Page 26 of His Secret Virgin

When he reached out his large hand, I didn’t know what he wanted. “Give me your cell, Emma.”

Without hesitation, I reached into my purse, taking out my phone and placing it in his hand. “Okay.”

“What’s the passcode?” Christopher asked.

“A secret,” I said.

Dad looked at me with an expression that told me not to make jokes. “Emma.”

Christopher only smiled. “I promise that I’ll forget it as soon as you tell me.”

“Yeah, he’s old like me; his memory isn’t what it used to be,” Dad had to add.

Christopher wasn’t old like Dad. Not one bit. He kept his body in top shape, and he didn’t look like any other man my father’s age that I’d ever seen.

“Four, six, one, five,” I said quietly.

As he typed that in, he asked, “What do those numbers represent?”

It felt dumb to say it out loud, but I’d never been good at lying. “Four is my favorite number. Six is the number of chin-ups I can do. One is my best friend’s favorite number. And five is the…” I didn’t have a clue what to say, but knew I couldn’t tell him the truth about that number. I’d recently changed the passcode to include the number of days I’d eaten with Christopher. I had to make up a lie, “…amount of pancakes I can eat in one sitting.”

I wonder what he’d think if I told him the real reason behind that number.