“You want to take mine? I’m just going back to my office to go through reports. That way if you’re still at the store, you can dial in for the call.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
Weston held out his phone to me. “No problem. You already know my top-secret code.”
The gesture felt monumental. It was something a couple did for one another. Things we keep in our phones can be very personal—not that I was planning on scrolling through his and searching for anything. But it meant Weston had nothing to hide. Even more than that, it meant he trusted me. And that spoke volumes.
I took the phone and kissed him. “Thank you. I’ll tell you what, as a token of my appreciation, tonight we can do a live reenactment of your code.”
Chapter 24
* * *
Sophia
It was a good thing I borrowed Weston’s phone.
I’d been standing around the Verizon store, playing with a bunch of phones I had no interest in buying for the last forty minutes, waiting for my name to be called. I had to dial in for the conference call with the hotel’s attorney in five minutes. So I rummaged through my purse to find the paper with the telephone number. As luck would have it, one minute before the call was to begin, my name was called.
I held out my broken iPhone to the sales clerk. “Hi. My phone isn’t working. I dropped it, and it won’t turn back on. I have AppleCare on it, so if I could either get this one fixed right away or get a new one, that would be great.”
“Sure. No problem. Is your account under the email address you used to sign in for your appointment?”
“It is.”
“Okay. Let me have someone take a look at your phone, and then I can let you know your options.”
I looked down at the time on Weston’s cell phone. I needed to dial in for my call. “Do you know how long that will take? I have to jump on a phone call for work.”
“About fifteen minutes.”
I nodded. “Okay, great. If I’m still on my call when you’re ready for me, could you possibly take the next customer and come back to me?”
“Sure. No problem.”
What I thought would be a fifteen-minute phone call turned out to be nearly an hour. After I finally hung up, the sales rep was already on at least his third customer, so I had to wait for him to finish up. As I paced back and forth, Weston’s phone buzzed in my hand. Out of habit, I looked down to see who it was. The screen illuminated and showed a preview of an incoming text from someone named Eli that started: Yo, dude, did you fall off the face of the planet?
It made me smile because I was pretty sure most of my friends would feel the same way about me lately. I didn’t want to invade his privacy, so I didn’t swipe to open the rest of the message. But as I went to push the button on the side to turn off the screen, a second message popped up. This one was an email preview:
Did you get what we need from the Sterling girl?
I froze.
What was that about?
Certain I must’ve read it wrong the first time, I read the message preview again, more slowly. It had come from [email protected]
Did you get what we need from the Sterling girl?
My heart started to race, and I felt a little nauseous, though I tried to remain calm. There had to be a logical explanation for a message like that.
Maybe the email was from Sam Bolton… They’d gotten an estimate for the flood work and wanted both of our approvals to proceed.
Though that would be pretty fast.
And Oil40? Why would Sam’s email be something about oil?
I shook my head. I’m being ridiculous. This message could be any number of contractors Weston was working with. Why did my mind automatically go to the worst place and think something ominous was going on?
Maybe Weston had been getting bids for something and told the contractor he needed my sign-off? We’d been so busy lately that he probably hadn’t even mentioned it to me. That was it. That definitely had to be it.
Yet…
Did you get what we need from the Sterling girl?
The Sterling girl…
It was definitely not the right way for a contractor to refer to a person he wanted to do business with. But I suppose there are plenty of old-school idiots out there who still refer to a woman as a girl.
That was not Weston’s fault.
This contractor, whoever he was, was obviously a jerk.
In fact, I should probably open the email and take a look at the sender so I could be aware of exactly who referred to women in such a derogatory manner.
But… Weston had given me his phone because he trusted me, and opening his email would be a violation of that trust.
Though I’d already read the preview, so the damage had been done. Seeing the sender wouldn’t be anymore of an intrusion on his privacy than I’d already accidentally committed.
Not really, anyway.
Right?
I stared down at the cell phone with my finger ready to swipe open the preview. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt wrong, no matter how many different ways I tried to justify things in my mind.
So when the sales rep walked over to talk to me, I slipped Weston’s phone into my purse and tried to put thoughts of what I’d been about to do out of my mind. It turned out my phone wasn’t repairable, so the rep brought me a new one and offered to transfer all the information from my old phone. He said it would take another ten minutes, and he’d be back soon.
Unfortunately, that gave me more time to stand around and overanalyze.
Why did I feel so unsettled after one little preview of an email?
That wasn’t too hard to figure out.
Because I have trust issues. Just about every man I’d put my faith in had let me down. So, not surprisingly, my imagination wanted to think the worst.
Weston didn’t really have feelings for me.
He’d been using me to get something.
Did you get what we need from the Sterling girl?
God, the message sounded like something my father would say.
Get what we need from the Lockwood boy.
But there were so many ways to interpret that sentence. It could mean anything. But the bottom line was, if I opened his email, I’d be violating Weston’s trust. In some ways, I’d be no better than Liam. Because without trust, there was no relationship.
Miraculously, I managed to keep Weston’s cell phone in my purse while I finished up at the Verizon store. Outside on the street, the fresh air made me feel a tiny bit better. During the two-block walk back to The Countess, it dawned on me that Weston was going to see the email at some point after I handed him back his phone. If he was waiting to talk to me about something that had come up—whatever that email exchange referred to—he’d probably bring it up soon enough anyway. I likely wouldn’t have to wait long to feed my curiosity.
In an hour or two, I’d be laughing at how silly I’d been for stressing over some email from a sixty-year-old plumbing contractor or something like that. Weston would tell me he had an estimate to go over that needed my sign-off, and that would be that.
Yeah, that was what would happen.
I’d probably get a good laugh at myself, too.
Though as I walked back into The Countess, I definitely felt more anxious than amused.