If You Dare (Entangled Flaunt)

by Lemmon, Jessica

  Part of him suspected this awards dinner was the ultimate practical joke to get him back for the jokes he’d played on his coworkers over the years. If it wasn’t a practical joke, well…that was worse. Because then he’d be expected to give a meaningful speech about his early influences, his process, his—

  God.

  The speech.

  Just picturing the podium at the center of the room, imagining the white-hot lights beating down on him from overhead, caused his brow to bead with sweat. He pulled at the collar of his favorite T-shirt and imagined the noose-like bowtie knotted at the front of his neck. How was he going to stand in front of five hundred of his colleagues and not die on the spot when just thinking about the acceptance speech made him break out in hives?

  A hooting owl snapped him back to the present. He could worry about the speech later. Right now, he had one mission. He knelt and dug through the costumes until his hand landed on the perfect one.

  Marcus pulled the covering over his face and listened to his breath echo behind the mask.

  His mission was simple. His target clear.

  Scare Lily McIntire out of the house, and win the date he’d wanted since the moment he laid eyes on her.

  Chapter 4

  Lily folded the cover over her iPad and strained to listen to the silence hanging in the room. She swore she’d just heard something.

  A voice.

  Not necessarily, she thought with a shiver. She’d spent the last half hour watching an episode of Friends. Maybe she’d confused the voice on her computer with the voice still echoing inside her skull.

  She moved on the air mattress until she faced the staircase behind her. The room was swathed in darkness save for the circle of light her little lantern cast around the bed. In front of her, the grainy shapes of the stairs lifted into the ominous upper floor, but the ceiling kept her from being able to see the landing. She’d spied it earlier, though, and knew there was nothing beyond the top step besides a yawning, cavernous hole. Just imagining the murky darkness made her want to curl up in that warm puddle of light and scrunch her eyes closed.

  Maybe you imagined the voice.

  It’d come from behind her. Right behind her. A chill clipped its way down her spine, ticking every vertebra along the way. The hair on her arms stood on end. She tried, and failed, to convince herself she hadn’t heard a voice. A voice that had spoken one word, a word now echoing in her memory like the tune of an overplayed song.

  Go.

  Feet on the floor, she rose from the air mattress slowly, intentionally, her eyes tracking from the staircase to the closed front door. The urge to obey the unseen entity’s command, and bolt outside as fast as her Sketchers would carry her, was strong. But the practical half of Lily’s brain—the half logical enough to know a howl of wind could have masked itself as a two-letter word—kept her rooted to the floor.

  Blood pounded her eardrums as she pulled her shoulders back and attempted to listen past her jackhammering heart and jagged breaths. She watched the stairs until her eyes blurred and her forehead broke into a sweat. Come on. I know I heard it.

  An untimely chime from her phone made her yip. She slapped a palm over her mouth to staunch the pathetic sound and pulled the cell from her back pocket. A text. From Marcus.

  Of course.

  10 pm. is all well? send me proof.

  Bihourly photos were part of the bet. She’d promised to send evidence she was inside the house. A time-stamped photo from her smartphone would prove she hadn’t snapped them all in a span of five minutes then hoofed it off the property.

  She tapped her camera app, lined herself up with the mostly boarded-up window behind her, held up her middle finger, and snapped the picture.

  A few seconds after it sent, a return text read: ha! She could almost swear she’d heard Marcus’s deep chuckle coming from somewhere outside the house, but then she was imagining hearing a lot of things tonight, wasn’t she?

  Two seconds later, her phone chimed again.

  what’s that weird ball of light over your left shoulder?

  Before she could stop herself, she’d snapped her head around to look behind her. And Marcus, asshat that he was, must have guessed she’d fallen for it. The next text read:

  sucker!

  With a growl, Lily tossed her phone onto the mattress and sat beside it. She faced the creeptastic staircase…just in case…and reached for her iPad. Then reconsidered.

