Chapter Ten
Perish
“What’s with all the lumbering around?” Croft asked.
“Lumbering around?” I repeated. “It’s how I walk.”
“You’ve been stomping around for days,” he insisted as he set up the beer pong table.
“I don’t think the girls are going to play pong.”
“You never know. They get crazy.”
I was worried about that.
It was why I’d been planning on being out for the night.
Until fucking Fallon personally requested that I do guard duty while the girls were partying.
There was no way to turn him down without someone getting suspicious. I didn’t need anyone thinking about shit.
Because I was pretty sure my damn guilt was practically scrawled across my forehead.
Guilt for doing it.
But not one damn drop of regret.
If that was all I would get from her, I had to make myself believe it was enough. Because it was a lot.
Her sighs, moans, whimpers. Her begging, her writhing. The smell of her. The taste of her. The feel of my fingers inside her. The way her walls clenched as she came.
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the memories.
I knew it was useless.
I’d been replaying them on a loop for days.
Inevitably, I found myself straining in bed.
And damn if I didn’t nearly get carpal tunnel from trying to get some relief from the desire. To no avail.
I knew what I really needed to do was go out, find some random woman, and fuck the memory of Gracie out of my head.
But just the thought of it was enough to leave me completely and fucking utterly flaccid.
So, yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen anytime soon.
“Where’s your brother?” I asked Croft.
While Spike, Cain, and Croft were hanging around, Rune and I were the ones Fallon explicitly asked to be on guard.
“He went up to the glass room.”
“Why?”
Was there an explosive quality to that one word? Yep. Because the glass room had been my fucking plan, damn it. Far and away from the girls. No seeing Gracie. No smelling her. No wanting to grab her, drag her into a closet, and fuck her senseless.
“Guard duty,” Croft reminded me, brows furrowing.
“I was going to go up there,” I said, trying to shrug it off.
“You can switch later.”
Later.
When the girls were at the bar and the danger of fucking up my whole life had passed.
I could go outside.
Tour the grounds.
Keep my damn hands to myself.
I finished helping Croft set up the liquor and snacks, then when I saw headlights out front, I went ahead and did a nice, slow, thorough inspection of the fence.
Then another.
And another.
But on the fourth round, I became painfully aware of Rune up in the glass room, likely watching me, wondering why the fuck I was avoiding going inside.
I steeled myself for seeing her before making my way inside.
Where the first thing I heard was her sweet, twinkling laugh drifting over toward me even over the music.
She was sitting on the bar with Layna on one side and Kit on the other.
She was in another of those damn rompers that had no right to be as sexy as it was.
This one was in a sage green with shorts and an enticingly deep V between her breasts.
My cock twitched, remembering my face buried in exactly that spot, breathing her in, feeling her shake with need beneath me, hearing her beg me to taste her.
As if hearing my thoughts, her head turned, and those blue eyes pinned me.
There was fucking impact in the look.
I went back a half a step.
She was every bit as gorgeous as I remembered.
Her cheeks were flushed red from the half-empty margarita in her hand.
“Perish!” Layna greeted me, her smile suspiciously wide.
Did she know?
Had Gracie told her?
My spine tensed.
“Come say hi!” she said, sounding drunker than she should already. But Croft was right. The girls knew how to party when they wanted to. She was probably on her third marg. And that tequila, that shit just hit differently.
“Hi,” I said, taking two steps forward.
But that wasn’t good enough.
“To our faces, dummy,” Layna demanded.
I sucked in a deep breath that I planned to hold so I didn’t have to breathe in Gracie as I moved closer.
“Happy?” I asked.
“Delighted,” Layna said. “Say hi, Gracie.”
“Hi,” she said, her voice small.
“Can I say hi too?” Kit, dressed in her signature goth style with her lilac hair pulled into two space buns, asked.
“Hey, Kit.”
“So, we are planning on going dancing,” Layna went on. “Do you want to come?”
“I’m on guard shift tonight.”
Layna pouted.
“Well, maybe we can dance here to start!” she declared, jumping off the bar. Her margarita sloshed on her hand, and she lifted it to lick it off before making her way to the stereo to change the music.
“Car fixed?” I asked, painfully aware of Kit’s gaze sliding between me, Layna, and Gracie, and trying to keep it casual.
“Yeah, Uncle Seth got it fixed and back at my apartment before I even woke up.”
