At the Midnight Hour

by Alicia Scott

  “Do you work by yourself?” Liz asked presently. The effort at conversation was beginning to be almost too much, but she was yet determined to make it work. Anything was better than just sitting, watching the lean fingers of his hands twirl the glass.

  He nodded again, his wintry blue eyes finally glancing up to meet her own. “Yes. Most of my tests are run on computer, so I don’t really need any assistance.”

  “It must get lonely at times,” Liz ventured gently.

  “Mostly it’s just frustrating.”

  “What is your goal right now? What are you working on?”

  “Finding an ideal dielectric to enhance the capacitance of a supercapacitor.”

  “Oh. Well, that explains everything.”

  For a moment, he paused at her humor, as if it had somehow startled him. But he quickly recovered his indifference, mustering his control.

  “It’s not that technical,” he told her brusquely. “Basically, a capacitor consists of two small sheets of, say, metal, with a substance—a dielectric—between them. There are several traditional minerals that are used as capacitors—aluminum oxide, tantalum and the like. But to build a supercapacitor with the storage ability that I’m aiming for, those substances would take up too much room, making the capacitor huge. And I don’t want that.”

  “I see,” Liz said. “So you want to build something like a battery?”

  Across from her, Richard nodded and took another sip of his brandy. Unbidden, other images rose in his mind of other conversations. Yes, the person across from him should have blond hair, almost white. And she should be wearing something filmy and pink and looking at him with huge, china blue eyes as he babbled on and on about his work and his lab until he realized that she understood none of it. And really didn’t care to, either.

  “Something like that,” he said with a shrug, letting the subject trail off.

  Across from him, however, Liz’s mind was racing on its own.

  “What does a capacitor look like?” she asked. “Surely it isn’t exactly like a battery, or you would simply use that.”

  He turned his brandy glass in his hand once more, then took another sip.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said abruptly. “It’s not that interesting.”

  Across from him, she frowned. He was definitely shutting her out, and for whatever reason, it made her angry. She was tired of all this mystery, and darn it, she was curious now. She’d never known anyone who had made a capacitor before.

  “But I want to know,” she responded stubbornly, her forehead crinkling into a small frown. “I really do.”

  The words pulled at him, threatening his control. He didn’t want to talk about his work. He didn’t want, for one minute, to wonder if she truly was interested. Because he’d been down this road before, damn it. And he wasn’t so big a fool as to make the same mistakes twice. He was different, he’d learned that long ago. His mind worked faster, too fast, his inventions were important to him, too important. Other people, they just didn’t understand these things. And he didn’t want to try, he didn’t even want to start, to make the effort only to look over and find her yawning, as he had found Alycia doing time and again throughout their marriage. “Well, really, dear, it’s not as if it’s anything interesting.”

  “Forget it,” he said out loud, his features grim. “Perhaps when you bring Andrew to the lab, you can see them for yourself.”

  It was, however, too late. Liz was easily as stubborn as he was, and she really did want to know.

  “How big is a normal capacitor?” she quizzed. She glanced around suddenly, then picked up her discarded book. “Is it bigger or smaller than a book?”

  He turned then, and that was his undoing. She was looking at him with those big clear eyes so unlike any eyes he’d ever seen. The dark blue color should have made them mysterious, should have made them unreadable. But instead, her eyes possessed an open unrelenting determination that drew him in, tempting him with their apparent sincerity.

  “It’s smaller than a book,” he said tersely, staring into her eyes even as he told himself to shut up. “In fact, a normal capacitor would be the size of—” he looked around for an immediate reference point, and his eyes landed upon a simple silver ring she wore on her right hand “—like this,” he said, and without thinking about it, he moved over to the couch and picked up her hand. “This small stone here, the sapphire, is about the right size. And traditionally, a capacitor of this size can store ten to the—” he looked up suddenly to find her face just inches away as she leaned closer to see “—ten to the negative six farads,” he finished softly.

  “That’s not much energy?” she asked, glancing from the ring to find him right in front of her. His eyes are intense, she thought hazily. Beautiful pale blue eyes. Lost in his much larger grip, her hand began to tremble once more.

  “No,” he was saying. “A charge like that would be used up instantaneously.” His hand was still holding hers, but neither moved. Neither wanted to move.

  It was a stunning contrast, Richard noted absently, his mind taking in the scene with almost clinical detachment. The pale beauty of her small, soft hand lying in the encompassing strength of his own large palm. Her fingers looked fragile and delicate, but he could imagine them having a strong, earnest grip to go with the rest of her. Hadn’t she talked of fishing, and horseback riding? He could see these hands on the reins, controlling the stubbornest of horses with the lightest of touches.

  And he wondered...

  He looked up to find her eyes watching his with a kind of dazed breathlessness. Then his eyes wandered down a little farther to the red flush of her cheeks and the parted moistness of her lips. If he leaned forward, just a couple of inches...

  She licked her lips, and the man of pure logic lost his rationality. He leaned over abruptly, and claimed her lips with his own.

