by Tamara Lush
Dirty Games
Burning Secrets Series
Tamara Lush
Contents
DIRTY GAMES
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
CRAVING MORE STORIES?
A note to the reader
About the Author
DIRTY GAMES
Burning Secrets Series
Head to Tamara’s website for info on new releases:
www.tamaralush.com
Copyright © 2017 by Tamara Lush
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Chapter 1
CATALINA
When you’re twenty-three and a graduate of an Ivy League school in New York, the last thing you want is to deliver a carload of pizzas in your backwater Florida hometown.
To a beachfront mansion.
In the rain.
Cradling five boxes in both arms, I twist and contort my body, so my elbow makes contact with the doorbell.
No answer. Come on.
I press it again. So help me God, this better not be a prank. I don’t want to be the one to tell my brother that we baked all these pies for nothing.
Open the door…
I balance the boxes on one arm and a knee and paw at the receipt taped to the side of the top box with my free hand. My blue-black nail polish with the cutesy name of ‘Frock ‘n Roll’ is chipping already, only a day after my at-home manicure. Sighing, I squint at the receipt.
Pre-paid. Five hundred dollars worth of pizza. The other forty-five boxes are in my car, stinking it up with the smell of cheese. But they’re already on someone’s credit card, and now I don’t care whether this is a joke or not. Just dump and go. I un-contort myself and my elbow jabs at the doorbell a third time. There’s a long string of chimes from inside the house. At least I’m shielded from the rain under this archway.
The imposing wood door finally swings open and a young guy, about my age, stares at me. I fumble and almost drop the boxes, but recover. He’s kind of cute, with sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Not my type, though. I prefer dark hair and dark eyes, always have.
Why are his eyes so bloodshot? He’s probably high.
I shouldn’t be so judgmental.
I had promised myself on the flight home that I’d leave the New York snark behind when I moved back to my parents’ house. So far, I’m failing.
“Hey. Pizza delivery." I thrust the boxes toward him.
The look of surprise on the guy’s tanned face irritates me.
“I didn’t …” He turns his head and shouts into the cavernous house while his blonde hair bounces over his forehead. “Dudes! Did you guys order pizza?”
A couple of voices holler no, and I grit my teeth.
“Are you sure it’s the right place?” he asks.
I point with my nose at the ticket taped to the pizza box. My hair and clothes are damp from the rain, but the guy doesn’t seem to notice or care enough to ask me inside.
The guy snatches the ticket from the box, reads it, and laughs hard. “Master of Warcraft sent us five pizzas!”
“Um, fifty, actually,” I say, wondering what the hell is going on. Maybe they’re having a party. But where are the cars? The people?
“FIFTY?” the guy screams and doubles over in laughter. “Fifty fucking pizzas?”
“Yeah. Fifty. The rest are in the car. Here, I’ll get them,” I hoist the pizzas into the guy’s arms, and he steps back into the mansion. I peer in and don’t see anyone, and the guy’s voice echoes in the seemingly empty home.
“Sawyer, dude, come here and help this poor girl. It’s raining. And she’s got forty-five more pizzas for us. We’ll be eating pizza all week! Fuck yeah!”
As I walk back to my tired Honda SUV for the other pies, the boy voices waft into the night. “A pizza delivery GIRL!” one says.
I roll my eyes toward a fountain in the middle of the circular driveway. Who are these guys? They’re about my age, but I don’t recognize them from school. Palmira High had been pretty small, and even though I’d been in New York for five years, I still knew everyone around my age on the island.
And everyone certainly knows me. Or knows of me.
No, these guys must be rich kids on vacation, staying at daddy’s beach mansion. I curl my lip into a sneer when I catch a second glimpse of the fountain, which is lit up and surrounded by well-groomed tropical foliage. All the beach mansions on this part of the island are huge, behind gates and over-the-top luxurious. The fountain is of a nude woman with a bucket of water? Really? The statue is bathed in a soft blue light, and the raindrops fall around her in a mist.
How tacky.
Sometimes I hate my hometown, this island and its ostentatiousness. Sometimes nothing seems authentic. It’s all faux wealth and too-bright sun and stupid tourists. And the summer rain. Especially the summer rain. So depressing, and it matches my mood this month. Then again, I thought I had it made in New York, with my dot-com content job for a gossip website and my always-down-for-cocktails friends. In reality, I had nothing. New York was no less of an illusion than Florida. Just a different kind of dream.
Of course, I’m too annoyed to notice a puddle, and I stomp straight into it, soaking my black sneakers and drenching my bare legs with cold water. I yelp and realize that I sound like a dying animal. Awesome.
At my car, trying to hurry, I’m stacking pizzas into my arms as the rain pisses down. That’s when the blonde guy – in my mind, I’ve already dubbed him surfer dude – and a tall black guy approach. They’re both barefoot and grinning, seemingly not caring about the wet pavement.
