Takedown Teague (Caged #1) (22 page)

She leaned over to her right to look at me more closely, and I turned to show her the left side of my head.  I reached up with one finger and tapped the two silver earrings hanging there.

“Yes, sir, he does.  Um…tattoos?”

I sighed dramatically and turned around, then lifted my shirt to show her my back.

“Yes, sir.”

I watched her eyes get wider as she listened to the voice on the other end and stared unabashedly at me.  Finally, she stopped and held the receiver in my direction.

“He’d like to talk to you…”

“No,” I responded as I looked back to her.  “Just give me a fucking room.”

She licked her lips nervously before relaying my message into the phone.

“The presidential suite?  Um…of course, sir.  I’ll take care of it…anything he wants...of course...thank you, sir.  It was a pleasure to”—she pulled the phone away from her ear and scowled at it—“speak with you,” she finished.  She hung up the phone and looked at us again.  “I’ll have you all checked in momentarily, sir.”

It was pretty impressive that Tria managed to remain silent as we were handed key cards and given directions to the executive elevator of the Silver Springs Hotel.  She didn’t say anything as we got inside, and I pressed the button for the eighteenth floor.  She managed to stay quiet all the way down the hall and to the door to the room.

Once I opened the door, she was too distracted by the room to ask any questions.

I had to admit, it was a pretty damn fine suite, all leather and cherry with a large screen television, a computer set up on the desk, and plenty of room for your own laptop if you brought one, too.  There was a small hallway with doors to a closet and bathroom.  There was a dining area, a living room, and large double doors that opened up to the bedroom and master bathroom.  It was probably about double the square footage of our apartment.

Tria halted in the doorway for a moment and then made her way slowly inside the room.  She took it all in with a couple of big sweeps of her head to the left and the right.

“Are you going to explain all this to me?” she finally asked without turning around.

“Do I have a choice?”  I walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of orange juice and a tiny bottle of vodka.  I took two big swigs out of the orange juice, added the vodka to it, twisted the lid back on, and shook it up.

Tria moved to sit on the plush couch and continued to look at me pointedly.

I dropped down onto the couch next to her and took a large gulp of my screwdriver.

“Can we just make out instead?” I asked.

“Not a single lip until you tell me,” she responded bluntly.

Well, damn.

“My uncle owns Silver Springs Hotels,” I finally said.

“The entire chain?” Tria asked with surprise.  “They’re all over the place.”

“A hundred and fifty or so in the States, yes,” I told her.  “There are a couple dozen outside the US, too.”

“So, he’s rich.”

“Without a doubt.”

“What’s with the earrings?” she asked.  “I thought you just wore them to look cool.”

“Are you saying they don’t look cool?” I smirked at her, and she blushed.  “I bet they make you hot, don’t they?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” Tria said all haughty.

“You don’t have to,” I responded, “I can just tell.”

She snickered and then pondered for a minute.

“Wouldn’t he…you know…give you a job?  I mean, if he’ll give you a suite for the night, he’d give you a job, too, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah.”  I shrugged and downed the rest of the bottle.  I dropped it on the dark-stained coffee table, careful to avoid the coaster because I felt like being an asshole.  “He’s offered.”

“Liam!” she exclaimed.  “Don’t you realize what that means?  You wouldn’t have to live like that anymore!”

“Like what?” I asked, knowing full well what she meant.  I was baiting her, and I didn’t care.  It was better she understood this now.

For a moment, she just stared at me.

“Like in that horrible neighborhood,” she finally said.  Her face was tight, and her eyes narrowed at me.  “You wouldn’t have to let people beat you up for cash.”

“They don’t beat me up.”

She reached over and touched the spot over my eye that still held stitches.

“Really?”

“It’s nothing,” I responded.  I pulled back a little.

“You could live better,” she emphasized.

“I don’t care about any of that, Tria,” I informed her.  “I’ve been there and done that, and I can tell you right now, it doesn’t mean shit.”

