Page 86 of Gather the Storm

Did I owe Blake anything after what had happened between us? Did I owe Blake somethingbecauseof what had happened between us?

Daisy sighed in her sleep and shifted, flinging one leg over my hips and rocking against me a couple of times while she slept, like she was trying to get herself off in her dreams.

Fuck.

I tried to focus on Blake, on what had gone down between us before the night of the party, even though it was a subject I usually avoided, because that night — and everything leading to it — had been all kinds of fucked up.

Truth was, Blake Hammond had always been a dick.

But that wasn’t the reason we’d killed him.

That had been about the shit he was involved in, the shit he threatened to involve Daisy in. We’d put up with his big talk until he brought her into it. Maybe we should have told someone, but honestly, Blake had always been a big fucking talker. It wasn’t until he’d gotten secretive, until he started flashing a bunch of money — big money, not the kind that came with his allowance from Charles Hammond — that we’d gotten wise.

Then he’d mentioned Daisy, mentioned how much money a sweet little virgin would bring in his twisted enterprise.

And that had been that.

Had he been kidding? Making a twisted joke? Trying to get under our skin because he’d picked up on the vibe that we all liked her, that we all wanted to protect her?

Well, that was something we’d never know.

Something we hadn’t been able to risk finding out.

Daisy shifted again, and this time I was pretty sure she was at least half-awake. Her fingers trailed over my chest and I’d never been more grateful for the thin fabric of my T-shirt and the jeans that stood between me and the sleepy movement of her hips on my thigh.

“Must be some dream, sunshine,” I murmured.

“Not sleeping,” she mumbled.

I adjusted, trying to ease the pressure of my expanding dick under the stroke of her hips and the thigh she still had flung over me. “You should be.”

“Maybe I don’t want to sleep,” she said, trailing her hand down to my now painfully hard dick.

And if I’d been hard before, feeling the light touch of Daisy’s fingers trailing over my cock turned it to granite. I’d only resisted her so far because I’d kept her busy enough to (mostly) keep her hands off me.

It had been fun to let her use me in the truck that first day — and it had been way more than fun to eat her pussy at the Orpheum (knowing Jace was watching only enhanced my enjoyment) — but behind all the fun of getting her off had been something selfish: an attempt to honor my promise to Blake fucking Hammond.

Now she was next to me in the dark, sleepy and horny, rubbing against me like a kitten looking for affection, stroking my dick through my jeans.

This was not good. This was worse than not good: it was a five-alarm fire threatening to combust.

For a split second I imagined rolling her under me, slipping off her shorts and easing into her tight little pussy, helping her out with that whole virginity thing she seemed so eager to get rid of.

In the end, it wasn’t Blake that stopped me, it was what had happened to her in the alley and the fact that she’d been drunk just a couple of hours before.

I took her hand and kissed it. “That’s not a good idea, sunshine.”

“You don’t want to?”

She sounded hurt and this time I did roll her under me, not to fuck her but to make a point.

She opened her thighs and I pressed my dick against her pussy and fuck me if it wasn’t hot even through her shorts. It was all too easy to imagine sliding into her, feeling the slippery walls of her pussy close around my shaft like a velvet glove.

“Does this feel like I don’t want to fuck you?” I asked, looking down at her.

Her eyes were shimmery in the dark, the plush bow of her mouth open just enough that I felt the whisper of her breath on my face. “Then why?”

“Because when I fuck you, it’s not going to be when you’re still half-drunk after some asshole had the nerve to assault you.”

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