“Ooh yeah,” Tabby chipped in. “What gives? Did you come back to pledge your undying love to Sammy?”
“No.” Scott felt his cheeks grow hot. “I, uh, had a change of plans. My job’s been transferred here.”
Tabby let out a low whistle. “Wait till Sam hears about this. She is going to shit.”
She didn’t sound as though she meant this as a good thing. God, he needed to get out of here. “Okay, well, you’ve got the folder and I’ve included my card if you’d like to discuss the offer on your house again. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”
“That sounds good,” Nicole said. “I’ll look over the folder and let you know. It was good to see you, Scott.”
“Hang on,” Tabby protested. “Why don’t I call Sammy and—”
“Stop stirring up drama.” Nicole turned and headed for the hallway, cutting a wide path around the giant tattooist. Noah followed her with his gaze, watching until she disappeared into a side room.
“See you around,” he said to Scott and the subtext was ‘watch yourself buddy.’ Considering what his father had done, Scott couldn’t blame him. “I doubt you’ll be seeing me again. I’m in South Melbourne and I don’t want to cause the DaSilvas any more distress.”
The big man nodded, leaving the room so he and Tabby were alone again.
“Goodbye,” he told Sam’s sister. “Sorry about your skates.”
Tabby beckoned him closer. “Fuck the skates, c’mere.”
Scott hesitated, then moved. “What’s up?”
“Sammy’s in Ink the Night. That’s why she’s not here. She’s setting up for the comp.”
“What’s Ink the—”
“It’s a tattoo comp. They pick a theme out of a hat and you have three hours to give someone a tat that relates to the theme. Sam hasn’t done one in ages, but the winner gets a spot in Fadeout Festival so she has to compete.”
“Okay…what does this have to do with me?”
Tabitha cast a quick glance behind her. “You want to see her again, don’t you?”
“I…”
“Then it’s settled, you give me a lift to Ink the Night and I’ll get you into the competition so you can talk to Sam. She’ll be rapt to see you. She’s been talking about you heaps.”
Scott’s heart leapt in spite of himself. “I shouldn’t. I don’t want to bother her when she’s working.”
“She won’t mind! Come on, she wants to see you. And besides, you owe it to her, what with your old man going ape on her this morning. Let’s just go to Ink the Night together.”
Scott frowned. “What’s in this for you?”
“Nothing!”
Scott gave her his best Paddington stare, the one he used on clients being finicky about their offshore accounts.
“Okay fine, there’s a free bar for the artists and I want to drink infinite cider. Still, Sam does want to see you, so can you just take me, yeah?”
“Why don’t you catch an Uber?”
“I don’t have any money and you owe me for my roller skates.” Tabby flashed him a winning smile. “Besides, didn’t you get away with stealing a bunch of Sam’s underwear off our washing line? Replacing those would have been expensive.”
Scott flushed from hairline to collar. He wanted to tell Tabby she had it wrong—it had only been one pair of panties, stolen when he was fourteen and he hadn’t ‘gotten away with it.’ He’d been apprehended by Sam’s dad, who’d encouraged him to ask Sam for a pair if he wanted to wank over them.
God, remembering that made him want to commit seppuku where he stood.
“Fine,” he told Tabby. “I’ll give you a lift. Just don’t tell Noah, or Nicole or anyone else about the underwear.”
Sam’s little sister beamed at him. “I’ll go get my coat.”
Chapter 8
A few years ago, Sam had been interviewed by a tattooing blog. They asked questions she’d answered a hundred times—where do you get your ideas? Why don’t you have a fucking phone? How long did you have to practise to get good at tattooing?
She gave cheerful stock answers—Eighteenth century Flemish paintings! I like my privacy! A couple years! She figured a baby blog with fewer than a dozen readers didn’t deserve the truth. Which was—I don’t fucking know! Because I’m scared of what I might do if I could contact anyone I wanted at any time! I didn’t have to practise! I was always good!
