Chapter 81: Caught
The blood instantly, violently drained from Priya’s face.
The reality of the situation crashed down on her with the force of a falling building.
She was caught... She was ruined... Derek was going to find out and her entire life was going to implode right here on this pool deck.
She scrambled frantically, releasing her grip on Wren’s waist and trying to sit up with her hands slipping against the wet tiles in her panic.
"N-no!" Priya stammered.
Her dark eyes were wide with genuine horror. "Dani, wait! It isn’t what you thi—thin—"
Instead, the situation took a pivot so jarring and so completely unhinged, that both Wren and Priya simply stopped to blink.
Dani completely ignored Priya’s frantic stuttering. The smug, teasing smile vanished from her face, replaced by an expression of intense desperation.
With a casual flick of her wrist, Dani tossed her smartphone aside.
The device clattered harmlessly onto the stone deck, the damning photo completely forgotten.
Dani took a step forward, then practically slid across the wet tiles, dropping directly to her knees right beside Wren’s leg.
Priya stared with her mouth hanging open.
Dani looked up at Wren.
Her cheeks were flushed a violent shade of crimson, and a literal, actual trickle of dark red blood was starting to form at the edge of her left nostril, trailing down toward her lip like a degenerate anime character experiencing a system overload.
She completely abandoned every single ounce of her dignity.
Dani reached out, her small hands clutching desperately at Wren’s wet, muscular arm.
"Please, Wren~" Dani begged, her voice whining in a high-pitched, pathetic tone. "Wren~ I was joking... I swear I was just joking. I’d never tell anyone. I’d never blackmail you~ I don’t care about Derek!"
She squeezed his arm as she stared at the dominant display of his body hovering over Priya.
"I just want you to, uh..." Dani stammered, her eyes darting down to the ground with a fresh wave of heat making her nosebleed slightly worse.
She swallowed hard, feeling the weight of Wren’s deadpan gaze on the top of her head.
Slowly, Priya looked back up shamelessly.
"I want you to do the same to me, Wren..." Dani pleaded, tugging on his arm. "Pretty please with a cherry on top."
The silence that followed was deafening.
The pool water lapped gently against the stone... The tropical birds chirped in the distance...
Priya sat frozen on the edge of the tiles, her wet hair clinging to her face, too utterly stunned to even process the sheer absurdity of the betrayal unfolding right in front of her.
The girl who had just caught her cheating didn’t want to expose her; she wanted to join in?!
Wren stayed perfectly still.
He looked down at the short, energetic girl kneeling on the wet stone, clutching his arm, bleeding from the nose as she begged him to grope her.
He looked over at Priya, who looked like her soul had just left her body.
’I mean... she asked, didn’t she?’
Wren let out a long sigh that rumbled deep in his chest.
He reached up with his free hand, his wet fingers casually rubbing the back of his neck as he accepted the unrelenting chaos that was his existence.
"Sure," Wren said. "Why not?"
Dani remained frozen on her knees with her hands still hovering desperately over his wet forearm.
Her eyes blew out even further. Her brain, which normally operated at a mile a minute, generating endless streams of degenerate thoughts, suddenly hit a massive, impenetrable brick wall.
’Wh–why the hell did it work and is he serious?’
The thought echoed in the hollow cavern of her mind.
She had expected him to violently shove her away, to get defensive, to threaten her right back for pointing a camera at them and it was valid as he had thrown out the most shameless request she could possibly think.
But he had just agreed...
Dani’s jaw went slack.
The flush on her cheeks burned so hot it physically stung, and the thin dark trickle of blood at her left nostril seemed to pulse in time with her violently racing heart.
Beneath Wren, Priya was faring no better.
Her spine was still pressed flat against the sun-warmed mosaic tiles, half her body dangling over the rippling water.
Her chest heaved, her wet hair plastered to her neck, but she didn’t make a single move to get up.
With a slow fluid motion, Wren dropped his hand from the wet, clinging spandex of Priya’s swimsuit.
PLOP!
"Mmmm..."
He peeled himself away from the intoxicating heat of her body, leaving her lying there in the sunlight, gasping for air and staring blankly up at the sky.
Wren pushed himself up and sat on the very edge of the pool, his long legs dangling back into the cool sapphire water.
He rested his forearms against his thighs with the muscles in his back flexing as he leaned slightly forward toward the kneeling girl.
Dani flinched, her shoulders instinctively rising toward her ears as his shadow fell over her.
She braced herself.
He had said yes... What was he going to do? Was he going to grab her? Was he going to pull her into the water?
Instead of indulging her degenerate request immediately, Wren simply raised his right hand.
He reached out, his knuckles brushing against her cheek and pressed his thumb directly against her upper lip.
Dani gasped, her breath hitching sharply as she felt the rough skin of his thumb drag gently across her flushed face.
He swiped the fresh trickle of crimson blood away from her nostril with his touch surprisingly careful, it lacked the aggressive dominance she had just witnessed him using on Priya.
"Stop bleeding so much..." Wren told her.
Dani blushed furiously.
The heat in her face spiked to critical levels as her skin burned under the casual intimacy of his touch.
’U... uh... uh...’
He wasn’t disgusted by her... He wasn’t angry... Wren was just taking care of her.
Wren lowered his hand, resting it back on his knee. He looked at her flustered, wide-eyed expression for a moment then, he leaned in closer.
Dani squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands curled into tight fists against her thighs.
This was it!
Wren closed the final few inches of space and pressed his lips directly to the center of her forehead.