  If she had heard something, and if it were a real threat, she didn’t like the idea of background noise. If there were a rabid raccoon chomping on the exposed wires or a freaky opossum hunching its way across the insulation in the attic, she would like to know. Even though her only weapon she had was the plastic knife that’d come with her dinner. She really should have brought the crowbar in with her…

  Most likely, nothing would happen, and she’d claim Hawaii with nary a hair harmed on her head. She abandoned the tablet and dug out the novel she’d impulse purchased. It was a romance, thank you very much, no Stephen King for her. No, sir. She’d barely cracked the spine when she heard it again.

  “Go.”

  Gooseflesh lit her arms and her legs despite the propane heater next to her warming the air. Definitely a voice, she was sure of it this time. It’d been tinny as if being played back from a gramophone, but unmistakably feminine. And forceful.

  Her dinner lurched in her stomach as her eyes tracked to the stairs leading up to the inky beyond. The voice had come from the second floor this time. If only she hadn’t made out the word so clearly. If only it’d been some garbled, unidentifiable sound, she could’ve passed it off as the house creaking. But she’d heard it. As clearly as she heard her teeth chattering in her head right now.

  Whatever was up there wanted her to leave. And she may have needed to be told twice, but she wasn’t about to wait around for a third. Knees wobbling, Lily kept her eyes glued to the staircase as she felt for her phone and her purse. The darkness upstairs morphed into shapes the longer she stared into it, so she risked looking away long enough to gather her things. She gauged the distance between the staircase and the front door, inventorying the obstacles that laid between her and the exit.

  The urge to run was strong, but she forced herself to step carefully. A very lucid argument that she couldn’t physically outrun a ghost presented itself and she ignored it, following the mental path she’d mapped in her head. She stepped around the air mattress, over the lantern, and skirted the heater. She’d come back for her things in the morning. In the bright, happy sunshine. She was out of here.

  Her feet hit the porch seconds later. She ran for her car, not bothering to close the mansion door behind her. Heart thundering, Lily plunged a hand into her purse.

  “Keys, keys,” she muttered, searching for the lost metal in the depths of her purse. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. But she’d already begun to panic—each time her hand encountered everything but keys in her Dooney & Bourke bag. Why, oh, why did she refuse to use the sewn-in hook to anchor her keys?

  A sound in the distance made her jerk her head toward the house. The faint light from her lantern dully illuminated the entrance. That was it. No screeching banshee raced across the yard. No specter floated toward her on a cloud of ethereal smoke.

  Still. Lily didn’t want to go back inside.

  She upended the stubborn handbag and dumped its contents onto the hood of her car. Lip gloss, pens, coins, and various other useless items rolled onto the ground. But no keys. Which meant…

  “No.” Her voice came out no more than a tiny whine.

  She was going to have to go back in and get them.

  “No,” she said again, yanking at the driver’s door, then the passenger doors of her cherry red compact. Each handle gave beneath her palm only to spring into its original position. Locked. But of course.

  Lily rested her hands on the hood of her car and forced herself to breathe. “They’re in there somewhere,” she told herself in the calmest tone she
could manage. Other than a preliminary sweep of the kitchen when she’d first arrived, the only area she’d been in was the twenty square feet in the center of the living room. That was good. That was a relatively small area. It’d take her five seconds, ten tops.

  Although…

  Her temporary boudoir was strewn with shopping bags, blankets, and snack food. The spark of hope that had ignited fizzled. The keys could’ve been inadvertently kicked under the air mattress, tossed away with her dinner container by mistake, or balled up in the packaging when she’d unwrapped the fresh bedsheets. She’d have to do a careful search to find them. That would take several minutes. Minutes that might have her hearing or—gulp—seeing something that would forever haunt her psyche.

  Dread pooled in her gut when she cast another glance at the doorway. “You can do this,” she whispered, ignoring her quaking insides.

