The next thing she knew, they were lying on their sides. The hard dirt beneath her didn’t even feel bad. All she cared about was Liam. He rested beside her. His shirt was off. She traced a tattoo of an odd-looking cross symbol on his shoulder.
His hand slipped under her shirt and the kisses grew hotter, sweeter.
Natasha moved her hand down his abs and around his waist.
They should stop before it went too far, but then logic intervened. All they had right now was each other. How could it be wrong to cling to that?
His fingers slipped beneath her bra and brushed over her nipple. It felt heavenly and so real. Even more real than before.
She turned her head, let her eyes drift open and saw a tennis shoe. Natasha’s shoe. Natasha’s closet. The she felt a hand again, on her breast.
“Shit!” Della muttered, snapping out of it. “Get your hand off my—”
“Shh.” Chase’s other hand, the one that wasn’t fondling her boob, pressed over her mouth.
Della instantly remembered why they had to be quiet. But his hand, still gently cupping her breast, stayed where it was. And while she hated admitting it, it felt heavenly. But also wrong. Crazy wrong.
“Move your other hand, now,” she whispered through his palm in a voice low enough he couldn’t complain, but he must have heard her deadly intent, because his eyes widened.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t … I wasn’t.” His voice came lower than a whisper, for her ears only. “Oh, hell, I’ll move my hand if you move yours.”
My hand? Still struggling to connect with her own body and to leave the vision, her breath caught with the startling realization. Chase wasn’t the only one getting touchy-feely. Her hand was down the back of his jeans, under his soft cotton underwear, and gently caressing his butt. Blood rushed to her face instantly.
She yanked her hand out of his pants.
“Easy,” he said again, slipping his hand out from under her shirt and pulling her against him. She started to struggle and he whispered, “You’re going to hit the wall and we’re going to get caught.”
Caught making out in Natasha’s closet while her parents were downstairs, a voice inside her said. She listened, not to the voice, but to what was happening in the house. Sure enough, she heard voices, a male and female.
She took a deep, sobering breath and slowly shifted away, getting a few inches from Chase. But it didn’t make her feel better. How could it?
She’d just gone to second base with the Panty Perv. Unintentionally. But it still counted, didn’t it?
She tried to remember anything about it—him touching her, her touching him—but all she could remember was being Natasha and being high on Liam’s kisses.
That’s when she knew Chase had been inside Liam, just as she’d been inside Natasha. Did that mean she couldn’t get mad at Chase? Probably. Somehow, she got the feeling he hadn’t been the one to slip her hand in his pants. She’d done that all by herself. Or with Natasha’s help.
Oh, but she still wanted to be mad at Chase.
And when he looked at her, she glared at him. It might have been wrong, but it still felt good.
He frowned. “I think we can leave … quietly. They both seem to be downstairs. We should be able to open the window and jump without them seeing us.”
She gulped tension down her throat. Two kinds of tension. The one she felt low in her belly from Chase touching her, and the other kind. The kind that said they weren’t out of the woods yet—they could still get arrested for breaking and entering. It didn’t matter if the window had been open.
On her hands and knees, she followed him out of the closet. As she rose up, her gaze shifted up to his butt, his cute muscular butt, and she blushed again.
He carefully and quietly lifted the window then looked back at her. “Jump to the right, out of view of the front window. Stay behind the trees, and head to the car. I’ll be right behind you.” His words came so low she barely heard them.
She did as he said, and landed to the far right of the window. She made it to the line of trees. The sun had already started to rest in the west. The golden light caught on the red and yellow leaves and made them look even brighter.
Adrenaline took her another few steps, then she stopped. She hadn’t heard him land. She looked back. Chase wasn’t there. Where the hell was he?
One. Two. Three. She was giving him to ten, then she was going in after him.
She got all the way to nine when he finally appeared at the window and leapt out, landing on his feet a good ten feet away from the view of the window.
Together, they made their way through the small patch of trees to the road. When Della spotted the blue Camaro, she could almost breathe.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“Get in, and I’ll tell you.”
And that’s when Della noticed the bulge under his shirt. “You took something!” she seethed. “They’ll know, damn it. They probably have everything in that room memorized.”
“It was in the closet, behind some shoe boxes. I don’t think they even knew it was there.” He pulled out a small book. “I think it’s a diary.”
Della instantly thought of Miranda and her diary. Sure, Della had teased her about wanting to read it, but she wouldn’t have. Those were private.
“That wasn’t yours to take,” Della said.
“If it helps us find Natasha and Liam, I’ll gladly take any hell you want to give me for stealing.”
Della fought with her conscience, debating if he’d been right or wrong, then decided she probably would’ve done the same thing. But for some reason that didn’t stop her from feeling as if Chase had done something wrong.
Maybe she was just still angry at him about other things. Things that involved them on a closet floor. Oh, yeah, that had been so wrong.
They got in the car and Chase raised the top to make them less noticeable, and took off. As they passed the house, a man and woman were outside the house looking up at the open window. They zipped past, but Della did notice the man standing beside Natasha’s mom wasn’t the man in the family picture. Nevertheless, seeing them outside told Della just how close they’d come to being caught.
Too close.
* * *
“You getting anything helpful?” Chase asked fifteen minutes later, She hadn’t spoken since they’d left Natasha’s neighborhood as she read through the diary.
“No,” Della said. “It’s normal stuff, and it dates back almost two years.” She looked down at the handwritten notes from Natasha’s diary.