One of These Nights

He pushed open the car door and gathered up his briefcase and cup, and put one foot out. Then he stopped and looked back at her.

“Next time I’ll chatter,” he said unexpectedly.

She grinned at him. “This I want to see.”

He returned her grin rather sheepishly. She watched him walk toward the side door. He stepped into a patch of sunlight, and it gleamed on that thick mop of hair.

He really was, she thought as she watched him, quite charming in a studious sort of way.

“I brought you a sandwich, Professor.”

Ian took a breath, held it for a single second, then answered congenially, “Thank you, Rebecca.”

Her startled look told him he’d been as snarly to her as he’d feared. And her sudden smile made him feel even more guilty about it.

It also made him doubt the suspicions that had become chronic since Josh had planted the idea of a leak inside the lab. Rebecca was simply young and overeager, he thought, not devious. She just thought she wasn’t getting the credit she deserved. But he also feared that she wanted glory without having earned it, and that was a mentality Ian simply couldn’t understand. What was the point of being praised for something you hadn’t really done? For him the joy was in the process and the final success, not in the accolades that came after.

He smothered a sigh as he took a bite of the turkey sandwich. It was from the Redstone Café, so it was much tastier than the vending-machine fare that was standard at most places.

“Did you look at the paper I gave you yet?” Rebecca asked.

For a moment Ian looked at her blankly, then remembered the project paper she’d so excitedly presented him the other day. She’d done that before, come up with some idea she thought they should pursue, and this time he’d made the mistake of telling her to write it up, simply to get her out of his hair for a while.

“I did glance at it, yes,” he said.

“And?” Rebecca asked, hope brightening her angular face.

He tried for tact, feeling as if he needed to apologize in some way for being suspicious of her.

“It’s clever,” he began.

She beamed.

“And the process is very thorough. At first look, I’d have to say it appears solid.”

“Great!”

She looked so thrilled he almost hated to go on. But teaching was part of having a student assistant. He sighed inwardly; he’d told Josh he was no teacher.

“What’s your goal?” he asked.

A crease appeared between her brows. “Goal? Just as it says, to create a new polymer.”

“To what end?”

The crease became a frown, and she gave him a look that hinted that she was thinking him deliberately obtuse. “To do it, of course.”

Irritation spiked through him, but he fought it down. As gently as he could, he asked the crucial question.

“Why?”

Rebecca blinked. Twice. “Why?”

“For what purpose? How will this polymer be better for that purpose than anything that already exists? What about it will make it worth going through this lengthy and expensive process? Will it make something stronger, lighter, more durable?”

She took a step back, staring at him. “Is that all you care about, whether it will make money somehow?”

Idealism, Ian thought with a sigh. It was the most wearing thing about children.

“What I care about,” he said, “are things that will make lives easier, better, safer, and even give hope where there is none. Spending months to design a polymer we have no use for is a waste of effort, intelligence and, yes, money. But most of all it’s a waste of the most valuable, finite resource you have, and that’s time.”

Her expression turned troubled. “Haven’t you ever wanted to invent something just to see if you could?”

He was glad now he’d been gentle about it. “Yes. And I have. But eventually you come to realize the truth of the old saying about the scientists who got so wrapped up in the fact that they could, they forgot to question whether they should.”

“Yeah. Right.”

She turned and walked away, and he wondered if he’d inadvertently accomplished his goal of keeping her out of his way. Even if she wasn’t the leak, it was best to find out now. If the simple rejection of an idea could stop her, she wasn’t cut out for this.

Still, he hadn’t liked smashing her hopes. And it was still bothering him when he got into Samantha’s car that evening.

“Rough day?” she asked, discerning his mood so quickly it startled him.

“Sort of. I had to rein in my assistant today, and she wasn’t happy.”

“Rein her in? Was she messing something up?”

He settled into the seat and fastened the seat belt—something he didn’t always do when he drove by himself but that Samantha demanded before she would even turn the key—before he answered her.

“No, she just wanted to take off on a project that was a bit…misguided.”

“Misguided?”

