Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2) by Mina V. Esguerra Page A

this? He told me about the accident himself. I want more info, that’s all.”
    “Fine. You know that relationships are supposed to be founded on trust, right?”
    “Yeah well, there’s trust, and then there’s protection.” Lindsay sighed. “I think he confuses the two.”
    Lindsay could see Marnie’s eyebrow shoot up. “I think you have some learning to do too.”
    “Whatever. You’ll do this please?”
    “Yes. Check your phone later.”
    “Thank you.”
    The next person Lindsay looked for was her sister. “Cordelia?”
    “Linds?” From the background of the video that came up, it looked like Lindsay had caught her sister at the supermarket. “Aren’t you in China or somewhere?”
    “I’ll be back in New York by the weekend. Jake is here, with me, by the way.”
    “I know. Rusty told me. Things are good?”
    Rusty, her brother-in-law. Lindsay knew that he and Jake were close. She was counting on it, even. “Yeah, they’re great. Cord, do you know why Jake wasn’t with us at Christmas last year?”
    There it was—a split second of something passing through her sister’s face. Lindsay was waiting for that awareness, and it was the reason why she called video instead of by phone. The image shifted to the Whole Foods prepared meals display, but that was enough of a tell.
    “Please tell me what you know about what happened,” Lindsay said. “He told me that he had an accident, and for some reason kept me in the dark about it. I know he talks to Rusty. I know Rusty tells you everything. Cord.”
    She heard her sister cough, and then the video moved, and it was Cordelia’s face there again. “Hey, I don’t know everything, Lindsay. All I know is that he’s okay, and he was messed up, and he didn’t want you—or Zane and Brian too—to see him like that.”
    “Was it really bad? I was worried he’d be on drugs or something.”
    “It’s not that, is what I know,” Cordelia said. “I don’t know much more, really. I didn’t pry. I found out he’s okay, but needed time, and I respected that. He seems okay now?”
    “He’s awesome.”
    “Then why are you digging this up?”
    “He wants us to be together. Seriously together.”
    “Well duh, we knew that. You’re not happy about this?”
    “I am, like a little bunny, you have no idea,” she said. “But I’m concerned about what made him do this. It’s like phone calls you make when you’re drunk at two a.m. I don’t want to be a decision he regrets when he has more time to think about this.”
    “Lindsay, he’s always loved you.”
    “I know that.”
    “And I think he’s had more time to think about this than a drunk with a cellphone.”
    “I know. I just wish...”
    “Lindsay, I don’t know what to tell you. You crazy kids should know how to talk to each other about this.”
    “Will Rusty talk to me about it?”
    “Don’t ask him to throw his bro under the bus. Jake is his only bro.”
    Lindsay shook her head. “Well. Thank you for telling me what you know.”
    Cordelia was shaking hers too. “Talk to him!”
    How could she? Do you really love me, or am I only the thing you reach out to in a crisis? Will you still want me when you’ve conquered this new world, which you will, because you’re like that? She’d figure out a way to ask that, after today.

Chapter 18
     
     
    The point that Lindsay needed to get across in her presentation that day was “all’s well that ends well, we fixed it, let’s move on, give us more money.”
    She’d taken environmental science as her undergrad and started out being intern and assistant for air quality measurement firms. When she moved to Caine to do the same thing but for the benefit of poorer nations, it was to make a difference. Well, she still wanted to. A lot of them did. But the higher up she began to see into this, the more she realized that the real art to this was not crunching numbers pulled out of an air quality monitoring sensor, but in getting the funding to put