28. Daisy
Chapter 28
Daisy
I texted Joan for her meatball recipe and made Wolf take me to the store after work. I was still pissed at them (actually, it was a lot more complicated than pissed) but I was worried about Jace. He was still huge, but he was definitely leaner than he’d been before he disappeared, and there was a haunted look in his eyes that kept me awake at night.
Since I wasn’t ready to let the Beasts back into my bed, I figured a good meal was the next best thing, so I put my hair in a ponytail and got to work. They offered to help, but after the long day at the building site, I wasn’t in the mood for small talk with the three guys who’d leveled me with the biggest lie I’d ever been told. I spent the next two hours making meatballs and cutting tomatoes and fresh herbs and slathering thick loaves of bread with a mixture of minced garlic, oregano, butter, and sea salt.
Once I’d pulled the meatballs from the oven, I simmered them in the sauce according to Joan’s instructions and a half hour later the scent of cooking meat and garlic filled the kitchen.
It had been a while since I’d cooked a big meal, and I was surprised to find it meditative. Alone in the kitchen, trying to follow a recipe or get the timing right, there was no room for worry or fear. It was like knitting in a way, except I had to sit to knit and sometimes I didn’t feel like being still.
We sat at the table in the kitchen and talked about the punch list — all the little jobs that still had to be done — for the house. It was safer territory than the missing girls, Jace’s dad, my mom’s relationship with Mac.
And it was definitely safer than Jace’s fake death, something that still made me want to kill him for real.
“When do you want to tackle the kitchen?” Wolf asked. “I got the oven installed in the third-floor kitchen over the weekend. We can use it while this one’s being done.”
“I don’t know,” I said. The kitchen was our main communal space, the place where we had coffee in the morning and gathered at night when we couldn’t sleep. I didn’t like the idea of it being unusable.
And there was something else, something I’d barely started to articulate for myself: once the kitchen was done, the house was done.
And once the house was done, the Beasts had no real reason to stay.
What then? Would we go our separate ways like everything that had happened between us hadn’t happened? We’d said the L word — well, Wolf, Otis, and I had said it — but committing to someone was a whole other thing from loving someone.
Did I even want to commit to the Beasts? Okay, that was a dumb question. Of course I wanted to commit to them. In spite of everything and because of it, I couldn’t imagine not having them in my life.
But that didn’t mean they wanted to stay.
After everything that had happened, maybe they’d want to put Blackwell Falls in the rearview once and for all. It wasn’t like I could blame them.
“You okay, doll?”
I blinked and looked at Otis. I’d been spaced out, thinking about the Beasts and our questionable future even though I was still mad at them for keeping me in the dark about Jace.
“Just thinking about the kitchen.” It was less humiliating to lie than to admit I was worried they would leave when the house was done and we figured out who was responsible for the missing girls.
“It’s your call,” Wolf said. “But we might as well get it over with. The cabinets and appliances are in the ballroom. They came in last month.”
Last month.
Last month when I’d been swimming through a morass of grief. Last month when I thought I’d never see Jace again.
I felt a familiar swell of euphoria. It happened every now and then when I remembered that Jace wasn’t really dead, like my chest was filling up with helium, my head buzzing with happiness even before I could identify the cause.
Not that I’d told Jace that. He’d made me suffer. He could wait.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
I was glad they left it at that. Jace didn’t have an opinion and I wondered if it was hard being back, wondered how much he’d suffered while he’d been away, because he’d definitely suffered, I could see it in his eyes.
I forced myself to swallow my sympathy for him. He’d chosen to disappear — to pretend to be dead. I hadn’t had a choice in the matter. He’d known he would come back eventually. I’d been completely in the dark, forced to sit with the reality of never seeing his stupid gorgeous face again, never feeling his arms around me or his body on mine.
My pussy throbbed with the memory of our insane fucking in the kitchen the night he came back. I was hungry for him — for all of them together again — but not ready to give in to the primal demands of my body.
Not yet.
They did the dishes while I retreated to the sofa in the living room to knit. Later, they joined me and put on a movie — something with a lot of shooting and explosions — and I settled into a relaxing food coma. I didn’t want to admit how nice it was to do something as ordinary as sit in the living room, the TV flickering over their faces while they made comments back and forth.
Otis sat next to me on the couch, leaning forward to tinker with one of the antique mantel clocks that wasn’t working while he listened to the movie. I was mesmerized by his fingers as they manipulated the tiny wheels and levers. I knew what those fingers felt like inside me, could recall the memory of his calloused thumb on my clit while he finger-fucked me.
I shifted, trying to quell the pulsing in my cunt, and glanced at Wolf, sitting at the other end of the sofa.
Big mistake.
He was restringing his guitar, his arms flexing as he twisted the pegs on the neck. He was completely oblivious to my stare, focused on the task at hand, but I felt like someone had lit a match at the center of my body.
What the fuck was wrong with me? It had only been a few days since my steamy night with Wolf and Otis at the inn — and Jace had fucked me so hard in the kitchen the night before that I was still sore — but I was horny as fuck.
I looked over at the chair next to the sofa and found Jace staring.
Not at the movie. At me.
His green eyes blazed with hunger, a smirk playing at the corners of his full mouth.
Like he knew exactly what I was thinking. Like he was thinking it too.
Maybe it was having them back together again, knowing what they could do to me when we were all naked. Maybe it was knowing Jace was alive, the dull ache of my grief replaced with the fire of anger and indignation at what they’d put me through.
I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it was pretty inconvenient. I’d been determined to make them pay, determined to keep my distance, for a while at least. Now I felt like I’d be lucky to make it to morning without fucking them all until their dicks fell off.