Tip.
Toe.
Crouching, I take my time as I sleuth to the bed, studying him before moving forward another few inches.
He’s so eerily still, not even his chest is moving up and down.
The anticipation is making me anxious—I can’t wait to see the man jump out of his skin when I wake him up, the way I’m going to wake him up.
This is going to be so entertaining.
See, because our Scare Score is uneven (Posey: 2, Duke: 1), I’m no longer feeling so cocky and wasn’t willing to take the chance that he wouldn’t try to scare the shit out of me while I was still sleeping—the way I’m doing to him right now.
“You’re about to rise and shine, buttercup,” I whisper, reaching into my back pocket for a toy megaphone someone once got me as a gift, then reaching to remove the covers from his body so I can expose his face. Dude must be suffocating beneath all those blankets—
“OH MY GOD, DON’T TOUCH IT!” a deep voice bellows—no, yells—then blasts an air horn. It pierces the air, blaring behind me in three short spurts.
I scream—obviously, I scream—an ear-piercing screech so loud it could wake the dead and probably has, or at least woken poor Mrs. Galvin next door. Or maybe I don’t scream at all. Who knows. I'm so freaking freaked out I have no way of knowing if actual sound is coming from my body.
“Oh hey,” Duke says casually, emerging from between the guest room closet doors as if it were his office, or the bathroom and he belonged in there. “Almost didn’t see ya standing there.”
Liar.
Liar, liar, LIAR!
If he wasn’t on the other side of the room, I’d…I’d…
“Y-You…” I stutter, heart racing so wildly I have to sit on the edge of the bed and remind myself to breathe. I can barely put two sentences together. He scared me so bad. “Were you hiding in there?”
“Thought you’d pull a fast one over on me this mornin’, did ya?” He tosses the air horn on the bed. “Jeez, never thought you’d wake up. I was gettin’ so bored in there.”
When I pat my hand around the formation under the covers, my fingers sink in. “If you’re over there, then what is this?”
I yank the covers down.
Pillows.
Pillows!
That bastard created a dummy Duke with pillows, the oldest trick in the book!
And I fell for it.
He laughs at my pain, wasting no time bossing me around. “Come on, get dressed. I’m hungry and could use some caffeine.”
Duke extends his hand to help me off the bed.
“Can’t,” I tell him. “I’m too busy trying to get my heart back into a regular rhythm.”
“I got you good, didn’t I?”
Yeah, he sure did.
I shrug. “Whatever.”
He laughs. “Come on, Miss Scaredy Cat.”
Duke: 2, Posey: 2