The Billionaire Glitch Date - Elle James Page 0,10

let her pick the location for the first date. That way she would know what to expect.

So, how did she go about letting him know she was interested? She scrolled down and found a button to push if she wanted to know more.

As she pressed her finger to the screen, another text came through, flashing across her phone.

Ariana, this is Dillon Jacobs. BODS matched us. Want to go out tomorrow?

Her heartbeat fluttered, and then pounded so hard she could barely breathe. As she positioned her hands to respond, the phone slipped and fell into the tub.

“Shit!” she cried, pushed to her feet and fished for her phone. Once she could get her fingers around it, she stepped out of the tub and wrapped the device in a towel.

Please, please, please, still work, she prayed as she dried the phone and looked down at the screen.

Nooooo! Ariana sank to the bathmat on the floor and shook the phone, hoping the water it had ingested would fly free and the phone would miraculously recover.

She tried rebooting it. Nothing.

Rice? Oven? Anything?

She ran naked through her house, dripping on the wood flooring. When she rounded the corner of the hallway and moved into the living room, she slipped and nearly crashed to the floor. A quick hand out to the side caught the wall, and she slowed her pace a little as she hurried to the kitchen.

She pulled out a glass casserole dish, poured uncooked rice into it, laid the phone in the rice and placed it in the oven. The she turned the oven on low and murmured a prayer. A friend had used this technique when she’d dropped her phone in the toilet. Surely bath water with essential oils wouldn’t be worse than toilet water.

With her phone in the oven, Ariana raced back to the bathroom, wrapped herself in her bathrobe and wiped up the trail of water from the bathroom to the kitchen before she fell and hurt herself.

When she got back to the kitchen, she pulled the phone out of the oven and tried it again. The damned thing wouldn’t even boot.

Ariana stared at the clock on the microwave. It was ten-thirty at night. Would Leslie still be awake? If she was, what could she do? Ariana needed a new phone and soon. Her match would be expecting her to answer his text, in the morning at the latest.

Now, she was beginning to rethink her decision to disconnect her land line. With no phone to make any calls, she couldn’t call Leslie, even if she wanted. Nor could she call Emma to ask if one of her brothers was named Dillon.

What about her computer? She could get on social media and look for Dillon Jacobs.

She hurried to her laptop and flipped it open. The battery was dead. Ariana ran with it to her office and plugged it into the charger.

Minutes later, she brought up the logon screen, keyed in her password and googled Dillon Jacobs.

As the screen was coming up, her laptop blinked out, the screen going completely blank.

Ariana squealed. “What the ever-lovin’ fuck!” Everything she touched seemed to be blitzing out on her. She didn’t have a desktop, having gotten rid of it in her effort to be more minimalistic. With no computer and no phone, she was out of luck. She couldn’t even consider calling Leslie for the phone number of the man who’d walked her out of the BODS offices.

Trudging back to her bedroom, Ariana dressed in her night clothes and lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. Hell, she was afraid to touch the remote for the television. It might break as well.

For a long time, she stared at the texture on the walls, imagining stairwell guy with a quirky smile on his face, laughing at her stress-reducing techniques. Where were they now? They sure as hell hadn’t worked when everything had blown way out of her control.

Ariana reminded herself that some things were worth worrying about. Others…well…it just wasn’t that important. In the scheme of things, not being able to respond to a text for one night wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t cancer. She’d live through the disappointment and frustration.

After a while, her eyelids drifted closed. Her last thought was not of the text she needed to reply to, but of the big guy she’d met at BODS. What was he doing at the moment? Was he thinking about her at all?

Chapter 4

Dillon laid awake half the night with his cellphone beside