It was a soft kiss.
There was no tongue.... It was just a sweet gesture but to Dani, whose mind had been actively marinating in the gutter for the past ten minutes, the unexpected sweetness of the action was infinitely more devastating than anything else he could have done.
’A k-ki-kiss?’
The kiss completely and utterly short-circuited her brain.
Dani’s eyes rolled back a fraction of an inch.
"Eek!"
A soft high-pitched squeak escaped her throat as the tension holding her upright simply evaporated.
She practically toppled over backward onto the wet stone tiles with her arms flopping to the sides before she quickly brought both of her hands up to clutch her forehead.
Dani lay completely flat on her back, staring up at the tropical ferns swaying gently in the breeze, guarding the patch of skin he had just touched like she had been physically blessed by a deity.
Wren pulled back, straightening his posture. He looked down at the giggling girl on the floor, shaking his head slightly.
Before he could even turn his attention back to Priya who was still trying to remember how to breathe... a loud creak echoed across the enclosed garden.
The massive wooden door that separated the private pool from the rest of the VIP residential wing swung open and Leah walked in.
’Ah damn...’
The billionaire heiress stepped onto the sun-drenched stone deck.
She was wearing a wildly expensive, custom-tailored designer swimsuit which was a sleek, high-cut black one-piece that clung flawlessly to her curves.
Delicate, real gold chains acted as the straps, glinting sharply in the morning sunlight, and her vibrant purple hair tumbled in messy, untamed waves over her bare shoulders.
She had an oversized, incredibly plush white towel draped elegantly over one arm, and a pair of dark sunglasses pushed up onto the top of her head.
’I wonder... will Wren like i—’
Leah took three confident steps into the garden area before she stopped dead in her tracks.
Leah raised her perfectly manicured eyebrows as her green eyes darted rapidly across the scene, taking in the wreckage of the morning.
To her left, Priya was finally scrambling to get out from under the lingering shadow of Wren’s frame.
The town girl’s face was burning a dark crimson with her chest heaving as she frantically adjusted the straps of her simple forest-green swimsuit.
Her bare feet slipped against the wet tiles, making her look incredibly flustered and entirely out of place.
To her right, Dani was lying completely flat on her back, staring at the sky and clutching her own forehead while giggling softly to herself like a mental patient.
And directly in the center of the chaos, sitting casually on the edge of the pool with his broad back glistening with water, was Wren.
’Did he do something to them?’
"What the hell is going on here?" Leah demanded.
Her voice cut across the humid air like a whip as she planted a hand firmly on her hip, glaring at the three of them.
Priya finally managed to struggle to her feet.
Her knees were visibly trembling.
She opened her mouth to speak, desperate to offer some kind of logical excuse for why she was out of breath... why she had been practically lying on the ground and why the other girl was malfunctioning.
"I—we... we were just—" Priya stammered as her voice became a fragile terrified mess.
She couldn’t form a coherent sentence.
Every time she tried to speak, the phantom sensation of Wren’s hand gripping her breast flared in her mind, making her face burn even hotter.
Priya looked down at the wet tiles, entirely unable to meet Leah’s furious gaze.
Wren simply sat up straight.
He turned his head, looking over his broad shoulder at the fuming woman with an entirely relaxed expression.
"We were doing swimming lessons..." Wren explained plainly. He gestured vaguely toward the deep end of the sapphire water with his thumb.
"I was just getting swimming lessons from Priya..." He continued with a smile. "And Dani just happened to show up."
Leah stood near the wooden cabana, her jaw tightening so hard her teeth ground together.
She ran her free hand aggressively through her vibrant purple hair, genuinely at a loss for words.
"That’s fair..."
She stared at Priya, then at Wren.
She knew for a fact that Wren didn’t spend much time in the ocean, and Priya’s background made her the logical choice for an instructor.
It made perfect sense...They were childhood friends... They were in a pool... It was a perfectly innocent explanation...
But logic meant absolutely nothing against the massive, agonizing spike of jealousy twisting like a knife in her stomach.
’Why the hell doesn’t he just ask me for once?’ Leah thought with her lower lip involuntarily pushing out into a stubborn pout.
’It’s just like the previous days on this island... When he wanted to go on that ridiculous treasure hunting mission through the jungle that Mom gave, he went straight to Isabella... Wren didn’t ask me... He went ahead and asked that bitch and now, when he wants to learn how to swim... when he needs someone to hold him in the water, to guide his waist, to press their hands against his bare, muscular chest... he goes ahead and asks Priya?!’
She glared at the water.
’Am I invisible?’ Leah fumed silently.
Her grip on the fluffy white towel tightened until her knuckles turned a stark white.
Furious and pouting, Leah aggressively dropped the white towel onto a nearby wooden lounge chair.
’I’m going to teach him a lesson.’
Leah didn’t say another word... She didn’t ask for permission to join them... She just set her jaw, her green eyes locking onto the back of Wren’s head and started speedwalking directly toward the edge of the pool where he was standing up.
She intended to march right up to his chest, plant her hands on his waist, and demand his full attention.
She was going to make him get back in the water right now and let her be the one to teach him...
Leah moved fast with her eyes narrowed, completely ignoring her surroundings in her singular focus.
It was a fatal mistake...
In her blind haste, her bare foot came down hard on a slick heavily saturated patch of mossy tile right near the edge of the pool coping.
The friction vanished instantly from beneath her sole.
Leah’s leading leg shot forward as her center of gravity completely collapsed.
"Ah—!"