There was a long pause as I stared out the window and wondered who would be the most pissed off if I smoked in the room.  There was a nice, big balcony—maybe I’d just go out there.

“What happened to you?” Tria asked quietly.

“Nothing,” I said automatically.

“Bullshit.”

“That’s my line.”

Another long pause.  Just when I thought maybe she would give up, she spoke again.

“I want to know you,” she told me.

“Not much to know,” I replied with a little grin, which she did not return.  I sighed, and then I was dumb enough to make eye contact with her.  “I’m just me, Tria.  I fight.  I work out.  I hang out with friends sometimes.  That’s it.  I don’t have anything else to give you.”

“Give me your past,” she whispered.  “Tell me why.”

I watched her look carefully at me, searching my face for answers.  I felt my resolve crumble around me.  I couldn’t even identify the feeling; I just knew that there was a part of me that wanted her to know—to understand.  There was a part of me that wanted to tell her everything.

I was never one to open up, but I could not deny those eyes.

“My family has a lot of money,” I told her as she moved around the suite to get ready for bed.  Even though we only had the bare necessities, Tria seemed insistent on putting everything in dresser drawers and out on the bathroom counter, which I thought was pointless, at the very least.  I sat on the couch, drank another screwdriver, and tried to deflect her every question.

“Not just your uncle?” Tria asked for clarification.

“No,” I said, “pretty much everyone.”

“How much is a lot?” she asked.

“Only my father’s accountant knows,” I said with fake humor.

Tria stopped placing clean clothes into the dresser long enough to stare at me.  I pretended to be very interested in the condensation of the orange juice bottle.

“Are you going to elaborate?” she eventually asked.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I replied.  I tilted the bottle up to my lips before looking at her again.  “It’s really late, and you need to sleep.  All this shit is way too long a story for now.”

“You are just blowing me off,” Tria said, the accusation hanging between us.

I couldn’t really deny it because it was absolutely true.  She still needed sleep, though.

“We stopped here because you were about to fall right off the bike,” I reminded her.  “You need to go to bed.”

As long as she was moving around, she was awake, but I was pretty sure as soon as she lay down, she would doze off, and I would be saved.  She crossed her arms and raised her brows at me.

“You’re exhausted,” I told her.  “You need sleep.”

“Then tell me in bed.”

I rolled my eyes and got up off the couch.  Tria finally relented and agreed to get herself ready for bed.  I let her take the shower first while I smoked on the balcony, hung out, and flipped through the crappy cable channels offered by the hotel.  I was mildly annoyed by the realization that I could rack up a huge bill on the porn pay-per-view for Michael to sort out later, but having Tria there with me made that a lot less feasible.  I decided to order almost one of everything for breakfast from room service to make up for it.

Once we were both ready for bed, Tria climbed onto the plush mattress and sighed deeply.  I smiled, finding the decision to come here was a good one after all.  At least she was warm, safe, and comfortable.  I was almost glad the other motels and shit around the city wouldn’t take us because they would have been nasty.  If nothing else, Michael made sure his hotels were the very definition of posh.

I climbed into bed and got into the usual position with her coiled up next to me.  The bed was incredibly luxurious.  The pillows were stuffed with something that felt like feathers but didn’t make my nose tickle.  The sheets were obviously high quality, and I felt like I was merging with a pile of clouds or some such shit.  It was good, that was for sure.

It was so good, I had to lean over and kiss Tria.  She responded, and she brought her hand around my head, rubbing her fingers through my hair backwards again.  I trailed my hand up her side, then back down again, moving a little lower to grip her hip.  I started to move around to her backside, but she stopped me.

“You never gave me ground rules,” I reminded her.

“I know.”

I was pretty sure I could see her cheeks darken in the subdued light.  I reached out and touched the side of her face.  She turned toward me, and her throat bobbed as she swallowed.

“I’m not sure what they should be,” she said.

“Oh.”  I had to think for a minute before I responded to that.  “Um...well, the kissing is okay, right?”

