The slight trace of vulnerability was so well hidden that Natalie almost missed it, but she knew by the sound of his voice the answer he wanted and she hesitated only momentarily before giving it to him. "Yes."
"I'll be home for supper," he added.
"Okay."
His eyes swallowed her whole for few seconds as his gaze searched hers. Something intense flared between them and the tingling in the pit of her stomach slid downward and landed is a rush of heat between her thighs. "You're so sweet," his voice sounded agonized, but Natalie lost the ability to think completely when his mouth landed on hers and she experienced his kiss for the first time. It lasted only a second and his lips remained closed on hers, much as a parent's would on a child. But the kiss didn't feel parental in any way and it sent a cascade of new tremors down her spine.
Her eyes were still closed when she felt him release her and walk away, allowing her to begin breathing again.
****
Thirty minutes or so after he left, Natalie was still a bit dazed from the events of the morning. She walked around the penthouse aimlessly, and then wandered back to her bedroom where her eyes fell on the phone he had tossed on her bed earlier.
Her mind running a mile a minute, she picked up both the phone and her purse, and stepped inside her bathroom. She sat down at the small vanity, and removed from her purse the pay-as-you-go phone that she had been using before she met him.
She studied the two phones carefully while her mind raced. Marco was doing crazy things to her equilibrium, and there was absolutely no denying that he was gorgeous and made her heart race.
And now he'd broken up with Tanya.
Before this went even a day longer, she needed to know if she could trust him enough to stay here. She was already in danger of falling under his spell.
She needed to know what technology he had monitoring her. She didn't even know for sure if he was tracking her. The day he came to her rescue, could have been, as he claimed, a coincidence. But she damn sure didn't think so. If it was just the GPS locator in her phone, she was going to write it off as him being careful with his investments, as he had intimated she was to him. After all, she did owe him a lot of money.
But if the guy had cameras on her, or was monitoring her on the computer, then she was out of here.
She looked around the small room. Surely, if he actually did have cameras around the apartment, then he wouldn't have them in her bathroom. If he did, he was lower than low. She was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for now.
The question was, how did she find out what he might have done? How did she find out if she couldn't use her own computer to do a search on the subject? She needed to get to a public library, where she knew she could use the computers with privacy. But she didn't particularly want him to find out she had left the apartment, at least not while she was gone. Afterward--maybe it wouldn't matter.
What she knew about technology wasn't anything to write home about. She knew nothing about computers or the intricacies of how they worked. All she knew were the basics, things she had learned in high school such as PowerPoint and Excel.
But she did know several things about cell phones. Probably only enough to get her into trouble, but the small amount of knowledge she had was all she had to work with at the moment.
Obviously, she knew the smart phone he'd given her had Internet access. She knew that when it was in the apartment, it picked up the wifi in the building. When she took it outside, it picked up the signal from the cellular carrier. And damn lucky for her, it was the same cellular carrier where she'd purchased her pay-as-you-go phone.
She was positive there was a SIM card in her old phone because she'd taken it out once when she thought her phone had gotten damp. She was fairly certain that most smart phones came with SIM cards--but not all of them. She knew that the smart phone itself was the little computer that allowed access to the Internet, much as a Tablet did but on a tinier scale. The SIM card was the little doohickey that allowed the phone to make calls.
So what she was planning was simple in theory, but dangerous because that's where her knowledge became completely sketchy. She thought that if there was a SIM card in the smart phone, she could just switch them, and then carry her original phone with her when she left the building--thereby, leaving his tracking device in her bedroom. That way, if he phoned or sent her a text, she could answer and respond--and he'd never know she wasn't in the penthouse.
What she wasn't sure of were a couple of things. Well, many things but she didn't need to borrow more trouble. She had no idea what kind of application or software Marco was using to track her. She couldn't see an icon on the smart phone that indicated a simple application to track a missing phone. But that made sense, because if he was tracking her on the down-low, he wouldn't want it to be openly visible to her. So, she had no idea what kind of system he was using, and even if she had known, that's where her knowledge dried up.
So that came to the other big problem. If she managed to switch the SIM cards, would the missing component disable the tracking device and thereby alert him to a problem immediately? Or would it, as she was hoping, continue tracking the phone at the apartment, never knowing the phone had been separated from the SIM card?
She'd probably never know the answers without asking Marco, which obviously, she wasn't prepared to do. At least not yet. And none of this would even be possible if she hadn't watched her cousin 'jailbreak' a smart phone about a year ago so he could use the phone on a different carrier. He had assured her it was perfectly legal, as he'd bought the wildly popular phone for full price at the cellular store. Yeah. If only he'd bought liability insurance instead.
She steadied her nerves and took out a nail file and paperclip from her purse and set them aside.
She got everything else ready to leave the apartment, herself included, because if she was successful, the very second she had the SIM cards switched, she was walking out the door.
Ten minutes later, she had the answer she'd hoped for about the SIM card in the smart phone and she had the SIM cards switched. Of course, she still didn't know if he would or wouldn't know she'd left the building, but she was willing to take that chance.
She already debated the best place to leave her smart phone and her first inclination was to hide it--but then she immediately blew off that idea because if it was being tracked, he'd know where to find it anyway. And if he did come home and come in search of her, her story would be she'd forgotten it. Of course that would only work if he hadn't tried to contact her while she was out. Either way, she was going to have to take a chance. She walked from the bathroom, and as she didn't know if she was being watched, she casually walked to her bed and began fluffing the pillows and putting the magazine on the bedside table. She dropped the phone back on the bed where he had originally thrown it and then headed out to find the public library.