Not that it was a yes, either, mind you. No matter how magical that night seemed, I wasn’t about to actually have sex in a bounce house that got rented out for kids’ parties.
But I could still lose myself in the moment when Horst kissed me again, his hands still slowly working my shirt up my body, the sound of the fan keeping the castle inflated rising sharply, almost like...
Sirens.
Police sirens.
Chapter Fifteen
Horst’s head snapped up, and he held very still for a moment, holding his breath as though that might help him hear better. Then, as the sound became undeniable, he swore under his breath.
“The police are here,” I said.
“Yeah.” Horst pulled his hands away from me and grabbed his pipes, blowing a quick tune before shoving them back into his pocket. “I think the slide might be the fastest way out, don’t you?” And with that he swept me against his side and leapt onto the slide like something out of an action movie.
It was pretty hot, actually. It might have been hotter had we been, I don’t know, swinging on vines across an alligator-filled moat or something and not bouncing our way down an inflatable castle slide painted to look like a pastel rainbow, but whatever.
We reached the drawbridge at the bottom, the impact of hitting what seemed to be an extra springy part of the castle bouncing me onto Horst’s chest. I gazed down at him, at his beautiful face that seemed almost to be carved from living wood, his heavily lashed honey-mead eyes that always seemed to hold both a secret and a promise, and his incredibly kissable lips. For a moment, I forgot that we were, you know, running from the law, and it seemed like Horst did, too.
And then Oomy appeared out of nowhere, making frantic kobold squeaks, and the whooshing stopped suddenly as unseen kobolds apparently unplugged the inflatable, which began rapidly sinking around us.
Horst grinned as though this was all part of a regular day for him—and for all I knew, it could be—and rolled to his feet, helping me up. We stopped to shove our feet into our shoes, andthen we darted for the back door, which seemed like a mistake to me. Wouldn’t the cops be waiting out there for us? They hadn’t come through the front door yet, the one closest to the inflatables, so they had to be out back.
But there was no one there when we emerged from the warehouse. Horst hustled me to the car, breathing a sigh of relief as we closed the doors behind us. “That was a close one,” he said, leaning back against his seat. Then he straightened up. “Oops. Spoke a little too soon.”
Turning, I saw the flash of a police light at the far end of the strip mall.
That was when it hit me. The cops weren’t there for Bounce Bounce Bounce. They were there for a different business. The one at the other end of the block.
The pawn shop with the deer targets in the window.
Headlights briefly blinded me as the cop car drove along the back side of the strip mall, obviously checking everything out.
Horst’s hands slipped to the hem of my shirt again. “I’m going to need you to take this off.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m just very interested to see what bra you have on today. Your black one? Maybe something in red? Or even...leopard print?”
“The cops are going to be here any minute. Shouldn’t we get out of here?”
“Too late now. If they see us driving off, they’ll be all over us.” He leaned over the center console, setting his lips to the base of my throat and scraping his teeth over the sensitive skin there. “It’s called an alibi. Just go with it.”
Maybe Horst kissing my neck just plain made me stupid, or maybe the whole night had eroded my good sense, or maybe I really did just make the worst decisions, but I allowed Horst to strip my shirt off and toss it into the back seat. Then he shovedhis hands through my hair, tousling it thoroughly as he crushed his lips against mine.
