FOURTEEN
I wasn’t in any hurry to deliver Cyrus’s news to Anderson, so I decided to go for a run as soon as I got back to the mansion. As luck would have it, Maggie had the same idea, so I had company. I wasn’t exactly feeling sociable, but running with Maggie isn’t much of a social occasion for me anyway. She’s five eleven to my five two, and she can cover a daunting amount of ground in a single stride. I have to run like my life depends on it to keep up, and I don’t usually last all that long or have the breath to do a lot of talking.
On a day like today, running like my life depended on it was just what I needed. The effort of keeping up the aggressive pace left no room in my mind for inconvenient thoughts and worries. For just a little while, I left my problems behind me and didn’t think about anything at all. My muscles burned and protested, my chest heaved with effort, I was sweating buckets despite the chilly temperature, and I adored every painful, oblivious moment of it. I pushed well past my usual limits and didn’t even notice I was doing it.
By the time we started our cool-down walk, my legs were shaking with fatigue, and I was really glad I wasn’t just an ordinary human being anymore or I’d never have been able to get out of bed the next day. Much of my hair had slipped free of the ponytail I’d tied it in, damp tendrils clinging to my face and neck. Maggie was panting delicately, and her face was glowing a bit with the exertion and a touch of sweat, but her curly auburn hair was pristine in its French braid. She looked like she was just about to start a run, while I looked more like someone staggering over the finish line of a marathon. She gave me almost as much of an inferiority complex as Steph did, but she was a good friend anyway.
“So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Maggie prompted when I was no longer breathing so hard I couldn’t answer.
“Wrong?” I asked, giving her innocent wide eyes. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“You don’t love running enough to push yourself that hard. Not unless you’re trying to run away from something that’s on your mind.”
I grimaced, realizing she was right. There were times when I enjoyed running, but mostly I did it because it was good for me, not because I loved it. And usually I’d quit long before I’d worked myself into such a lather.
I was sick to death of lying and trying to hide my feelings. Or maybe I was just too exhausted, both mentally and physically, to hold it all inside. Instead of pretending nothing was wrong, I told Maggie about my disturbing conversation with Cyrus. My lips were chapped with the cold, but that didn’t stop me from chewing on them, making them worse.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked. “Should I tell Anderson?”
I realized I knew her answer before she even spoke. Unlike me, Maggie’s first instinct is always to follow the rules. Hiding the truth from Anderson might not be technically breaking any rules, but I suspected it would feel that way to her.
“Of course you should tell him,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He has a right to know. And he would want to know.”
“But—”
“Besides,” she interrupted, “he’s likely to find out eventually, and he’ll be pissed off that you didn’t tell him.”
She had a point. I kicked out at a pinecone in frustration, sending it straight into a tree so that it almost ricocheted back at us.
“I just don’t get it,” I said, restraining the urge to give the pinecone another kick. “Where is Emma getting all this crazy shit from? What have I ever done to give her the slightest hint that I might be after Anderson?”
I’d meant them as rhetorical questions, and wasn’t expecting Maggie to answer. And yet there was a kind of waiting quality to her silence. Something that told me she had something to say but was thinking her words over carefully. I came to a stop, shivering in the cold now that I was finally cooling down.
“What is it? What are you thinking?”
Maggie gave me an almost apologetic smile. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you or what you’ve done. I think it’s more about Anderson.”
I frowned in confusion. “Anderson’s never done anything that would give her reason to be jealous, either. Not if she were sane, that is.”
Maggie shrugged and turned as if to start heading back toward the house, but I grabbed her arm to stop her. Obviously, she had more to say, even if she was reluctant to say it.
“Come on, Maggie. Help me out here. Is there something going on I don’t know about?”
She looked distinctly uncomfortable, but like a true friend, she answered me anyway. “I’ve known Anderson a long time. I even knew him back when he and Erin were together.” She gave me the apologetic smile again. “I can see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking, Nikki. It’s just like how he used to look at Emma when his relationship with Erin was going south. Emma’s a crazy bitch, but she’s not making it all up.”
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but I couldn’t come up with anything to say. Never once had I picked up that kind of a vibe from Anderson, but now I had to wonder . . . was it because there’d been nothing to pick up, or had I been completely blind to the signals?
I shook my head. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You have to be. I can be clueless sometimes, but not that clueless.” My voice went up at the end, making my words sound more like a question than a statement of fact.
“Maybe,” Maggie said with an unconvincing shrug. “But I bet you anything that Emma’s seen the same thing I have, and that’s what set her off.”
“Guess that means you’re both nuts,” I grumbled. So much for the peaceful oblivion I’d been looking for when I decided to go running.
I was in even less of a mood to deliver bad news to Anderson now than I had been before. How could I look him in the eye after what Maggie had just said? I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from overanalyzing every nuance of his behavior, looking for any hint that Maggie was right. If Anderson had the hots for me, I didn’t want to know it. I had more than enough complications in my life as it was.
I took a long, hot shower, and by the time I got out, I’d convinced myself I had to tell Anderson that Emma was behind the fires, no matter how much I didn’t want to. It could turn out to be dangerous for him to underestimate her level of malice, and the sooner he accepted what she had turned into, the safer we would all be.
Dread making my stomach feel twisted and cold, I descended the stairs to the second floor and forced myself toward Anderson’s study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, I found the room empty.
I could have gone looking for him, or I could have tried again later. Instead, I decided to take the coward’s way out. Maybe the “right” thing to do would have been to wait until I had a chance to sit down with Anderson and deliver the news in person, but I’d had more than enough confrontation for one day, and I just couldn’t face more.
Hoping Anderson wouldn’t come back and catch me in the act, I rummaged through his desk for a pen. Then I took the screen shot that Cyrus had given me and scrawled a brief note on it. I saw Cyrus today, and he gave me this. He says he got it off of Emma’s computer. Remember not to shoot the messenger. I left the paper on the seat of his chair, and then hustled out of there, glad to have escaped without having to face him.