“We’re here to help, little lady,” surfer dude says. He and the other guy surround me and reach into the back of my car. They load their arms with boxes. I don’t laugh. They giggle. I catch a faint whiff of weed.
Little lady.
I roll my eyes. They’re totally high.
“Go inside and take a left,” surfer dude says. “Put them on the pool table.”
I quickly do as I’m told and watch them stack the pizzas on the green felt, then take their cellphones out of their pockets. I try to look around at the big house, but my glasses fog up, which they do whenever the humidity is high. I enter into an air-conditioned building. Unable to see, I take my glasses off and wipe them on a moist patch of my T-shirt. The vision isn’t much better when I put them on, and I blink rapidly, wondering why desks line the walls, almost like an office. This is clearly supposed to be a living room or maybe a dining area. Odd.
“We
’ve got to put this on Twitter, man,” the black guy says. He has a sexy English accent. I assume he’s Sawyer. He’s good looking, too, with a lean build and a shaved head.
Cute stoners.
My hair is sopping and stringy and I push it back, tying it into a messy ponytail with the elastic I always wear around my wrist. A trickle of water runs down my cheek, and I brush it off, annoyed. The two guys’ faces are buried in their phones.
“There’s still a few more in the car,” I say, interrupting their social media moment and edging toward the door.
“Wait, wait, stand by the pizzas.” Surfer dude moves his hand through the air, invisibly guiding me along. “We wanna show our fans what Master of Warcraft did. Let’s get this on Twitter.”
“Wait, what? No. I need to go. I’ll grab the rest of the pizzas,” I stammer. Twitter, Facebook, social media. I want no part of it. Not tonight, anyway. I’m far enough away from the pies now that I won’t be in their photo.
“Hold up,” says surfer guy, rummaging around in his pockets. “Shit, I don’t have any cash on me. Let me get you a tip. Then I’ll get the rest. You’ve already gotten drenched.”
He pads out, and I watch Sawyer snap photos and cackle at his phone. From a nearby room, I hear the familiar and repetitive sounds of shootings and explosions and grunts. A video game. World of Warcraft, it sounds like. The loud explosions are soothingly familiar because I used to play. I haven’t, though, not since I left Palmira for New York and not since I got a real job. Not since I lost that real job, either. Lately, I haven’t felt like doing much more than painting my nails and moping around my mother’s house.
Since Sawyer is still absorbed in his phone, I turn my head, taking in the high-ceilinged room. Three desks line as many walls, and the computer equipment atop the desks looks pricey. My eyes land on a stone fireplace at the end of the room that’s almost as big as the wall and I point.
“Is that a computer inside the fireplace?” I ask. It looks like a tower sitting inside the cleanest fire nook I’ve ever seen. So very odd.
“Yeah, it’s part of our server,” Sawyer replies, without tearing himself from his phone. “That’s where we store it. The stone keeps it cool.”
“Server?” My eyes sweep around the room once again, and I see cables and wires snaking around the baseboards and into the fireplace-computer nook. There’s no decoration on the walls, and each desk is piled with what looks like gamer fuel: tubs of beef jerky, industrial-sized boxes of Pop Tarts, cans of Red Bull. I spy the round eye of a surveillance camera nestled in the corner of the room where the ornate wall molding met the ceiling.
“What is this? Some kind of webcam business?”
Sawyer grunts.
He and the surfer are young. Fit. Dressed with J Crew-like ease. Both seem to possess that casual, effortless hotness in that way guys with lots of time, money and vanity often have. I have to give them credit if this is a webcam business. They’ve discovered a way to make money and are riding that wave, if the gargantuan house was any indication.
Maybe they aren’t staying with their rich daddy. Or maybe it’s a different kind of daddy. I want to giggle from sheer uncomfortableness but don’t. Or they’re probably paid to live here. A voyeur dorm kind of thing.
Surfer guy comes back in the room. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Um. Cat. Catalina,” I say, unsure of whether I should tell the truth. I eye the door, wondering if I’m in danger. Both guys seem harmless and uninterested in me. Or maybe they’re gay. It doesn’t matter which, not to me. I didn’t come back home to meet a guy. This is a temporary stop, and plus, I smell like cheese and am wet from the rain and my sneakers are squooshing uncomfortably as I shift my weight. I’m not in prime seduction mode.
Like I ever am.
“Cat. That’s adorable. I like that. You’re adorable,” he says. I smirk. I want to get the hell out of here, not flirt with a cute stoner. But I’m lingering in hopes of a tip. Because I need the cash. Bad.
“I’m Liam.” He grins.
“Hey,” I say, flatly.