A little smile crossed her face, and she nodded a couple of times.

“And this is okay?”  I ran my hand over the side of her face, down to her neck, and then over her arm.  I took her hand and brought it up to my lips for a moment.

“Yes,” she said.

I let go of her hand, and she returned it to the back of my head where she once again played with the short hairs, stroking upward, against the grain.  I worked my mouth against hers, and I gently ran the tip of my tongue across her lips before reaching inside.   As we kissed, I slowly caressed her side and moved over her hip.  As I started to reach around to her backside, her hand left my head and reached around again to stop me.

For a moment we stopped kissing, and Tria looked to the side, not meeting my gaze.  I moved my hand back to her side and tickled the soft skin right below her T-shirt.  She smiled again, and I touched my lips against hers briefly.  When I pulled away, her eyes remained closed.

“You need to sleep.”

“You haven’t told me anything.” She pouted as she spoke.

“In the morning,” I suggested.

“No,” she said.  “You’re just delaying.”

“How about I tell you, and in return, you let me grab your ass when I kiss you.” I was joking, but it was the only way I could see myself getting out of this.

“Deal!” she responded immediately.

I eyed her for a minute and knew she was completely serious.

“I don’t…” I started, then closed my eyes and took a deep breath before continuing.  “I don’t talk about my history.  It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Tria’s chest rose and fell with a deep breath.  She shook her head slightly and then rolled over to face away from me.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

She turned her head to look over her shoulder.

“You said you’d try this,” she reminded me.  “What exactly do you think is involved in a relationship?”

“I also told you I wasn’t going to tell you shit and that I was going to fuck it up.  Do you believe me now?”

“That was yesterday,” she said.  “You made a deal with me just now.  Are you going back on it?”

I glared at her for a moment, but this time there was no wavering in her determination to get something out of me.  It was too late to start this shit, but I knew I was going to have to give her something.

Besides, her ass was calling to me.

I sighed, knowing that I couldn’t deny what she was saying, either.  I didn’t know a lot about being in a relationship, but I knew enough to understand there was give and take; there was compromise.  If I give a little, it sounded like she was willing to give a little, too.

Maybe a short and quick version would be enough.

“My dad kicked me out when I was seventeen,” I told her in a rush.  “I haven’t spoken to him since.  My uncle, Michael, tries to get us back together every once in a while, which is why he offers me jobs.  I don’t want them.  I don’t want anything to do with them.”

Tria rolled back over to face me and propped herself up on her elbow as we talked.

“Your father owns the hotels, too?”

“My father is the owner and CEO of Teague Silver,” I told her.  “It’s a conglomerate of companies that started with a bunch of silver mines.  Originally, it was a chunk of the Comstock Load, if you remember anything about US history, but now there are mines in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina—all over the place.  That expanded into smelting ore and mining copper.  Now there are jewelry stores and a bunch of other related shit, too.”

“That’s why the earrings are significant,” Tria said with a nod.

“Yeah—everyone in the family has them,” I told her.  “They’re engraved on the inside, too.  You have to look closely, though.”

Tria’s face scrunched up a bit.

“How does that fit into hotels?”

“Michael wanted to expand and diversify the company,” I explained.  “When I was a kid, he ended up buying this failing hotel chain and turning it into Silver Springs.  He’s got a few other things like that—casinos in Vegas and some riverboat casinos in the Midwest, too.  I think the last thing he started up was partial ownership in some computer hardware company.”

“So your family owns all of that?”

“Yep,” I replied.  “The silver goes back generations.”

“Wow.”

“Like I said, I’ve been there and done the rich thing.  It isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

“But still,” Tria said with a shake of her head, “you walked away from all of that?  Why?”

No fucking way.

“Enough for one night,” I said.  “Go to sleep.  We still have a ways to go tomorrow.”

Tria growled at me a bit, but I wasn’t going to budge, and she didn’t really have the energy to argue with me about it anymore.  I moved my fingers up her arm and to her cheek, which I stroked softly.  Tria’s eyes drifted closed for a moment, and I took the opportunity to press my lips against hers.  She responded, her hand gripping the back of my neck again.