She’d been six when her dad first let her hold a tattoo machine. She’d inked a smiley face on the banana he’d offered and the lines had come out as fluid as when she drew on paper. In that moment, she knew she was going to be an artist. Other artists whispered that her career was the product of nepotism, that she never even had to try. It was bullshit. Her dad wouldn’t have given her an apprenticeship if he didn’t think she had talent. She’d inherited his ability to take images from her mind and print them perfectly onto skin, the first time. Every time. She was good, goddamit, but in the eyes of her peers, she was never good enough.
As she sat hunched over Kelly’s thigh, tattooing her contribution to Ink the Night, Sam remembered why she’d stayed off the competitive circuit for so long. She could hear the spectators discussing her legitimacy, or more accurately, tearing it apart. She was too young, too female, too—and as much as it sounded like a compliment, it fucking wasn’t—good-looking to be taken seriously. And when people found out who her father was? Game over. All Sam’s career, the consensus was anyone could be an artist if they had her background. Forget that Nicole, her identical fucking twin, couldn’t draw a stick man, her career was based on nothing but nepotism. All the bearded dudes with the same nine steampunk tattoos? They deserved to be tattoo artists. She and Tabby were Kat Von D wannabes riding on their daddy’s coattails.
“Are you okay?” Kelly whispered after a man in his fifties stage-whispered that he had t-shirts that were older than she was.
“I’m fine,” she said, keeping the needlepoint moving slow and steady down Kim’s thigh.
There were ten minutes left on the clock, no room for bitching. This wasn’t about her ego, Silver Daughters Ink needed this, and when she won the Fadeout Festival slot, these assholes could bitch all they liked—she’d be a winner.
The competition theme tonight had been ‘Paradise Lost.’ A more perfect motif Sam couldn’t have asked for. She sketched Adam and Eve on a background of lacy green leaves. Their bodies were narrow and smooth in style of the sixteenth century Flemish oil paintings, their eyes wide and full of anxious fear. The apple of knowledge hung between them like a ruby and a viperous green snake twined itself around Eve’s curves, hissing poison in her ear.
Kelly, her friend and model for the night, had said ‘fuck yeah’ to the design and away they went. As she filled in the edges of the leaves, she could feel her wrist seizing. Her weekly trips to a massage therapist had gone the way of the dodo when business started running out of money. She was paying for it now, her whole body was stiff.
It doesn’t matter. Win the comp, get into Fadeout, win Fadeout, save Silver Daughters, be a hero, die of exhaustion. Everybody wins.
“No one’s work looks anywhere near as good as yours,” Kelly whispered, craning her neck to peer at the nearby TV.
There were cameras on all nine of the tattooists, displaying their work more clearly to the crowd. Sam had so far refused to look at them. Adam, Eve and their immortalization on Kelly’s skin was her concern, not the competition and not the crowd which was growing rowdier by the minute.
Watching people get tattoos was boring after about thirty seconds and the fifty or so people crammed into the pub were marking time as they always did—by drinking and bitching about the artists.
“Oh my god!” Kelly shifted in her chair and Sam lifted the needle just in time to avoid streaking. “What the fuck, Kel?”
Kelly flushed. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I saw a hot guy and I wanted a better look.”
Though she’d come dangerously close to a heart attack, Sam grinned. Sh
e and Kelly had been mates since school and her friend was still as unapologetically boy-crazy as Claudia from the Babysitters Club.
“If you’d fucked the tattoo I’d have been forced to murder you,” she told Kelly, dropping her gaze to her thigh and resuming her work. “Since we averted crisis, I’ll ask what he looks like.”
“Gorgeous,” Kelly sighed. “Tall and wearing a suit. Not one of those shiny Lowes suits, either. A nice suit.”
That was appealing enough for Sam to risk a quick glance. Seeing nothing but the same heavily tattooed crowd she’d seen all night, she dropped her gaze back to Kelly’s thigh. “Can’t see him. What the hell is a guy in a suit doing here, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s a pub manager or something?”
Sensing her friend wanted to crane around for another glance, Sam tapped her thigh. “Hot guys come later. Hold still for two more minutes and you can go impress him with your new ink.”
“Okay.” Kelly slumped back into the dentist’s chair. “You’re going to win, by the way. You’ll win tonight and then you’ll tattoo me at Fadeout. Then you’ll win that and we’ll both become Instagram famous.”
