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His gaze flicks between my eyes. Etienne’s pupils dilate as he closes in.
Weakly, I disagree. “Of course, we have internet and phone service,” I say. “I can see a tower from here.”
Etienne is determined to get me to join him in crazy town. I believe that one of the guards confiscated his phone on orders from the king and that the king is quarantining us here for some reason. But taking our passports? I don’t want to believe it, yet a nagging dread tells me he might be right.
“Darling, why do you think the king put us on an island with armed guards at the resort’s every exit? All the easier to watch us,” he says.
But I have my phone, and it has internet because I’ve been texting Steffen off and on all day to order drinks, food, and water. Something is off about this.
“I’ll take that bet,” I say. “What’s the wager?”
“If I’m right, and we have no internet access, then you have to sleep in tomorrow,” he says, his lip curling. The anger at his father that flooded his gorgeous face a minute ago has boiled over and undergone a chemical transformation into something else. That “something else” crackles in the air between us.
“And if you’re wrong?”
“You decide,” he says, twitching an eyebrow.
“If I’m right, you have to wake up at 6 a.m. and run on the beach with me!” I exclaim, proud of my idea.
“Deal,” he says.
He took that bet rather quickly. So quickly, it makes me nervous.
But either way, maybe I will win. Easy enough, as he didn’t say how late I’d have to sleep in. Sleeping in could mean 7 a.m.
This bet doesn’t change the unsettling feeling that we might be in an actual precarious situation. No phone? No passport?
This has to be a mistake. He missed seeing it somehow. He misplaced them. That has to be the solution.
And if someone took them? All I have to do is contact the nearest embassy…somehow.
We shake on it, and his touch sets off a shiver up my spine.
I shoot him a winning smile. “Let me check my phone, and we’ll see who wins.”
I glance at one of his biceps bracketed against the wall, and Etienne slowly, casually, lowers his arms and backs away.
With a spring in my step, I go to my beach bag and find my phone still wrapped in a dry towel to keep it from overheating in the sun.
“Ha! Look!”
I wave the phone at him to show him the three bars. “There’s the Wi-Fi signal. Right there,” I say, pointing at the screen.
“Now open your browser and google something.”
Buzzing my lips dismissively, I do as he says.
But when I google “paranoid delusions,” it says, “Browser is not connected to the internet.”
I narrow my eyes at the screen. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
I try other apps, but there’s no Wi-Fi. “I don’t understand. The bars are there… I’ve been texting the hotel staff all day to get service to the beach…”
I open my settings, and it says Wi-Fi is connected.
“Well, it seems I both won and lost,” I say, showing him my phone.
And although I have unlimited cell data, it does me no good. And when I try to make a call, nothing goes through.