As our tongues touched, I let my hand drop back down her arm, over her elbow, down to her waist, and then to her hip.  I paused for a moment before reaching around, going slowly just in case she hadn’t really meant what she said or had changed her mind.

She didn’t move to stop me.

With my fingers spread out, I cupped one ass cheek and pulled her lower body closer to mine.  I groaned into her mouth, unable to help myself as her grip tightened on my neck.  Our mouths moved together, and I held her firmly against my body as we kissed and touched.

We broke apart, breathless.

Relaxing my grip, I let go of her ass and my fingers drifted back up her body until they reached her cheek again.  I leaned forward, touched her lips softly, and then backed away.

“Now go to sleep,” I commanded.

With an exaggerated sigh, Tria settled against me with her head on my shoulder and was asleep in seconds.  I joined her quickly afterwards.

*****

I woke hugging the pillow Tria had slept on.

It still smelled like her, and I found myself gripping it tighter and inhaling the scent before I even bothered to open my eyes.  The bedroom was empty, and the door to the bathroom was open and the light was off, so I figured she must have been up for a while.  I dragged myself from the Egyptian linen sheets to take a piss.

In the outer room, Tria was on the computer, intently staring at whatever was on the screen.  For a long moment, I just watched her face as she sat there, and I wondered if that’s what she looked like when she was in class, listening to a lecture.  She glanced up at me when I shuffled to one side, and her eyes narrowed into a glare immediately.

“I haven’t been awake long enough for you to be pissed at me,” I stated.

Tria tilted her head to one side and turned the monitor so I could see it.

It was fucking Wikipedia.

“When were you going to tell me?” Tria asked.  “Ever?”

I briefly scanned the webpage with the heading “Teague Silver” and the section Tria was reading, detailing the marriage of Douglass Teague, the monarch of the silver industry, and Julianne Hoffman, the sole heiress to Hoffman College.

“These are your parents, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” I muttered.  I reached back and scratched at my head nervously.

“Your mother owns the school I’m going to?”

“Yeah,” I repeated, not really sure if she was asking a question or not.  From what she had up on the screen, it was pretty obvious my family was connected to almost every legal business venture in the world.

“So were you ever going to share that information?”

“Probably not,” I admitted.

“Liam!”  She swiveled in the desk chair until she was facing away from both me and the computer.  She leaned over and dropped her forehead to her fingers.

“What?” I snapped at her.  I was still tired and had never been accused of being a morning person anyway.  The sudden attack just as I was waking up was pissing me off.  “After a forty-eight hour relationship, I should have given you a copy of the family tree?  You want a list of birthmarks?  If I withhold the name of my favorite teddy bear from when I was five, will that piss you off, too?”

Tria looked up at me, her eyes still dark.

“Like all the other shit I told you last night, none of it matters.”

“You knew I was going to Hoffman since the night we met,” she said.  “It never occurred to you to mention your mom runs the place?”

“She doesn’t
run
it.  She
owns
it.  She shows up for gala events in a dress that costs as much as a year’s tuition, cuts ribbons, opens champagne bottles, and throws money at people to make her feel like she’s helping the ‘less fortunate.’  That’s what she does.”

“I’m trying to do this…this
relationship,
and I don’t even know who you are!”

“I’m the same guy you’ve been living with,” I told her.  “There’s nothing different about me because I have some blood ties to a bunch of people who mean nothing to me.  I haven’t seen them in nearly ten years, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m never going to see them again.  I’m not a part of that family you see on the screen.  My name probably isn’t even mentioned.  I’m no more a part of the family there than you are of that fucked up douchebag.  If they mean nothing to me, I don’t know why they should suddenly be so fucking important to you!”

“Because you could have everything!” she yelled at me.  She tightened her hands into fists, and she held them against her thighs.  “Why do you do this to yourself?  Why?”