Throngs milled, stepping into the oddly shaped front doors and into apparent darkness beyond. Brief spurts and short shrieks of laughter escaped with each entry. Inwardly, Adelie dug in her heels. Whatever was going on in there, she wanted no part in it. Someone had to be the spoilsport. Might as well be her.
She pivoted, taking in the long, curved, fiberglass table situated in the March Hare’s front yard behind a low, white fence. The table was bright blue, its sides striped like a barbershop pole. Teacups of every size and shape littered the curved surface, and a mechanical dormouse appeared to reside in the centermost mug, popping in and out with crazy eyes and spouting out, “Twinkle, twinkle little rat.”
“It doesn’t look like a ride,” Adelie said suspiciously.
“Maybe it’s not one,” Suzie replied. “Maybe it’s a walkthrough and we’ll find the rabbit inside.”
Another cutesy sign, which gathered giant, fiberglass mushrooms at its base, read, Stuff and Nonsense. Don't believe anything you see within. If you get lost, just wait a while. The way out will come back to you.
“Sounds promising,” Suzie said. “It’s like a funhouse.”
It sounded like anything but fun. Had whoever crafted this hunt put the rabbit in there? Was that why no one had found it yet? She glanced around, settling on a decision. This would be their last stop. If they didn’t find the rabbit in there, they weren’t going to find it anywhere.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Poor bunny,” Adelie said. “It’s probably scared to death being hunted by all these people.”
“It’s a rabbit. It doesn’t care.” Suzie stepped onto the cartoonish path toward the door and paused to peer back. “You coming in?”
There was no point. With all these people? The weird clues? This entire situation was a ploy. Like the lottery, the likelihood of winning, of finding this supposed rabbit, were slim to none.
“Not a chance,” Adelie said. “Knowing my luck, I’ll be the one getting lost, and you’ll have no riddles to help you find me.” She added a smile to lighten the statement. “I’m staying right out here, where I can breathe. And Suz, after this, I’m going home.”
Suzie’s face fell. She broached the few steps back to Adelie’s side. “I thought you were having fun with me.”
A hint of remorse struck her. Suzie had always been flighty and daring, while Adelie was the timid, down-to-earth type determined to keep her feet on the ground. She should have known not to leave paying the mortgage in her dreamy sister’s hands. It was almost like she was a child instead of a few years older than Adelie’s twenty-five.
Adelie gave her a smile, trying to will away the skepticism that had been plaguing her since they arrived. She hoped it was enough to make up for her surliness. “It’s not that. This has been really fun, probably the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
“Then why can’t you just loosen up?” Suzie shook Adelie’s hand by the wrist.
Adelie dipped her head. “I’m sorry, I wish I could. I’m just worried, Suz. Guilt has been eating at me since we got here. I can’t spend the whole day here when I could have been looking up places that accept washouts who can’t find work anywhere else.” Another smile. At this point, she’d have to start applying at fast food places.
She was really looking forward to getting her nursing degree, but until she finished school, she’d have to do what she could to make it through. Adelie wished she could skirt around her worries and indulge in the lighthearted fun everyone else around her seemed to be having. But she’d been born practical, it was in her nature. And her practicality couldn’t allow her to ignore the threat hanging over her head with every step she took.
“All right then,” Suzie said, shaking her head as if dusting away Adelie’s doldrums. “But you’re so missing out. See you on the other side.”
Adelie laughed and waved to her sister as Suzie stepped through the door. Several more people quickly entered behind her.
Pivoting, Adelie shuffled the few feet and took one of the empty seats around the vacant tea table. Her feet aching, her soul weary, she rested her elbow beside a plastic triangle of cheese, plunked her head into her hand, and began tracing the rim of a wide, pink polka dot teacup with her finger.
She should have lied. Told Suzie how awesome the day had been, pretended away her worries. That had never been her style, though. She was honest to a fault, and timid as well.
