Beverly Hills Maasai by Eric Walters Read Free Book Online Page B

person. My imagination was running away with me.
    Our house had an elaborate alarm system. We’d always had an alarm—who didn’t?—but after my father moved out my mother upgraded to a system that most banks would have been envied. Since then, she’d been much, much more relaxed. Still, she always armed the alarm when she went to bed. I was safer sleeping in my own bedroom than in a bank vault.
    So what if my window was open? I probably hadn’t latched it properly and the wind had just blown it open … although the wind did seem pretty gentle. But so what? It wasn’t like anybody could get in through my window anyway. I was on the second floor—really almost as high as the third floor because of the way the ground below was landscaped and dropped off—and there was no way anybody could climb up the side of the house. It was a straight drop.
    I didn’t like heights, and I didn’t like looking straight down from my window. If you ever fell it would be one big drop to the ground. You’d probably break your neck, unless some of the shrubs below cushioned your fall.
    There was a tree not far from my window, but it wasn’t close enough to climb up to my room. There was no way. I knew that for a fact. The security experts who’d installed the alarm system upgrade had also done a full security audit of the property. Based on that, they’d removed some of the shrubs, installed motion-sensor lights, and trimmed branches from the trees that were too close to the house.
    Carlos had been
so
angry. He treated the trees and shrubs as if they were members of his family, and he just couldn’t believe that these security guys had hacked away the branches. He called them a bunch of butchers. I think he would have taken a chainsaw to
them
if he could have got away with it.
    Now you’d have to be a leopard to leap from that tree to my window, and this wasn’t Africa. There was nothing more dangerous here than a chihuahua. Butthat shadow in the corner was a lot bigger than a chihuahua, and it certainly didn’t look like a leopard. Not like a leopard … but it did look like a man. Paranoia was back for an encore.
    I tried to focus my eyes on the shadow. If I stared harder maybe I could see better. This was stupid. Why didn’t I just turn on my bedside lamp? Then this whole thing, my imagination running wild, would dissolve in the light.
    Unless it really
was
a man standing in the corner of my room … standing there watching me sleep … waiting for the right moment to—The shadow moved!
    Slowly I moved my hand from under the covers, inching it closer to the light. I fumbled around on the table, trying to find the switch, and—
    “Alexandria.”
    I froze in fear and—Wait … that voice. “Nebala?”
    “Yes.” He stepped forward.
    I switched on the light, and Nebala used his hand to shield his eyes.
    “What are you doing here?” I gasped.
    “Scared?” he asked.
    I almost said no but realized my reaction had to be etched on my face. How could I not be scared? I’d have liked to see how
he’d
react if I suddenly showed up in
his
hut in the middle of the night. Probably by pulling out a machete or tossing a spear at me. That would be very bad for me. The worst thing that could happen to him was me pummelling him with one of the stuffed animals that lived on my bed.
    “How did you get in here?” I asked.
    “Window.”
    “But it’s twenty-five feet off the ground. How did you get
up
to the window?” I was wondering if he’d found a ladder in the garage.
    “Tree.”
    “You used the tree? Okay, but how did you get from the tree to my window?”
    “Jumped.” He pantomimed jumping.
    “Nobody could jump that far. That’s impossible.”
    “Possible.”
    I wanted to argue, but since he was standing right there I had to figure it really was possible.
    “Okay, you jumped.”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you going to give me anything except one-word answers?”
    “Maybe,” he said, and then he smiled.
    “In that case,