  “Or I could sleep outside.” She swept her gaze to the shadowy woods surrounding her, the hunkering willow overhead. Anxiety rose like bile in her throat. As uninviting as the mansion’s unseen inhabitant had been, the shrouded forest surrounding her locked car was worse.

  A flash of movement—something too tall to be an animal, unless it was a bear—moved at the tree-lined edge of the forest.

  Hallucination caused by stress. Lily blinked, closed her eyes for the count of three, and reopened them. The shadow moved, the shadow of a man, and lifted a long handle with a curved piece on top. Then it progressed, that figure wearing the night, crunching over sticks and brush on the ground and coming right for her.

  The scream that should be pealing from her lips refused to come. This was like being trapped in a dream. The one where she couldn’t run because her feet were mired in sludge. Wake up, Lily. But she wasn’t sleeping.

  The figure stepped from the trees into the pale moonlight, revealing a white face with black eyes…no, that wasn’t his face.

  It was a hockey mask.

  Adrenaline pushed aside the panic freezing her limbs and shut out her brain’s insistence that what she was seeing couldn’t possibly be real. She pushed off her car and ran for the door on rubbery legs. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man take off after her, calling something in a garbled, muffled slur.

  Lily found her voice.

  And screamed.

  Chapter 5

  Dammit!

  Marcus tripped over a rock and lumbered to the edge of the woods in time to hear Lily make a decidedly frightened sound as she trekked from her car to the house. Clive was wrong. Marcus’s brilliant idea to spook her in this mask had scared her. Far worse than he’d ever imagined.

  “Lily!” He called out, but the mask muffled his words. He reached for the Friday the 13th face covering his own and yanked. “Ow!” How it’d wound itself in his short hair, he had no idea. Stumbling, thanks to the welt on his shin from a misplaced tree branch earlier, he lifted both arms, plastic ax still in hand, and attempted to untangle his hair from the strap.

  Through the eyeholes—with zero peripheral vision, he might add—he saw Lily risk a look over her shoulder, her expression one of sheer fear.

  Shit. He was an asshole.

  She missed the first step on the porch and fell, banging her knee so hard, the bump on his shin pulsed in sympathy. At least she hadn’t lost her footing altogether.

  “Lil!” Marcus said, giving up on literally unmasking himself. She dragged herself to the doorway, and he held out his arms to show her the chintzy toy ax he’d found at the store this morning.

  She either didn’t hear him or didn’t believe the ax was a fake because she swiveled her head to the open door of the mansion, then to the lock that rested on the patio before bending over and grabbing something on the porch.

  “It’s me!” he called, climbing the stairs.

  He dropped the “weapon” and showed her his empty hands, but she didn’t care. She swung the object in her grip—a rusted watering can with a long, pointed spout, he could see now—and slammed it into his forearm.

  “Ow!” he yelled.

  Her eyes went wide for a split second, but she’d drawn back to hit him again. “Lily!” Hearing her name made her hesitate, but her body was already moving in an arc and he took another blow to the forearm.

  He snagged the watering can and yanked, but she tipped off balance and started to fall. Marcus dropped the can with a clatter and caught her around the waist, pressing inch upon inch of Lily McIntire up against his torso.

  God. She felt amazing.

  In no mood to cuddle, she yanked away from him and picked up the toy ax, swinging it at him full force. On the second connecting hit, the blade squeaked. She stopped swinging and frowned at the weapon.

  “Lily, dammit!” Marcus wrestled with the mask again, yipping as he pulled it off along with a bit of hair from the back of his head. He rubbed the spot while she blinked at him, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. She didn’t look terrified anymore. She looked pissed.

  She lowered the ax and shoved against his chest with her free hand. “Am I ‘okay’?”

  “Relax, Lil, I’m—”

  But “sorry” didn’t make it out of his mouth. Lily wielded the plastic ax and swung it again. She was a lot stronger than he’d thought. Did she take jujitsu or something? She was going to maim him with the faux weapon if he didn’t stop her. He blocked his face with one arm and caught the toy with the other. “Lily, stop!”

