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  But if she was just conning people to con them, taking money from good people, honest hard-working people...well, that was an entirely different thing.

  "What do you mean?" she asked.

  "Is this what you do," I said. "Con dickheads? Or was Coker some kind of exception to the rule?"

  Tempest exhaled heavily. "When my parents kicked me out, I swore I would do things differently," she said. "I was in Vegas, and I thought I could get a real job, one with a regular paycheck, you know? But it's not who I was. I was a grifter. So I did short cons - card tricks, pickpocketing, that kind of thing, to survive. Then, when I pulled my first long con without my parents, I knew I wanted to do it different - so I picked someone dirty, someone who deserved what he got."

  "And that's what you're doing now," I said, my sense of relief palpable. I knew Tempest wasn't the same as her parents, no matter what she thought. I knew she was different from them.

  "We grift people who are bad guys," she said. "Murderers, pedophiles, corporate executives who are responsible for stealing their employees' pensions. We make them pay. And then we take care of the victims, the people who were hurt by them. Before, there was no justice for Johnny and Deborah and their daughter. Now they'll be taken care of, for a long time, at least. It's enough to get them back on their feet."

  "It's different from what your parents did," I noted.

  "My parents conned indiscriminately - it didn't matter to them if you were honest or dishonest. They would have had me pickpocket a nun if they thought she was carrying cash. That's how I was raised. My father used to say that everyone was a potential mark. It just so happened that it's easier to pull a long con on a bad guy, because, well, they tend to be dishonest and greedy, so that's how a lot of their games played out."

  "Is that how it played out in West Bend?" I asked. I ran my hand down her back, feeling the softness of her skin under my fingers. I lingered on her tattoos, tracing the outline of one of the birds on her shoulder.

  Tempest raised her eyebrows. "Well, the people they grifted here never turned them in. They didn't pursue them in any way. So what does that tell you?"

  "That they were dishonest," I said, my fingers lingering on the wings of the bird tattoo. I peered at the feathers, the purples and blues that swirled together. "What's the bird tattoo?"

  "They were dishonest," she answered. She paused, glancing at her shoulder before responding to my question. "It's a swallow."

  I traced over the edges. "It's beautiful," I said. "Really nice ink. What does it mean?"

  Tempest looked at me and flicked her tongue over her lower lip, and for a moment, I was distracted by what she was doing. "Travelers get them a lot," she said. "In old times, sailors got tattoos of swallows to mark the number of miles they'd traveled. So it's just a symbol of freedom, you know? Being on the road. Never looking back."

  "Is that what you've been doing?" I asked, tracing my finger around and around the tattoo, raising goose bumps on her skin. "Walking away and never looking back?"

  She exhaled heavily. Wearily, I thought. "It's what I do, Silas," she said. "One of the rules."

  "What rules?" I asked.

  "Grifter rules," she said. "My rules. Never stop moving. Don't look back."

  "Those are the two rules you live by, then?" I asked. "Some kind of grifter's code?"

  She shook her head. "They're just mine."

  "Any other rules, or is that it?"

  "One more," she said. "Don't fall in love."

  I was silent, my finger tracing down her arm before I brought it back up to her shoulder and down between her breasts. Her nipples rose to attention at my touch, and she squirmed in front of me.

  I didn't tell her that she was wrong about the swallow tattoo. Swallows might represent freedom and travel - but she was forgetting the most important part.

  And that was the fact that no matter how many thousands of miles they traveled, swallows always returned home.

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  TEMPEST

  I woke to Silas moving beside me.

  "Sorry," he said. "I wasn't trying to wake you. I just had to get up to brush my teeth. And take a leak."

  "Classy," I said, rolling over onto my stomach in the bed and sliding up his body until my head was on his chest, my cheek pressed up against his warm skin.

  I didn't want to move from where I was laying. I wanted to stay like this for as long as I could.

  That fact was frightening. Staying here for a few days was one thing, but more than that? Letting myself get used to this with Silas wasn't a good idea.

  And yet, it's the only thing I wanted to do.

  Silas ran his hand over my hair, the strands clinging to his hands momentarily, then falling back into place as he let them go. "How did you sleep?"

  "Good," I said, the response automatic. The memory of last night was etched on my brain - Silas and I moving in sync, sweat glistening on our skin. I had fallen asleep in Silas' arms afterward, my need completely satiated. I hadn’t slept that well in years. "How did you sleep?"

  "Mmm," he murmured, pulling me up to him, close, so that my breasts brushed against his chest. He kissed me lightly on the lips, but I pushed him away.

  "I have morning breath," I said.

  "Obviously," he said. "This is real life, not a romance novel."

  I laughed. "Well, let me brush my teeth, then."

  Silas squeezed the flesh of my ass cheek and pressed me against him. "Oh, you don't want to get out of bed, do you? It's all nice and warm in here. It's cold and lonely out there."

  "I really have to pee," I said, pushing away from him.

  He groaned loudly. "Come on, bright eyes," he said. "You know you want a piece of this."

  I laughed as I walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Being here with Silas in his place felt comfortable. It wasn't like the morning after that we'd had in Las Vegas, the one where I felt awkward and tentative. This felt like being someplace familiar.

  It felt like home.

  I shrugged off the thought, easily distracted as soon as I opened the bathroom door. Silas lay in bed, the covers kicked off his body, stark naked, proudly displaying his erection. He grinned. "I was going to get up and go make you breakfast," he said. "But then I thought, well, I'd hate to let this perfectly good hard-on go to waste."

  I rolled my eyes. "You are nothing but class," I said. "I'm realizing that you didn't learn any manners in the seven years since I've been gone, did you?"

  "Manners?" he asked. "I don't understand. What are these manners things you're talking about?"

  I sauntered over to the bed, enjoying Silas' eyes on me as I walked. He didn't waste any time when I reached him, his hands immediately on my waist, pulling me toward the bed. Swinging one leg over his body, I knelt with my knees on either side of him. He wrapped his hand around the base of his rigid cock and guided the tip to my entrance, rubbing it on my wetness before he teased me by pressing it against my clit.

  “Quit teasing me,” I said. “You know I’m wet.”

  “Tell me you want me.”

  “I want your cock in me, Silas,” I said, reaching down between my legs and moving his hand. I replaced his hand with mine, holding his shaft steady as I sank onto it.

  “And how’s that?” he asked, his expression changing to one of unabashed pleasure as I began to rock back and forth on him.

  I felt my eyes nearly roll back in my head. “That is perfect.”

  Silas ran his hands up my sides and over my breasts until he reached my shoulders. "I don't think this will ever get old," he said.

  "What?" I asked, my breath catching. He was talking as if we were going to be together in the future, and the problem was that when he said things like that, it sounded...nice.

  "Seeing you like this, naked, on top of me," he said, his hands on my waist, guiding me up and down on his cock. I slid onto him, rocking him deeper inside me as his hands roamed my body.

  “Me