If it hadn’t been for Suzie, she probably wouldn’t have done half of the gutsy things she’d attempted in her life. Like trying out for the community softball team. Volunteering on the community theater board to direct teenagers on the light and sound crew. Signing her name on the mortgage of their late grandparents’ house.
She released a sigh with that last thought. What were they going to do?
“You look lost.”
A man leaned his hip against the table. If the blue, striped teacup hadn’t been fiberglass and attached to the cutesy table, he would have tipped it over and spilled its contents.
He may as well have tipped her over though. The insides of her brain were slowly seeping out. His mahogany hair was gelled away from his forehead, his green eyes held teasing glints of riddles and rhyme, and he rested a hand on the table as he stared. Right. At. Her.
Her heart picked up the pace. He looked familiar. Why? Where had she seen him before?
She shook herself, remembering too late to reply. “No, I’m not lost. I know exactly where I am.”
“And where is that?”
She raised her brows, glancing around. Could anyone be here and not know where they were? “Do I really have to answer?”
He sank onto the orange, backless stool beside her. She caught a whiff of his warm, amber musk. “No, you don’t have to. But if you did answer, what would you say?”
He was too gorgeous for his own good. How could anyone be that good-looking? Adelie found herself tongue-tied, unable to form a coherent answer. Something about his tousled hair, the mischief dancing in his eyes, and the seduction in his smile made her feel like a pot set to boil. Her temperature rose. Bubbles reached the surface, and heat coursed through her the longer he sat there staring at her.
“I’m in Wonderland,” she said. “At a mad tea party while thousands of people are chasing a white rabbit.”
“No rabbit-chasing for you?”
She grinned in a sardonic kind of way, attempting to slow her racing pulse. “I’m not that desperate.”
Well, she kind of was. But she wasn’t about to admit it to him.
He rested an arm on the table. “What would make you be?”
Adelie was taken aback. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “What would make me be desperate?” That was an odd question for a first meeting. Not to mention kind of personal.
He shrugged. “Desperate enough to put it all on the line for a silly white rabbit chase?”
She couldn’t follow his train of thought. Who asked questions like this? Still, this flirting was harmless. She’d be off and leaving the park as soon as Suzie came back out again.
Adelie rotated on her stool and decided to humor him, though the directness of his gaze didn’t help her pulse. “If I were going to be desperate, it would have to be over something I really wanted. Something that meant more to me than anything else in the entire world.”
“And that might be?”
Adelie rubbed her hands together and stared off at nothing for a moment. “Security,” she said unexpectedly. “Knowing everything is going to be okay.”
He considered her answer for a moment. “Sounds worth it,” he said, his voice deep.
She couldn’t believe she’d opened up to a practical stranger. Adelie needed a subject change, stat. “What about you? You’re not interested in finding the rabbit?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get what I wanted out of this,” he said, winking at her before standing up and striding away.
Adelie stared after him. Their exchange played over and over again with
every step he took. Without a doubt, that was the weirdest conversation she’d ever had with a total stranger. Catch the white rabbit? Please. Chasing rabbits led Alice into a totally bizarre world that she couldn’t escape from until she woke to find it was a dream.
Adelie didn’t need the distraction of dreams. She needed reality; a new job, to make enough to catch up on their mortgage, and to keep her feet firmly on the ground.
People were visible through the windows of the fun house. They treaded in and out, flocking in a steady line to and from the front of the park. Looking beyond, Adelie allowed herself to be momentarily hypnotized by the whirling rides and the distant, lazy Ferris wheel.
“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” she muttered, bumping her elbow into the plate beside her.
The table hummed beneath her. The plate began to sink. A creaking noise sounded. The mechanical dormouse in the center of the table stopped his repetitive mutterings and descended slowly into the table itself. Cups disappeared, and in the middle of the transformation, as the table lost part of its contents, a cage slowly began to rise in their place at the table’s center.
