Page 5 of Stone
The thought of canceling didn’t sit well with her. She hadn’t been attracted to a man in the way she was to Simon in ages, if ever. She didn’t want him to think she’d lost interest. And maybe spending timenotobsessing about the past few hours would help clear her head and make it easier to tackle the problem in the morning.
She rolled her eyes at that logic. She should just admit to herself that she wanted to see him. Own the decision and be okay with it. Maybe she shouldn’t allow herself to get distracted, but the situation with Suit and Blue would still be there in the morning. A few hours with Simon wouldn’t change that, but it would give her a reprieve from the intensity of the afternoon.
Bringing her Bluetooth to life, she dictated a text.
Juliana:Hi Simon, it’s Juliana. My work thing in the city ran late, and I won’t be home by seven. Fingers crossed I don’t hit any traffic, but could we push to eight?
She hoped he believed that she still wanted to see him, but she didn’t know him well enough to guess how he’d take another change to their plans. In her experience, which admittedly wasn’t vast, men did not like to make accommodations.
She jumped when her phone rang instead of chiming with a text response. Simon’s name appeared on the screen.
“Hey, Simon,” she said, trying to sound casual and not as if a swarm of butterflies fluttered across her skin.
“Hi, is everything all right?” he asked.
Unable to read his mood, she hesitated. “It’s fine. Sort of,” she said.
“Sort of?”
She cocked her head at his concerned tone, then flickered another look in her rearview mirror. The traffic had thinned since merging onto Interstate 80, and only six cars were visible behind her.
“I mentioned an event in San Francisco?—”
“I remember. A new exhibit on how immigration built the city,” he said.
She blinked in surprise. As an unabashed geek of all things history and archive-related, she never expected people to actually listen—let alone remember—when she talked about her work.
“Yeah, that one. It was great, by the way. They did an excellent job.”
“So why are things only ‘sort of’ okay?” he asked, his voice rumbling over the line. No one should sound that good over speakerphone.
She bit her lower lip as she considered her response. She had no intention of dumping her current situation on him, but she sucked at lying. She had a lot of experience with prevarication, though.
“I need to make an unexpected run through Sacramento on my way home. I’ll still be home tonight, only a little later than I thought,” she answered.
“You think you’ll be home by eight?” he asked.
“If I don’t hit any traffic.” She paused, then added, “I’d much rather be having dinner with you than driving several hours out of my way. It might not seem that way since I’ve changed plans on you twice, but I hope you believe me.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you?” he asked, sounding genuinely confused. “If you didn’t want to go to dinner, I assume you’d tell me.”
She’d be insane not to want to spend time with him and opened her mouth to tell him, but he cut her off. “You would tell me, right?” he asked.
“I would,” she responded without hesitation. She didn’t have much experience turning men down—usually, it was the other way around. And having been on the receiving end of it so many times, she believed in the kindness of being straightforward.
“Okay, good,” he said. “That’s good,” he added on an exhale, sounding kind of adorable. “Since you might hit traffic, we could postpone tonight and do something tomorrow. I have the day off.”
He and his friends—or brothers as he called them—owned several businesses in town and as far as she could glean, nine-to-five, Monday-Friday jobs weren’t really their thing.
“I do, too, and that would be great,” she said with a smile. She’d be able to focus on Suit and Blue tonightandhave a full day with Simon rather than a few hours over dinner.
He let out what sounded like a relieved breath—as if she might have turned him down. “Great, why don’t I swing by your place around ten? We can go for a walk along the fire road trail, then lunch, then see what else we feel up to?”
She smiled. “Perfect.” She’d hiked a lot in her very early years, but then life had changed and she’d rarely had the opportunity. She’d never picked it back up, but she did love to amble through the mountains and down the old wagon trails. Nature displayed its own history exhibits. Every tall tree, every arrowhead or pottery shard, every bubbling creek carving its way down the hill, and every crumbling remnant of the first European settlers’ farms told a story.
“Great,” he said again. “Where are you now?”
“On Interstate 80, about fifty miles from Sac.” She hadn’t yet decided which route to take south from there. Her options were a two-lane road that wound through the mountains or a proper four-lane highway. The latter was the safest but nowhere near as pretty as the first.