“That’s the plan,” Sam said, her stomach squirming like a bag of live eels. A certain amount of bravado was necessary in this business but she was having trouble calling it up tonight. There was just so much at stake. She let her focus dip back into the ink, which always calmed her.
“Ooh!” Kelly said. “Your sister’s here!”
Sam smiled at Kelly’s thigh. Tabby’s presence was guaranteed by the free bar, but she’d hoped Nix would tear herself from the office and come. They hadn’t had much time to bond so far and a solid night out was just what she needed.
“Can you wave them over?” she asked Kelly. “Nix always gets shy at competitions. So many people know dad, it’s like being a celebrity’s kid.”
“Nix? She’s not here, I meant Tabby.”
Sam felt her good mood stiffen. “I thought you said ‘your sisters’ are here’? As in both of them?”
“Oh, no, I just meant I could see Tabby! I’m sorry babe, were you expecting Nicole?”
“Nope,” Sam lied, refocusing on Kelly’s thigh. Nicole wasn’t here and that was fine.
A couple of minutes later, the buzzer sounded and she stepped away from Kelly. She took a detached pleasure in the tattoo. The lines were crisp, the faces detailed. Eve was torn between fear and lust. Adam, stern yet uncertain.
Kelly beamed at her. “This is your best work ever.”
“You say that every time, but thanks.”
They hugged, and Sam bandaged the tattoo so Kelly could take a much-needed pee.
As soon as she was alone, the evening’s stakes felt painfully apparent again. Sam dug her nails into her palms, trying to contain the adrenaline pulsing in her veins. What she wanted more than anything right now was fifteen minutes with a guy who knew exactly how to spank her. The pleasurable burn would be so cathartic, so distracting. But there was no chance of that. Maybe if she won, she’d muster up the enthusiasm to re-activate her Kinkworld account—the only social media platform to which she was a member. She’d never had success on there before, but there had to be someone on there who wasn’t a pillock…
She looked around for Tabby and saw only unfamiliar people, taking in her body, her tattoos, her face. None of them were smiling so she kept her own expression cool as she bent over to pack away her gear.
She glanced around at the other tattooists as she worked. None of them would meet her gaze. There were always rivalries between tattoo parlours, but comps like this were on a whole other level. The guys she was up against tonight were kings of their trade, well-known artists from Melbourne, Sydney and the Gold Coast. Marias Blanco had even flown in from Toronto. It was well worth the effort. Whoever won tonight would get two thousand bucks, free advertising and a guaranteed position at Fadeout Festival.
Fadeout’s Grand Master Tattooist comp always drew big crowds but this year it would also be filmed for streaming on Netflix. You couldn’t buy the kind of publicity winning Fadeout would bring and that was good, because she couldn’t afford to buy any kind of publicity right now.
“Sammity-Sam!” Tabby burst out of nowhere, an explosion of pale skin and blue hair. She wrapped her arms around her middle. “Nice work! You’ve got this thing in the bag!”
“Cheers.” Sam could smell cider on her sister’s breath and wondered if she’d drunk the entirety of her TAB. “What did you think of the shading? It wasn’t too dark?”
“It was great.”
“What about Adam’s eyes? I was worried he looked a bit Manson and you know—”
“Don’t think on it.” Tabby waved her phone in Sam’s face. “Where’s Kelly? We should post a good picture of you guys now, at least on the business’ storyline. That way when you win and everyone gets on our hype train we’ll already have snaps up.”
“Okay.” Sam’s insides gave another serpentine wriggle. “I think Kelly was just peeing, she should be back soon.”
“She’s already back. She’s over there talking to Scotty!”
“Talking to…?” Sam followed her sisters’ gaze and her mouth went dry. It hadn’t been a coincidence. Scott Sanderson was here, in a suit, flirting his ass off with her tattoo model. Well she was flirting her ass off with him at any rate—she looked ready to seize the back of his head and plunge him face-first into her cleavage.
“What the hell is he doing here?” she asked Tabby. “He should be back in London.”
