“It’s a win or lose thing?” I asked.
Dominico nodded and looked away, but not before I caught his smile.
Fine. If he didn’t want to give up any clues about what we were doing, I would pump him for other information. “You never got the chance to tell me about your family,” I said, drawing his attention back to me.
The server brought our drinks. Dominico held up a finger and took a sip. “That was intentional,” he admitted. “You don’t really want to hear about them.”
“Yes, I do. Do you have any siblings besides Michael and your sister who’s about to get married?”
“Nope. Just the three of us.”
I could tell by the way his smile disappeared that he didn’t want to talk about them, but I wasn’t willing to let it go. I needed to know something about him. “Your parents still married?”
“Yep.” He looked at melike I was crazy, which told me divorce wasn’tan issue in his world.
“Nice. What are they like?”
“You’re like a dog with a bone,” he said.
“Is getting to know you really that bad?”
He chuckled and played with his glass. “Well played. Mamma is nice. Smart. Forever trying to shove food down our throats. It’s a miracle we’re all not three hundred pounds. You’d like her.”
I giggled. “Is she a good cook?”
“Oh, the best.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“Present company excluded,” he amended. “But if you ever tell her I said that, I will deny it.”
Mimicking the gesture he’d shown me the first night he took me home, I held up my right hand and said, “Scouts honor.”
“You’re tellin’ meyouwere a Boy Scout?” he asked.
I leaned back in my chair and threw up my hands. “No more than you were.”
He held my gaze for a moment before breaking into a smirk. “Touché.”
Dominico’smother was ahousewife and hisfather was somesort of businessman. I made a mental note to ask Papa if he knew anyone in the Mariani family so I could find out more, but was unable to squeeze anything else out of Dominico before a man approached and introduced himself.
“My name is John and I’ll be your guide for this evening. Are you ready to begin the challenge?”
A challenge? I raised my eyebrows at Dominico and he nodded. We grabbed our drinks and followed John out of the restaurant and down the hall. He opened a door and waved for us to precede him into a large room decorated and furnished in an early 1900s motif, before handing us each a spy glass and a Sherlock Holmes style hat. Then he started in on the spiel.
“This is the escape room, which means your goal will be to escape it. To do this, you’ll need to solve five riddles that will each give you one of the numbers on this lock.” He pointed at the keypad on the wall. “Enter all five numbers and the door will unlock and you will win.”
A little thrill ran up my spine. I’d heard of places like this before, but had never been in one. I scanned the room as he continued speaking, wondering where all the clues were hiding.
“In a moment, I’ll hand you your first clue,” John continued. “It will lead you to the first number and your clue to the next. You will have sixty minutes to solve the lock and escape the room before an alarm sounds, letting the entire establishment know you failed.”
Well that explained a lot. “You shame the losers?” I asked.
Dominico grinned. “Amateurs. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”
John didn’t look nearly as certain about our sleuthing abilities as he handed over our first clue, wished us luck, and then let himself out. The door clicked locked behind him, and the second hand on the giant wall clock started ticking.
“Have you done this before?” I asked.
