parents had done a complete makeover to the house, repairing the damage and adding even more amazing amenities.
They had also purchased the lot on either side of ours and had had a tall stone wall erected from street to ocean, with the only access to our house through an iron mechanical gate to ensure complete privacy. Automatic shutters now covered all the glass on the back of our house to protect from another storm. The pool and hot tub had been replaced, all three decks reinforced, and the pool house waterproofed.
And if that weren’t enough, Dad had installed a state-of-the-art alarm system that enabled everyone in his family and band to get into any door of the house with a simple press of our thumb on the keypad. After it had been installed, Trey had busted his chops for days about being a Batman wannabe.
It was quite a life we all had. Whenever I sat by myself, enjoying the spoils that came from being adopted by Jack and Leila Lair, I thought of my birth mom. From the letters she’d left before she’d died, this life I’d been gifted was exactly what she had hoped for me. I had no memories of my childhood before she died, but I knew Mom had struggled to take proper care of me. And it was times like now when I missed her so damn much. But having said that, I couldn’t have asked for a better family to become a part of.
Hearing the glass door slide open behind me pulled me out of my thoughts.
“He’s alive,” Chase said, plopping down much as I had on the lounge to my right while gripping a bottle of chocolate milk. He was such a child. “I worried you two fucked yourselves to death.”
“Please don’t say that to Alivia,” I barked. Steering away from that topic, I asked, “What did you guys do yesterday?”
“Oh, a little of this and that.” His smirk meant that the this and that wasn’t much different than what my day had consisted of. “It was rough, though. I’m not gonna lie. Having to navigate through all the spoils of your destiny… home theater, game room.” His hand waved across the space. “Heated pool, hot tub. It was fucking torture. Edna was great, though. She made sure we were well taken care of and didn’t starve to death.”
“Yeah, you look very distressed over your ordeal,” I said on an eye roll. Anyone else would’ve felt guilty, but knowing Chase as well as I did, yesterday was a wet dream from start to finish. He’d been to our beach house a thousand times but had never had the place to himself. “Alone in a mansion being catered to and doted on while having your girl with you to fuck at whim is the kind of hell Greek tragedies are written about.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Jackass.”
His chuckle was robust before he asked, “So what’s on the agenda today? More of the same? Can Liv even walk?”
“Shut it, fuckhead,” I jabbed, while suppressing a smirk over the accuracy of his dig. “It’s none of your damn business.”
“Fine, be that way.” He took another sip of his drink before adding, “Just answer me one thing?”
“That depends on the thing.”
“Was it worth the wait?” I’d had to deal with much whining from my best friend over the last year or so. According to him, fucking in the back seat of a car still constituted fucking, and geography shouldn’t matter.
I really couldn’t blame him for not being able to wrap his brain around it, especially when he’d had sex and knew what I’d been missing. Because now that I also knew what I’d been missing, there was no fucking way I could go celibate ever again.
So was it worth the wait? I thought over my response, flipping through the long list of moments that had made the past day or so one of the best in my life, before saying, “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
By the time the girls joined us, we were starving. After stuffing our faces full of Edna’s blueberry pancakes, bacon, and fruit salad, we separated from Chase and Kim to get into our bathing suits.
Two seconds through the door, I convinced Alivia to have a quickie on my balcony. For me, the quickie part occurred because the entire situation had me coming far faster than I ever had. While behind her, I had to finger her clit to