“So get this. One of our fans sent us all these pizzas. I’m going to your car to get the rest. If that’s okay with you.”
So they are like a voyeur boy-dorm. A sex thing. A surge of triumph goes through me at guessing their hustle correctly. I nod and giggle.
“Your fans. Are you joking?” I ask.
Liam and Sawyer answer in tandem and grin. “Nope.”
“Wow. Well, that’s … something.” I don’t really care, I only want my tip and my bed. Leave these hot freaks and their computers to themselves. I should bring the pizzas in myself, but since he’s offering to grab them, I won’t stop him.
“And yeah, sure. Thanks for getting those pizzas. The back hatch is open.”
“No problem, dude.” Liam ambles out of the room.
I wince. Don’t guys my age know that calling a woman ‘dude’ is not only stupid but also the biggest turnoff on the planet? I roll my eyes.
“Where’s the pizza girl?” booms a voice from another room. “Bring her here so I can tip her on camera.”
I frown. That voice, it sounds oddly familiar. It has a slight accent. New York? It probably sounds normal since I’d lived there for five years. Any feelings of familiarity are quickly replaced with several dark thoughts. There’s no fucking way I’m going on any camera. The online blogs will eat it up: Disgraced gossip site writer guest stars in voyeur dorm video with hot studs! I can see it now.
Sawyer extends his arm and points with his phone. “Go in there. Meet Apathetic Fire. He’ll give you a tip.”
I blink several times, and when I turn my head toward Sawyer, a strand of damp hair breaks free from my ponytail. A powerful, sickeningly familiar smell catches my nose. Great. My hair smells like pepperoni and cheese and dough. I have a really sensitive nose. I can even detect notes of those slimy mushrooms that my brother slaps on the pies right before he slides them into the oven. Gah.
“It’s fine, he won’t bite.” Sawyer points again with his phone towards the room. I take two steps and stop.
“Or maybe he will,” guffaws Sawyer.
“Apathetic Fire?” I ask.
“That’s his online name.”
I grimace.
“I’ve got a hundred dollar tip for the pizza girl. Where is she?” calls the voice.
Why the hell does he sound so familiar?
Not interested in being the punch line of a trio of webcam guys, I hesitate. What will I find in the other room? A third hot guy performing on camera? Or some fat man on a couch, jerking off? I sigh out loud Sawyer chuckles. My curiosity evaporates, and I reach for my car keys in my pocket.
But, a hundred bucks. That'll pay for windshield wipers. And the three-days-late cell phone bill.
Shaking my head, cursing the fact that I was fired from my first job out of college and probably the best job I’ll ever have, I cross the room. It’s so huge that I have to take several steps to get to the other side. I pass through an arched doorway and am halfway in the room when I see the guy on the overstuffed, brindle sofa, staring laser-like at a wide-screen TV mounted on the wall in front of him.
Everything suddenly becomes sharper.
Oh.
Hell.
No.
He glances at me, and I know those near-black eyes. They’re the darkest, sexiest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve never forgotten them. My heart plummets to my feet.
My first love.
My greatest downfall.
The one who changed me, humiliated me, ruined me.
Chapter 2
DIEGO
“Will I be streaming any games after my shift?” I repeat the question typed on the screen from one of my fans and I shove the joystick forward with my thumb. “No, I’ve got a lot to do. Plus the pizza girl is here and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky with her. If so, it’ll be the first time in months I’ve hooked up without the use of an iPhone app.”
&nbs
p; Everyone laughs and talks shit. One of the fans says something crude about my sex life. Which is nonexistent because I work all the fucking time, but I pretend otherwise for the guys online. The fans. I laugh into the microphone attached to the headset and smirk for the camera that broadcasts my every move. “Yeah, I do get lucky a lot. I’m a lucky motherfucker.”
It’s a typical Wednesday night. I’ve got the console in my hands, the headphones over my ears and now, a half hour before my shift ends, the explosion. Not an in-game one. A real life explosion.
I’m in the final raid of the night in World of Warcraft when she walks in.
Catalina. I used to call her Cata.
In the last few years, I’ve tried to forget her name and her face. But her presence in my house is like a bomb in the form of a five-foot-two-inch bombshell with wavy, white-blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Not to mention a mouth that I dream of, one that’s left me with the dirtiest memories any guy could want or need.
It only takes the blink of an eye to know she’s still every bit as gorgeous as when I last saw her five years ago. Trying to keep my composure, my eyes race back to the TV screen, and I attempt to finish the raid with my team.
What’s the saying from the old black-and-white movie my grandma used to make me watch? Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine…
My thumb fumbles because I’m shaking. Someone on another team shoots me when I fail to turn a corner into a dungeon. Other players shout, their voices echoing in the headphones, and they jeer when they see Cata on the camera that also captures me playing the game.
