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Thinking back, maybe they should have noticed that I wasn’t a bad girl. I was just bored. Well, maybe I was bad. Maybe I just didn’t care.
I wondered what Gertie was doing right now. Halle would have checked in on her. We had an understanding. I took care of Dick, her lizard, and she took care of my Gertie. What a life to lead, that’s what I’d left behind.That and Roman.
And that pissed me off. No one was taking me away from my Gertie. Still, what to do? Windows were out since they had those stupid alarms and that would give them more time than they deserved. Plus, that drop looked more James Bond than Emilee Rossi. Maybe in my younger years. I laughed. I was still young. But dumb seemed to have found its way out of my head the moment I had to be an adult.
Adulting was hard. All this damn logic.
I hated the logic that told me I’d been illogical with Roman. If I were being honest, I was being a brat. The idea that I’d been forgotten that night, it had scared me. All those times waking up alone in a house with nothing but a nanny that hated me or a guard that despised kid duty. I’d woken up and years of resentment and sadness had been so like drowning that taking in the reality felt like trying to pull more water in past already filled lungs. I just couldn’t.
That made me sad now.
Would Romy-poo forgive me?
Kicking my feet off the bed and sitting myself up, I had a little thinking session, which wasn’t really my thing, so it didn’t last long.
I was more of a do and think later kind of gal, and right now I needed to do something or my entire body was going to implode. I’d be the first to admit that although I’d learned how to wait at boarding school, I’d never mastered it.
Out the door I went and through the hall. Neither of the guards were there, but that was just a decoy, I was certain.
The hall was short for something that had five bedrooms on it, or maybe that was just my perspective. Still, I didn’t much like it. This marriage was doomed from the start. I looked right and left. The odd area the other way was most likely the master bedroom and from the look of it, the hall there was open to the downstairs. I’d go at least take a peek at that.
A few steps and there was still no action, no movement, not even a shadow. I got on all fours and crawled to the edge and looked around the wall. Through the slats in the railing. I wasn’t wrong. During the day, this also probably had a really pretty mountain view. At night? Creepy.
No one was downstairs. Maybe it was too late, and everyone went to bed thinking I would just comply. Joke was on them.
I hated the house layout, but retracing my steps got me to the staircase where I watched every single step and waited for a stair to betray me. My luck might have been improving, because that didn’t happen.
A few more steps and I was going to blow this popsicle stand, as they said. Or at least open a window down here that set the alarm off.
Tile floor, a table or two staged with a perfect plant. Who was paying for all this? Not Vinny.
My feet were cold on the tiles. I’d forgotten my shoes, but that was fine. My escape would start here, and I would just start with the room right off the main entrance. A long table and nearly a dozen chairs said it was the formal dining room.
I reached for the bay window. The window directly in the middle had a latch, so I pushed it open and slid the heavy window aside.
Just as I expected, the alarm sounded, and I ran.
I could have planned better, but I didn’t really want to spend hours figuring out anything. I just wanted new, exciting, and distracting so I could get out the back door. At this point, if I passed a window, I was opening it. No new alarms sounded, but they would have to figure out the what to the problem before they caught me. I was pretty sure of that.
I ran through rooms, and I was really close to getting through a study and back to the living room I’d been brought to earlier. I could do this.
If I didn’t succeed, at least no one was sleeping tonight.
TWENTY-THREE
roman
We’d followedthe mountain road up to the gates and left the car.
“Are there bears up here? Why did your aunt own this place? It doesn’t seem Rossi like.”
Parks grabbed out two packs and put them on the side of the road.
“Fucking change. We aren’t hiking through this shit in loafers. And what? You don’t own any properties in the tropics or something? I don’t remember much of my aunt, but my mother had said that she was one of the few Rossi’s that was not an asshole. It’s why I guess I latched onto Emilee. She wasn’t an asshole. Wild and fun, but she loved me. Rare in my family.”
Not pushing was something I was good at. Besides, I didn’t need to sit down and braid his hair or have him wanting to paint each other’s nails. He wasn’t giving me more, and it told me enough. What fucking families had love? Except that hit deep. Emilee was my chance.
I was done spending my nights alone. Parks was right. She wasn’t an asshole. I slipped on the hiking boots. They weren’t the most comfortable things I’d worn, but he was right. They were better than what I had.