  She went rigid with the shock, her lips suddenly stiff under his as her eyes opened wide. But his lips were warm and moist against her own, his tongue darting out to trace delicately around her lips and an electric thrill shot through her. Suddenly, she found herself moaning in his arms. Her lips opened, her eyes closed, and she welcomed him in.

  His blood raced at her submission. He moved forward, pressing her against the couch as his tongue plunged into the heated recesses of her mouth. She tasted fresh and sweet, her arms wrapping around his neck with a pure passion that filled him with raw satisfaction. There was nothing coy or artificial here. She welcomed him with honest desire, and he took her with primal need.

  He explored her mouth, wrapping his tongue around her own and feeling her move against him in response. His hands dived into her hair, tilting back her head to plunge deeper. He heard her moan, he heard her sigh and he thought if his body got much harder he would be crippled for life.

  He forgot about the library, his lab, the dielectric that eluded all his efforts. He thought of only the taste of her lips, the smell of her skin, the sound of her small sighs of satisfaction.

  His lips moved to her ear, and delicately, deliciously, he nipped at her earlobe. She sat up with a small gasp of surprise, the electric jolt of desire catching her completely off guard. Her skin felt hyperaware, every nerve ending attuned to his touch. She wanted to taste his skin, she thought suddenly. She wanted to run her hands through his hair, flatten her palms on the warm flesh of his chest.

  She wanted. Oh, God, she wanted...

  Nick had never touched her like this.

  The thought penetrated out of the blue, and all at once, her eyes flew open.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, and the next thing he knew she was pushing him away with desperate hands. She didn’t even stay on the couch, the shocked energy propelling her off the sofa until she was standing before the fireplace, wrapping her arms around herself tightly. In her face he could see a kind of dazed horror, the kind one might experience after awakening from a nightmare.

  And then it hit him. Of course. She was horrified that she was a
ttracted to him, horrified that he, a man thought to have murdered his wife, would dare to kiss her.

  Why shouldn’t she be horrified? he thought harshly. He was a man who’d lost all hope of redemption long ago.

  His eyes became the cold blue slate developed from years of practice, his bearing suddenly stiff and straight. He drew back into himself completely, and in a matter of mere seconds, was once again Richard Campbell Louis Keaton, III. Distant. Proud. Cold.

  Liz still hadn’t said anything. She could only stare at him, this dark man before her. And then she found herself looking at his lips, the shocked attraction fizzling through her once again. Angrily she told herself to stop it. She wasn’t supposed to be feeling these things. She didn’t want to feel these things.

  All her life her emotions had belonged to one man. From those first awkward moments of adolescence to those that had marked the pure joy of maturation, all her attention had been for Nick. Yet here she was, just one year later, riveted by a stranger and the way he’d touched her. She found herself shivering, and wrapped her arms tighter around herself. What was wrong with her? She and Nick had been so in love, and certainly, she had enjoyed his touch a great deal. They’d shared sweetness and passion, the gentleness of two young people falling in love. Yet compared to what this man had just done to her senses, what they’d shared might as well have been from a Disney movie.

  Richard Keaton was not a boy. No, he had kissed her like a man.

  She couldn’t take it. The guilt and doubt and confusion swirled inside her like a suffocating mist. She needed to leave the room.

  She didn’t want to go yet.

  What was she doing? What in the world was she doing?

  She turned away completely, approaching the fire as if its heat might afford her some kind of protection against the tension that was slowly strangling the room.

  “I should be going now,” Richard said curtly behind her, his face still ominous. But he didn’t move.

  She nodded, her eyes stricken as she took in the golden flames. “Yes. It’s getting late.” She didn’t step away.

  She needed something to hang on to, she realized. Some small, simple conversation to restore her view of the world. Then she could pretend this entire evening had been filled with nothing but casual conversation, getting to know her charge’s father. The rest, well, she could write it off as a flukish event brought on by an overly tense atmosphere. Perhaps Wuthering Heights wasn’t the best reading material for her....

  But she needed to say something, anything, to get the evening back on track. Normalcy. She needed normalcy. When nothing better came to mind, she latched on to the question of his work.

  “So,” she began, the word slightly shaky while her back remained to him. “When, when you find this...dielectric thing, what will you do?”

  Richard didn’t answer right away, he was still watching her, still feeling the raw anger and tight passion in his gut. But then he let it go. What did it matter, what she thought of him? It wasn’t as if the entire town hadn’t already tried him and found him guilty. He’d spent the past five years listening to all the whispers behind his back when he went out, feeling all the curious stares. It wasn’t important.

  So after a moment he went along with her little game. It wasn’t as if he cared, he told himself. It wasn’t as if he cared at all.

  “The biggest breakthrough would be for solar cars,” he said finally, his voice distant and professional. “As the sun is only available for half a day, the major challenge is in trying to store the energy acquired during those hours for use after the sun goes down. Currently, such storage capacity requires the use of almost six hundred pounds of batteries. The weight alone is prohibitive. With the proper dielectric, however, it should be possible to build a supercapacitor that could store the necessary energy while weighing, say, fifty pounds. That, at least, is the theory.”

  She nodded, seizing the words. “But finding the right dielectric is hardly easy.”