  He attempted to drag the ax out of her hand but only dragged her with it. When she reached his side, he wrapped an arm around her one more time. To contain her, he told himself, but really he’d just wanted to hold her close until she calmed down. He hadn’t meant to scare the bejeezus out of her.

  With her against him, he took in Lily’s wild hair, narrowed eyes, and flushed cheeks with way more admiration than the situation called for.

  Especially since she looked downright murderous.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she shouted in his face. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

  Not like he could tell her the truth. That he wanted her to give up the bet so he could take her on a real date. Silence was the only option. He gave her a sheepish shrug.

  She gestured at the mask in his hand. “You’re trying to scare me off?”

  He smirked, hoping he could save some face. “I’ve never been to Hawaii.”

  “Yeah?” She snatched the mask out of his hand and threw it into the front yard like a Frisbee. “Well, you’re not going now, either.”

  Lily shook out of his grip and stomped into the mansion with renewed purpose. She swung the door shut, or tried to, anyway. He wedged his hiking boot in the crack, preventing her from shutting him out.

  She glared through the gap in the door. “Move.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.” Marcus knew he needed to wipe the half smile off his face, but damn, she looked good tonight in black jogging pants that fit snugly around her butt and a matching zip-up hoodie, with the word “couture” emblazoned over her breasts.

  She continued glaring.

  He held his palms in front of him but didn’t move his foot. “It was immature, I know. Let me in, and I’ll explain.”

  Those blue eyes narrowed further.

  “Lily, come on. What do you have to lose?”

  …

  Frustration seeped from Lily’s every pore, thanks to the man gracing her doorway. She’d like to tell him where he could shove that explanation, and the mask for that matter, but as her adrenaline ebbed, so did her rage. The feeling now washing through her bloodstream felt a lot like…relief. The familiar sight of someone she knew was much better than facing someone who wanted to shish-kabob her.

  What had he been thinking, coming after her like a crazed madman? “You can explain from out there.”

  He dropped his arms, licked his lip, and bit down on it, his dimple showing in the pale light sifting through the doorway. She sort of hated how handsome he was when she was trying to be angry. />
  “First off, I was only going to wear it long enough to jump out and say ‘boo,’ but the mask got stuck in my hair.”

  When she screwed her mouth to one side in disbelief, he half turned his body and pointed at the back of his head. “See this giant bald spot?”

  She didn’t.

  He spun back around. “I was calling your name the whole time.”

  That’s what that was? She could have sworn the sounds coming out from under that mask were a series of threats. Of course, she very well might be losing her mind tonight.

  “Lil.”

  She took a deep breath. What were the odds Marcus would make up a whopper of a story like that? He may be a prankster, he may be competitive, but he wasn’t a liar. She knew that much.

  She swung the door open and stepped back. Shifting his big shoulders to get through the door, he strode in and glanced around the room. “Charming.”

  She’d never seen him wear flannel and denim until now, and she admired the way his big body filled out his wardrobe. It also became irritatingly apparent the parts of her body that had pressed against his solid form moments ago were still tingling. Tingling, for God’s sake. She had no right to be tingling where Marcus Black was concerned.

  Then an idea hit her. She considered his presence, his admission he’d been trying to scare her off, and the voice that sent her running from the mansion in the first place… Marcus. She’d found the source of the disembodied voice.

  She faked the sweetest smile she could manage under the circumstances. “You can come in.”

  “Thanks.” Unaware, he took a step forward, running a hand through hair so dark it was practically black. With the pale moonlight at his back, his eyes appeared almost the same shade.

  Before she tumbled headlong into the depths of those eyes, Lily stabbed a finger into the center of his rock-hard chest as he crossed the threshold. “If you promise to turn it off.”