“Oh my gosh!” a voice screeched behind us. “It’s Will Valentine!”
I cringed and spun around. A wave of dizziness overcame me and I stumbled, but that didn’t stop me from seeing my worst nightmare coming at us. The whole alleyway was filling with fangirls, even more than there had been on the street behind us before. One of the Valentine boys swore under his breath, but I wasn’t sure which one of them it was.
“Get in here!” Will ordered. I assumed he was talking to Tino, but the next thing I knew, someone was grabbing my arm and hauling me inside too. The door slammed shut with a clang that reverberated through the walls and made my head pound, although I would still prefer that to the screaming coming from outside.
“Where…” The question fell from my tongue as I spun around and came face-to-face with three more people: Noah and Logan Valentine (the other two-thirds of the band) and their bodyguard. The place was empty aside from them—and the hundreds of boxes and hangers of costumes that filled the room.
“We’re in the storage room of the Halloween store,” Will said in his gruff voice. His arms were crossed and he was looking at me with a gaze that made me feel a little like he somehow blamed me for the predicament we were in, even though I wasone of the few people in the room who wasn’t famous. “And it looks like you’ll be stuck here with us for a while.”
CHAPTER 3
tino
Lilah Turner was never morebeautiful than when she was mad at me. Which was pretty much always.
“Tell me again why you’re in here,” she demanded. We’d moved from the back storage room to the main area of the store, which the owners were nice enough to clear out so that we could hide comfortably. The street outside seemed almost deserted now from my view, but my brothers’ bodyguard insisted that we needed to stay inside until the cars showed up to take us home safely—me and Lilah to Hartwell Academy, and each of our brothers to a hotel for the night.
“Do you think I’m hiding some of the story from you?” I asked. I reclined in the spinny chair I’d found behind the counter, although the thing felt so unbalanced that I wouldn’t be surprised if I went toppling over. Lilah was sitting on the counter in front of me, a huge white bandage covering the side of her head where I’d slammed the door into it. The bodyguard had checked it over for her and reassured us the wound was superficial, but he was still worried about her possibly having a concussion. Lilah had been unfazed by that, saying that there was nothing we could do about it until we got out of here, thenpromised that if she felt nauseous, she would be sure to throw up in my direction.
“I just think it’s pretty convenient your brothers happened to be visiting on the same day mine was,” Lilah argued. Her legs were swinging back and forth like a kid sitting on a too-tall chair and I grinned at the motion. “And that you happened to be on the same street as us too.”
“Do you think I planned this?” I asked. “That I eavesdropped on your conversations to find out when your brother was visiting, then invitedmybrothers to come the same day, and then spread the word that we would be on this street so we would all be forced to hide together?”
She gave me a look that told me that was exactly what she thought happened. Maybe I should have been more offended than I was, but really, I couldn’t totally blame her for thinking so because it did sound like something I would do to get some alone time with her.
“Well, I didn’t,” I said firmly. “Besides, if I were the mastermind behind some plan to make sure we would end up locked in a store together, don’t you think I would have also planned for it to happen without our brothers present?”
I pointedly looked toward the back corner of the store where Noah, Logan, Will, and Luca were sitting on the floor getting a tarot reading by one of the employees. She looked to be only a couple of years older than us and was very obviously flirting with Will, but he was completely oblivious. Even though they were seemingly occupied, I could feel them glancing in our direction every minute or two like they were making sure we weren’t doing anything untoward. Then I glanced at the front of the store where the bodyguard was on the phone, probably arranging for more security to come, but also pointedly keeping an eye on us as well.
“Point taken,” Lilah sighed.
“And for the record, I would have also planned it in a way that didn’t involve me hitting you in the face with a door,” I added. “That just feels like an important thing for you to know.”
Lilah’s lips quirked into an almost smile and I felt a weird pang in my chest. It was a strange feeling, a cross between being happy that I could make her smile like that at all and being sad that she hardly ever let me. She laughed at me a lot, but seeing her genuinely smile at my jokes was a rare enough occurrence that I just stared at her now, wanting to memorize the look on her face.
“I’m bored,” Lilah announced a minute later, breaking the perfect image. She jumped down from the counter, then squeezed her eyes shut and wobbled as she landed like she thought she got dizzy. I immediately jumped to my feet and put my hands out so I could catch her if she needed me to, but a moment later, she was fine and walking off like nothing happened.
Which pretty much summed Lilah up as a whole.
She walked down the first aisle toward the front of the store, pulling costumes out at random and studying them, then putting them back on the rack. A couple of times, she pulled out a costume and held it up to me with a thoughtful expression, but every time, she found a reason it wouldn’t look good—too blue, it was too long, reminded her too much of Shrek—and she’d put it back with a smirk. I refused to take any offence to her comments, which made her lips twist in an adorable frown. I thought we were going to continue the process down another aisle, but as we reached the front end of the store, she suddenly stopped and spun around with a wild grin on her face.
“What?” I asked, immediately on edge. When Lilah looked that happy, it usually meant something bad for me. She didn’t say anything, but she turned to the shelves lining the wall. They were filled with boxes and packages of costumes. I assumed theywere just packaged versions of the ones hanging on the racks, but Lilah seemed to have her eyes on one in particular that I had to assume she hadn’t seen out.
She sighed. “Why are they so high?” I watched as she put her foot on one of the lower shelves and put a little weight into it like she was testing whether it could hold her. A moment later, she pulled her foot back down with another loud sigh, which made me think she decided it wasn’t—and thank goodness for that, because I could see at a glance that it wasn’t stable enough to anyone’s weight and I could only imagine how fun it would be to try to catch her while boxes of costumes rained down around us.
Then again, maybe catching her would be super romantic and she would finally realize how perfect together we were.
I mean, probably not, but a boy could dream.
“Want some help?” I asked. I wasn’t sure which one in particular she was reaching for but it was obvious she was aiming for the second highest shelf, which was just out of her reach.
“No, I can get it!” Lilah insisted. She was on her tiptoes now and tugging at the thin cardboard box, her whole body wiggling with every pull. Normally I might have been happy to stand back and laugh at her attempts, but it had been less than an hour since I slammed a door into her head, and right now, all I could imagine was that box also crashing on her head and making it even worse.
I sighed. “Just let me help you. I’ve got better reach.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all know you’re taller than me,” she said without letting go of the box.
She pulled again and it shifted forward about an inch, making her goah-ha!I decided not to point out that it was barely any closer to coming off the shelf as I stepped up behind her and grabbed the box myself, carefully pulling it down around her so it didn’t smack her in the head. It was hilarious, really,how easily it was in my reach when she’d barely been able to get a grip on it even when standing on her tip toes. Had she always been that short? I’d never noticed before.
