I feigned embarrassment, chewing on the inside of my cheek as I looked down at the floor. “I don’t have Spotify or any other streaming services. I know they’re not that expensive, but it all adds up, and I’m trying to save as much—”
He held up a palm to cut me off. “I get it. I’ll use mine.”
He pulled out his phone and typed in his unlock code. My heart hammered in my chest as I glanced up at the tiny wireless button cam Adam had stuck on the bottom of the chandelier earlier today.
While it was on and transmitting a bird’s eye view of my room to his computer at home, a tiny yellow light flashed on the side of it. It wasn’t obvious at all, but the sooner Adam got what we needed and switched it off, the less anxious I’d feel. Hunter could look up at any moment for any reason, and if he happened to spot the tiny light amongst the chandelier globes, he’d instantly know what I was up to.
My phone vibrated on my bed a second later, and I went over and picked it up. It was Adam. Got it, he said. 9483. You’re on your own now. Good luck ;)
I glanced up at the chandelier again, breathing a sigh of relief as I saw that the little light had gone off. Now there was no way Hunter would ever know it was there.
I deleted Adam’s message and switched over to the local food delivery app on my cell. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I said, looking over at Hunter. “I thought we might get hungry, so I ordered some pizza.”
“You should’ve let me order,” he said. “The places around here aren’t exactly cheap.”
My smile tightened. “It’s okay. I can afford takeout once in a while.”
Hunter’s brows furrowed. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant…” He trailed off and hesitated, slightly shaking his head. “Never mind. You said you wanted the new Moonsorrow album?”
“Uh-huh.”
Deep, rhythmic music filled the air, and Hunter grinned and set his phone down on my nightstand. “There you go.”
“Awesome. Thanks,” I said, taking a step closer. “Hey, do you think you could do me another favor?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
I bit my bottom lip, trying to look as nervous and helpless as possible. “Well, the app says the pizza will be here in six minutes, but the delivery guy can’t come into Blair Hall and drop it at my door because he hasn’t got an RFA keycard to get into the building. So I have to meet him outside,” I said. “The thing is… I’m kinda nervous about going out at night right now, because some really creepy things have happened to me lately.”
Hunter lifted his brows. “Really?”
“Yeah. It sucks,” I went on, sighing deeply. “You know, someone even managed to get into my room while I was asleep one night,” I added, as if I genuinely had no idea it was him. I lowered my eyes to the floor. “I think it was just a prank, because it was the same night as the Friday the 13th party, but still… it was really scary.”
“That’s horrible,” Hunter said softly, taking the opportunity to rub my arm in a comforting manner. “I’m so sorry.”
Fucking asshole.Good actor, though. For a second I almost believed he wasn’t involved in the whole thing.
“Anyway, could you go outside and wait for the pizza?” I said, holding my phone out toward him. I figured if I did that, giving him my full trust, he’d be more likely to trust me in return. “While you do that, I can go and freshen up.”
Everyone knew what ‘freshen up’ was code for.
Hunter took the bait and grabbed my phone. “Sure. I’ll get it.”
I gave him a winning smile. “Thanks. I’ll leave the door open for you to get back in.”
He stepped out of the dorm with my phone, and just as I expected, he left his own phone on my nightstand, still playing the new Moonsorrow album. As far as he knew, I had no idea what his unlock code was, so he was perfectly safe leaving it here for a few minutes.
He also had my phone on him, completely unlocked, so if he wanted, he could spend the next five minutes going through it while he waited for the delivery guy to show up. It didn’t matter, because I’d deleted anything suspicious, so he wouldn’t find anything.
I wedged a shoe in my door to leave it open for him when he finally returned with the food—I knew he still had a keycard for the lock, but he didn’t know that I knew that, so he couldn’t exactly use it—and then I hurried over to his phone and used the code Adam sent me to unlock it.
I turned off the music, set the call volume to silent, and hurried into the bathroom to hide it in one of the vents. Then I raced back into my bedroom and grabbed the decoy phone Adam had procured for me earlier this week. It was the exact same model as Hunter’s, only it didn’t work. It wouldn’t turn on, wouldn’t charge, wouldn’t do anything.
When Hunter returned with the pizza in a few minutes, he’d think his phone had stopped working for some reason, but it would be too late to do anything about it, because there weren’t any tech places open at night in Royal Falls. Besides, he was on a special date with me; one he thought was going to lead to sex. That meant there was no way he’d leave until I wanted him to.
By the time he woke up at home tomorrow morning, he wouldn’t need to take it into the shop to get it fixed, because Adam was going to sneak into his room and replace the non-functional decoy phone with the real one after retrieving it from me in the middle of the night. Hunter would think his phone had simply fixed itself after a few hours, as phones tended to do sometimes, and then he’d forget about the whole thing.
I set the decoy phone down on the nightstand, and then I went back into the bathroom to change into a cute but sexy nightdress Trina bought me from a local boutique. It was pale pink satin trimmed with lace, and it was so short that it barely skimmed my ass.