Confidence Tricks (23 page)

As Asprey’s hand came away from the door, he pulled it across her lower back, fingers dragging and lingering. She shivered.
Desperate.
That seemed about right.

But if he noticed the effect he had on her, he didn’t let on. He flipped on the lights, illuminating layers of dust, the basic details of a bare-bones hotel room and, as Norma had promised, about two dozen coat hooks hanging off the walls in a haphazard pattern.

“What do you think the mother-in-law
did
in here?” Asprey asked, taking it all in. He tossed their wet jackets and helmets onto an overstuffed floral chair.

“HolyshitmotherofGod!” Poppy screamed. She leaped a good three feet into the air, not landing until she was safely on top of that chair, her arms wound around Asprey’s chest where he stood next to it. “Get it out. Get it out. Get it out.”

“What are you freaking out about?” he asked. She wanted to smack the calm right out of him, but he noticed it then, the bundle of mangy white fur and red-devil eyes ambling like it hadn’t a care in the world. He twitched a little but didn’t lose his footing. “Is that a rat?” He leaned down, taking Poppy with him. “Or that chupacabra you were talking about before?”

Poppy squealed and wrapped one of her legs around him, far too shaky for her own peace of mind. But adrenaline had taken over the rest of her limbs, and instead of turning her into the militant ninja Asprey loved to joke about, she was dissolving into a gooey, feminine mess. “Don’t get any closer! It’s a possum. It could have rabies.”

His laughter rumbled from somewhere deep in his chest, and if Poppy didn’t need him as an anchor to keep her from hitting the floor, she’d have let go. “That’s the least rabid-looking animal I’ve ever seen.”

She closed her eyes. This wasn’t funny. Asprey might have grown up with an oversized mansion and all the vermin of the world a safe distance away, but opossum had been as common as dogs around here. And they
bit
. She’d been only eight years old when it happened, when the neighborhood boys had dared her to pet a stray mom living under her grandma’s trailer. It was one of the many initiations that resulted in a trip to the free clinic.

The rabies shots had taken weeks to get over. The memories…they lingered.

“Would you please get it out of here?” she asked, unable to stop a shudder from running through her. “Rats I can do. Jail I can do. Todds and Graffs and Winstons I can do. Opossums I cannot.”

Asprey complied, gently disentangling her arms from around his chest and grabbing hold of a ceramic cat that doubled as a bookend. With a quick jab, he waved the cat like it was some sort of lance. The opossum blinked twice before taking the hint and scampering out the still-open door.

Her adrenaline hadn’t yet had a chance to fully abate when Asprey turned to confront her, the ceramic cat in one hand, his smirk undeniable. “Your foe has been vanquished, my lady.”

“Check under the bed for babies.”

“What?”

“If that
thing
has any of its demon spawn under the bed, it’ll be back. Trust me.”

He stared at her for a full thirty seconds, where she remained safely perched on the chair, as if waiting for the punch line. “I don’t know that I’ll ever figure you out.”

“I’m glad my justifiable fear of rabies-infested vermin amuses you,” she countered. “But I will not hesitate to stab one of those coat hooks in your eye if you don’t check under that bed.”

With a long-suffering and totally fake sigh, Asprey dropped to his stomach, peering under the bed for signs of mammalian life. Poppy used the moment to check out the rest of the room—and definitely
not
the way his ass twitched as he looked this way and that.

In addition to the numerous hooks hanging from the walls, there were several pieces of cat decorations, ranging from ceramic statuettes to framed pictures that looked like they came out of a paint-by-number box. The room was narrow, no more than two Asprey-lengths across, with a quilt-covered bed right in the middle. A single desk stood behind her, holding a ten-inch television, and a door to the back led to what must have been the bathroom.

It wasn’t much, and it was dusty, and there were probably opossum droppings in all kinds of awful places. And the only window was a shoebox-sized one next to the bed, looking, from Poppy’s current angle, like it had been painted shut.

She couldn’t tell what was worse—the lack of exits and open air or the fact that the bed was awfully small. Single-old-lady-living-alone small. Newlywed small.

Asprey leaped to his feet, wiping his hands on his pants, seemingly unconcerned about what kind of sleeping arrangements might exist in this twelve-by-twelve space. “Unless you count about twenty dead beetles, there’s no sign of anything approaching life under there. I think we’re safe.”

He held out a hand to help her down from the chair. Other than a slight wobble to her legs, Poppy felt like she did passably well.

He didn’t let go right away, rubbing his thumb along the back of her hand as he asked, “Any other fears I should know about? Snakes? Roller coasters?”

“I’m not keen on the lack of exits in this place,” she confessed. Might as well get it out now—in a few hours, she might very well be rocking back and forth in a ball in the corner, broken out in a cold sweat and mumbling incoherencies.

He studied her, his eyes darkening. “We’ll sleep with the window open, if that helps. And you can be closest to the door.”

He let go and turned his back to her. She thought he was going to leave, but he lifted off his shirt, revealing a lightly muscled back she had a sudden and profound urge to lick.

She whirled around instead, fixating on the pattern of wall hooks. “What are you doing?”

“We have to get out of these wet clothes, fear of tiny spaces and marsupials aside. I don’t suppose you have anything dry to wear?”

“I have a ninja sock,” she offered.

He snorted. The sound was accompanied by the fall of a zipper, and Poppy’s head whirled as she realized he’d removed his pants. Her own pants were soaked well beyond her underwear.
Please let him still be wearing his underwear.

“I never would have taken you for a prude, either,” Asprey said, amusement in his voice. “This trip is turning out to be quite enlightening. Here.”

“What?” She turned, just catching sight of seemingly endless expanses of perfectly molded skin, before a quilt fell over her head, smelling of old age and what she swore had to be opossum droppings.

