Page 40 of Watch Your Back (Devil’s Backbone #2)

I’m still laughing about Carter’s face when I stole that token out of his hand.

Classic. He thought he was soooo sneaky but apparently forgot who the fuck he was dealing with.

Nothing slips past me if I have anything to say about it.

And in this case, I’m best positioned to keep Ashley safe.

All three of them are so focused on her magical vagina, they wouldn’t see a threat coming even if it slapped them in the face with a wet fish.

It kind of makes me mad when I think about it. Do they even like her as much as they’re pretending? Or is it just all about the sex for them?

It fucking sucks that I’m questioning my friends’ motives like this. They’re literally the best people I know. But still…they’re also guys. And Ashley is hot as hell.

T he rest of the game turned into a bit of chaos with friendly fire increasing with every passing minute as people got bored or competitive.

After some time and plenty of annoyance from me, Nate admitted that his ankle might be sprained.

He’d only been limping since the moment he’d fallen, but every time I mentioned it, he tried to gaslight me into thinking I was imagining things.

Dick.

Eventually, he caved and agreed that, yes, he was limping, and yes, he was in some “small measure” of pain, so I parked him up in the stolen silver tower—where we had found their egg after all—and used him as bait to pick off any other players who came for an easy shot.

Our finest moment was when Carter tried to lure me into a quickie in the bushes, and I swiped both his flag and egg, then left him with blue balls. Sucker. Nate had laughed so hard at that one, I’d done a full double take. I couldn’t remember ever hearing him laugh genuinely.

When the bell tolled, I insisted Nate lean on me so I could help him trek back across the acres of battleground to see the final scores. We had no clue if our team had successfully defended our egg and flag, but we’d undoubtedly taken a hit for Paige being disqualified.

Paint-covered players all trickled back onto the patio, where servers were already roaming with trays of champagne, and Nate snagged a pair of full flutes for us.

“Sit down,” I ordered, pointing to a vacant seat by a little garden table. “Take the weight off your ankle. I’ll get some ice.”

“Stop fussing, Layne,” he growled. “I’m fine. It wasn’t that bad.” Still, he sat down where I had pointed, and that in itself told me he was in pain. If it were really fine, he’d still be stubbornly on his feet or doing a tap dance just to prove his point.

I just arched a brow, then plucked a bottle of wine from an ice bucket on the nearby cocktail table. “Excuse me,” I said politely to a passing waitress, “could I trouble you for that napkin?”

She shrugged, handing me the linen napkin folded over her arm. I laid it flat on the table and dumped a pile of ice out of the wine bucket, then wrapped it up in a little package.

“This is unnecessary,” Nate grumbled as I sank to my knees in front of him and lifted his injured foot up into my lap to apply the ice to his ankle.

I glanced up at him with a grin. “You don’t like feeling like the damsel in distress, Essex? You’re lucky you’re so fucking heavy, or I’d try to carry you out just to emasculate you further.”

He scoffed and his lips twitched like he was trying really fucking hard not to find me amusing. It was a losing battle—he just hadn’t realized it yet.

“Whoa, what happened, Cinderella?” Royce asked, sauntering over to us.

He was covered in so many different colors of paint, I could barely make out his silver tuxedo, but the grin on his face said he’d had a great time nonetheless.

“Squirrel, babe, I don’t think a glass slipper will fit his stinky foot. ”

“Don’t tease,” I scolded. “That’s my job. Nate sprained his ankle out on the battlefield.”

“Oh, baby!” Royce threw himself into Nate’s lap dramatically, knocking the chair over and spilling the both of them onto the pavers in a tangle of ruined designer suits and spattered paint.

Nate groaned and cursed between bursts of laughter, trying to shove Royce off while his friend smothered his face in kisses. “Get off, you overgrown child. Fucking hell, I actually needed that ice!”

“Did you?” I chimed in, sitting back on my heels as I waited for them to scrap it out on the ground. “Weren’t you just saying it was overkill?”

They wrestled a little more before Royce helped Nate right his chair and get seated once more. I arched a brow at him in question, offering the makeshift ice pack, and he took it with a muttered thanks before applying it to his own ankle propped up on a second chair.

“Have you guys seen Carter or Heath?” Royce asked, swiping a couple of water bottles from a passing waitress and handing me one. “My team totally flaked this challenge. Carly got disqualified for something and lost both our egg and flag. Totally useless.”

Nate and I exchanged a smirk because we’d already handed off the spoils of war to one of the masked, robed referees for safe keeping.

“There they are,” I said, seeing the two handsome devils heading over to us, grinning and jostling each other as they debated who’d been hit with more paint.

I rose back to my feet and brushed off my full skirt, which was an entirely pointless gesture considering how filthy I was.

Not only was I splattered with several colors of metallic paint but I was also covered in mud, grass stains, and crushed grapes.

My hair probably looked like a fucking albatross had started nesting season judging by how tangled it felt.

“Spark! How the hell are you so untouched right now?” Carter exclaimed, scanning me over from top to toe. I was hardly untouched, but the only direct hit I’d taken was the one from Paige in my stomach. All the other splatters were just that: splatters.

I laughed, shrugging. “Teamwork, obviously.”

“Also I’d be cautious challenging her to Call of Duty anytime soon,” Nate added with a smirk. “Layne is a closet sniper.”

Heath, Royce, and Carter all looked at me in surprise and I offered an innocent smile. “I used to go deer hunting with my dad when he was home from work. He was pretty strict about making sure I put in the hours at a rifle range to ensure I was capable.”