“What in the—?” Adelie couldn’t finish.
Inside the cage before her, a fluffy, white rabbit wearing a red and blue-striped waistcoat sat and wiggled its nose. Its long ears went straight back on alert, and it stared at her with wary, red eyes.
“No way,” Adelie said to herself, pushing to her feet and staring at the transformation. Had she made that happen? She glanced around just to be sure.
“Look,” someone shouted. “Look at that!”
“She did it. That girl—see that lady? She found him.”
“She found the white rabbit!”
Noise exploded. Applause signaled behind her. People gathered faster than kids to an ice cream truck. The handsome, strange man appeared at her side, clapping along with everyone else. The expression on his face was different though. Intuitive. Almost proud, though she wasn’t sure how that could be.
She lifted her hands in surrender and attempted to step back, losing her footing against the stool she’d been sitting on. “I—I didn’t know it would do that; I swear.”
“Something always happens here when those words are spoken,” the man said, sidling close to her and leaning in to be heard over the crowd, which had doubled in size in minutes. “But not many guests know it. I’ve kept it a secret on purpose.”
“You—you kept it secret?”
“Congratulations,” he said, flashing a knee-knocking smile at her. “You’ve won the scavenger hunt.”
The crowd clustered around her. People shouted and whooped exclamations of surprise and amazement.
Adelie’s mouth gaped. Her pulse pounded as the roaring noise around her increased to a deafening din. The good-looking man removed a phone from his pocket and spoke into it with one finger in his left ear, waving over what appeared to be a news crew.
The ground turned to glue. Adelie glanced around in desperation. Where was Suzie? Had she made it out of the fun house? She was the one who wanted to find the rabbit, not Adelie. What was she supposed to do now?
“You look a little shocked,” the man said, putting his arm around her and guiding her away from the tea party table and to the open path between the park’s street and the March Hare’s house. “You’ve just won my contest’s grand prize.”
He handed a letter to her, one in the same midnight-blue cardstock with the now-familiar same gold writing swirling across it. Another quote from the book probably, but Adelie couldn’t bring herself to concentrate enough to read it.
“You—your contest?” She took the folded letter he offered and held it in her hand.
“Sure,” he said. “This is my park. And you’ve just won my challenge. You’ve just won fifty-thousand dollars.”
Adelie couldn’t think. She couldn’t believe it. She’d found the rabbit. And the man who’d been sitting at the table with her? Had been Maddox Hatter.
CHAPTER FIVE
Adelie’s brain had turned to cotton. Cameras flashed. Phones took the place of faces. The rabbit skittered in its cage, and someone pronouncing herself as Wendy Hendricks kept ramming a microphone in Adelie’s face and asking for her name.
“A-Adelie,” she managed.
“Got a last name, Adelie?” Wendy asked, tipping the mic to her. A man in a blue baseball cap appeared, cradling a large, black video camera labeled WV3 on his shoulder and directing it right at her. Was she being recorded?
“Carroll.”
Crowds filtered out from the March Hare’s house, squeezing in as tightly around the area as they could. Maddox waved to them in greeting as though completely thrilled that even more people were attempting to squish into a space that was already packed. Someone else—a woman—barked an announcement over the crowd, shouting her name over and over.
“Adelie Carroll is the winner. Adelie! Adelie Carroll!”
Some clapped. Some folded their arms in disgust. Some shot glares so piercing they might as well have been daggers. Suzie mustered through the crowd, pushing past everyone with a fervent declaration.
“Excuse me, that’s my sister!”
Relief stole over Adelie like a downpour. Suddenly, things were a little easier with her sister there. Suzie gripped her hands and bounced up and down, squealing with delight. She kept repeating the same words over and over before moving on to the next.
“You? You. Did it. You did it!”
Adelie tucked a hair behind her ear. Suzie’s excitement was doing the job, trickling in and injecting her with its own dose of disbelief. This morning, she’d been despondent, frustrated and borderline hopeless. She never in her wildest dreams could have imagined this.
