Page 32 of Tasting Innocence

Chapter Twelve

“He’s coming.My phone didn’t have service down there,” Scarlet says, the words flying out of her mouth quickly.

“Zo?” Dex questions, looking confused.

“We didn’t want him to walk in on anything,” Monique replies before widening her eyes like she just realized she said something she shouldn’t have.

“They know?” he asks me.

I pin my lips together, glancing at my girls before I face him again. “Yeah, they might know some stuff.”

“Well, then you should know that on top of Ronan knowing, Trevor knows. He saw us in the garden last night.”

I slap a hand on my forehead. “So basically everyone knows.”

“I plan on talking to Renzo when we’re back home.”

“Sooo,” Scarlet coos, sashaying up to us. “Y’all are official?”

I roll my eyes and Dex chuckles.

Loud voices travel through the doorway before everyone comes marching in, laughing and talking. I grab the cards and shuffle them a few times before dealing them between me and Dex. Renzo strides up to the table with a smile on his face.

“Oh, this is where y’all were. Too afraid to go down into the basement, huh?”

“It’s a basement?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Something like that.”

Renzo sticks around to chat for a little bit before leaving with Ronan. A few people linger in the room, drinking or playing games, but for the most part, people come and go and don’t pay attention to much of anything, so me and Dex continue to play card games while talking without raising any alarms.

“Why did you choose to do this?” I ask.

“You mean a weekend at this hotel?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought it would be fun,” he answers with a shrug.

I pick up a card from the deck. “We could’ve hung out at your house or anywhere, really.”

“I get tired of my house. I’m always there.”

I don’t know a lot about Dex and his homelife, but I am aware that his dad is hardly around, and he’s left alone in the house with a housekeeper who comes in twice a week. I mean, it’s not like he’s a child. He’s twenty-years-old, so he can take care of himself and drive to wherever he needs to go, but it’s been like this since his mom left. My parents leave town a lot now that they’re retired, but I’ve always had Renzo with me, until recently when he moved out.

“So, a creepy hotel,” I say with a laugh. “You get points for creativity, that’s for sure.”

He cracks a smile, his eyes flickering up from his cards to look at me. “How many points do I have?”

I pretend to think about it. “Uhh, probably about seventy-five.”

“Seventy-five?” he asks, sounding aghast.

“What? That’s a lot.”

“Not out of all the numbers there are in the world. If the max is one-hundred, maybe.”

I throw my head back and laugh. “You’re crazy.”

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