Silas Read online

  The buck comes with a moan that’s part pleasure, part pain from the involuntary movement. But he never lets go of my hips. It’s then that I know that no matter what, he’d never ever let me fall. The realization is almost too big to bear. Part of me wants to run. But still he’s holding me fast.

  “Touch yourself,” he says hoarsely.

  It’s not a command, it’s a request.

  “I want to watch you.”

  I can feel in his hands on my hips that he is shaking with desire. I’d bet my bottom dollar that this is new territory for him as much as it is for me. I straighten up and unbutton my blouse. I don’t let it fall to the floor, I leave it open at the front. I’d feel too exposed entirely nude, I need the idea that I could cover myself if someone came in. Suddenly I feel self-conscious again but somehow, he knows.

  He looks up at me then kisses both my hands that are hanging by my sides in turn before he leans forward and plants a kiss on my sex. Nowhere near the squishy bits, just softly on the silk fluff covering my mound, a fraction above my slit. The way my body reacts, though, you’d think he’d stuck his tongue all the way up inside me.

  He looks up at me again and slowly I bring my right hand in front of me and slip a finger between my lips. I’m dripping. Literally. No need to dip into my hole and gather the moisture to spread around my clit. It’s there already, smothering it. I’m almost too slick, I can’t get the friction I need.

  And I can’t watch him watch me, it’s too intense, so I shut my eyes and miss the cue that tells me one of his hands is about to slip around and spread my lips apart.

  So he can see, I realize.

  It does something else as well, though. Holding me open like that spreads tension across the skin, pushes my clit against my finger and suddenly the friction I need is there. I add a second finger and I rub over my clit in nice tight circles, feeling the tension build deep in my belly.

  If I were alone, I’d be flying already, but something about knowing that he’s there, holds me back, frustrates me. I can’t get there knowing these could be his fingers, knowing he could help me here. I open my eyes and look down at him. His gaze is fixated on my fingers. It’s hot, the way he watches me. But it’s still not enough.

  “Silas,” I call to him hoarsely, and he looks up. “Please.”

  Silas

  “Please,” she says, and I know exactly what it is she needs.

  I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.

  I cross two fingers and slide them into her slowly. For a moment, she forgets to circle her clit and I catch her finger with my thumb, like we’re playing thumb war, and kick start it again. She clenches around me when I do, and I feel another stream of her syrup slick her up. Jesus. I’ve never known a woman could get so wet. I’m slowly circling my crossed fingers inside her, pushing the rest of my hand against wherever it finds skin.

  She’s panting and gyrating on my hand while her fingers flick ever more quickly over her clit. Her juices cover our hands and I’m torn between wanting to watch her come like this and wanting to taste her.

  She makes the decision for me when her free hand suddenly cradles the back of my head and gathers me forward. I lean in, ignoring the sharp pang of pain that that elicits from my bruises, and with one long lick over her fingers and clit, I push her over the edge.

  Grace

  I see stars. For real.

  His tongue hits my clit and my fingers at the same time and his digits inside me gyrate harder, hitting just the right spot.

  I explode and the orgasm punches holes all through my body. There are fireworks behind my eyes. My pussy contracts so hard, so rapidly, it’s painful. And when I come down, I’m a bit lost but for that one steadying hand that throughout all of this Silas kept on my hip. It’s grounding me.

  So is the smile he gives me as he slowly slides his fingers out of me. They trail up to my abdomen where he writes something invisible across my tummy in the ink of my juices. It’s erotic in a playful way I didn’t think he’d have in him and I look down in wonder.

  “What’s that?” I ask, still breathless.

  He grins at my belly button, pulls me towards him and kisses me where he’s just drawn the letters.

  “Not telling,” he says.

  There is something so sweet about it, it somehow doesn’t go with the raging hard-on that’s still straining against his jeans. Or with any of him, really.

  He sees me looking and a serious expression spreads over his face. He starts buttoning my shirt up from below, reaching up as far as he can. Then he pats the space on the couch next to him.