“Yeah, about that, he lives in Melbourne now!”
Sam gaped at her sister. “How do you know?”
“Because he told me. He showed up at the shop today to apologise for his mental dad and we got chatting and long story short, we came here.”
“Right…he wouldn’t have given you a lift, would he?”
“Maybe,” Tabby said with faux innocence. “You know, he’s gotten buff. And he drives a schmick car. And he has a nice accent. Do you think it gets even posher when he’s …?” she raised and lowered her eyebrows at an alarming rate.
Sam scowled at her sister. “Don’t you fucking start.”
“Jealous, eh? Well don’t take your issues up with me. Take it up with Kelly, she’s the one trying to back him into her labia.”
That was true, but Sam hated letting men come between friends. Besides, who was she to demand dibs on Scott Sanderson? Because she’d known him the longest? Because she’d terrorized him as a child? That should have given her less of a right to go near him, but Tabby was right, she was jealous. Actually, she felt a hundred things, but jealous was the largest and most easily identified emotion.
“He’s still into you,” Tabby said. “The whole time you were working, he didn’t take his eyes off you.”
Sam felt a deep stab of something. Longing maybe, or maybe just loneliness. “You shouldn’t have brought him here. I don’t want to see him.”
“Why not?”
There were a million reasons, none of which Sam felt like confiding to her sister. Luckily she knew exactly how to get Tabby off her tail. “Want to go into the VIP section?”
Her sister’s eyes lit up. “Do I? Do I?”
So Sam steered Tabby to the fancy reserved room, away from Kelly and away from Scott Sanderson. The two of them hooking up would do nothing but good for all parties involved, despite whatever her heart and stomach kept saying.
Chapter 9
Scott knew he was being ungrateful, that any number of men would love to be standing where he was standing and being chatted up by who he was getting chatted up by, but he wasn’t listening to a word Kelly was saying. His attention was in his peripherals, desperately trying to locate Samantha. He couldn’t get his head around what he’d just seen, the way she’d transmitted a beautiful image onto another person’s skin in the time it took to watch a couple of movies. It had been like magic. She’d looked so gorgeous doing it, too, her eyes narrowed in supreme concentratio
n, her red lips slightly parted…
“Do you have any tattoos?” Kelly said, pulling him back to the present.
“Ah, not at this point, no.”
Kelly reached out and squeezed his right bicep. “You should get one, or several. I love a guy with sleeves.”
Scott smiled and gently removed himself from her grasp. “That wouldn’t be very professional.”
“So? Heaps of suits have tattoos now. As long as you can hide them under your clothes, it’s fine. Sam does business guys all the time.”
Scott had a flash of Sam bent over a half-naked businessman and felt a hot wash of jealousy. “Is that right?”
“Totally.” Kelly, oblivious to the mental discomfort she’d provoked in him, smiled. “If you end up getting sleeves, go to Sam. Seriously, she doesn’t do filler, even with big pieces. She’s the best artist here by a mile.”
“I could see that.”
In truth, he had no idea—the other tattoo artists could have been virtuosos. He wasn’t looking at anyone but Samantha.
“Would you like to see Sam’s work up close?”
“Uh, sure.”
Kelly lifted her skirt and, trying to look like he didn’t find this weird, Scott examined the fresh tattoo. Kelly’s skin was slightly raised and inflamed, but the tattoo itself was fascinatingly detailed. If painted, Scott could easily see the image hanging in a museum, but the fact that it was laid into living skin gave the figures of Adam and Eve additional vulnerability. It seemed to be making a comment on the fragility of human life itself. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Thanks! I wish there was a way to keep it this fresh forever but it’ll fade soon enough. Still, it’s gorgeous now. Doesn’t Eve look cool?”
She did. She was tall and fair, one long hand reaching for the apple, the other cupping a small breast. She had long dark hair and her pink mouth was tight with fear. Something about her was oddly familiar…
“It looks a bit like Sam, doesn’t it?” Kelly said, reading his mind. “She says it’s easier to use a familiar model when she’s under the pump. I don’t know who Adam is thou—” her gaze flew to his face. “Oh my God, he looks like you!”
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