by Hannah Ford
“You never called me back,” the male voice said.
It wasn’t red, but the voice was somehow familiar.
“Do I know you?” Nicole asked.
A slight chuckle from the other end. “Not as well as you might, but in time I think we could become good friends.”
She sat up in bed, feeling nervous. “Are you a stalker or something?”
Again, the laugh, this time even more amused. “Some might call me that, but those are just the ones who complain because it makes them feel good to play the victim. And then when I’m not around anymore, when I’ve lost interest and moved on, they call me and ask me to come see them. They always beg me to see them in the end.”
“Listen, I don’t have time for this. Please don’t call me again, whoever you are—“
“You really don’t care that your fiancé has had two previous engagements?” the man on the other end said, his voice deep and smooth and somehow threatening without being obvious.
“You’re lying. Who is this? Tell me your name.”
“Anderson.”
The man who’d left that creepy voice message earlier.
“Anderson who?”
“Have you ever seen Silence of the Lambs, Nicole?” he asked.
She didn’t answer him. Yes, she’d seen the movie, with Anthony Hopkins and Jodi Foster. Anthony Hopkins was brilliant as the deranged serial killer, Hannibal Lector. And come to think of it, this Anderson creep actually sounded a bit like Lector from the movie. “I’m not in the mood to play games,” she told him.
He spoke as if she hadn’t said anything. “If you recall the film, there is a running dialog between Clarice Starling, a young FBI agent trying to track a murderer, and Hannibal Lector, an imprisoned therapist who has a brilliant mind but is also a serial killer. Clarice finds that in order to elicit information from Dr. Lector, she must first provide information about the thing that interests the mad doctor most. Namely, her.”
“I don’t get your point, and to be honest—“
“Don’t say that,” Anderson chided her. “I’ve found that the ones who say, ‘to be honest,’ are usually lying to my face. It’s such a trite phrase, uttered primarily by compulsive liars.”
“I don’t care whether or not you believe me,” she replied.
“But you’re still on the line,” he reminded her. “So perhaps you do care.”
She hung up on him. She expected him to call back, and if he had, she intended to put him through to voicemail. But he never did call back, and now Nicole was left wondering about his statements, wondering about who Anderson was and how he’d gotten her cell number.
Another restless night of sleep, one of many in the last month or so.
Every so often, she turned to look at the time on her cell and found that only a few minutes had passed. She started to doze around four-thirty and then she still woke up at a quarter to six.
Nicole sat up in bed just as her phone rang. This time it really was Red. When she answered, she was struck by how chipper and awake he sounded. No tossing and turning for him—he’d probably slept on some enormous bed with temperature controlled settings to cool his pillow off when he needed it.
“Beautiful,” he said, his deep voice pleasant and alert. “How are you?”
“Okay. A little tired.”
“I missed you last night,” he said. “You should have been here with me.”
“I miss you too,” she said, smiling despite her exhaustion.
“I’m on my way to your apartment now,” he told her. “I should be there in about half an hour.”
“Really?” She jumped to her feet. “I don’t have time to shower and dress.”
“Come on, you can do all that in thirty minutes. I get up, shower, shave and put on my suit every day in like twenty minutes.”
“It’s a little different for a woman. You’ve never lived with a woman, have you?”
He hesitated. “Well…”
And then the phone conversation with her stalker came flooding back to her, filling her stomach with lead. That creepy voice asking her if she knew Red had been engaged before. She’d thought Anderson must be lying, but Red’s hesitation told her otherwise.
Nicole tried to control her sense of anxiety. “You told me no woman has ever even been to your house.”
“I mean, technically that’s true,” Red replied. “This house I’m in now is only about a year old, and no one I’ve dated has ever been here.”
“So you basically lied to me,” she said. “You used a technicality to make me think I was special.”
“I wasn’t trying to lie. I was just making an offhand comment at the time—I didn’t think I was in a court of law. And it was the truth, by the way.”
“So I’ll ask you again. Have you ever lived with a woman?”
Another pause. “Yeah. I have.”
“For how long?” Her hand tightened on her phone until she thought she might break it.
“I don’t know, exactly. Probably about eight months.”
“Eight months…”
“Listen, Nicole, we can talk about this later. I don’t think the phone is the best way to have this kind of—“
“And were you ever engaged before me?”
She heard him sigh deeply through the phone. “I want to have this conversation in person.”
She slapped her hand on the wall. “Just answer the question. Why are you trying to avoid answering me? What are you hiding?”
“Hold on just a minute,” he said, and she could tell that beneath his controlled voice, he was seething. “I’m not hiding anything. You never asked me any of this before.”
“I’m asking now.”
“You don’t get to make demands of me.”
“I’m not some stupid girl you can bully,” she told him. “Have you been engaged before me or not?”