“I suddenly don’t feel good about the black-gold win,” Carter admitted with a grimace, running a hand over his scruffy jaw. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and it was a good look on him. “Even if we did get both the pewter team’s egg and flag.”

“Wow, nice work,” Nate drawled, barely hiding his sarcasm. “That’ll be hard to beat.”

Carter narrowed his eyes in suspicion. He obviously knew we’d stolen his egg and flag, but he didn’t know about the other wins we’d clocked.

A moment later, a loud crack rang out and the sky above us erupted with fireworks.

It was midafternoon but cloudy enough that we could still see the display well enough.

“Congratulations, white-gold team!” one of the masked referees announced over a loudspeaker. “Winners of this game with an impressive score of 8,283 points. Each qualifying team member has won fifty thousand dollars. Honorable mention to black-gold team, who came second with, er, 3,612 points.”

Carter gaped at Nate and me in shock. “No! How?”

I was still hung up on the prize announcement that had just been made, though.

“Did he just say fifty thousand dollars? American dollars, not Japanese yen?” The guys were all so casual about wealth, it was probably the equivalent of a Starbucks gift card to them, but to me?

This was huge. “Wait, he said qualifying members. What does that mean? Am I not…? Not me, right?” Because surely there was some sort of buy-in or membership fees or something that qualified someone to win.

Heath gave me a puzzled look, shaking his head. “Were you disqualified at any stage of the game?”

“No…”

“Then you get the money. Disqualification means you’re out of the game and ineligible for prizes. If you played and your team won, then you get the prize.” Heath looked so matter-of-fact about it. Like it was just that simple. I didn’t even know what to say.

I was so overwhelmed, tears burned in the back of my eyeballs, and I did the only thing I could think to do: I launched myself at Nate in a huge hug. He stumbled but caught me with arms around my waist, steadying us before we toppled over.

“Thank you,” I sobbed into his paint-covered jacket. “That pays off a huge chunk of my debt.”

He awkwardly patted my back, body stiff like he was unfamiliar with the sensation of being hugged. Which I knew couldn’t be true because Max was far from distant as a parent, and I was sure my mom had forced plenty of her motherly affection on him in the last year.

“I don’t know why you’re thanking me,” he replied with an uncomfortable laugh. “It was teamwork, right?”

Still, I squeezed him tighter. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but if I’d ended up on literally any other team, I would not be walking away with fifty grand this weekend.

Nate was the only one more interested in winning the game than getting his dick wet.

And while I loved the sneaky make-outs behind vines, I loved financial freedom more.

Finally, sensing he was as uncomfortable as he could possibly get, I released Nate from my hug.

“If you have debts to pay—” Carter started to say, his brow set with a confused frown.

“Don’t,” I snapped, shaking my head. “I don’t want or need any man to support me.” But I was more than happy to win the money fair and square, and I was 100 percent confident that was what’d happened here. We’d won, no questions asked and no charity offered.

Royce smacked the back of Carter’s head. “Bro. You’d think you’d know her better than that by now.” He extended a hand to me, and I took it, letting him pull me away from Nate. “Come on, Squirrel. Let’s head into the party. The games aren’t over yet!”

He tucked my arm through his, guiding me to walk with him across the patio, where paint-splattered players were in full party mode already. The other guys followed, and Royce glanced at me a couple of times, but his tight jaw suggested he was holding something back.

“What’s on your mind, Roycey?” I asked as we approached the main estate.

He huffed a small sigh. “I feel the need to explain…none of us knew what the prize for winning would be. Sometimes it’s just bragging rights or something stupid like a life-size crystal giraffe, so we don’t ever really take the games seriously.”

I nodded slowly, guessing at the point he was trying to make. “So if you’d known there was so much money at stake…?”

“I’m glad Nate was on your team for this one,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think we forget what sort of real-world impact these prizes might have…and we forget that you weren’t raised like the rest of us assholes, with such a casual indifference toward money.”

I gave a small laugh, shaking my head. “That’s true. Weirdly, I’m also glad I was on Nate’s team this time. I’m sure that’s a statement I’ll never say again, but for today it’s true.”

We’d paused behind a small crowd of guests, and as we moved forward, I realized what the holdup was. Everyone was stripping.

“Um…?” I blinked up at Royce in confusion, and he smirked.

“Dry cleaners,” he said, gesturing to the uniformed staff taking paint-ruined dresses and suits from the guests. “They get the clothing cleaned and then donated to a charity that provides formal wear to impoverished high schools for their students’ proms.”

That…was actually a really lovely idea, and I noticed guests were handing over their entire outfits, shoes included, stripping right down to underwear. In lots of cases, girls were just going full bare-chested as they collected a cocktail and continued on inside.

I bit my lip, suddenly very aware of the fact that my dress had enough structure in the bodice that I’d not worn a bra. So if I took it off, I’d just be in a tiny pair of white-gold lace panties which barely covered the crack of my ass.

But for charity? It would be a dick move to keep the gown. Especially since I hadn’t paid for it myself. So I sucked up my modesty and turned to let Royce unzip the back of my gown when we reached the front of the line.

As I slipped out of the dress, a man’s shirt dropped over my head, still partially buttoned up.

“Oh, um,” I started to say, before recognizing the manly cologne scenting the fabric, and threaded my arms into the long sleeves. “Thanks, Heath.” I turned to smile at him, and he brushed a quick kiss on my lips.

“Anytime, Ashes,” he replied, then continued stripping down to his briefs.

It only then clicked in my brain that we weren’t heading back to our rooms to change; we were just staying as is. Practically naked. Somehow I suspected the evening was going to turn real dirty, real fast.