Samantha’s POV
When I tell people I have lived in a fraternity house my entire life I get one of two reactions. First and foremost there is always shock, but then it’s followed by either concern trolling or jealousy.
The concern trolling I can kind of understand. After all, I am a teenage girl, which does make the arrangement sound dubious, but the jealousy I don’t understand at all. It is a right pain in my ass, especially since I can’t even escape it by going to college.
Nope, the only college where I was offered a full ride is also the one where my guardians work, so I have four more years of living in Alpha House to look forward to. As much as I’d love to go somewhere else there’s no way I’m saddling myself with mountains of debt. My parents left me a decent nest egg when they died, but I have avoided touching it as much as possible. It’s my only safety net.
I don’t remember my parents. They died while on a business trip in Europe when I was eighteen months old and I have been living with my great uncle Nathan Dubois and his wife Lana at Alpha House ever since. It was one of the six houses that made up Fraternity Row at Federation College.
FC was not your typical college, at least when it came to housing. In addition to the six frat houses, which were all big enough to house up to thirty students apiece, plus the house parents, there were two dorms for international students that held up to twenty six apiece.
There was a section of townhouses on campus for married students, and six sorority houses of similar size to the fraternity houses across campus. Most of the other dorms were what you’d expect for a private college, with the exception of Night House, Trinity House, and Green House.
Rumors surrounded those three dorms and you could only go into them if you were a resident. I wasn’t sure how you got to be a resident of those dorms, but they were all co-ed which didn’t appeal to me. I’d been living with college aged guys my whole life, and let’s just say I was unimpressed by their behavior.
I shouldn’t complain so much. Growing up the way I did had a lot of perks, at least when I was a kid. There was always someone there to look after me, to help entertain me, help with homework, or to play. It was like having an army of older brothers, only they didn’t tease or torment me the way my friends’ older brothers did to them.
Most of the guys that lived here when I was in elementary school still sent me birthday cards and gifts at Christmas. And I think I got a check or gift from every single alumnus that came through our doors during my lifetime when I graduated from high school this past June.
Unfortunately, the dynamic between me and the Alphas started to change when I turned thirteen and has gotten progressively weirder every year since.
I know it’s because now I’m essentially the same age as them, so they can’t really treat me like a kid sister, and I wouldn’t want them to. However, I don’t appreciate the way they do treat me.
They all act like overprotective dads: policing my outfits, snooping in my texts, stalking my social media accounts, and trying to ruin my dates. The two biggest offenders are Clint Ashbury and Declan Byrne.
Declan is two years older than me and Clint only one, but they’d both stood on the porch of Alpha House, flanking the front door, wearing just jeans, when my date for prom came to pick me up. Those fuckers had stared Adam down, while flexing, flexing!
To make matters worse, their best friends showed up in all of their muscled glory when we were leaving the house. Adam was so scared that he barely spoke to me at dinner, and then wouldn’t even dance with me when we got to prom. I told him he needed to grow a pair and then spent the night dancing with my friends. It was so unfair.
I scowled at the memory and put my irritation to good use by pounding the crap out of the chicken cutlets I was flattening for dinner. Lana and Nathan always hosted a big welcome cookout the Sunday of move-in weekend, and I’d been toiling away all week doing prep work.
Dinner tonight was supposed to just be the three of us, a bit of calm before the storm of testosterone tomorrow, but fate decided to punish me a bit more. They’d happily informed me that the two jerks at the top of my shit list had been given permission to arrive today instead of Saturday. I sighed as I placed the last cutlet on the platter and began the process of breading them.
The kitchen at Alpha House was bigger than a lot of apartments. It had to be in order to accommodate the equipment we needed to keep these lunatics fed. I know people joke about how teenage boys are bottomless pits, but none of the guys I knew ate the way the guys at Alpha House do.
There were two six burner stoves each with double ovens, a deep fryer, two sub zero fridges, three dishwashers, three sinks, including one in the island, three microwaves, four refrigerator drawers for produce, and two eight slice toasters.
The pantry alone was larger than my bedroom and held two chest freezers big enough to hold an adult’s dead body. It was the heart of Alpha House and I was the mistress of the domain.
I’d been gradually given more control and responsibilities throughout high school until Lana had completely handed me the reins last August. She still oversaw all of the housekeeping and dealt with anyone who broke the rules, but I planned the meals, did the shopping, and did the lion’s share of the cooking.
It wasn’t as daunting as it sounds. Sunday’s midday meal was the only time that everyone was expected to dine together and it was always a buffet. The rest of the week the guys just had to sign up for dinner twice a week, with a maximum of five guys per night. Saturday was my night off. Breakfast food was provided as well as snacks, but they were on their own for lunch and the other dinners.