  “Sit down,” he says.

  I narrow my eyes at him and look pointedly at the bulge in his jeans.

  “What about you?”

  He takes my hand and tugs at it, using the other to guide me into a sitting position next to him.

  “He’ll shut up in a minute. Just sit with me for a bit. He’ll get his turn. But first let’s do this.”

  He twists toward me and I can see in his face that the movement hurts him, but he dismisses the pain as if it weren’t important. Then he reaches up into the hair at the nape of my neck and pulls me in for a kiss. He leisurely plays with my mouth for a few minutes, caressing me with his tongue, chasing mine, and then he draws back and smiles.

  “Who are you, Grace Turner?” he asks gently, sprawling his other hand over the swell of my left breast, roughly where my heart should be. “Tell me your secrets.”

  And I do.

  Silas

  We sit in the living room until the small hours and alternate between kissing and her telling me about her life.

  She’s snuggled into my side, the one that hurts a little less than the other, and she remains mindful of my injuries, keeping herself light against me.

  My dick goes hard and then partially calms down again a few times during the night. She’s taken to rubbing the bulge when we kiss, staying on the outside of my jeans, and I won’t let it go further. Not yet. It takes all my willpower, but no matter what, I’m scared enough to stay in control. And she seems to get that without me having to spell it out for her.

  Not that she’s not pushing the boundaries every so often.

  There is a moment, while I’m not watching ‘cause I’m too busy concentrating on sucking on her neck without leaving hickeys, when she’s massaging my dick through the denim, and then her fingers curl around the waistband and she touches the top of his head. I nearly come there and then. It’s like she’s turned back time for me. Turned me back into that teenage boy, so full of lust and devoid of darkness.

  She’s amazing.

  When we’re not caressing each other, she talks or sometimes both. She tells me about growing up in DC, about her mum, about her dad who remarried and who’s got a new family she never sees despite the fact they only live two blocks away. About not going to university because her mum got sick and about not having a clue what she wants to do with her life. She doesn’t talk about feeling lost, but she doesn’t need to. I get it anyway. I feel the same.

  Granted, I still have a mum.

  But Mum knows so little about the real me, the me I’ve become, it’s almost as if we were strangers. At some point during that whole lark of picking up his ─ I force myself to think his name for the first time in ages ─ Rowan’s, debts, we stopped being mother and son and became business partners.

  Business partners without a business.

  I don’t really want to go down that rabbit hole right now, so I concentrate on the beautiful woman sitting next to me. While Grace talks, she goes from being super animated one minute to stroking my face, she seems to have a thing for that, the next.

  And it’s those caresses that really get under my skin.

  Being touched with that much love and care. As if I somehow matter to her already.

  There are a few times when I feel the impulse to bolt from her again, but I remind myself that there is no need.

  We’re safe, we’re on a time scale.


  She’ll be gone in three weeks.

  And I’ll likely be dead in four.

  Grace

  I wake up to the sound of somebody jingling car keys next to my ear.

  I try to pry my eyes open, but they’re not playing ball. It was very late. Or very early, depending on your point of view.

  Silas and I sat in the living room all night talking, cuddling, making out a little more. Like kids. It was nice. Correction, it was great.

  Admittedly, I used up most of the oxygen in the room, but even though he only said marginally more than usual, I found out his deepest, darkest secret. Around five in the morning the no-sugar eating plan goes out of the window and he’ll make you candied bread if you ask nicely. Way too much candied bread, so he has to have a whole load as well. And he pulls the most adorable face if you let him have sugar. I get the feeling that before the muscle and the fighting, he was just this really normal, sweet kid. The kind I would have made eyes at in high school. Though I have to admit I’m starting to appreciate the muscle as well.

  Since I couldn’t touch most of him for fear of hurting him and he wouldn’t let me get down to business, I played a lot with his arms last night, running my hands up and down those curves. It’s funny how that word is always used for women’s bits but, actually, it’s men who have curvature, really. Hard, smoothly skinned, perfect curves. Women have jiggly lumps. I giggle into the pillow at my own thoughts and he nudges me.

  “You’re laughing, which means you are awake, Grace Turner.”

  I love the way he says my full name. No idea why. I love it even more that he lowers his mouth to hover by my ear now and starts whispering into it.

  “Come on, beautiful, it’s afternoon, the sun is shining, the car is washed, probably, and I’ve packed a picnic.”

  I turn my face toward him, open my eyes and lay a hand on his cheek. I swipe my thumb through the tawny stubble. It’s longer and softer than it was yesterday and just the right kind of rough. His eyes are trained on mine and my heart begins pounding again already.

  “Kiss me first,” I demand.

  And he does.

  Gently at first and then thoroughly.

  Silas

  I have no idea why Bramber Castle of all places but apparently, it’s on the list.

  It’s not even a castle. It’s the remnants of a wall on a motte in forested land and a tiny chapel with a graveyard that has about twenty headstones in it, at most. Around the bottom of the motte there is a dry moat, a dark and dingy circle of soggy leaves that you can walk around in, if you fancy getting your boots muddy.

  “It really is completely unspectacular, Grace,” I tell her again.

  I’ve been warning her for the entire drive here not to have any expectations, with graphic descriptions of how there is fuck all there to see and she appears to be in stitches. I didn’t think I was being particularly funny, but it makes me happy to be able to make her laugh. She has a nice laugh, all deep and husky, like it should belong to a woman twice her age who smokes three packs a day and drowns a bottle of Scotch each night.

  “I have no idea what I said that’s so hilarious,” I say as we go around the roundabout and take a sharp left up the steep stone chip path that leads to the ruin.

  The Capri bottoms out on the ascent, slipping and sliding on the shitty road surface and throwing up stones at the paintwork. I groan inwardly. Mum will kill me if there is any damage to her baby.

  “It’s not what you’re saying,” Grace informs me. “It’s how you’re saying it.”

  “And how am I saying it?”

  “With a lot of words.”

  She composes herself as we pull into the car park, for want of a better word. It’s basically a slightly bigger gravel patch with room for about five cars. Four if they are Land Rovers. Three if one is a bus. Today, there is only us.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I park up and she looks at me sideways with an indulging smile. The kind you get from a teacher who really likes you but who you’re driving nuts.

  “That you’ve said more in the last ten minutes than you’ve said since I’ve met you. I like the strong but not so silent version of Silas.”

  “You had me down as the strong and silent type?” I ask, gobsmacked.

  “Well, yeah.”

  She makes a ‘duh’ face at me then gets out of the car.

  By the time I’ve secured the Capri to Mum’s specs, Grace has already wandered off towards the little chapel and is looking at the graves.

  I sidle up to her.

  “In school, I got more detentions for talking in class than for fighting, I’ll have you know.”

  She grins and I know it’s the ‘I’ll have you know’ that got her. She loves those English phrases the way I love it when she says shit like ‘cooties’. It tickles her. But she doesn’t rib me for it. Instead, she wanders over to the next gravestone.

  “So what happened?” she asks when I follow her.

  Rowan, I think unbidden. Rowan happened.

  And for the fraction of a second, I even contemplate telling her about him. Maybe not all of it but at least some of it. The more palatable parts. The debts. But she’s already found another grave and looks intently at the weathered inscription.

  “Hah!” she exclaims, pointing. “There I am!”

  I look at the gravestone and sure enough, one of the names on it is Grace.

  I frown.

  “Is that some kind of game you play? Finding Graces in graveyards?”

  “No, dummy,” she says, laughing and slapping me playfully on the arm. “Although I like it. I might do that from now on. Sounds like a hobby. I need a hobby now Mum’s dead. No, she,“ she adds, pointing at the name on the stone, “I believe, is the reason I’m called Grace.”

