flannel shirt.
Nothing there, I knelt to search under the bed, since it made sense that a person in such a precarious position would try to hide the evidence. As far as I could tell, there were several dust bunnies but no shirt.
Had he hidden it in his luggage? I walked over to the closet for a look-see.
Sure enough, there was a dark-green backpack. I thrust my arm deep inside and rustled around. Contact case. (He wore glasses?) A bottle of leaking sunscreen. Ick! And . . .
“Can I help you?”
Crap. Trolls!
I yanked my hand out of the backpack, wiped the sunscreen on my dress, and came out of the closet to find none other than Dash Merrill himself recently returned from the shower, dripping wet, with only a rather small white towel wrapped around his hips.
Gentle Reader: I have not led a sheltered life. I’m a frequent beachgoer, and I’ve seen plenty of guys with their shirts off. And some I’d literally pay good money to put their shirts on. Dash did not fall into that latter category, because he was Dash Merrill and his body was amazing. Smooth chest. Impressive shoulders. Muscular in a natural, i.e., not weird iron-pumping way.
“Hi!” I held up my hand dripping with white sunblock, mortification seeping through my pores.
I realized then that “looking for Marcus” wasn’t going to cut it, as it was very rare to find normal high school seniors, even those of questionable intelligence, hanging out in their friends’ backpacks. In their closets.
Dash closed the door behind him. “You mind, uh, explaining what’s going on?”
“What?” I said innocently.
He pointed to the closet. “You going through my pack.”
“Was I going through your pack?” I conjured a dismissive chuckle. “No, no. Hardly. The Queen asked me to do a spot-check for illicit food.” I dropped my voice and cupped my mouth in confidentiality. “Apparently we have a bit of a problemus rodentis.”
He wasn’t buying my ruse. “Shouldn’t that be Maintenance’s thing?”
“It will be, if we find the mice.”
“I thought you just said there’s a rodent problem.”
“An alleged rodent problem. You have to stay on top of these things, you know, if you don’t want to be infested with rats.”
Dash tossed his black Dopp kit on the bed. “Gee,” he said, keeping a tight clutch on that towel. “And here I thought you were searching for something else.”
I swallowed hard. Was he implying what I thought he was implying? “Nope. Just food, other than, of course, Marcus.”
“Marcus?” He raised an eyebrow. “In my closet?”
“Or thereabouts.” The trick was to keep your tone calm and even.
“Marcus isn’t here. He’s down in Wardrobe getting his coat altered. If you hold on a minute, I’ll take you there.”
I started to say that wasn’t necessary, since I went to Wardrobe twice a day and obviously knew the territory, but Dash insisted. “If you wouldn’t mind turning your head . . .”
Had I been staring? Oh my. Red-faced, I stepped inside the closet again and closed the door while outside, inches away, Dash slipped into one of those boxers I’d probably touched. Seconds later he opened the closet wearing a gray tee and jeans. He put his finger to his lips, like I wasn’t supposed to talk.
“Come on,” he said loudly. “I’ll take you to Marcus.”
I followed him dumbly down the hall, my mind reeling in confusion. We walked through the doors and past a security troll to the elevator that would take us directly to Our World. We got in. Went down one floor, and the elevator lurched to a stop.
Dash had pushed the emergency button and taken off his shirt, throwing it over the small camera in the corner. Monitor #21, I believed. Not that, you know, I spent too much time staring at the camera in the elevator to the Princes’ Tower. Ahem.
“I’ll make this quick,” he said, looking down at me with a kind of longing that I found half intriguing, half freaky. But mostly intriguing. “I want to thank you for last night. You really saved me with that heads-up.”
Holy . . . ! I was gobsmacked. Dash was my prince? I’d been right? “So it was you?”
He grinned sheepishly, busted. “I don’t want to bring you into this any more than I have to. I just need to know you’re not going to tell . . .” He cocked his head toward the camera. “She’s monitoring my every move these days, so I think she’s on to me.”
“I’m not going to tell, and by