Love Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

in air, and my hair curled. Spencer had abad effect on me. He made me want to get naked right there between cigar-smoking Uncle Harry and green-eyed Calamity Jane. But he was poison. An Olympics-worthy womanizer. He was the Usain Bolt of players. But I wasn’t going to let him catch me.
    “The toilet is in the game room,” I said, for no apparent reason.
    Uncle Harry pulled three hundred dollars out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Here you go, Legs. A down payment. I’d appreciate it if you got on it quick-like.”
    I clutched the money in my hand. Cash. It was the most money of my own that I’d seen in one place in forever. I mean, in my whole life. I could afford real cashmere now. I was almost a one percenter. I was Donald Trump with better hair. A tear threatened to roll down my cheek. I tucked the bankroll in my pocket.
    “We’ll get on it immediately,” Lucy announced, standing. She tugged at my hand to leave.
    “We?” I asked, but there was no way I could get rid of Lucy. She wanted first dibs at shooing away any of Uncle Harry’s potential suitors. Attraction is a weird thing. There’s no accounting for it.
    “Hold on.” Spencer pulled my arm away from Lucy. “We need to talk. It will just take a second.”
    He led me out to the balcony. I got a rush of vertigo and turned away quickly from the view of the canyon below us. I clutched Spencer’s arms and closed my eyes, willing the world to stop spinning.
    “We need to talk,” he repeated. I opened my eyes. He had leaned down, and his face was inches from mine. He smelled good. Better than good, and he wasfocused on me. Earnest. He absentmindedly slipped his hands around my back and caressed me with slow, circular movements.
    He wasn’t going to leave me alone until we cleared the air. “You had a concussion,” I said.
    “I had a concussion.”
    “They didn’t catch it at the hospital.”
    Spencer nodded. “I should sue them!”
    “Yes, you should. They shouldn’t have let you out.”
    I wasn’t lying. Spencer had his skull bashed in by a bad guy, and the hospital let him out the same night. “And you fainted,” I said.
    “I didn’t faint. I lost consciousness.”
    “You lost consciousness.”
    “When you were kissing me.”
    “When you were kissing
me
,” I lied. I had gone to him with a clear intention. It was my idea. I wanted him, and I initiated the kiss.
    He had let me into his house, and before he could close the door behind me, I slipped my arms around his neck and pulled him down to my lips. I had kissed him once before, and my memory of that first time was fireworks on the level of the Fourth of July. It turned out my memory was dead-on, but the second time the fireworks were accompanied by a passion I wasn’t expecting.
    The kiss went on and on. We connected so perfectly that I didn’t know where he left off and I began. I stepped forward and moaned. He put his arms around my back and let his hands slip lower. I knew we were going to go beyond the kiss, go all the way, as they say at prom.
    I was powerless to stop the momentum. My headwas invaded by a buzzing that clouded my judgment, drowned out reality, and disoriented me. To make a long story short, I was lost.
    Being lost in Spencer’s arms was dumb. He regularly lost women, and they didn’t show up again, at least not as themselves but more like lunatic stalkers who couldn’t find themselves after the lip ninja had dumped them for the next hapless female in line.
    I didn’t want to be lost. I had a lifetime of being lost. I wanted to be found. But the buzzing got louder, and I knew I was out of luck.
    Then I won the lottery. Just as I began to forget my name, Spencer froze. His lips slid off my face, and his hands dropped to his sides. A second later his knees buckled and he slumped over me. I managed to hold his weight for a moment, confused, but quickly I realized that Spencer was no longer conscious, and we fell together onto the maple-colored laminate