Page 39 of Convict’s Game (Skeleton Crew #1)

M ila

My clothes hangers rattled on my leaf through my wardrobe, and I plucked out a dress for the evening. Purple again, with a halterneck, silver studded gems around the neckline, and a floaty short skirt.

I paired it with silver heels then finished my makeup, my stomach tight when I glanced in the tall mirror that still gave me shivers. For the first time in over a week, Convict and I would be apart for hours.

I didn’t like it. No matter how I felt about him imprisoning my brother, not that Kane seemed to give a damn in his one-word answers to me since, but Convict didn’t get why that was an issue.

Kane was claustrophobic, one of the few things I knew about him that wasn’t easily seen.

I’d guessed it after seeing how he always drove with the window open, even in the rain, and how he could never sit in a booth at a café.

He saw it as a weakness, and I’d never reveal his secret, but I didn’t have to.

Convict should never have ridden roughshod over my family.

Even with that hanging over us, I still couldn’t shake a strange sense of loss and apprehension.

I’d also received another shitty email.

Anonymous: All those boats sitting in the dock. What a legacy you left, Marchant. Fuck you for everything you’ve done.

Fuck the sender. Tonight, I had my own worries, and they were all shaped like a man I’d obsessed over.

Outside the bedroom, Convict leaned on the opposite wall in the hallway, the grey shirt I liked so much open at his throat and rolled up on his forearms. I stopped and stared, more than a little stuck on how badly I wanted him.

Holding back had been an exercise in pain.

Every night, he showed me what I was missing, spending hours between my thighs.

He never resisted the pull. That was all me.

I let him fuck me and showed him nothing in return.

I didn’t recognise my stubbornness. I didn’t know how to stop it either.

Convict’s gaze travelled up my legs, heat in his eyes along with concern, urgency, and a dozen other emotions. That heavy focus sent a crackle of electricity over my skin, alerting me to the danger he presented.

We’d barely been apart in a week, and now he was leaving on a road trip for hours that suddenly felt like days.

I wanted him so badly I couldn’t breathe.

“Fuck it.” He shoved off the wall and caught me up in his arms. His mouth landed on mine in a bruising kiss.

I returned it. If he expected me to push away, both of us were failing.

We crashed into a hot and wet attack. Our teeth clashed, but we didn’t slow, only built and built into a fever. I wound my legs around his waist, and Convict turned me to the wall and reached between us, cupping me through my underwear.

He didn’t speak. No taunting me about how wet I was already. Nothing but a return of his mouth to mine and the opening of his jeans.

I tucked my head to his shoulder, needing this more than I could say. He freed his dick then pulled my lacy underwear aside and pushed inside.

I gasped open-mouthed.

Without any kind of foreplay besides the kiss, it burned where he stretched me open. It was like being back in the basement again, with the roughness and the spiking emotions, but that was where the similarities ended.

He held still. Supporting me one-handed, he used the other to wedge between us and tease my clit.

“I’m going to miss you tonight.” He spoke against my temple. “As much as I need to learn about myself, I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Understand?”

His fingers kept moving until desire rushed in and the burn turned to pleasure.

He jacked his hips to fuck deeper into me, beginning a rhythm in time with the circles he made with his hand. Waves of delicious friction centred on where he touched me. In his arms, I rocked, chasing that need.

“You might not like me right now, but I’ll make it up to you. Give you what you need. Do whatever it takes. Feel how much I need it? How badly I want you to look at me again?”

Inside me, he thickened, thrilling multiple pleasure centres at once.

It boosted my scattered state to the stratosphere. Usually, he held back until the very last minute, ensuring I got mine repeatedly first. I was deep in lust with him being out of control.

I crushed him with my arms and legs, wanting nothing more than to keep him in place. Convict’s strokes sped up until he was hammering into me.

“Only you, Mila. I’ve only ever wanted you, and that is never going to change.”

It triggered the approach of a fast climax. Abruptly, I came, and with such sweet relief I could’ve sobbed.

Convict groaned, tucked his head beside mine, and thrust hard for three more beats. He stilled and pulsed into me.

Both of us gasped for air, clutching the other. For a long minute, I didn’t want him to let go. But by degrees, he set me down on my heels and stepped away. The lust in his gaze shuttered.

“Go clean up. I know you won’t want to wear me all evening.”

I did as ordered, but with the strangest sense of regret.

When we arrived at the warehouse, Convict led me to the central corridor outside the office and made a public display of kissing me stupid.