Fifty-thousand dollars for finding a bunny in a cage?
“All this for a scavenger hunt?” she mused, but the crowd around her was so deafening, she could barely hear herself.
“It is hard to believe,” Wendy went on, signaling to quiet the crowd. “When you came here this morning, did you ever think you’d actually win such a grandiose prize?”
“No,” Adelie said, warming up to the newscaster. A smile crept onto her cheeks. “I never thought I would.”
“Mr. Hatter,” Wendy turned to Maddox. Adelie had forgotten he was standing beside her. “Did the challenge take as long as you anticipated?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I thought it would be something swift. The clues weren’t all that challenging, at least not enough to be impossible.” He smiled. “I knew the table would be the trick.”
“So, tell me, Adelie,” Wendy said. “How exactly did you get the rabbit to appear?”
Adelie tried to think back to what had happened. She’d said the riddle aloud; it had served as a verbal password, triggering a change she never expected. Who knew the table would respond to a code like that? It made her wonder what Mr. Hatter usually kept in there.
“I—I just spoke the riddle to the table,” she said.
Wendy’s forehead indicated her confusion.
Mr. Hatter stepped in. “It’s always been something, one of those hidden tricks I never informed people about. A few have discovered it here and there, but anyone who sits and says those exact words, where the trigger can catch them, unlocks the table.”
Wendy’s mouth gaped open. She appeared completely spellbound by his words. Or maybe it was just standing close to someone who looked like he did. His eyes had the effect of a magnet.
“Incredible.” She shook herself before turning back to Adelie. “Tell me, Ms. Carroll. What are you going to do with your winnings?”
Adelie hesitated. She wasn’t sure where this interview would be broadcasted, and she wasn’t about to tell the entire world her problems or about the foreclosure with her house.
“I’ll figure something out,” she hedged with a smile. At this point, she could no longer manage to clear it from her cheeks, and if she was being honest, she didn’t want to. Fifty-thousand dollars. She’d won fifty-thousand do
llars.
Wendy turned to the cameraman to give her take on the report, and Mr. Hatter tilted in. “First interview?”
Adelie stared around the park in wonder as if seeing it for the first time. The lightness she’d longed to feel was there now, giving her the impression she was floating. Exhilaration fluttered through her, spiking her adrenaline in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time.
“First everything,” she admitted.
Another man with dark hair and a zip-up jacket joined Mr. Hatter’s side. He punched him in the shoulder and inclined his head to his left. Mr. Hatter nodded to him in unspoken communication and then tilted in again.
“Excuse me, Miss Carroll. Now that the surprise is over, I think we should take this to a quieter location. Would you care to join me?”
Oh goodness, this was really happening. She was really his grand prize winner. Adelie wasn’t sure what was more spine-tingling: that she was the winner, or his proximity and the prospect of having been invited somewhere by him. Either way, she’d take it.
Get a grip, she told herself. He's only inviting you because you're his winner.
“Where?” she managed.
“My office. Things will be much calmer there, and I can answer whatever questions you might have.”
Questions. Yes. She had those. Adelie had to admit, after such a bustling, emotional day, some solitude would be nice. She’d been looking forward to escaping the noise and crowds.
“That would be great. Do you mind if my sister comes?”
“Not at all.”
Mr. Hatter waved to the crowd, but it was already dispersing. People weren’t leaving the park, though—they were riding rides and enjoying their day in spite of the contest’s close. Several park guests even commended him on such a fun idea.
Dozens of riddle cards littered the walkways, being picked up by workers in imaginative, baggy uniforms with brightly colored pants in varying shades of the primary colors. Adelie walked in an unbalanced way as if on loose ground, her brain disconnected from the rest of her.
Alice And The Billionaire's Wonderland (Once Upon A Billionaire Book 3) Page 3