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
Tears overflowed and spilled down her cheeks. “I wish you would have told me some of this. I thought…I thought I was special to you.”
“You are,” he said. “Nicole…”
“I have to go. And don’t come to pick me up.”
“Nicole, don’t do this.”
She hesitated. “I’m so angry at you right now. I feel like a fool. Do you know how I found out about your other engagements?”
“I have no idea. It was never publicized.”
“That Anderson person—the one who called my phone and left that voicemail you listened to.”
“You spoke to that guy?” Now it was Red who sounded shocked and appalled.
“He called me last night and—“
“Why would you speak to some guy you don’t even know?”
“It was late at night and I was taken by surprise.”
Red laughed harshly on the other end. “You obviously had a good, long talk. Is he with The Rag or one of those tabloids?”
“I really don’t know who he is. I hung up on him.”
“But not before he told you about my engagements. Did you tell him anything about me—about us?”
“No.” She shook her head. Suddenly, she was confused, defensive.
“I need to be able to trust you,” he said. “If you’re talking to the tabloids…”
She put a hand to her head and closed her eyes. “I swear I’m not. He called me and started telling me these things about you.”
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing, but he hinted there was more. And then he started talking about Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m coming over there to pick you up. Be downstairs in ten minutes.”
“Ten? I thought you said half an hour.”
“We wasted too much time arguing. Ten minutes, Nicole. I’m serious.”
***
When she got in his car, Red leaned in and gave her a long, deep kiss on the lips that almost—almost made her not care about the two engagements, their argumen
t, the tabloids, any of it.
His mouth was warm and his lips tender, and she could tell from the way he touched her that he cared about her. And then he started driving, as usual at high speed, his jaw set, eyes glued to the road.
“Do you still want to marry me?” he asked her.
“Yes.” She said it without hesitation and knew it was true.
“Good.” The car hugged a turn and the tires squealed a little.
“Maybe we should slow down.”
“You want to push the wedding date back?” he asked. “Because I didn’t think we’d even set a date yet.”
“I meant, maybe you should slow the car down. I don’t want to end up a paraplegic before the big day.”
He glanced at her, saw she was nervous, and immediately took his foot off the gas. “I like to drive fast.”
“I noticed.”
“Nicole, we need to get some things straight.”
“I agree.”
He glanced at her again. “I’ve lived a very big, flashy life for a lot of years. You’ve seen the articles, the interviews, the stuff on the web.”
“I know, and I don’t really care about that stuff. It’s the stuff about me, and my family—and your secrets—“
“Let me finish.” He took a deep breath. “It’s not possible to separate my life and my history from yours anymore. All of the people that used to write only about me—they’re now going to focus on both of us.”
Nicole gripped her purse tightly as his words hit home. “You need to give me some time to get used to this,” she told him. “A strange man called my phone—I have no idea how he even got my number—and told me things about you that nobody else knows.”
“Yeah. I’m going to deal with that. I want you to forward me that clown’s number.”
“Really?”
“Really. In fact, do that now.”
She took out her phone and texted the number to Red’s cell.
They drove a few more minutes in silence. Outside, the sky was getting lighter and the skyline of Manhattan was majestic, towering overhead. She was starting to dread having to go into the office and deal with all the judgments and hatred that people directed her way since the news about her and Red had come out.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so dramatic,” she said, finally.
“You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I’m also a little freaked out that you were engaged twice already.”
He nodded. “I can understand that. But just so you know, one of those engagements was when I was in college.”
“College. Why would you get engaged as a college student?”
“Why? Because I was an idiot. And I was young.”
Nicole shook her head. Then she grinned. “I’ve only just graduated college, so who am I to talk.”
He looked at her and smiled his winning, magazine cover smile. “That’s true. You are a little on the young side. But you’re different—special.”
“Right. Lucky number three.”
He sighed again. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“So who was engagement number two?”
“Number two was just a bad idea. The woman I lived with for eight months. We were never any good for each other.”
“So, let me get this straight. Your judgment is pretty much terrible when it comes to women.”
“Usually, but not in this case,” he replied.
“How can you be sure?” she asked him.
“Because, you feel it, don’t you?” He glanced over at her once more. When his eyes connected with hers, even for just that brief second or two, there was a shot of electricity that radiated up her spine and warmed her body.
“I do feel it,” she admitted.
“Don’t forget that,” he told her. “Don’t let everyone else make you forget what we have.”
Soon, they were at the office and Red parted ways with her, after a long drawn out kiss that further reminded Nicole of what the two of them shared.
She got in and went up to her floor, making herself a piping hot cup of coffee and grabbing herself one of the complimentary bagels that were usually available if you got into the office early enough. Back at her desk, she chomped away at her little breakfast and sipped her coffee, relaxing for the first time since realizing that the entire world knew her business.