“With no real purpose. And somewhat self-indulgent. But she’s young, so I tried to cut her some slack.”

Samantha smiled at that. “You say that like you’re ancient.”

“Sometimes I feel that way,” he admitted. “Her methodology is good, she’s got the ‘how’ down pat. I hated to see one simple question take all the wind out of her sails.”

She studied him for a moment. “You asked her…why?”

He was startled anew, but realized a perceptive woman like Samantha could have figured it out from his own words.

“Yes.” His mouth quirked. “I told her not to feel too badly. A very wise real professor once said, ‘Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question How?, but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question Why?”’

“And how many eons ago was that?”

“Recently. Erwin Chargaff of Columbia, 1969.”

Samantha chuckled, but it somehow didn’t sting. He knew he tended to older trivia, and she was too perceptive not to have noticed. Her next words proved it.

“Only you, Ian, could consider that recent. Do you have any quotes from this quarter century?” she asked as she started the car.

“Sure.” He thought a moment as she negotiated the parking lot. She glanced at him as they waited for cross traffic, and he grinned and said “‘It’s hard to be religious when certain people haven’t been struck by lightning.’ Calvin and Hobbes.”

She burst out laughing this time, and it pleased him more than he wanted to admit.

“If you’d told her that instead, it probably would have gotten through,” she said. “How angry was she?”

“Not angry, really,” he said, thinking back to Rebecca’s reaction. “More…unhappy, I think.”

She seemed to consider her next words carefully before saying, “How unhappy?”

It hit him in that moment—what hadn’t before but should have. He must have been too preoccupied with how to let her down easy. But he should have thought of it. Should have wondered if Rebecca was—and perhaps had been for a while—unhappy enough to do something foolish.

If she felt unappreciated enough to sell out Redstone.

“How’s it going?”

Sam finished her last bite of salad, then raised her gaze to the man who looked enough like her to be her brother. The first time she and her partner, Rand, had come face-to-face, it had been an eerie sort of shock for them both. Later they laughed when they discovered they had both started checking the family history to make sure there were no unclaimed siblings floating about. Since her parents were dead, she couldn’t be absolutely positive, but Rand’s parents were alive and well and had been somewhat insulted by his questions. That is, until he’d brought Sam home to meet them. Two jaws had dropped, and all was forgiven.

“Fine,” she answered his question. “He’s not a tough job.”

“I’ve heard he doesn’t do much, outside of work.”

“Doesn’t seem to.”

Rand had called this meeting to give her the final sale papers on the house, in case she should need them. It never ceased to amaze her how fast the Redstone name and horsepower got things done, even government paperwork.

They were at the restaurant where she’d met Josh when she’d started this assignment. She had grabbed the chance at a decent meal; this job was making her rethink the wisdom of never having learned to cook. Rand, as usual, was drinking a soda, while she sipped at a surprisingly good lemonade.

“Is he as odd a duck as they say?” Rand asked.

Sam felt strangely defensive. “I haven’t seen him do anything particularly odd. Yes, he thinks differently, but that’s good, not odd.”

Rand raised a brow at her.

“Like this morning,” she said, “we heard a story on the car radio about some firefighters who were killed in a forest fire. The report said they made it into their fire shelters, that it was breathing the superheated air as the fire burned over them that killed them. So Ian immediately began thinking about developing some device small enough to carry that would give them just enough breathable air to survive a burn over.”

“I see what you mean,” Rand conceded. “And if Josh is right about him, he’ll probably do it, eventually. Although St. John says the Safe Transit Project is his only focus right now.”

She nodded.

He paused before saying, “It’s Ian, now, is it?”

She grimaced at him. “Well I can hardly call him Gamble to his face, now can I?”

“Sorry,” Rand said, with a grin that belied the words. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

“So what’s up back home?” she asked, not caring if her subject change was obvious. “I feel like I’m totally out of the loop.”

“You heard Draven got McClaren out?”

“Josh told me,” she confirmed.

“So his record is still perfect.”

“Was there any doubt?”

Rand shrugged. “You never know.”

