Page 70 of Convict's Game

“Do you recognise anything on the shelves?”

He turned in a circle then raised a shoulder. “Not a fucking thing. I doubt I owned a vase, though. If I can find something with my name on it, that will be enough.”

I took the opposite shelf and searched. The first box gave me nothing, but a second contained a sealed envelope with the name ‘Mr R Locke’.

I held it out. “Bingo.”

Convict took the box and sat on the floor while I searched the rest of the shelves. I turned back at his exhale.

“I have a bank account. Who knows if there’s anything left in it, but at least I can access it now. Maybe see what I was doing in a past life.” He read the next letter in the stack, one that had already been opened. “This tells me my final probation appointment. Three months’ time. Good to know. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the cops might be after me for recall to prison if I missed a date.”

My heart skipped a beat at the thought of him being whisked away to jail. “They can’t have you. You belong to me for twenty-nine more days.”

He raised an eyebrow. Then he lifted from the floor in one easy move, picked me up in his arms, and walked me backwards until my spine met the nearest shelf. “How is it you’re still into me now you’ve seen what a scumbag I am?”

Annoyance flashed through me alongside rising heat from him between my thighs. “You’re no different to the man who appeared outside my window ten days ago.”

“No? I guess even then I was breaking and entering. You must have a thing for bad boys.”

He landed his mouth on mine. His lips moved surely, sliding into a devastating kiss. Oh fuck. I melted onto him, defenceless against his kisses.

It didn’t matter that we were in a dank garage surrounded by other people’s discarded property. My body knew only one thing: Need for this man.

Something vibrated between us, close to where our lower bodies touched.

“Oh hey, my dildo came with a surprise vibration setting.”

Convict barked out a laugh, his eyes widening. “I love it when you dirty talk. It’s so at odds with your good-girl exterior. Let me kill this call and we’ll get back to what we were doing.”

He checked his screen and frowned.

“If you need to take it, it’s okay.”

He nodded and accepted the call, dropping me to my feet. “Arran?”

As he listened, his expression shifted from confident and in control to that lost-boy worry. I knew Arran was the leader of the skeleton crew as well as his friend. He also held the power to kick Convict out of their crew altogether, if he chose.

“We’ll be there. See you soon.” He hung up and stared at the phone. “He’s back. He wants me to come in this evening. You, too.”

I took a deep breath. “It’ll be okay.”

From the floor, Convict snagged the single cardboard box we knew to be his and gave a hard laugh. “I’m homeless, probably barely staying within the law, and on a slippery slope to a shitefuture. If Arran kicks me out, I’ll be unemployed, too. I’ll have nothing to offer…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“He won’t. He’s your friend. Friends care about you.”

A tiny glimmer of hope returned to his eyes. I’d put it there. That felt powerful.

I stood taller, my mind racing over what Arran meant to him and what the man wanted to see. “Have we got time to stop in at my place?”

Convict tilted his head. “If you want me to fuck you, you just need to ask. In fact, I was halfway there. Lock the fuckin’ door, baby.”

I choked on a laugh. “I mean that we’re going to the warehouse as a couple, right? When we came out of the game, people congratulated us. They celebrated the fact you’d done what you did.”

“They’ll do the same tonight.”

“Right, so we put on a show to convince Arran that your actions were the right thing to do.”