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Glancing at the diamond sparkling on the ring finger of her left hand, she said, “Don’t go there, Ina. You know I won’t use Reed.”

“I know just the opposite.” Ina wasn’t one to mince words.

“Ouch!” Inwardly, Nikki winced as she glanced at a picture propped on her desk. In the photo, she and Reed were huddled close together, beach grass and sand dunes visible, their faces ruddy from running on the sand. The wind was up, her red-blond hair blowing across Reed’s face. They both were smiling, their eyes bright, taken on the day he’d proposed on that same beach. So now she was considering compromising their relationship.

“Okay, maybe not use him, of course, but m

aybe he could, you know, let you get involved in some way with a current case?”

“That’s not Reed’s style.”

“Hmmm. Seems you managed to squeeze into an investigation or two before,” her agent reminded her and she squirmed a little in her chair. There was a time when she would have done just about anything for a story, but that was before she’d agreed to become Mrs. Pierce Reed.

Right?

Right!

“Forget it, Ina, okay? Look, even if I could get him to agree, and let me tell you that’s a gigantic ‘if,’ it’s not like knife-wielding psychopaths run rampant through the streets of Savannah every day, you know.”

“Every city, or area around a city has bizarre crimes. You just have to turn over the right rock and poke around. It’s amazing what you might find. People are sick, Nikki.”

“So I should capitalize on that?” Nikki didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

“Absolutely. It’s what you do best. So dig a little,” Ina suggested. “Turn over those rocks. Squeeze Reed for some info on a new case, even an old one. There’s got to be something. What are the police working on now?”

“Reed doesn’t confide in me. Or anyone. It’s just not his deal.”

Ina wasn’t persuaded. “Not even pillow talk? You know, men really open up in bed.”

“If you say so. Look, let’s not even go there.”

Ina sighed loudly. “Don’t play the blushing virgin with me, okay? It’s not going to work. I know you, Nikki. If you want something, you go after it and hell or high water be damned, you get it.”

That much was true. “Come on, Ina. Think about it. If there were another serial killer running loose in Savannah, don’t you think I would know about it?”

She could almost hear the gears turning in her agent’s mind. In her midforties and shrewd as hell, Ina was barely five feet tall and the only agent in New York who had wanted to take a chance on Nikki when she’d submitted her first manuscript. Ina had seen what others couldn’t and now, damn her, she was trying to wring out of Nikki that same essence to the story. “So get creative,” she suggested and Nikki heard bracelets jangling as she moved the phone. “Maybe, this time, not a serial killer, per se.”

“Just a really sick monster with some kind of a blood fetish.”

“Or foot, or hand or breast. Or whatever twisted obsession turns him on.” Ina laughed, deep and throaty from years of cigarettes. “Yeah, that would probably work.” Clearing her throat, she added more earnestly, “You know the book is due in six months. It has to be published next year if we don’t want to piss off the publisher and keep the Nikki Gillette brand out there.”

Oh, Nikki knew all right. The date was circled in red on two calendars and highlighted in her virtual office as well. She wasn’t about to forget and she really couldn’t. The Sentinel was struggling, and was a slim remnant of its former self. Layoffs had been massive and painful. Nikki was working part-time for the paper and lucky to have a job. More and more, she relied on the advances and royalties from her books. Between the economy, new technology and her own ambition, she’d backed herself into a financial corner. She would be an idiot if she didn’t make this work. “Okay, okay. I’ll come up with something,” Nikki heard herself say and, as she hung up, wondered what the hell it would be.

She didn’t take the time to think about it now. Instead, she flew down the circular stairs to her bedroom below, peeled off her jeans and sweater and stepped into her running gear, old jogging pants and bra, a stained T-shirt and favorite, tattered sweatshirt with a hood. She’d never been one for glamor when she was working out. Her running shoes were ready, near the back door and after lacing them up, and tossing the chain with her house key dangling from it over her head, she took off, sprinting to the front of her home and ignoring the coming darkness. Her mind was a jumble, not just from the pressures of coming up with a blockbuster idea for a new book, but about the marriage to Reed. In her family, happily-ever-afters rarely occurred and now she was planning to marry a cop; a cop with a tarnished reputation in San Francisco who had left a string of broken hearts from the Golden Gate on the West Coast to Tybee Island here on the Eastern Seaboard.

“You’re an idiot,” she muttered under her breath as she jogged in place, waiting for a light so she could run through Forsythe Park. And deep inside a hopeless romantic. The light changed, just as one last car, a Honda exceeding the speed limit, scooted through on the red, and Nikki took off again.

Starting to get into her rhythm, her heartbeat and footsteps working together, she ran beneath the canopy of live oaks with their graceful branches dripping with Spanish moss. Usually the park had a calming effect on her, but not today. She was jazzed and irritated, Ina’s call only adding to her stress level.

Get over it; you can handle this. You know you can.

The air was heavy with the scent of rain, the clouds moving slowly overhead a deep, dusky gray, the weather warm, even for November. If she was lucky, she might be able to get home before the storm broke and before night completely descended on this city she’d called home for most of her life.

A few pedestrians were walking on the wide paths where street lamps were just beginning to come on. A woman pushing a stroller, and a couple walking a pug made her feel a little calmer, because the truth of the matter was that Nikki wasn’t as confident as she seemed, wasn’t the pushy cub reporter who’d been irrepressible and fearless in her youth. Truth to tell, she’d had more than her share of anxiety attacks since her up-close-and-personal meeting with the Grave Robber and to this day small, closed-in spaces, especially in the dark, freaked her out. So she ran. In the heat. In the rain. In the snow on the very rare times it fell in this part of the country. She didn’t need a shrink to tell her she was trying to run from her own demons or that her claustrophobia was because of her past. She was well aware that she was walking on the razor’s edge of some kind of minor madness. If there were such a thing as “minor” when applied to her kind of anxiety.

So she ran. Mile after mile, and as she did, the nightmares that came with restless sleep and the fears of tight closed-in spaces seemed to shrivel away and recede, if only for a little while. The exercise seemed safer than a psychiatrist’s couch or a hypnotist’s chair or even confiding in the man she loved.

You’re a basket case. You know that, don’t you.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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