Testing Limits (Shadow Ridge Series #2)

Chapter 1

I live at Shadow Ridge along with my parents, Derrick and Tammy Podmore, and my almost twenty-year-old sister, Kimberly who graduated from Henry Clay High School in May. The operation has been passed down for generations, most recently to my parents after my grandpa, Ray, on my dad's side had a heart attack. My grandma, Mary was on him for a little while over it and he finally agreed that it was time to slow down, knowing my parents were more than capable of handling the responsibility. It has been a dream of mine to run the farm one day and since my sister has no interest in racing, I know one day it will be mine.

Lucas lives here on the Misty River property with his parents and his older brother, twenty-year-old Tyler, who graduated from Henry Clay the year before Kimberly. It's also a generational operation that his parents got from his mom's parents who passed away about a year ago after being involved in a bad accident during a summer storm.

Lucas and I got together officially in May, just over three months ago, he kind of pursued me after he watched me put Brody Davis, one of his best friends, in his place when Brody acted like an asshole towards me after school one random day in April. Brody had missed a throw of a football from Trey Shultz, their other best friend, the three of them are currently teammates on the varsity football team at Henry Clay.

I hadn't really known who any of them were at the time, but I did recognize them as football players, and even though Lucas didn't say a single word to me that day, he smirked at me a couple of times and I'm not going to lie, I was kind of hooked from then, but I tried to blow it off as nothing. Things progressed from there, well, more so after I physically ran into Lucas a few days later in the hallway during a passing period and then I made another complete idiot of myself in front of him when I dropped my things after someone slammed their locker on two separate occasions within a week. We started talking, which did include some flirting, and he gave me his phone number by the end of the week so we started talking almost twenty-four seven from then on.

We have been working out together as much as we possibly could since the end of June to help prepare Lucas for his second year on the varsity football team as the starting quarterback, and now the team captain as well. It's been fun, even with the little bickering moments we've had from him teaching me things about proper workouts and teaching me about football when I would get sassy, sometimes just from pure frustration, other times just because I knew how to push his buttons.

Lucas and I attend Henry Clay, which starts up again in three days, on Wednesday, with our group of friends who have all gotten a bit closer over the summer vacation. My three best friends, Aubrey West, Grace Barnes and Savannah Davenport, as well as Grace and Savannah's boyfriends, Austin Ward and Owen Buckley are sixteen-years-old like me and we're incoming sophomores. Aubrey's boyfriend, Hayden Phillips, is a seventeen-year-old incoming junior like Lucas, Brody, Trey and Trey's girlfriend Whitney Greene.

"Don't be an ass," I grumble, glaring back at him.

"Hey, I ran doubles yesterday and I'm still doing better than you."

"Okay, now you're really being an asshole."

"Just give me five more reps and you can be done," he smirks again, his kissable lips slightly curving up at the corner. "You can still lift Roxy and she's got to be almost eighty pounds now," he adds, mentioning my nine-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog.

"Yeah, I doubt I can even lift Cooper at this moment," I counter, name dropping his own dog, Cooper, a four-year-old Border Collie who is probably barely fifty pounds.

"You can do it babe. Come on, just five reps, that's all I'm asking."

"Luc," I complain, trying my best not to sound like a toddler. I was already in decent shape from running laps around Shadow Ridge when the weather was nice and just being active in general, but I'm nowhere close to him, even after this summer.