Another rule of Alpha House was that they had to wash up the nights they ate dinner here, and everyone had to take turns accompanying me when I did my bulk runs. I just hoped that this year I wouldn’t wind up with Clint and Declan at the same time again. They didn’t get along and yet, whenever one of them signed up, the other one did too.
It struck me as weird since they’d gotten into an actual fist fight on Clint’s very first day here. The rumor was that it was over a girl, but I never saw either one of them with anyone. At any rate they never seemed to get past it and were constantly trying to one up each other or slinging insults.
That’s what made their macho display of muscle on prom night extra annoying. The one time they put aside their differences it was to join forces to ruin my night.
Still, a part of me wondered who the girl was that had captured their attention. She was one lucky bitch. Hey, they might annoy the snot out of me, but I wasn’t blind. They were both hotter than molten glass.
Clint had wavy blond hair, green eyes, and dimples. Combined with a perpetual tan and the build of an Olympic swimmer he looked like Malibu Ken come to life.
Declan, on the other hand, was like a photographic negative of Clint, with black hair, blue eyes and perpetual five o’clock shadow that softened his sharp jawline and the cheekbones he could cut glass with.
If he had dimples I’d never seen them. Look up brooding in the dictionary and you’d find his picture. He was slightly taller than Clint, 6’5″ to Clint’s 6’4”, and had a heavier build with bulkier muscles.
I referred to them as Cap and Bucky when I was discussing them with my friends, except when I was furious with them. If they were going to flaunt it then I was going to enjoy it. And flaunt it they did.
At least once a day they appeared shirtless in front of me, and one time Clint came up to me in just his towel claiming he’d accidentally locked himself out of his room and his suite mate wasn’t home.
I rolled my eyes at the memory. Despite enjoying the show I wasn’t interested in either of them. No freaking way. It would be suicide to try and date any member of Alpha House.
Not only would there be the absolute bat-shit nature of our living arrangements to interfere, but these guys were not my type. They were all way too bossy and probably wanted their women to call them Daddy. Um, no thank you. I’m not giving Freud that satisfaction.
Frankly, if I was going to date a guy from any of the houses in the Row, as it was called, I would pick someone from Gamma House. The guys from Gamma Phi were outgoing, relaxed, and more metro-sexual than the other houses. The type of guys who would pick a chick flick for a movie date night and enjoy it.
The guys in Delta Theta Sigma, or the Delts as they liked to be called, were all ROTC types and/or super into CrossFit. When I was a freshman in high school they were having a push up contest outside when I was dropped off after school. One of them wanted me to stand on his back while he did pushups. I noped out of there faster than you could say jock itch.
The members of Epsilon Pi Epsilon, or Eps, were all majoring in a STEM field and gave off mad genius vibes and kept to themselves, while those in Zeta Kappa Chi were all pre-law. I’m not joking, every single one for the last six years has been pre-law (I checked), and they would argue over everything just to practice. And don’t get me started on the guys from Beta Nu.
They were almost as overbearing as the guys in Alpha House, but weren’t as intense. They all seemed to be business majors of some variety. Despite being in different frats the guys all had friends in each house, sometimes more than one.
It was kind of weird, now that I thought about it. You would think that they would be closest to the other guys in their own fraternity, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
I finished breading the cutlets and went to wash my hands while keeping an eye on the time. I knew that the cutlets would need to be fried in batches and I hoped no one else showed up early.
As it was I wasn’t sure I had enough for the five of us. We only had sixteen cutlets that were going to be made into sandwiches. I’d fixed corn casserole, a three bean salad, and had a huge watermelon to cut up.
I hoped that all of that, with the addition of the lemonade cakes I had cooling on the table and the raspberry sorbet in the freezer, would fill them up enough to keep them out of the food that was prepped for the heavy appetizers that Lana liked to serve on move in day.
It was disgusting how much food those boys could eat, and my great aunt and uncle weren’t exactly light eaters either. While I was contemplating adding another side dish to the menu I heard the tell-tale sound of Declan’s 1968 Dodge Charger pull up. I hated to admit it but the sound of that car always did good things to my insides.
I knew as a good hostess that I should meet him at the door, but I was still pissed at him. I also need to shower and change before dinner so instead of leaving the kitchen I preheated two of the ovens and pulled the two corn casseroles out of the fridge so that their dishes could warm up before going into the oven.
“Hello? Anybody home?” I heard Declan call, his deep voice sending a frisson of pleasure through me. The hell? “Ms. Lana? Mr. Nathan, sir?” His voice got louder as he got closer. “Samantha?”
I didn’t respond and then I heard the floorboards creak as he came into the kitchen. I got a whiff of his citrus spice cologne and a shiver went through my body, causing me to grimace. What was wrong with me? And what business did he have wearing cologne that smells so damn good?
Then I heard a low growl and his voice became clipped. “What the hell are you wearing, Samantha?”
