow caresses and the gentle removal of my clothes. Instead there had been frantic fingers, the sound of ripping fabric and the yanking of jeans in order to get as bare as possible in the least amount of time.
And I’d loved each and every second of it.
“Gotta fucking be inside you, Shell,” he’d groaned as he’d finished getting me naked and pushed me towards the bed as he tried to stomp out of the jeans that were twisted around his ankles. While I’d centered myself in the middle, adjusting the pillows behind my head, he’d given me a look so hot, so scorching I felt it down to my bones. “Turn the fuck over, princess, and offer me that amazing ass.”
I blinked up at him a couple of times until I realized he was dead serious.
He wanted to do it from behind which I had to admit made me nervous. Though no stranger to sex, I’d always considered that position to be a bit too impersonal to find it pleasant. A way for the guy to use a woman’s body as he fantasized her about another woman.
But I trusted the big man in front of me and knew if I declined, he’d go with it without quibbling. And I opened my mouth to do just that when I’d caught the look in his eyes. A look that spoke of nothing but his want of me, of being inside
me and had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with any other person.
So I rolled over onto my hands and knees.
“Put those beautiful tits on the mattress but keep that ass up, baby,” he growled and I felt the mattress dip as he crawled up from the bottom. Soon, his hands were rubbing my backside before pushing on my thighs in a silent request to spread them further open. “Fuck, that’s hot!”
His hands drifted down to my moist cleft and he dragged two fingers along my exposed flesh, causing me to moan into the pillow while my hips jerked. God the inability to see, to anticipate what he was doing, only heightened my arousal as well as my need. “Si!” I begged.
“Need something?” he questioned on a growl, draping himself over my back, his mouth at my ear as his member slid through my puddling wetness, rubbing the latex-covered head of himself against my clit again and again. “Tell me what you need, baby.”
“Inside!” I panted. “I need you inside.”
“Oh fuck, yeah.” His voice was throaty and thick as he reached between us to guide himself to my opening and I felt him thrust all the way in at once, causing me to shiver and almost scream. “That’s it, Shell. Ain’t nobody home, so let it right the fuck out, baby!”
And I needed no other encouragement to let my vocalizations resound in the room that was filled with nothing but the slapping of our flesh as he drilled himself in and out of me. The speed, depth and pressure he maintained had my orgasm coming faster than it ever had before. And on the heels of mine, I felt him stiffen behind me. The heat contained in his condom increased before the echoes from his own shout had even died out.
I allowed my quivering knees to straighten and he followed me down as I laid myself flat-out on the mattress, my breaths hard pants.
“You fucking kill me, Shell,” he whispered into the hair by my ear. I could feel the booming of his heart against my back as he held most of his weight on his elbows. “Every time you let me into your sweet pinkness, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
Okay, it wasn’t the most romantic thing a man could say to a woman but coming from Silo, it was perfect and only added to my afterglow. After a few minutes, he kissed my shoulder before disengaging and moving to the bathroom.
A Civilian for Silo Page 22