Looking down, she saw that her fingers were still curled around her phone.
Her grip on it loosened, and Anneke’s throat dried when she saw the time and the number of missed calls listed on the screen. It was pretty easy to calculate – one for every half hour.
Marcus.
Oh, Marcus.
Why?
And just a few minutes later, right on time, her phone started to vibrate again.
Seven
Marcus was bent overthe rails of his hotel room’s balcony, staring down at the empty road, when he heard a completely unexpected sound come out of his phone.
“Hello?”
Shock had him losing his grip on a phone to an eight-hundred-foot drop.“Accidenti!”He caught in time but almost fell over the balcony in the process.“Fuck!”
On the other end of the line, Anneke blinked, stunned. “I beg your pardon?Are you actually—-?”
Marcus caught the end of her words and was aghast at the realization that Anneke thought he had been cursing her. “No, you misunderstand. I was—-”
The iPad he had left on the balcony table caught his eye, its screen lighting up with a Google News alert, and he cursed under his breath when he realized what the latest thing the press was reporting about him.
Okay, that was too much,Anneke thought, more than a little offended at being cursed several times. “This is obviously a bad idea,” she muttered. “I’m sorry if you’re mad that I didn’t answer any of your calls, but that’smyright—-”
Realizing he had been once again misunderstood, he said right away, “Don’t hang up.” And without waiting for her to answer, he asserted vehemently, “I wasn’t cursing you in any way.”
When she still didn’t answer, he added in a stiff voice, “I didn’t expect you to answer my call. It shocked me – enough to drop my phone.”
“Oh.”
Grimacing, he felt honor-bound to further reveal, “And I almost fell over the balcony—-”
Anneke gasped.“What?”