It became clear pretty quickly that the primary game in question was chase. The woods were vast, uneven, and littered with rocks, trees, and the kind of dense underbrush that a golf cart could only plow through going full speed—and only because these particular golf carts had a lot more horsepower than the kind you’d find on a golf course.
“Truth or dare?” Victoria yelled in my ear as we hit a bump that sent us airborne—and swerving to miss a tree. Behind us, I could hear another cart full of girls shrieking—and closing in.
“Really?” I shouted back, easing off the gas just enough to hang a turn. “You want to play Truth or Dare now?”
Our headlights illuminated the woods for just three or four feet in front of us. I aimed for what I hoped was a bit of a clearing and gave the cart enough gas to tear through the brush.
Victoria may have tightened her hold on the cart, but she didn’t show any signs that her heart rate had ticked up even a beat. “My mother is thirty-five years younger than my father. I’m the family scandal and the much-beloved baby. It’s called multitasking. Truth or dare, Taft?”
“Truth!” Lily yelled as we picked up speed. The shrieking behind us got louder and our pursuers closed in. “She’ll take truth.”
“Excellent choice,” Victoria commented. I hauled it ninety degrees to the left, hit a clear patch, and managed to circle back behind the other cart, flying past them before they’d registered what was happening.
Victoria chose that moment to let loose her question. “Why did you ask me about Ana?”
“Who’s Ana?” Lily said beside me.
This time, I took a major bump on purpose. Golf carts didn’t come with seat belts, so we all bounced upward, fast enough and far enough to nearly hit our heads on the cart’s roof.
Unfortunately, once we’d righted ourselves, it became clear to me that neither Victoria nor Lily was letting go of the question.
“Ana,” Victoria told Lily, “is my niece—and a friend of Sawyer’s mother, and yes, my father really is that old.”
Though we’d left our closest pursuers in the dust, I could hear at least two more carts nearby. I steered us away from the noise.
“Your turn,” Victoria told me. “Truth. You don’t have secrets from your cousin, do you?”
She’d boxed me into a corner, and she knew it. If I didn’t answer her question, that would only make Lily more suspicious.
“Ana was my mother’s friend,” I reiterated, “and I wanted to know what happened to her, because last anyone heard of her, twenty years ago, she was pregnant.”
I couldn’t risk looking away from the “road” long enough to ascertain which one of them had the more marked reaction to that statement, but Victoria was the one who recovered first.
“That explains some things. Knowing all six of my much-older brothers, not to mention my father, if the family knew she was pregnant, there was probably a lot of blustering about convents—they’re very fond of hypothetical convents.”
“Are they fond of kicking people out of the family?” I asked pointedly.
“Your mama had a friend who was pregnant twenty years ago?” Lily grabbed my arm, then seemed to realize I was still driving and let go of it.
“Yes,” I said.
Victoria countered that question with one of her own. “Back at the gala, why did you step outside alone with Davis Ames?”
“I thought we were playing Truth or Dare,” I said pointedly. “Doesn’t that mean it’s my turn now?”
“If we were taking turns,” Victoria said, her voice low and silky, “I’d pick dare. There’s nothing I won’t do, with proper motivation.”
I wanted to ask her what she was doing with Walker—what her father’s motivation in approaching Davis Ames had been. But she hadn’t chosen truth, and even if she had, Lily was right beside me.
“What if I dared you to jump off this cart?” I threw out the question, allowing the pedal to creep back to the floor.
“Is that a hypothetical dare… or a real one?” Victoria asked.
“Sawyer!” Lily yelled beside me.
I realized too late that we were going too fast. The cart hit what I thought was a bump, but when we went airborne, I realized that it wasn’t a bump.
It was a ledge.