What washisgame here?
But those thoughts were overwhelmed by the spinning in my head as I considered their earlier remarks. Screwing over the Hell Kickers—had someone else done that recently, or had Marcel been talking about the Nobles? What was he planning on doing that he felt would teachmyfamily a lesson?
The men in the room didn’t seem inclined to fill me in. Griffin started talking about his shitty dad and how glad he was to have gotten out of that house and be really making something of himself, and I heard the floor creak near the top of the stairs. I hustled away before I could get caught eavesdropping. It’d sounded like the most specific parts of the scheme had been discussed previously, and Marcel had simply been setting things in motion.
What was on Orvil Street?
As I stewed over that, I noticed Darius heading down the stairs from his third-floor rooms. His gaze latched on to me. I considered heading to my bedroom, but he’d already shown he was perfectly happy to follow me there. Better to detour to somewhere more public, I suspected.
I walked down the stairs at a brisk but not panicked pace. Down the hall, voices carried from the kitchen. Well, I’d just make myself some tea. That was a perfectly normal thing people did that had nothing to do with fleeing from gang heirs.
I slipped into the kitchen and made a beeline for the kettle. Two young men I didn’t recognize were laughing together as they grabbed a couple of chip bags out of the cupboard. Just my luck, as Darius stalked in after me, my only other company ambled out, leaving me alone with him after all.
“Why am I getting the feeling you’re avoiding me?” he asked, propping himself against the kitchen island a few feet from where I stood.
“I don’t know,” I retorted. “Because your ego is so overblown you assume everything anyone does is about you?”
“Hmm. Is it really the size of myegoyou’ve had on your mind?”
“I haven’t really spent much time thinking about you at all,” I said flippantly, which was a total lie. Although mostly I’d been thinking about punching him in his cocky face.
Darius tsked his tongue. “I heard you’ve been naughty. Sneaking off in the middle of the night.”
I tensed despite my best intentions. I didn’t think Lucan had reported my stealthy excursion to his father, since Marcel hadn’t hassled me about it, but maybe it wasn’t a surprise that he’d mentioned it to his brothers.
“I thought your father would prefer it if I wasn’t seen walking in and out the door more than necessary.”
“I doubt he expected you to be quite that stealthy. Where did you have to go so urgently anyway?”
“Where do you think?” I’d had plenty of time to come up with a cover story now. I glanced over my shoulder at him, arching my eyebrows. “You’ve made itveryclear that I’m not welcome here. My brother isn’t going to open his door to me any time soon, and I don’t think I’d want to go back under his roof anyway. So I’m doing what I can to figure out a new situation for myself. And the kinds of dealings that happen in the middle of the night are all I really know, as you should probably understand.”
Darius grunted with obvious skepticism. “Your brother would really disown you that totally?”
“You don’t know Ezra,” I said. “Although from what I’ve been hearing, you probably should be able to figure out how ruthless he can be.”
There wasn’t much Darius could say to that. He opened a drawer and took out a tea towel that he whipped against his hand with a smack that made my nerves jump—and not totally in an unpleasant way. A traitorous part of me immediately started imagining him spanking me with it.
But Darius had other ideas. “I think you’ve been here long enough that you should start earning your keep,” he said. “You seem to be getting a lot of use out of this kitchen. Let’s see you pitch in by wiping down this floor.”
Oh, he was going to go there, was he? I glanced down at the glossy gray tiles. “They already look pretty clean to me.”
“Trying to weasel your way out of repaying what you owe us?”
I glowered at him. “No, just making an observation.” An idea clicked in my head, a way I could make this more torture for him than it was for me. I snatched the towel from his hands and dipped it under the tap. “If it’ll make you happy.”
“Very happy,” he shot back with a broad grin.
I knelt down on my hands and knees near the wall, keeping my distance but staying within his view, and tugged my dress so my knees wouldn’t mash the fabric into the floor. Then I started scrubbing.
As I swept my hand back and forth over the nearest tiles, I let my hips sway. My ass rose a little higher in the air, then a little higher still. From the corner of my eyes, I saw Darius lick his lips.
“That’s right,” he said. “Exactly where you should be—down on your knees.”
“I definitely don’t want to know whatyou’reimagining right now,” I said, but I let a little breathiness creep into my tone.
Darius shifted his weight as if his pants had gotten tighter. Ha.
“I’ll imagine whatever I want,” he murmured. “And you should be imagining all the things I could do to you while you’re bent over like that, if you deserved it. I’d have you swaying twice that hard.”