Billionaire Ghost Tour - Stephanie Fowers Page 0,40
making deathbed confessions, she’d let him have it. As it was, she’d still tease him. She lifted a brow and lied through her teeth. “I thought nothing of it, actually.”
“Nothing?” Janson’s thumbs caressed the palm of her hand as he watched her under the lashes of his deep-set eyes. “I’m calling your bluff. You must think something of me to set a trap up for me in the catacombs.”
“Of course not. We just keep ghosts in the rafters for our more rambunctious customers.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “I’m sure you do.”
Mollie took an unsteady breath. She’d rather talk about scaring people than that startling, appalling... incredible kiss. She latched onto his change of subject. “We have a broken piece of ground at the end of the tunnel, and we have it set up so that when anyone steps on it, a cloth flies down out of the rafters and freaks out anyone standing under it.”
He let out a low grumble of laughter. “I would’ve made you pay for that.”
“It probably would’ve worked best on Dwayne.”
He was silent a moment. “Dwayne’s still guarding the door,” he muttered. Janson brought up his legs and sat up, watching her intently. He still kept his voice down. “I know you wanted us to come here for a reason. Was that why? So you could scare these guys?”
She wished she’d been brilliant enough to have some Home Alone plan tucked up her sleeve to take out their captors in imaginative ways, but no. “I wanted to get to my phone.” Obviously that wasn’t going to work anymore. “I actually left it in the front desk drawer.” After Charlize had told her that Janson was in town last night, she’d been a little distracted. A lot distracted. She had planned to pick it up at the end of the ghost tour.
He didn’t press the issue. “How well do you know these catacombs?”
He probably wouldn’t like the answer. “They don’t go far, and they’re sealed off with stone walls. There’s another way out to the side there, but...”
“Another way?”
“Yes, but it just goes out into the same room Dwayne’s still in. He’ll always be between us and the exit out of this building. There are curtains out there on the other side of the room that we could hide behind, but I’m not sure how long we could stay there without him catching on.”
His dark brows drew in hawk-like over his glittering eyes. “How do we get out this exit?”
“The end of the tunnel, behind us.”
“And that’s by your ghost trap? You think we can scare Dwayne with that?”
She took a deep breath. That was like asking a fish if she could swim. “Are you kidding?” she breathed. “I specialize in creepy.”
He scrambled to his feet, cradling his hurt arm. His body shook like it was full of adrenaline that he didn’t know what to do with. He took her hand and pulled her towards the tunnels. “Let’s lure him in here and trap him inside. Then we can just leave.”
Her heart lurched. Now that they had a plan in action, she was more terrified than before. They weren’t taking their chances with fate anymore. If this didn’t work, she had a feeling they’d face whatever horrible ending his stepmother had planned for them sooner. Stepping carefully, she guided Janson through the dank tunnels, avoiding the puddles from the dripping pipes. The neon flares above them turned from purple to blue to red, glowing over Janson’s stoic profile. His eyes followed the odd things hanging from the ceiling here and there until she tugged him away. “That’s not it.”
There was no telling where those fake bats and cobwebs came from. People were creative. A mirror had been placed in the center of a narrow hall, which marked where some workers from before had rigged up the rag to fall from the rafters. She pointed to the broken floor, a finger to her lips. They were near the other opening of the catacombs, and Dwayne would overhear anything they had to say from that room. “There.” She pointed.
He nodded, and they edged around the crumbling bit of floor to get to the barred cell door that hung wide open. It might’ve belonged to a jail cell at an earlier time. She glanced over at Janson, not sure what he was planning exactly, but his gaze was caught on the escape route with such a burning need that her questions died on her lips.
He swallowed hard. He’d been