Page 55 of The Most Dangerous Games

Wyatt doesn’t plan it.

Neither does she.

They’ve pulled each other into a kiss. They both decided to do it at the same time.

When they finally pull back, both of them look as surprised as they are happy at what just happened. Hannah’s eyes flicker, sharp again—like she remembers the cameras.

“Bad idea,” she whispers.

“I don’t know about you,” Wyatt says. “But it felt as wise to me as it felt good.”

“A good kiss, you mean?” Hannah asks, smiling again.

“Good, period,” he says.

“No,” she whispers.

Wyatt swallows. “Why?”

Hannah looks past him, up toward the house.

“Because everything here gets used,” she says. “Everything.”

She steps back first.

“Let’s go,” she says. “Before we do something else we can’t take back.”

Wyatt follows her up the hill. He does feel good, about the kiss, about being with her, all of it.

And more scared than ever that things between them can only end badly.

38.

The Host watches the monitors without expression.

Wyatt and Hannah. Jack and Elena. The little clusters of loyalty and attraction forming like algae in water.

Predictable. Useful.

He watched them walk toward the house like they’re coming home from a high school date. He’s more convinced than ever that Wyatt is an immature fool.

A few minutes earlier he watched on a different monitor as the cocky oil rigger from Texas, McHenry, took a walk across a different part of the vast property with Elena Torres, the newscaster from Madrid, before both of them disappeared from his sight.

McHenry and Elena Torres had looked as smitten with each other—do people still say that?—as the two teenagers do now.

He had expected some pairing off like this, various attractions, it was to be expected when you threw people together like this in life-threatening situations. Or even, in the case of the Italian policeman, life-ending situations.

The thing he finds most interesting, and even more entertaining, is that even after the situations in which they found themselves in Antarctica and Chile, they clearly have no idea what’s coming next.

Or the choices these happy couples are eventually going to have to make.

Would Jack McHenry be willing to save Elena Torres’s life if it meant losing his own?

And what about the spoiled boy from New York City?

If it comes right down to it, would he choose his life or the life of the lovely, brilliant girl from Germany?

Better yet: