Page 26 of Gather the Storm

The staircase was more than a little claustrophobic but I forced myself to use it anyway. It would have been easy to use the grand staircase at the front, but I couldn’t avoid the creepier parts of the house if I was going to live here and fix it up.

“Embrace the creepy,” I muttered to myself as I climbed to the second floor, the scent of old wood and dust and something dank I couldn’t define filling my nose.

I emerged at the end of two long halls on the second floor. I started with the north wing, checking a series of en suite bedrooms plus two wood-paneled rooms I thought of as studies or offices, but saw no sign of Jace.

Fine. I wasn’t going to hunt for him all day. He’d turn up eventually.

Unfortunately.

I passed through the second-floor landing, the elaborate curved staircase descending to the foyer where I’d entered the house, then headed for the south wing. I’d already claimed a room there — a large one with peeling floral wallpaper, big windows, and an attached bathroom that looked like it had been added in the 1980s — and I passed the doors to the rooms I’d assigned Jace, Wolf, and Otis on the way to my room at the end of the hall.

The bag I’d brought the night before — filled with clean sheets and blankets — still sat on the slipcovered mattress where I’d left it. I’d also brought sheets and towels for the guys. Lucky for Jace, that had been before he’d acted like such a dick — turning my offer into a game of follow the leader where Jace was supposedly the leader even though I owned the house — because his bullshit made me wish I’d left him to sleep on the dusty old mattress in the room I’d assigned him near the second-floor landing.

He could drip-dry from the shower for all I cared, except now I was picturing Jace naked and wet, which only made me more confused.

Something in the room felt off, and I looked around, trying to figure out what it was before I realized the closet door was open.

I definitely hadn’t done it. I hadn’t even opened the closet in ages, mostly because I knew that even though part of the house had been upgraded in the 1980s, the walk-in closet was small and dark, not at all like my walk-in closet at home, one of the good things about modern construction.

But it was definitely open and I walked toward it, half expecting an ax murderer to come out swinging.

I reached inside and turned on the light, then stared at the clothes hanging on the bars.

What the actual fuck?

I stepped inside and started pushing the hangers aside to get a look at the clothes. It took me about 1.5 seconds to realize they weren’t mine.

They were obviously new, the tags still attached, but where I usually wore dresses that fell just above the knee and T-shirts and blouses with semi-modest necklines, these clothes were, well, slutty.

Which was not to say bad. Sarai always looked banging in the short dresses and plunging necklines that were her trademark. Itjust wasn’t me — like, at all — and I stood there with my mouth hanging open as I flipped past dresses and skirts that looked like they’d barely cover my ass, shirts that would require me to go shopping if I didn’t want my bra to show, and pants a size smaller than the ones I usually wore.

“Oh good, you found your new clothes.”

I spun toward the voice behind me, adrenaline flooding my body, and realized Jace was standing in the doorway.

No, not just standing. Smirking like a cat that ate a canary.

And I was pretty sure in this situation, I was the canary.

Chapter 13

Daisy

“You scared the shit out of me!” It took me a second to register what he’d just said. “Wait… you did this?”

He was leaning in the doorway, and I had to say — assholery aside — he was hot as fuck. His short dark hair only accentuated the sharpness of his jaw and cheekbones, the dark green of his eyes. His jeans were well worn, the rip on one thigh giving me a delicious glimpse of skin, and my eyes were drawn to the ink snaking onto his arms from under a black T-shirt that looked like it was struggling to contain his shoulders and biceps.

Fuck me.

“You should thank me,” he said. “I almost decided to wait on the clothes, make you go without them for a while, walk around naked.”

I didn’t know if my face heated because just being around him pissed me off or because the thought of being naked around Jace Kane made me feel like I had a fever.

Probably the second one, because if Jace was a sickness he was the fucking plague.

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“Serious as a heart attack.” His gaze never left mine. They were like green pools of death, sucking me in, making it hard to think, to breathe.

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