Page 66 of Pay the Price

I see you.

No,I thought.You don’t.

Chapter 40

Daisy

Iwoke up with a slamming headache and vowed never to drink again. I’d had more hangovers in the past three months of my life than the entire twenty years prior combined.

Why did I do this to myself?

Then I had a flash of Wolf’s dick in my mouth while Otis fucked me and Jace jacked off next to us and knew exactly why I’d done it last night.

I also knew it had totally been worth it.

I lay in bed for a few minutes, birds singing outside my open windows, a soft breeze fluttering through the curtains. I could already feel the heat of the day and I wished again that I’d started with the pool. The company I’d hired was scheduled to start digging next week, but by the time they finished the pool and hot tub and built the blue stone patio, summer would be almost over.

Oh well. At least we had the river. Maybe I could talk the Beasts into cooling off with me under the falls.

The Beasts.

A storm of feeling blew through me at the thought of them. Lust was at the forefront after our night at the Velvet Rope, but there was more than that. A lot more.

I was falling for them. All three of them.

And who could blame me? Okay, lots of people would blame me.

They’d killed my brother. They weren’t good men by society’s standards.

But I was starting to wonder if society was full of shit. Blake had been planning to sell me, not because he was destitute and desperate for money, but because…

Why?

That was where I always got stuck. Was Blake just a sociopath? Or had there been something else? Some other reason he’d secretly hated me?

I was as in the dark about the Blake situation as I’d been since the Beasts had told me why they’d killed him, except now I had new reasons to be confused because that apparently wasn’t a deal breaker for either my heart or my body.

If Blake had been trying to sell me, the Beasts had killed him to protect me. Did that make them bad? Was Blake inherently good because he’d been born a Hammond? Because he knew which fork to use for shrimp at dinner? Because he wore a suit coat to the country club and kept his hair short and neat? Because he didn’t have dirt or motor oil under his fingernails?

It didn’t seem right, and I was starting to question society’s biases, the ones I’d known were there and new ones that were making themselves more apparent by the day.

The Beasts had been painted as monsters, but the people of Blackwell Falls had been asking all the wrong questions: not who killed Blake Hammond, but why.

No, that wasn’t right. The people of Blackwell Falls hadn’t asked any questions at all. They’d just been happy to find a placeto hang themurderersign, happy it could be hung on the necks of seemingly bad men.

I always knew they were trouble.

I wasn’t even surprised.

Poor Blake.

All things that were said in the wake of the Beasts’ confession.

But those people had been wrong.

A hazy memory swum to the surface of my mind: Jace, sitting on the edge of my bed after carrying me in from the limo last night. his expression a mixture of loneliness and sadness.

I see you.

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