Page 55 of Cruel Riches

“When you say ‘that guy’, I assume you’re talking about Nate Lockwood?” I asked.

Harry nodded. “Yeah. I agreed to stay away from you because…” He trailed off for a second, looking embarrassed. “Well, it’s him. Everyone knows you don’t go against Nate if you know what’s good for you.”

I sighed. “I get it. But I’m not involved with him. He’s just an asshole who won’t leave me alone.”

“Right.”

“Just to be clear,” I said, holding up my phone again. “You didn’t give me this phone, and these texts definitely aren’t from you?”

“That’s right. That’s not even my number.”

My face burned with embarrassment. “Sorry. I honestly thought it was,” I muttered.

“It’s okay.” Harry rubbed his chin and cocked his head slightly to one side. “So Nate—or someone else—has been messaging you for the last few weeks pretending to be me?”

“Yup.” I showed him the last message between us. “This is the last one I sent, thinking it was you. I asked you to help me get that video off the internet, but you didn’t reply. I thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore because you thought it was real.”

“No way. I wouldn’t have ignored you if you sent me that message,” he said. “I mean, I saw the video. Everyone did. But I always knew it was fake.”

My brows shot up. “How did you know?”

“Well, it looked real, but I knew it couldn’t be you, because when we met, you didn’t seem like a slut. Total opposite. So I figured it had to be a fake.”

Annoyance stabbed at my guts. The whole ‘you didn’t seem like a slut’ comment was throwing up red flags for me. The only guys I’d ever met who spoke like that turned out to be assholes who didn’t see women as nuanced human individuals. To them, women were either ‘good girls’ who were modest, well-behaved, and totally non-sexual, or they were ‘bad’ little jezebels with no morals and active sex lives. They treated them accordingly, too.

As nice as Harry seemed when we first met, I was starting to think I’d dodged a bullet with him.

“Right,” I murmured, slipping my phone back into my pocket. “I have to get going. Thanks for clearing that stuff up for me.”

“No problem. I guess I’ll see you around.”

I started to head out of the bakery. Then I whipped back around, brows dipping low. “Wait. You’re an engineering student, right? Or did I remember that wrong?”

Harry turned around to look at me again. “No, you’re right. I am.”

“So you must be pretty good with tech-related stuff, right?”

“Yeah, I guess I’m okay at it. I can’t fix your old phone, though. Once it’s fried like that, it’s done.”

“I wasn’t asking because of that. I was just wondering—would you be able to tell if whoever gave this phone to me put some sort of tracking device on it?” I asked, pulling my phone out again.

It had just occurred to me that there might be some sort of tracking software on it. How else would Nate know where I was all the time? He was always lurking somewhere near me when I was on campus, and I’d seen him hanging around this bakery a couple of times in the last week as well.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe. I’d probably have to connect it to my laptop to get a proper look at all the stuff on it, though. Do you happen to have a USB cable on you?”

“I have a cable in my car that I use to charge it when I drive. Would that work?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Go and grab it while I order my lunch.”

I went out to my car to retrieve the cable from the center console. From somewhere behind me in the tree-lined parking lot, a twig snapped. I whipped around, certain I was about to find myself face-to-face with a black-clad stranger in a ski mask—or worse, Nate—but nobody was there. I could still sense a presence, though. The human body reacted to danger before it registered consciously in the mind, and right now it felt like someone was softly breathing on the back of my neck, making every hair stick straight up.

“There you are!” A sweaty, shrill-sounding woman stepped out from the trees a few seconds later. At the same time, a black Labrador barreled toward my car.

“Sorry,” the woman called out as the excited dog jumped up to lick me. “He got off his lead!”

“That’s okay.” I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and smiled as I petted the dog’s head.

Content that no one was stalking me—for now, anyway—I headed back into the bakery with my USB cable. Harry was sitting at a corner table with his laptop. I handed him my phone along with the cable, and he made me unlock the phone before connecting it to his computer.

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