I nodded at that.
I wasn’t typically one for small talk. It wasn’t something that had ever bothered me before. But I suddenly wished I could think of something, anything to say.
Especially when Gracie lifted the margarita glass to her lips and took a sip, temporarily staining her lips red. And, fuck, I wanted to move closer and lick the taste off.
“Yes!” a cheer went up through the girls. Who, despite having wildly different personalities and, I would assume, tastes in music, all seemed jazzed about whatever pop song was currently blasting through the speakers.
Layna rushed forward to drag Gracie down from the bar, making her teeter on her heels.
My hand itched to reach out to steady her, but I forced myself to ball them into fists instead.
“Here, you take this,” Layna demanded, plucking the drink from Gracie’s hand to shove it at me.
I took it and leaned back against the bar, sipping the last of the contents, knowing intimately what Gracie’s lips would taste like right then.
Then I was tortured with the image of the girls dancing.
In particular, Gracie dancing.
Her hips swaying, her ass wiggling around. And, yeah, it seemed like Gracie simply never wore a goddamn bra. Because there was no way she had one on with the way her tits were bouncing under the thin material of her romper.
I forced my gaze away, studying my damn shoes, the paint on the walls, a ball of dust that missed the vacuum earlier.
Anything but her.
I couldn’t say if I was more relieved or disappointed when the girls finally wanted to break free of the walls and hit the bar.
“Yo,” I said, stopping Cain as he started to move past me.
“Yeah?”
“You keep a close eye on them,” I demanded, knowing my tone was way too damn serious, but unable to help it.
The shooting.
Chased by drunk guys.
Gracie had been through enough already.
“I got it,” Cain said, his tone so serious that I knew he would see it as his job to stay sober and act as private security.
Unfair of me, maybe.
But it felt necessary.
At some point, Rune came back down from the glass room.
I was quick to grab a few drinks and a charger for my phone and haul my ass up there, intending to spend the rest of the night up there and away from temptation if the girls came back to crash.
Which, if the past was anything to go by, they would.
They liked to take the party into the wee hours of the morning.
And they knew they were safe in the clubhouse.
No creeps copping a feel. Someone to keep an eye on them and make sure they weren’t getting sick or overdoing it.
From my vantage point, when the girls did eventually make their way back. They were still riding high from the vibes of the bar, dancing around, their smiles big. Layna was getting a piggyback from Croft, likely because of the high heels she’d chosen to wear.
To their credit, both Cain and Spike were flanking the crowd, their heads on a swivel, nothing about them seeming like they’d been drinking.
The music came back on, louder than before, drowning out the sounds of the women. And I tried to be relieved. All I could really feel, though, was disappointment.
Hours passed and, finally, the music cut as the women, I imagined, piled into the empty bedrooms, the prospect room, or the barracks-style room in the basement.
I prayed Gracie wasn’t in the latter of them. I didn’t want to have to walk past her looking all soft and sweet in bed when I eventually made my way down.
I decided to give myself another hour or two, just to make sure everyone was out cold.
But then I heard it.
The trap door pushing open.
Then there it was.
Her golden head.
Then her gorgeous face emerging.
“Hey,” she said, her voice small, shy.
“Hey,” I said, a warm sensation moving through my chest. Then, remembering the rules, asked, “What are you doing?”
“I, uh, like the view up here,” she said, a false note in her words.
She got on her knees to scoot into the space, and I was at once painfully aware that she’d discarded her romper for one of the guys’ tees that was swimming on her but revealing way too much enticing skin on her legs.
Enough to know she didn’t even have shorts on underneath.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said, trying to get up. But I’d been sitting there for hours. Every bit of my body immediately rejected the decision to move.
Before I could fight through the pins and needles, though, Gracie shut and slid the lock on the trap door.
“You can stay,” she said, trying to play it off as she moved closer until she dropped down at my side. “Can you turn the light off so we can see the stars?” she asked, staring up at the glass ceiling.
The last thing this moment needed was more intimacy.
But I couldn’t turn down a simple request, either. So I reached over and flicked off the light, blanketing us in romantic fucking starlight.
Great.
“I would sleep up here if I lived here,” she said, smiling softly as she looked up.
I couldn’t stop myself from looking over, from studying her profile.
She didn’t seem drunk.
Her eyes were clear, wide open.
Her skin wasn’t as flushed as it had been earlier.