AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sixteen
BROOKE
“We’re racingnow?” Reese repeated, with panic in his voice. “As inright now?”
“Well, not this very second,” Noah corrected himself, putting a hand up. “But tomorrow morning, bright and early, we’re meeting down at the beach. I’ll pull the trigger on the golden pistol, and the Race starts then. Just like always.”
Devin shook his head, like he was coming out of a dream. “Fifteen teams…” he murmured. “You brought fifteen whole teams here.”
“Yeah, and you’ve got no idea how hard the logistics of that actually were. I mean, with you guys it was easy. You won the trip. But the other teams, well, we had to trick them.” He rolled his eyes. “Or at leasttryto trick them. Some of them figured it out, and spoiled their montage footage. But other teams, like you…”
He was talking rapidly yet clearly, in the sing-songy voice that made him infamous as a reality TV show host. It was the same voice that made Noah Frost a household name over the past decade. The voice that spawned another two spin-offs and earned him a handful of voice-over work in children’s shows.
“Anyway yes, fifteen teams,” he went on. “There were supposed to be eighteen teams, but two of them couldn’t make it. The lead member of Born to Run shattered her knee, and just this morning one of the Super Sleuths got picked up at the airport on a pretty serious arrest warrant.” His eyes shifted downward, a little nervously. “But uhhh… you didn’t hear that part from me.”
“And the other missing team?” I asked.
Noah laughed. “Well that’syouguys, of course.”
“Us?”
“Sure! Your teams finished second and third last year,” the host explained. “People are chomping at the bit for more of you! But then three-quarters of the Sorority Sisters don’t show up for their vacation, and the Three Hunks here are missing their Badass. So—”
“So you combined us,” Devin said flatly.
Noah nodded excitedly. “Hell yeah we did! And it’s going to be fantastic, too. People are going to go nuts over it, especially considering you were such vicious competitors last year. And then all that mystery behind the Million Dollar meltdown? When you really should’vewon?”
I turned to face the guys. They were all staring back at me.
“Just think about it,” said Noah, putting his hands up like he was holding us all in an imaginary camera frame.“The Dream Team!”
His hands spread slowly apart as his hissed the words.
“That sounds dumb,” Reese said.
Noah’s expression went from being mock awestruck to looking legitimately crestfallen. “Does it? Fuck. I wasn’t sure of it myself.” He shook his head. “I told Bradley it seemed too simplistic, too cliché, but he told me keeping it simple would be—”
“We can’t racenow,” interrupted Devin. “We’re heading back to Minnesota the day after tomorrow.”
The man who’d criss-crossed the globe with us last year blinked three times in rapid succession. His expression was almost comical.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m dead serious,” Devin replied smoothly. “We’ve got a business to take care of. Obligations to fulfill. Already we’ve been away for too long, and—”
“But you’d be racing for four million dollars.”
The words stopped everyone, including myself. I folded my arms across my chest.
“Did you sayfour?”
“That’s right.”
A tingle ran up and down my spine. Beside me, Reese was practically vibrating.
“A million dollarseach?” asked Hayden.
Noah nodded and smiled. “This is a very special season — our tenth anniversary,” he said. “The winner of Second Chance Champions will get four times the prize money of any other season.”