That was a truth anyone on the Redstone security team soon learned, Sam thought later as she drove out of the restaurant parking lot. In an empire as varied as the one Josh had built, anything could happen. It was their job, impressed upon them from the moment they were accepted on the team, to see that no matter what happened, no Redstone people were hurt. Property, both physical and intellectual, came second.

She was waiting at what had to be the longest traffic light in the city when her cell phone rang.

“Beckett,” she answered.

“He’s leaving.” There was no word of identification, but she recognized St. John’s deep voice.

She glanced at her watch. “This early?”

“I believe there was some tension in the lab today.”

“Tension? Ian?”

“Ian is rarely tense.”

And that was all the answer she was going to get, it seemed. She had no doubt Josh’s omnipresent assistant knew exactly what had happened, but she didn’t press for details. No one pressed St. John except Josh, and she’d bet even he picked his battles carefully.

“All right.”

She disconnected and pondered a moment, still waiting for that blessed light to change. She and Ian had come to the agreement that she would come by when she got off, wait no longer than fifteen minutes, and if he wasn’t out by then she was to leave and he’d find his own way home. So far there had been only one day when she’d waited longer, nearly an hour, but he’d seemed to accept her story of heavy traffic. She knew from St. John that this regularity in itself was unusual; Ian had a tendency, St. John told her, to lose track of time.

She could go to Redstone now, but Ian might wonder why she conveniently happened to get off this early on this particular day. He had her cell number. She’d given it to him and told him to call if his schedule changed, but she doubted he would, not when as far as he knew she was working a regular job and got off at six.

Instead, she decided to swing by the Chinese takeout, grab some food, and then go get him. With luck the food would be distraction enough that her apparently flexible hours wouldn’t become a topic.

It worked. The moment he got into the car and smelled the luscious aromas, talk of mere time was forgotten.

“I was starved,” she explained. “I hope you don’t mind, I got enough for two, as long as I was there, anyway.”

“Mind? I could kiss you.”

Well, now that was a visual, Sam thought, shocked at the tiny jolt the idea gave her. He was digging around in the bags, seemingly unaware of what he’d said.

Of course, there was no reason to think he meant it as anything more than a joking remark. Something people just said. In fact, if the growl his stomach had just sent up was any indication, he was hungry enough to have meant it no matter who had provided the food.

It’s you who’s out of whack here, she told herself. Get your mind in the game, Beckett.

“How long have you worked for Redstone?” she asked.

“Four years.” He opened a bag and peered in.

“You like it?”

His head came up. “Yes. Yes, I do. Josh Redstone is one of a kind. He gave me a chance when no one else would, and I owe him everything.”

“It’s nice to have a boss like that,” she said, meaning it in the exact way he did, although he didn’t know it.

“Yes. He’s the best. It’s why everybody who works there stays, and he’s got hundreds of applicants to chose from for any job that opens up.” He dived back into the bag before he said casually, “How did you know I’d be leaving this early on a Friday?”

She made a note to herself never again to assume she could distract this particular mind. At least not for long.

“Actually, I’ve been off since four-thirty. My boss went out of town,” she improvised. “So I figured I had time to grab food.”

He looked up from the bag of small white boxes. “You really don’t have to be my taxi service every day.”

“I know, it’s a sacrifice,” she said with mock melodrama. “I have to drive an entire one hundred yards out of my way to cruise the Redstone driveway.”

“Yeah. Well.” He sounded rather embarrassed. “I got a call today that they have to order a part for my car. And they don’t know how long it will be.” He sounded disgusted, but not truly upset. St. John’s words came back to her. Ian is rarely tense….

“Sometimes parts are hard to find,” she said neutrally.

“I could make it myself faster.”

Sam had to stifle a smile. With any other man, she would have laughed at the comment. With Ian, she knew he was probably right. But he didn’t know she knew what he really did, so she kept quiet. And Ian wasn’t done yet, anyway.

“When I had to have a fender repaired a while back, just because it’s an older car they spent forever trying to match the paint. Like I cared. Henry Ford had it right.”

“Henry Ford?”

“With the Model T. He said you could have it any color you wanted as long as it was black.”

