Page 72 of Chasing Lynda

A knock on my door distracts me from my gloomy thoughts.

“Hey.” Dodge is at the door, and I can’t help but return his smile. “Ready for some lunch? Maybe a swim in the pool?”

I nod, leaning into his touch as he tucks a strand of my long, dark hair behind my ear. “I definitely could eat,” I say, caught by surprise when he touches his lips to mine.

“Let’s go then.” He encourages me. “Before I beg you to invite me into your room and we never make it out of here until dinner time.”

I close the door behind me, stepping closer to him.

He kisses me again and I melt against his soft lips, suddenly not sure that holing up in my room isn’t a better idea than going downstairs.

“Lynda,” he half-whispers, half-growls. “I’m seriously hanging by a thread here. You make me lose my mind, sexy girl. I can’t stop thinking about how you felt last night, how soft, warm and tight.”

My hand is fisting the soft cotton of his t-shirt. “Maybe staying in my room until dinner time isn’t a bad idea.”

Dodge nips at my bottom lip, it’s mostly playful but I can feel how he’s trying to rein himself in. “I want nothing more than to forget about everyone else for the foreseeable future, but I know for a fact that if we don’t show up downstairs within the next few minutes, the others will show up at your door. After all, I won at rock, paper, scissors for the privilege to come and escort you downstairs.”

I giggle at his eye roll and I can’t contain my smile. “You played rock, paper, scissors to decide who was going to come knock on my door?”

His smile is full of mischief. “What do you think we mean when we say that we’re vying for your attention? We take competition really seriously. Plus, the others were definitely hoping for a kiss or two as a reward for coming to get you.”

His expression is funny, more carefree than I saw it all day yesterday. “Ah, so you were sure that you’d get a kiss for escorting me downstairs?”

Dodge’s smile widens as he wraps a strong arm around my shoulders, walking me toward the stairs. “Of course! Have you seen how fucking ridiculously huge this house is? It takes a hot minute to be able to navigate it without getting lost. Had we left you to find your way to the pool, we might’ve seen you for Thanksgiving; so a kiss was a fitting reward.”

I laugh at his goofiness but I understand what he means when getting out to the pool takes us the best part of ten minutes.

“After you,” he says opening the patio door that from the living room we were in earlier leads onto a huge backyard.

Music and laughter immediately reach me and I instinctively recoil, stopping against Dodge’s chest. “I had no idea there were going to be other people.” I say, feeling nervous at the idea of hanging out with strangers.

Dodge takes my hand in his. “It’s just some of the neighbors.”

“You have neighbors?” I say teasingly. “This house is so big that you can’t see anyone for miles.”

He leads me outside, keeping me close. “There are a few houses around. You’re right, they’re spaced out, but we grew up playing with the kids that lived ‘next door.’ My ex’s family owns the house on our left and there were kids our age in the two houses on our right. The guys’ families all have houses along this strip of private beach too. But our house is the biggest and our parents were rarely home, so we’ve always gravitated more around here.”

I brace myself as we approach the group of people occupying several loungers by the Olympic size pool.

Dodge takes a couple of towels from a cabinet next to the outdoor shower and sets them down on two loungers but rather than taking one for himself, he straddles the one I take; he sits behind me, surrounding my body with his muscular arms, his chin resting on my shoulder.

“Guys, this is Lynda. Lynda, the two near Carter are Skip and Arya and the one next to Callie is Denise.”

He doesn’t sound particularly enthused by the presence of the newcomers and once I tune into the conversation they resume after saying hi, I understand why.

I’ve been around my fair share of rich, entitled kids while growing up, especially at the fancy private prep school I attended until I graduated high school. I had to sneak out of my room at night to go to parties and hang out with my peers, but I wasn’t as sheltered as my parents wanted me to be.

So I’ve seen people drink, shoot lines and pop pills, hooking up in a dark corner while others were dancing. I’ve heard all the shallow talk about exotic vacations and designer clothes. I know everything about the shit these kinds of kids got up to and I used to make up stories to match theirs for the sake of fitting in; to the point that I hid similar clothes in my locker and at Kelley’s house to change into once out of my parents’ sight.

I thought the people I went to school with were pretty bad, even without applying the restrictive values my family lived by.

I thought I heard it all on Monday mornings in the girls locker room when the girls in my class swapped stories about their wild weekends. But even Kelley and his friends with their sex games have nothing on the people I’ve just been introduced to.

“So Callie, are you and Denise coming out to this new private club we’re going to?”

Callie shakes her head. “No, we have plans. We found some interesting matches on the new Billionaire Hookups app and we have dates.”

Dodge immediately reacts, tightening his hold on me. “Billionaire Hookups? Sis, what the fuck is that?”

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