In my ear, he whispered, “Thank you for playing your part.”

If he meant with the kiss, nothing on my part was an act, but all too quickly, he was leaving with Arran, and Cassie had hooked her arm through mine to lead me into the lift.

Him walking away felt like my heart was separating from my body.

It took a long moment for me to realise we weren’t heading into the nightclub. “Where are we going?”

“Genevieve’s place. She’s made cocktails and mocktails, and Everly baked something.”

I hadn’t met Everly, though knew she was Shade’s girlfriend. She was also lovely, welcoming me with a hug and apologising for the fact she wasn’t drinking due to her pregnancy, one hand to the oversized hoodie that covered her stomach.

I congratulated her and concealed my shock. Surely babies didn’t mix with gangs and sex clubs, but then again, it felt like a different world up here at the top of the building.

On the eighth floor, the red-brick apartment had polished floorboards, arched windows with a view over the glittering city, and a gleaming kitchen. A fluffy brown cat wound around everyone’s legs, purring up a storm.

Cassie got behind the kitchen counter where Genevieve had bottles, a shiny cocktail shaker, and fruit on a chopping board. Pendant lights lit their station.

Cassie took frosted glasses from a silver freezer and dipped the rims in a liquid and then into salt. “Margaritas,” she explained.

I tilted my head at her, or more specifically at the t-shirt she wore over a red microskirt. “Skeleton Girls Detective Agency,” I read.

Cassie grinned. “Last year, there was a spate of murders in Deadwater. We investigated them. I had shirts made.”

“Those are too cute.”

“Aren’t they? Pertinent for tonight as well.”

Genevieve rattled the cocktail shaker then tipped the contents into four glasses, while Cassie prepared a fifth, sans the alcohol, and handed it to Everly.

“Are we expecting anyone else?” I asked. There were four of us but five glasses.

I took a deep sip of mine, the sourness of the lime exploding over my tongue, followed by the burn of the tequila.

“Lovelyn. With her access to police information, she’s my new best friend.”

A knock came at the door.

Cassie hopped in glee. “That’s her. The fun can begin.”

She trotted over to answer it, giving a hug to Lovelyn, then lingered to talk to the man who’d escorted her.

It was Riordan, Cassie’s boyfriend. He snaked an arm around her, muttered something about her being a wild girl, then drew her in for a hot kiss that had me exchanging a look with the other women.

Lovelyn giggled and greeted the rest of us, taking a seat at the kitchen counter next to me.

The pendant lights lit the blonde highlights in her waterfall of sleek light-brown hair, and her dove-grey sweaterdress had tiny purple flowers stitched onto it.

“Got to hate being single. I feel like the odd one out. All of you are matched up.”

I pulled a face. “If it helps, I’m barely talking to Convict right now.”

Genevieve uttered a laugh.

My mistake slammed into me. In all my thoughts on the evening, I’d settled on the positive of spending time with the women here. But in that, I’d forgotten that I was supposed to be a convincing partner to Convict.

I’d agreed to play a role and had betrayed him with one sentence.

But the wife of the mob boss only handed me a glass with a sympathetic smile. “Equally if it helps, for the first two weeks of being with Arran, I wanted to strangle him.”

I widened my eyes. “What did he do?”

“Everything. He was overbearing, controlling, hostile, I could go on. But also, it was a two-way thing. We didn’t trust each other. Luckily, the game rules have a way of fixing that.”

“They do?”

Cassie bounced back over, her energy infectious. “Now we’re all here, I officially commence a meeting of the Skeleton Girls Detective Agency, welcoming two new members in Mila and Lovelyn. Ladies, do you accept the invitation?”

Lovelyn and I exchanged a bemused glance then nodded in unison.

Cassie beamed. “Excellent. Solid choice. On tonight’s agenda is the recent murder of a young woman named Esther Eavis.”

I choked on my drink. “Did you say murder? I knew her. I thought she drowned.”

Cassie’s eyes rounded. “Tyler said you knew her, but I thought he told you the details. I didn’t mean for that to be a shock.”

All week, I’d waited for a news report to come out regarding Esther, but all I’d found was a line in the local press that had stated the facts I already knew in short sentences. Woman drowned, no suspicious circumstances.

“We went to school together,” I explained. “Then I saw her again recently. If she was murdered, why isn’t there more of an outcry?”

Cassie spread out her arms. “Exactly. Which is why I wanted this meeting. No one else but us seems to care.”