Just as she was starting to feel a little better about life, Edward stopped by her desk.
Nicole looked up at him, startled, since Edward rarely had any reason to talk to her. Almost all of her assignments came through Remi, and other miscellaneous discussions tended to be with Glen.
“Can we talk in my office for a moment?” Edward asked, his expression giving nothing away about what was in store for her.
“Yes, absolutely,” she said, wiping her hands with a tiny napkin and immediately getting out of her chair.
“Feel free to finish your breakfast if you need to,” he said.
“No, I’m fine,” she smiled nervously.
They walked through the maze of cubicles together, Edward slightly in the lead, and then they reached his office. “After you,” he said, letting her in and closing the door behind them. “Take a seat.”
She sat down opposite his desk. He moved to sit down as well, fixing her with a long, enigmatic look, before finally starting to talk. “Nicole, I’m going to be frank with you. I’ve spoken at length with everyone in our team about this, particularly with Remi Danvers. And we don’t feel as though you’re a good fit to work as assistant to the art director at this time.”
Nicole nodded, trying to keep the emotion from her face. “I know that people are unhappy with how things have come about between Red and—“
He put up his hand. “We’re not going there.”
“But obviously this is because I’m seeing Red. People think I’m getting preferential treatment.”
“You have to understand my position, Nicole. Red Jameson is the CEO of this company and I’m an employee. I’m his employee and I follow his directions. However, I still need to make sure my team functions effectively, and this…situation…is causing the team to become dysfunctional.”
“I’m sorry.”
“From now on, you’ll be working with me, personally,” he said.
She was stunned. “What will my duties be?”
“You’ll sit in on meetings, take notes, handle certain kinds of correspondence, call people for me and relay messages. And plenty more.”
“Like an administrative assistant,” Nicole said, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.
He shrugged. “Your title won’t change, nor will your pay. You’ll simply be working for me instead of Remi.”
“I was doing creative work with Remi, and I really enjoyed that.”
He smiled. “I understand you enjoyed it, Nicole, but unfortunately she didn’t enjoy it quite as much as you did.”
***
Red asked Nicole to meet him for lunch in the cafeteria, which she did, even though she knew all eyes would be on them.
When she first saw her fiancé standing and waiting for her at the entrance to the lunchroom, she wanted to throw herself into his arms and cry. She felt like a little kid who’s had a terrible day at school.
“Hi,” he said, smiling at her as she walked toward him.
“Hi.” She tried to put her best, most convincing smile on in return.
“That bad?” he asked, reaching out and lightly touching her arm. Of course he could see right through her act.
She nodded but kept smiling. “Shall we?”
“But of course.”
They walked together. Luckily, it was early for lunch, so there weren’t all that many people eating yet. Still, even with the few employees in the cafeteria, there were plenty of eyes following them.
Nicole could feel it sometimes, especially as they walked past. People pretended not to notice, and then as soon as her back was to them, she felt them staring. Occasionally she turned and caught some
one in the act.
It was almost humorous, except it wasn’t. Not really.
Red got them both special meals from the Italian kitchen. Chicken Marsala for him, Chicken Cacciatore for her. “You won’t be disappointed,” he told her, as they took a window seat in a somewhat secluded area of the cafeteria.
He unfolded his napkin and laid it across his lap, then dug into his meal with gusto.
Nicole hardly had an appetite, but she picked at her food so as not to upset him.
“How do you feel about seeing your new home tonight?” he asked, looking up briefly from his food.
“Nervous. But mostly excited.” It was true, she was excited. Unfortunately, she’d barely thought about the good things happening since that disappointing meeting with Edward.
Red sensed her uneasiness and put his knife and fork down. “Okay. What now?”
“Don’t be annoyed with me,” she said softly.
“I’m not annoyed, I’m concerned. What’s going on?”
She told him about the meeting with Edward and he leaned back in his chair, shaking his head when she finished. “I’m sorry that the creative team is choosing to handle things this way.”
“Please don’t intervene on my behalf,” she told him.
Red grinned. “How did you know I would?”
“I know you. Or, I know how you behave when you’re challenged.”
“I won’t stand for ill treatment of the woman I love.”
Nicole smiled despite herself. “I can take care of myself. I need to prove to them that I can handle whatever they throw at me.”
“I like your attitude.” He started eating again.
“They want to run me out of the group,” she said. “Don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“But they know they can’t fire me or overtly sabotage me, so they’re going to try and freeze me out and make things miserable enough that I quit.”
Red, nodded, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. His dark eyes met hers and for a moment she didn’t care about any of the workplace drama. She only cared about him, about pleasing him, making him happy in every way.