Staying On Top (Whitman University) by Payne Lyla

Author:Payne, Lyla [Payne, Lyla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-06T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Sam

I’d followed Blair’s eyes to the vents. The blinking red lights were innocuous to me, but they seemed to mean something to her—nothing good. They had to be cameras, or some kind of alarm. The sirens grew louder, inched closer, and the muscles in my legs tightened, aching to move.

When she came back into the living room, the snapping tension in her eyes made everything real. The control with which she moved, the calm flowing from her, helped me breathe.

She was a constant contradiction. A bundle of nerves in situations I considered normal, chill when we were about to get arrested for trespassing.

“What do we do?”

“We need to get out of here, obviously,” she whispered.

“There’s not another road, so there’s no way back to the car.”

Blair gave me a look that said duh, so I decided to stop thinking out loud. Instead I worried silently about Mari’s car and how she was going to explain why it was abandoned out there.

“What did you see in the bedrooms? Is there a balcony? What’s behind the house?”

The low volume of her voice and the pounding of my heart in my ears made it hard to decipher her questions. It finally made sense and I closed my eyes, trying to remember.

“We’re a little short on time, here.”

“Your impatience isn’t helping,” I murmured. “Okay. There’s a balcony that overlooks the river off the master bedroom. The rest of it is woods. Undeveloped.”

She walked off without answering me. I followed in silence as she poked her head into a couple of rooms before finding the master. We both went in and she closed the door, then yanked open the French doors leading to the balcony.

We peered together over the railing, cold morning air freezing the nervous sweat on my skin. Blair shivered and it crossed my mind to offer her my jacket. My mind, my autopilot, had been derailed by the sound of those police sirens, though. And the idea that they were coming here for us.

She turned to me, dark eyes stoic. “We have to jump.”

“Jump? Are you crazy?”

“It’s not too far to the river—sixty feet at the most. It’s the only way we’re not going to get caught.”

“So what if we get caught?” I hadn’t thought too much about this whole trip until I stood facing a sixty-foot jump into a freezing cold river, but Leo would kill me for running around trying to find Neil on my own. My trainer would kill me if I got injured. If the fall didn’t. “You’re his daughter, right? Don’t you have some kind of right to be here?”

“That’s not really the point, is it? We get caught, they contact my dad to check out my story and verify that we’re not trespassing, and your jig is up. If we don’t surprise my dad, it’s over. He knows we’re looking, he disappears.” She crossed her arms, her expression almost lazy. “It’s up to you, Bradford. What do you want to do?”

“How do you know the

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