Over the next several days she did her homework, attended classes and plowed through the rest of the personnel files, stopping when she found an M she’d missed. Todd Moore. She was pretty sure she’d met him. As she remembered it, he and his wife, Martha, had been Will and Becca’s best friends.
And the Montford Board of Trustees, on recommendation from their president, Will Parsons had hired Todd as a professor of psychology straight out of college.
She perused the first couple of pages of the personnel file carefully
. Todd’s performance reviews were stellar. His professorial ratings in the top quarter.
And...
She read and then reread.
Todd had been terminated. By Will Parsons. For having an illicit affair with one of his students—a girl half his age.
Will had fired his best friend.
That was good.
And now she had to see who’d also applied for the psychology professorship that had been awarded, on Will’s recommendation, to Will’s best friend. Any one of those applicants could argue favoritism. And if they were bitter enough...
She visited Nonnie every day—always when she was certain that Mark wasn’t home—and she stayed inside at night.
And on Friday morning, when she got out of the shower, she pulled on a pair of black leggings, something she usually wore under her exercise shorts, and a thigh-length blouse, belted it at the waist with black leather and finished the outfit with black wedged sandals. She kept her hair down, curled it and put on twice the makeup she usually wore.
Before leaving the house, she doused herself in perfume. And then she darted to her car.
She left botany class fifteen minutes early, too, checking to make certain Mark wasn’t leaning against the building outside before hurrying back to her car and driving over to the performing arts center for the drama club meeting.
She sat at the front of the theater, right beneath the eye of Matt Sheffield, who was standing in front of them on the stage. When they broke up into small groups to role-play, she made certain that she was in the professor’s group. And she stayed after the meeting, following him into the sound room under the guise of working on a theater article for the school newspaper.
She stood close to him. Too close. He backed up. She moved forward, touching his thigh with her hand.
He excused her from the drama club.
Maybe she’d come on too strong.
And maybe he was a decent man who’d been wrongly accused.
She went home and documented the event.
* * *
ADDY WAS SITTING in her living room, in jeans and a short-sleeved pullover with her computer on her lap, when Mark knocked on her sliding glass door Friday night.
She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t there. Her curtains were open, and her car was out front.
He was reaching out to her. And she’d promised herself she’d be there for him. For him. Not her. She opened the door.
“You’re avoiding me.” He looked her straight in the eye.
“Yeah.”
“Please don’t.”
She felt her nipples harden just peering into those blue eyes that looked at her with such directness. She dropped her gaze and ended up staring at the black T-shirt stretched across his muscular chest.
“I’m here as a friend if you need me, Mark. But I don’t completely trust myself around you. And I don’t fool around with married men,” she said.
“I’m not married.”