The Rivals - Vi Keeland Page 0,85

that warm feeling once again. I looked up at him. “When did you buy these?”

“A few days ago. They were just delivered by messenger, so I figured I’d use them as a white flag.”

“You bought us tickets to an event a few months away before we’d even had a discussion about our future?”

“You’re the only one who needed that discussion to make things formal, Soph.”

I stood, walked around my desk, and wrapped my hands around his neck. “Why don’t you go lock the door…”

Weston flashed a cocky smile. “Already did on my way in, sweetheart.”

***

I tucked my blouse into my skirt and turned my back to Weston. “That works better than Xanax,” I said over my shoulder. “Zip me, please.”

He zipped my skirt and pushed my hair to the side to kiss my neck. “Happy to be of service. What’s on your agenda for the rest of the afternoon?”

I turned and smoothed down my clothes. “We have that conference call with Elizabeth, the hotel’s attorney, in a little while about the new lawsuit. I’d planned on running to the store to get a new cell. I dropped it earlier, and now it won’t turn on.” I looked at my watch. “But I don’t think I’m going to have time. I don’t want to miss the start of the call, and there’s usually a line at Verizon ”

“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