Ian was always tossing off bits of historical trivia like that, she thought yet again. He seemed steeped in history, and as he’d admitted, many of the nonwork-related books she’d seen him with had been historical in nature. She herself was very much of the present, and only cared about history in passing as it applied to her or her work, and given their similar ages the difference intrigued her.

“Everybody driving the same car, same color. Or rather, no color,” she said. “Sounds kind of boring to me.”

He looked at her for a long, silent moment during which she wondered what he was thinking.

“Yes,” he said finally, slowly. “I imagine it would.”

And suddenly the easy camaraderie in the car vanished. It was as if Ian, who’d seemed to finally relax around her, had thrown a wall up between them.

She managed to maneuver it so that they ate dinner at his place—hers was, as befitted a temporary home, minimally furnished, enough to appear curious—but the withdrawal she had sensed continued. The only good thing was that his silence gave her the opportunity to surreptitiously inspect his home further. The more she knew about him, the easier her job would be, she told herself.

“Nice set of pots,” she commented, looking at the copper utensils hanging from a pot rack over the stove.

“My mother’s,” he said briefly. “Cooking is a production with her.”

“But not you?”

“I never learned that kind of cooking. Can’t afford the time.”

Which both answered and didn’t answer her question—time to cook or to learn? Weary of pushing when she wasn’t sure what she was pushing against, Sam finished her meal in a silence that matched his. She helped him clean up, then picked up her purse and keys.

She hadn’t intended to, but at the doorway she stopped and looked back at him. “If I said something to offend you, Ian, I’m sorry.”

To his credit he didn’t deny it. But he didn’t look at her when he answered. “You didn’t. It’s not you.”

Her gut told her to push; her common sense told her to back off. She was here to protect him, after all, not probe his psyche.

As she made her way next door, she wondered why she was having trouble remembering that simple fact.

Ian sat alone in the dark for a very long time. His parents hadn’t lived in this house for ten years, yet he could hear their voices as if they were here in the living room that now gave them heart palpitations to look at. As if he were still the child they didn’t understand.

“Why didn’t you invite your friend in?”

“Why didn’t you go to the party?”

“Why don’t you put that book down and go outside?”

He’d wanted to scream at them. Because I’m not like you, I can’t be like you, I’ll never be like you!

But it would only have hurt them, and he couldn’t do that. He knew they loved him; they simply didn’t understand that he was different. In so many ways. What was so simple for them, that easy, warm charm, just wasn’t in him. He was a throwback or something, a changeling. It wasn’t bad enough that he thought differently than they did, he had to be different in every other way, too.

A misfit, that’s you, he told himself.

It was the only explanation he could think of for what had happened tonight. All Samantha had done was give a simple opinion, and he’d shut down.

No color. Sounds kind of boring to me….

He’d shut down because in that simple statement all the differences between them had leaped out at him, and he wondered what the hell he was doing. More than once over this past week he’d caught himself eagerly looking forward to seeing her. He’d had the thought that the timing on the breakdown of his car couldn’t have been better. He’d even started to leave work at a regular time, and that was a real first.

And today, as much as he wanted to leave early, after a tension-filled day when he hadn’t been able to shake himself free of either Rebecca or Stan, he’d hesitated. He hadn’t wanted to miss riding home with Samantha.

He supposed it was only to be expected. He’d been alone for a long time, since Colleen had given up on him and walked out. Dump him into close proximity with a beauty like Samantha and it was inevitable he’d be drawn like an already singed moth to a new, even brighter flame.

But if he got singed again, he’d have no one but himself to blame.

He rubbed a hand over his eyes. For a while longer he sat there in the darkness. Finally, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he went to bed early, and without even cracking a book.

When the light in the converted living room never came on, Sam sat up straighter and watched the house intently. A short while later the upstairs light in the master bedroom came on, but only for a few minutes. When it went out, she expected the light downstairs to come on at last; he must have forgotten something upstairs.

The house stayed dark.

She looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was barely nine, and this time of year, barely dark. And Ian rarely went to bed before midnight.

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