Page 8 of Gather the Storm

We shouldn’t be anywhere near Daisy, but the letters were proof of what I’d suspected during the five years we’d been locked up: confessing to Blake’s murder hadn’t been the end of our relationship — if you could call it that — with Daisy.

It had been just the beginning.

Chapter 3

Jace

Ipaced my room at the compound, holding Daisy’s letter and feeling like an animal in a cage all over again.

It wasn’t the room. The rooms at the Blackwell Blades’s compound were nice enough even though they were situated in what had once been dormitories at a summer camp for spoiled rich kids.

There were two of the long two-story concrete dorm buildings. One was used to house the single members of the MC — married couples either moved off compound, towed a trailer onto the property, or if they were really ambitious, built a house.

The other building served as a kind of clubhouse with a kitchen that was a lot like a cafeteria, a low-rent movie room, a rec room, and the boxing ring where we all let off steam or settled disputes that couldn’t otherwise be settled. We used the existing high-school-style gym to play basketball because it would be a shame for it to go to waste.

I could hear the familiar sounds of the building all around me: music thumping from more than one location, laughter,angry voices raised down the hall, all of it not that different from prison.

I’d never thought twice about living on the compound. The Blades had been my family since my dad died when I was sixteen and Mac (we didn’t know his real name but his last name was McAllister and everyone had called him Mac for as long as I could remember) had been appointed my legal guardian.

Now I wantedspace. I didn’t want to be stacked on top of other men like sardines in a tin can.

I sat on my bed and looked around in amazement — my dresser and nightstands, the old sofa against the wall, my old clothes hanging in the closet — all of it just like it had been when I’d turned myself in with Wolf and Otis five years earlier.

Nothing had changed and everything had, as evidenced by the letter in my hand.

I turned the envelope over and shook my head with a bitter laugh at the sight of the wax seal.

Fucking Daisy Hammond.

Blake’s virginal little sister. Spoiled rich girl. So fucking naive and innocent it had hurt me to look at her.

At least, she had been. I had no idea what she was like now.

Blake had made it clear early on that Daisy was off-limits, which had been fine with me. I didn’t have any use for a pretty little princess — then or now.

It had been intentional, refusing her visits, ignoring her letters, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t read every one, the thick paper wearing to something soft as silk over five years of handling them, opening them, reading them like a man hungry for her words, stuffing them back into the envelope with a frustrated sigh.

I thought about the piercings on my dick, a partial Jacob’s ladder: three bars embedded in my shaft, one for every timeI’d allowed myself to beat off to Daisy in the last year of my sentence, when I’d finally given in to my thoughts of her.

I’d had them done by Big Mickey, a tattoo and piercing artist doing two years for second-degree murder. The piercings had been a penance for my forbidden thoughts, a reminder of why they were forbidden.

Now, I opened the new letter for what felt like the hundredth time.

Dear Jace,

I know you don’t want to hear from me. You’ve made that pretty clear.

I hope you’ll read this anyway, because I have a proposition for you. A proposal. One that would benefit us both.

One that would benefit us all.

Meet me at the old house at the top of the Falls at 9 p.m. tonight and I’ll explain everything.

Daisy

What the fuck was her game?

I’d known I’d have to see her eventually, but I was hoping it would be a chance encounter at Cassie’s Cuppa, maybe a glance passed between us downtown.

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