Page 26 of Bitter Rival

Good thing I stocked up on chlorine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Beckett

I’m woken by the rumble of a car engine and shouts of laughter at four in the morning. Fucking Daisy.

I open the security app on my phone and watch her sauntering to the front door. She looks up at the camera with a ghost of a smile on her face and blows a kiss as if she knows I’m watching.

Her eyeliner is smudged, her hair looks windblown, and she’s wearing an ugly mustard-yellow cardigan over her dress that does nothing to detract from her beauty.

Where was she all this time? Did she end up with the guy she was dancing with? Did she get naked for him and let him fuck her?

She looks up at the camera with her bottom lip clamped between her teeth and holds up her hands, wiggling her fingers. As usual she has no phone, and it looks like she has no keys either. But I stay right where I am and watch her back away from the door, and then she spins and walks away.

No doubt she’ll try to get in through the French doors, but I’ve locked them from the inside, so she’ll be shit out of luck on that front too.

Not my problem.

I close the app and try to fall back asleep but I’m wide awake now so after fifteen minutes, I give up and pull on a pair of sweatpants.

I descend the stairs, cursing Daisy as I flick the switch for the hallway light and unlock the French doors.

She’s curled up on the rattan sofa, already fast asleep. She looks young and vulnerable, like the little girl I taught how to ride a bike. The little girl who invented games and always asked if I would play them with her.

She used to ask me to read to her, and whenever she’d try to sound out the words, they always came out wrong.

Daisy was always precocious and had seemed so much smarter than other kids her age, so I thought it was just another one of her games until one day she got frustrated and threw the book down.

She glared at me for laughing and crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t laugh at me! My teacher called me lazy and said I need to try harder,” she fumed. “But I try harder than all the other kids.”

After I moved away, I wondered if anyone was there to help Daisy learn how to read. I got the feeling no one would notice or care.

And I don’t fucking want to care about her now. She’s not a child anymore. She’s twenty-five years old. An adult who is old enough to look after herself.

But I’m not completely heartless so I cover her with a blanket from the living room and leave the French doors unlocked before climbing the stairs.

“Hey, Beckett.” I glance over at Lauren standing outside her bedroom in a matching pajama set. Dark glossy hair falls around her shoulders and even at this hour, it’s still perfect. “Is everything okay?”

I push my hand through my hair. “Yeah, it’s all good. I was just checking on a noise I heard downstairs.”

She smiles. “I heard someone coming home.” She looks down the hallway then back at me. “I guess it was Daisy?”

I nod. Who else but the troublemaker? The very bane of my existence.

“Well…goodnight again.” She hesitates, and I think she’s hoping I’ll stop her from going into her own room, but I don’t. Even if she wasn’t looking for a relationship, there’s no chemistry and that’s not something you can fake.

So I close my door and try to fall back asleep but instead, I end up staring at the ceiling, thinking about the one girl in this house who does make me hard.

On a whim, I snatch my phone off the bedside table, and type Daisy Maja into the search bar. A few days ago, I signed for a delivery addressed to that name. Daisy’s middle name is May like her birth month, so maybe it’s a play on that? Who the fuck knows.

I’m not expecting to find anything, so I’m surprised when her Instagram account is the first one to show up. I’m even more surprised that she hasn’t made it private.

And would you look at that? I’ve just stumbled on her alias.

It looks as if she stopped posting to this account years ago, but her teen years are well-documented, so I scroll down to the bottom and start at the beginning.

The first photo is the Santa Monica pier.

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