Free Razor Sharp by Fern Michaels Page B

earlier. It was burned half-through. Oak was such a hard wood and Charles had been adamant about using only oak when building a fire. Charles had been adamant about so many things. She dropped to her knees and added several smaller logs and poked them about so they would burn evenly. The heat of the fire burned her eyes, and tears rolled down her wrinkled cheeks. She swiped at them angrily. She turned when she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Annie!”
    “Myra, you have to let it go and accept whatever happens. Anger and hatred are such wasted emotions. I’m the living proof, Myra. So are you. I made a promise to myself to never allow myself to go to that awful emotional place ever again. I know you made that promise to yourself, too, but then you broke that promise. The girls need you, Myra. I need you. Harry, Jack, all the others, they need you, too. You’ve always been our rock. You can’t crumble now. I want you to pull up your socks and get with the program here. I don’t want you to pretend either. I want you to give it your all. Your all, Myra, I won’t accept anything less.”
    Myra reached out her hand to Annie, who pulled her to her feet. Myra laughed. “Leave it up to you to pull me up short. I’m glad I never pushed you off that mountain back in Spain. I’m okay, Annie. I have my bad moments from time to time. Unfortunately, you always seem to be there when I’m having one of them. I mean it. I am okay, and I’m on board one hundred percent. You can all count on me. Now, let’s go take those showers and come back here to prepare lunch. I think we should make a huge pot of hot chocolate, too. After we check our e-mails.”
     
    Arm in arm, the two women bundled up and headed for the main building. They watched, indulgent smiles on their faces, as the youngsters shoveled and threw snowballs that Murphy and Grady tried to retrieve, only to find the snow crumbled to nothingness once they got the balls in their mouths.
    “Wouldn’t it be nice to be that young again, Annie?” Myra asked.
    “Only if we knew then what we know now.” Annie laughed.
    “You do have a point, my friend. You really do.” Myra smiled as she led the way up the steps and into the Big House. “There’s a lot to be said for old age but at the moment I can’t think of what it is. What’s more, I hope I never remember what it is.”
    “You rock, Myra!”

Chapter 7
    M aggie Spritzer gnawed on a nail that was already chewed to the nub. Chewing her nails was what Maggie considered her only fault. Other than her nail biting, she thought of herself as perfect. Perfect with one teeny-tiny flaw worked for her.
    Just then she was watching Lizzie’s list shoot out of the fax machine at forty pages a minute. She was tempted to snatch at the sheets but didn’t want to get anything out of order. The last page held a message that said Lizzie was faxing fifty-six pages including the cover sheet. The date and time were penciled in on the top page along with Cosmo Cricket’s fax number. But it was the P.S. on the cover sheet that popped Maggie’s eyeballs:
     
    “I got married at one o’clock this morning.
I am now Mrs. Cosmo Cricket.”
     
    Maggie stared at the cover sheet with unblinking intensity. Damn. The Silver Fox had finally taken the plunge. “Way to go, Lizzie,” she chortled. She turned around and sent the cover letter via fax to Big Pine Mountain. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the reaction the girls would have when they read the news. They’d be as happy for Lizzie as she was, but then they would wonder, just the way she was wondering, how the marriage would affect the current status of the Vigilantes.
    Maggie walked over to the copy machine and ran off five copies of the entire list. One set went into the safe. The second set went into a file in the cabinet behind her chair. The third and fourth copies would go to Ted and Espinosa. The fifth copy was hers, which she would fax to the mountain as soon as she