  “No, it isn’t easy at all. But sooner or later, I will do it.” He said the words with such quiet conviction they were easy to believe. And she did believe him. If his dossier, and for that matter, his son, was anything to go by, the man was a virtual genius. She imagined he could do pretty much anything.

  Like kiss.

  She clamped down on the thought with a horrified gasp, once more rubbing her arms in unconscious agitation.

  “Are things improving with Andrew?” Richard’s voice cut in, his penetrating eyes still detailing her every action. She seemed upset, and for the first time, he wondered if it might have to do with more than him. He knew nothing about her at all, maybe there was something else— But then he dismissed the thought with a mental shrug. What did it matter? She wouldn’t be around much longer, anyway.

  “A little,” Liz said after a moment, trying to focus on the change in topic. “I’d still like to get him out more. He’s too hung up on all those books and depressing statistics. It’s not natural for a boy his age.”

  “I was like that when I was his age,” Richard observed quietly. Let her understand now, he thought. Let her understand just how different he was, before she started getting any ideas, any expectations otherwise.

  “What? You spent breakfast quoting how many people die every minute, as well?”

  “No. But I did, after all, read the phone book, not the Almanac.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked abruptly, whirling from the fire to face him for the first time. “He’s your son, for God’s sake. Aren’t you concerned?”

  “That’s what I hired you for, Miss Guiness,” he said slowly, and already she could see him tensing, the cold formality dropping like a shield between them. Yes, she thought it was something to be concerned about. Something abnormal, wasn’t that the word they all liked so well?

  “It’s not that simple,” she began, but he cut her off easily.

  “I believe we’ve already covered this matter, Miss Guiness. As I told you before, your job is to take care of Andrew, not analyze my relationship with him. Besides,” he said tightly, “I don’t think even that will be your concern for very much longer.”

  She eyed him warily, her focus now completely on the conversation at hand. “What do you mean?”

  The solution had occurred to him while he was in Geneva, and after some thought, he had decided it was a good one. It solved the problem of taking care of the child, and at the same time removed the child from Richard’s immediate concern. It was a perfect solution, benefiting Andrew and himself. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  “Andrew is six years old now,” he began slowly, “and as you know, a very precocious child. I’ve been exploring educational options for him, and at his age, I feel he is more than capable of entering private education. There are a few excellent schools in Germany—”

  “Boarding schools, you mean!”

  “Yes. They are boarding schools, but their curricula will give him incredible opportunities.”

  “What?” she cried, her voice genuinely outraged. Her temper flared, seizing all her previous guilt and confusion and converting it straight to anger. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was bad enough he fairly ignored his son, but to get the child back after five years only to ship him away again...! Not if she could help it. “Intelligence and opportunity are the least of Andrew’s concerns,” she informed him vehemently. “What he needs is a stable, secure, loving environment to help teach him a little about the other side of life, such as living!”

  She crossed toward him, and this close, he could see her blue eyes flashing midnight fire. He smiled at her coolly, even as desire once again knotted his stomach.

  “I believe, Miss Guiness, that you are a bit of a romantic.”

  “Now what is that supposed to mean?” she demanded hotly, her gaze narrowing dangerously.

  “You seem to think,” Richard said dispassionately, “that the important things in life involve experiencing things l
ike emotions and sentiments and playing. I disagree.”

  The ridiculousness of the statement was enough to stall her temper. “What do you mean you disagree? What do you think life is?”

  “I think it is reasoning, I think it is logic. I think it’s man’s search for progress, man’s mastering of the resources left to him. In short, it is something precise, something definable and something reasonable.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “But I am,” he said grimly, the intensity of his features almost enough to make her believe him.

  “Well, I don’t agree,” Liz declared firmly, her own face intent. “And I don’t think you should send Andrew to a boarding school. For goodness’ sake, that child is giving himself enough of a textbook education, as it is. He doesn’t need more lessons. He needs a father!”

  “It is not your concern,” Richard repeated coldly.

  “Oh, yes it is,” Liz told him, her jaw tightening stubbornly. “It is very much my concern. My job is to look after him. And do you know what I see? I see a scared little boy who idolizes his father. And I see a father who, for whatever reason, is perfectly intent on ignoring his own son. And I think that’s a great tragedy.”

  Richard’s lips thinned dangerously at her description. “Don’t meddle in things you know nothing about,” he warned.

  “Well, how can I know anything,” she retorted, “when you tell me nothing.”

  “It is not your place—”

  “Oh, spare me,” Liz cut in, her fragile emotions roaring out of control once and for all. “You cannot draw invisible boundary lines and hope to chain me in with them. I already know you don’t have the highest opinion of me, Mr. Keaton, but when I took this job, I took it with the intention of doing my best. And if I have to tear down every last particle of your self-control, if I have to pry through your deepest darkest concerns to learn why you avoid your son, I will do it. If you don’t like it, fire me.”

  She let the remark hang in the air, filling the vaulted ceiling with a tight, heated tension. Her cheeks were flushed, her chest heaving. Abruptly, their gazes locked, and the air between them heated another hundred degrees.