“Undress and wrap in that. It’s the best we have under the circumstances. I’ll hang our clothes up to dry.”

Under cover of the quilt, she wriggled out of her wet clothes, which were already a pain to get in and out of because of their high spandex content. She balled them into a wet, steaming bundle and handed them to Asprey out a fold in the blanket. By the time she was able to get her head out without flashing all her goods, Asprey had tied a towel around his waist and already created some kind of efficient laundry line that strung between two of the hooks using floss, his lithe body moving efficiently, as though he had no idea he was the most beautiful creation in the world.

She loved his chest.

There. She admitted it.

Poppy was a strong, independent woman who had faced her own failings as a human being behind a locked door for two straight years. She’d proven on the ultimate battle ground that she didn’t need anyone to hold her up or hold her hand.

But she was still
human
—and that man, with his natural grace and seemingly endless lines of lean, tantalizing flesh—he was something else entirely.

She watched for a minute, flustered and impressed by his easy maneuvering. “You’re almost self-sufficient,” she said wonderingly. “Like a real person.”

“Strange as it seems, I
am
a real person, and you’d be surprised what tricks I know. In addition to India, I also spent time in Thailand, Indonesia and Australia—took the grand Pacific tour. I even did a two-night stint in an island jail in Bali, cots and public urinals and all.” He thumped his chest. “Made a man out of me.”

The walls swelled and started moving in.

Poppy brushed past him and tried to work the window. Fortunately, the paint had chipped away over the years, and she was able to get it to slide down. Cold air washed over her, and even though she shivered, it was a welcome sensation. She breathed.
In and out. Honest and clear.

“It just slipped out.” Asprey’s hand was heavy and warm where it came down on her shoulder, even through the layers of blankets. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking when I mentioned Bali.”

She shook her head and sniffled. The cold and wet must have been working against her body’s immune system already. “It’s not a big deal—you don’t have to censor yourself for my sake. We should probably get some sleep. I need to be back tomorrow pretty early.”

Bea was going to have a heart attack when Poppy didn’t come home tonight, and she had a meeting with her parole officer at ten the next morning at a nondescript office full of inspirational posters better suited for corporate drones. Asprey might like to joke about what was probably a misunderstanding over a bag of weed in a Bali customs office, but her reality was a little bit harsher.

And even though the worst of it was behind her, Poppy wasn’t exactly free. She couldn’t leave the state on a whim or fall into bed with the first handsome face who rented her a ramshackle bed-and-breakfast room in her hometown. All actions had repercussions—even the ones she made with good intentions.

In her life, it seemed to be
especially
for the ones she made with good intentions.

“Where will you sleep?” she added, looking purposefully at the bed. They’d stripped the blankets off, and, true to Norma’s warning, the right side of the mattress sagged heavily, and a rust-brown stain extended up from the bottom.

“I don’t know,” Asprey said carefully. “On the creepy side?”

Before she could stop herself, a laugh escaped. “Don’t worry. I’ll take it. I’ve slept in worse places.”

“Are we talking about the house by the Pit or jail now?” Asprey’s hand wound up the back of her neck, his fingers weaving through her hair. She leaned into him, her eyes closing sleepily, and did her best to ignore the blinking red warning sign in her brain.

“Jail wasn’t too bad,” she said, aware she was crossing a line but unable to stop herself. “Don’t get me wrong—there were definite bad parts. It’s a really dehumanizing experience, being put in a tiny room, told when to eat and what to wear. I promised myself when I got out that I’d never let anyone dictate those things to me ever again.”

“That explains your odd taste in clothes.”

“Watch the judgment, Vest Boy.”

His hand moved in a gentle pattern along her spine as Poppy let the quilt fall over her shoulders. She could feel the weight of it on every inch of her skin, the fabric worn and weary, scratching against her nipples as it slipped lower.

“But it’s the feeling of being
trapped
—that’s what I can’t seem to get over. I didn’t become a con woman and a pickpocket because I like following other people’s rules.” She paused, breathing deep. “The point has always been to live my life the way
I
want to—which is exactly what they take away from you the moment the key turns in the lock.”

“Yet you’re back at it.”

In any other situation, those words would have had her back up and fur flying, because they were the words of her parole officer, of Bea, of society. It was hard to be the one person who dared to defy all that.

“I’ve
tried
being other people,” she said. “There were some fairly long stretches when my conscience got the better of me, and I always thought that I could make it, transform the error of my ways and start paying dues to Uncle Sam.”

“But no dice?” Asprey’s hands moved lower, slipping over her shoulders, continuing to rub a pattern of warm insistence that made her long to stop talking and just
feel
. But the momentum of her confession felt too good to ignore. If she didn’t say this now, she wasn’t sure she ever could.

“I don’t
mean
to be the bad guy,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t take what isn’t mine—believe me, I
know
. But there are so many different shades of right and wrong. No matter how many times they might throw me in jail, no matter how many times I might look in the mirror and wonder what kind of future is out there for a woman like me, I know I’m being true to myself. And in all honesty, I think burying that part of me—pretending she doesn’t exist—would be worse than jail.”

“Hey.” Asprey turned her so that she faced him. His hand came up under her chin, forcing her gaze to meet his. His eyes blazed a vibrant blue. “You do realize you’re talking to a guy who’s also chosen to walk that shady line? I’m the last person in the world who has the right to judge you for the decisions you’ve made. Life is messy. Relationships are messy. And the things we do—you and me and Graff and Winston and even Todd—they don’t come with a handbook. The best we can do is take each difficult decision as it comes and follow our instincts. And you know what? My instincts tell me that you’re a good person. No matter what else happens, you have to believe that.”

“So it’s all okay? Because
the
Asprey Charles says so?”

“No. It’s all okay because
you
say so.”