Page 41 of Pay the Price

Chapter 25

Daisy

Iwas still flustered when I stepped into the shower. I turned the water cold, hoping to cool the fire in my blood because the sexual hunger simmering in my veins on my first day back with the Beasts was not a good sign (and don’t even get me started on the other feelings, which were a lot more dangerous than lust).

Once I’d cooled the fever in my body, I adjusted the water until it was warm and soaped my body and hair. Cassie’s place was nice, but it felt good to be back at the house, back in my own shower. Against all reason, it had come to feel like home, and I tried not to think too hard about whether it was because of the house itself and the lingering energy of my dead relatives or because of the three men who haunted it now.

I was going over my planned renovations for the bathroom — soaking tub, walk-in shower with Moroccan tile, marble countertops, gold fixtures — when I finally turned off the water and opened the shower door.

I reached for my towel and realized the towel bar next to the shower was empty.

Shit.

I’d been so off-balance after running into Wolf that I hadn’t thought to grab a clean towel, and someone had been in the bathroom during the month I’d been gone and removed the dirty one.

My bet was on Otis. He had an obsession with laundry. I couldn’t even set down a dish towel to put away a stack of plates and expect to find the towel on the counter when I returned to it. Half the time he picked things up and put them in the laundry before I even had the chance to use them.

Clearly he’d been on laundry duty while I’d been gone.

Dammit.

I wasn’t eager to put my dirty clothes back on now that I was clean, so I padded into the bedroom — dripping onto the wood floors every step of the way — and hurriedly grabbed a pale violet T-shirt and a pair of underwear from my unpacked bag.

They stuck to my wet skin as I pulled them on, but at least they’d get me to the linen closet in the hall.

I opened the door and looked both ways, making sure it was clear, then hurried to the closet where I kept extra sheets and towels. I could hear Otis talking to someone in his room — probably one of his sisters, he talked to them a lot — and Wolf playing guitar, the sorrowful notes of the song he always seemed to be playing echoing through the house.

I didn’t know where Jace was, but I was relieved I didn’t have to worry about running into one of the Beasts with my ass hanging out of my underwear and the T-shirt plastered against my wet tits.

I opened the closet door and grabbed a fluffy white towel from the stack of clean ones on the second shelf — and turned around to find Jace standing a foot away.

I froze, watching as his gaze traveled from my wet hair, dripping onto the already-wet T-shirt, down to my stomach,where the aforementioned T-shirt was stuck to my tits and stomach, and further down to my thighs.

I said a silent prayer that my T-shirt was covering my pussy, because my underwear were white and wet and I only had one towel and chose to smash it against my tits instead of my lady garden.

“What are you doing?” Jace’s voice sounded low and strangled, like he’d been screaming in the front row of a concert.

“I’m… getting a towel,” I said. “Otis must have cleaned my room while I was gone.”

“Don’t you have a robe or something?” Jace sounded almost hopeful.

“Aren’t you the guy who replaced all my clothes with scraps of fabric that barely cover my tits and ass?” I really wasn’t up for Jace’s shit, and also, his dick, a little too obvious in those jeans, was distracting, not to mention his sculpted arms and his stupid gorgeous face.

Keeping as much distance as possible — physical and otherwise — was my best bet if I didn’t want to end up fucking three out of three of the guys who’d murdered my brother.

I was already at two. I didn’t have a lot of room for mistakes.

He advanced on me, backing me into the closet until the towel was the only thing between us. “That was my choice. My game, my rules, remember?”

“You asked me to come back,” I snapped. “We’re not playing your game anymore.”

It had been dumb to agree to his game — wearing what he told me to wear, eating what he told me to eat, doing what he told me to do — but I’d agreed to get the Beasts to move in so I could figure out whether they’d really killed Blake.

Now I knew they had. They’d askedmeto come back. And this asshole still expected me to play?

“Irrelevant,” he said. “We’re still living here. The game goes on.”

“Says you,” I said.

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