He looked at me, expression unreadable. Unease stirred like a pit of vipers in my stomach. His jaw was so tight that I wondered if he was going to crack his molars.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

Cam exhaled softly as he glanced at the coffee table. “You got a message while you were sleeping.”

My gaze followed his, landing on my cellphone. At first I didn’t see what the big deal was, but then anxiety rose like a fast-moving storm. Wide-awake, I shot forward and grabbed the cellphone. Tapping the screen, my heart jumped.

You’re a lying whore. How can you live with yourself?

I dragged in a breath, but it got stuck. I stared at the message, wishing it would simply vanish from existence.

“It flashed across your screen when it came through,” he said.

Hands shaking, I deleted the message and sat the phone down. Hurt and a wave of irrational anger rolled through me. Those two emotions felt better than the threatening panic.  “You looked at the text?”

“It’s not like I did it on purpose.” He leaned forward, hands splayed over his knees. “It was right there, sitting on your screen.”

“But you didn’t have to look!” I accused, backing off the couch.

Cam’s eyes narrowed. “Avery, I wasn’t sneaking through your stuff. The damn text came through. I looked before I could stop myself. Maybe that was wrong.”

“It was wrong!”

“Okay. It was wrong. I’m sorry.” He drew in a deep breath. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw that text.”

I was frozen, standing in the middle of my living room. This was pretty damn close to my worst fear coming true. Him finding out what happened held the first spot, but this was a close second and just as horrifying.

“Avery,” he said in a low, careful voice. In that moment, I realized he wasn’t mad at me. Not in the slightest and not even after I yelled at him for looking at the wretched text. Somehow that was worse than him being angry with me. “Why would you get a text like that?”

My heart threw itself against my ribs painfully. “I don’t know.”

A dubious look crossed his face.

“I don’t know,” I said again, latching onto the lie with everything I had in me. “Every so often I get a text like this, but I don’t know why. I think it’s a wrong number kind of thing.”

Cam stared at me. “You don’t know who that’s from?”

“No.” And that was the truth. “It says unknown caller. You saw that.”

His shoulders tensed at that and then he clenched his knees. Several seconds passed while my pulse pounded.