  She takes my hand, entwines her fingers with mine and drags me away from the chapel and up the motte, towards the lone wall that is the ‘castle’. All the while she carries on talking, as if we did this all the time. Walking around landmarks, holding hands.

  “According to my mum, she and my father came here for a picnic the day after they made me. Or at least the day after they first fucked. I don’t know how often they did it before he went back to the States. Whatever. The important thing is, after he returned to America and she found out she was pregnant, she came back here to think about what she was gonna do. Like have me or not, ya know. And at some point in all of that she found my name on a tombstone.”

  She lets go of my hand, cocks her head, pulls a face and points at it with both index fingers.

  “Ta-da.”

  Grace

  He smiles at that. Properly. Eyes, mouth, cheekbones and everything.

  It’s friggin’ amazing to look at. This serious, serious guy with all his muscle and bruises and fucking brooding darkness, who’s given me barely as much as a tilted-up corner of his mouth so far to show amusement, is in a full-facial smile attack.

  I stare at him in wonder before he comes around to stand in front of me, reaches out and clasps my shoulders just by my clavicle. Clasps them in his strong, busted-up, steadying hands and starts doing that sweeping thing with his thumb, brushing the base of my throat with each swipe. And then his face goes serious, still smiley but earnest at the same time.

  “I’m glad she did,” he says, and when he sees the mystified expression on my face, clarifies, “have you.”

  And with that he completely undoes me.

  Tears well up in my eyes and I can feel the need to cry the way you feel the need to pull out a splinter. The first drop spills over and starts running down my cheek, and then he does the most amazing thing.

  He doesn’t wipe it away, he doesn’t tell me not to cry, he doesn’t say something about how he didn’t mean to do that. No, he pulls me close and wraps me in his arms and lets me sob into his chest until I’m full on ugly crying, shaking all over.

  The harder I cry, the more I push up against him, practically trying to clamber into him
and my belly makes contact with his. He winces, but when I try to draw back and apologize for my clumsiness, he holds me even tighter, pressed against those bruises we both know lie beneath his shirt.

  Silas

  I let her cry for as long as she needs to, which isn’t that long. After a while, she unhuddles a little and looks up at me with a tentative smile.

  “I need a tissue.”

  She sniffles.

  “There are some in the car,” I reply, but she doesn’t make any moves to step out of my embrace.

  I like it. The making her feel safe thing. Safe enough to come in front of me, safe enough to laugh, safe enough to cry. It makes me feel like I can still do something positive in this life. On occasion. The image of her coming on my hand last night floats through my brain. God, she was spectacular. My dick stirs, inappropriate wanker that he is, and I know she can feel it.

  She steps back a little, letting one hand slide down my back until it reaches my buttock and lets it rest on there. Well, almost. Her fingers are actually gently kneading and probing. Like I wouldn’t notice. But she is so surreptitious about it, it’s horny as hell. Jesus, I can’t keep up with her. A minute ago, she was still in grief mode.

  She brings her other hand around the front and indicates my general abdominal area.

  “How long until you’re healed, you think?” she asks, the trace of a wicked smile playing around her lips.

  “Couple of weeks,” I answer truthfully, and her face falls a little.

  I bark a laugh, cup her jaw in one hand and tilt her head up.

  “I can wait,” I say to her, searching her eyes, silently trying to transmit the words I should really say but can’t, not without an explanation that I’m not ready to give just yet.

  I need to wait. I’m not ready. Yet. But whatever you do, don’t stop trying.

  Then I shove those thoughts out of my mind and just kiss her. Those lips. They are divine. I know it’s romanticised crap, but it isn’t. Not with her. I could kiss her all day. And then some. She never seems to wear lipstick or any of that shit, so you’re guaranteed to get the taste of pure Grace. Today, it’s pure Grace with a seasoning of saltiness from her tears. I lick at her lips and she opens her mouth, her tongue eager to meet mine. We stand there for a few minutes, tongue fucking again until we’re both breathing erratically. We part for air and she stares into my eyes for a moment. I can practically see her brain cells ticking over. And then she speaks.