Free House of Payne: Steele by Stacy Gail

brief Steele on just how many Royal bodyguards would be invading the House. Since it sounded like sensitive information that shouldn’t be heard by totally normal people like her, she wandered toward the front door, head down over her phone as she pulled up Scout’s email and began to type. It was sweet of Payne to give her fair warning about this Maximo dude, but she wasn’t fragile. A few naughty suggestions or dirty words weren’t going to send her into a—
    Unintelligible male voices yelling at each other reached her ears as two men hurtled through House Of Payne’s front doors. She only had enough time to get an impression of them—a stocky Hispanic with a heavy Groucho-style mustache and hair pulled back in a bushy ponytail, the other a bald Caucasian bowling ball, as wide as he was tall. Both had their phones out and held up in such a way that she thought they were recording something, and yelling pure profanity at each other. That was all she managed to register before they plowed into her without even acknowledging her existence.
    As she flew through the air, she had enough time to ponder that there was a definite downside to being invisible.
    The shattering of her newly purchased mug almost drowned out her startled yelp. Pain sliced into her hand at the fleshy base of her thumb as she sprawled on the floor, rolling over the sad remains of her mug like she’d been thrown from a car.
    It took her a moment to realize she was still in one piece, unlike her poor mug, even as all hell broke loose around her. The hubbub that the shouting men had kicked off was nothing compared to what was unleashed around her—running footsteps, a flurry of movement, a furious screech from Scout, and Payne going off like a volcano packed full of nuclear F-bombs. It was total chaos, and she smartly kept her head down until the worst of it was over. Then she was being hauled to her feet by Payne while she still clutched her phone and the sad, busted handle of her mug.
    “Mother fuckers better not twitch a goddamn hair, or I’ll kill ‘em myself,” Payne snarled, holding Essie by the arms while staring pure death at a point beyond her shoulder. Dazedly she looked back to take in the scene in its entirety. The two men who’d trampled her now looked as though they had been trampled themselves. The dude with the Groucho mustache was curled up in a fetal position, rocking noiselessly with his hands between his knees.
    Ouch.
    The round bald guy was ass-end up and on his knees, his jowly cheek pressed to the floor while Steele stood over him. He had the guy in an arm-lock that looked excruciating to Essie, as if Steele was trying to see if he could bend the dude’s fingers forward along the man’s forearm to see if they could touch the elbow.
    Considering how the bald dude was screaming, excruciating was probably an accurate description.
    “Essie.” Steele’s eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them as he looked to her, not moving from his position over the screaming man. “You okay?”
    Embarrassment nearly strangled her to death. Seriously, why did stupid things always happen to her? “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry about that. I didn’t have a chance to get out of their—”
    “Don’t apologize.” Steele’s voice turned deadly as he bent over the bowling ball of a man. “Who do you think should apologize here, asshole? Who?”
    “Me! Meeeeeee !”
    “Well?”
    “I’m sorry, I’m sor-reeeee …”
    “Essie, honey.” Scout somehow jogged up to her in another totally kickass pair of stilettos, and pressed a paper towel into her hand. “You’re dripping blood like a faucet, girlfriend. This isn’t your dominant hand, is it? I don’t want you to be handicapped in the contest.”
    “What?” Icy prickles washed over Essie as she looked down. The white paper towel Scout had pressed into her hand was fast turning a dark crimson.
    Oh, God.
    Blood.
    The scent of it hit her. All at once her brain spewed out disjointed