Then he moved, shifting his focus—and the weapon—to Sam.
“Maybe I’ll just have to shoot you first, then.”
“You plan on killing everyone who’s coming through that door in the next two minutes?” she asked, noticing as she spoke that Ian was edging by millimeters back toward the wall behind Chilton.
“If I have to.”
Bravado, she thought. “You can try,” Sam agreed easily, “But I’d be willing to bet I’ve had a lot more practice at hitting a moving target than you have.”
The man swallowed visibly. Ian inched a bit closer, and Sam wondered what he was up to; he was getting dangerously close to Chilton.
“You know,” she said quickly, hoping to keep Chilton’s attention where it was, on herself, “if you were feeling that way, all you had to do was go to Josh.”
“You don’t get it, either,” Chilton snapped. “He should have seen that I was better. Ian never had to go to Josh. Josh came to him!”
“Did you feel threatened by that, or just by Ian’s brilliance?”
Chilton swore, low and ugly.
“Well, you’ve got Josh’s attention now,” she said, “after stealing Ian’s work and selling it to JetCal. But you’re going to regret it.”
She gave silent thanks for excellent peripheral vision as Ian moved even closer to the back wall. She still didn’t know what he was up to. But he was going to be directly behind Chilton soon, and she hoped urgently he didn’t have some silly idea about tackling the armed man.
“I won’t. I’ll be running things at JetCal, because you can’t prove a thing,” Chilton said. “I deleted all the evidence that I ever touched his computer. Any good lawyer would get me off.”
“What makes you think,” Sam said, “that this would ever go to court?”
Chilton blinked. Ian moved ever closer.
“You tried to kill one of Redstone’s own. You’re beyond the pale to Josh.”
“I didn’t touch Gamble!”
“But you sent the men who did.”
“And they bungled it. He’s alive and well.”
For a moment Sam’s breath caught, fearing Chilton would glance around for the man he was talking about and see that Ian was maneuvering to get behind him. But instead the man smiled, a vicious expression that made Sam’s stomach knot.
“But it doesn’t matter. I’ve ruined years of his work. He’ll never untangle it now. And there’s not a thing he or even Josh can do about it.”
Sam really doubted that. She was calmly certain that Ian had a copy of his work safely stashed away, just as before. She didn’t even have to look at him to be sure. Which was a good thing, because he was moving again.
“Do you really think Josh would need to have you arrested to put an end to your career, anywhere?” she said quickly, keeping him focused on her. “Do you have any idea how far his reach extends?”
A tremor went through the man, and Sam realized he hadn’t thought this through at all. He’d no doubt acted in a fit of offended self-righteousness, goaded by a sense of undeserved entitlement, and only now was realizing all the fallout from his ill-advised decision. Still, he tried to recover.
“You can’t even prove anything to Josh,” he insisted. “And he’ll never do anything without proof.”
Sam sighed. “Stan, Stan,” she said, as if to a recalcitrant child. “Don’t mistake Josh’s loyalty to his people as stupidity. You’re done.” She touched the cell phone at her waist. “Draven’s been listening this whole time.”
It was the final straw. Sam saw Chilton’s hand tighten on the pistol’s grip. Saw the trigger finger quiver. Regretfully began to raise her own weapon; shooting was the last thing she wanted.
In one instant Sam saw Ian reach out toward the wall behind the computer on his desk. In the next, a blaring Klaxon blasted through the air.
Chilton jumped. Jerked toward the sound. Sam leaped. Hit him midbody, taking him down with her full weight. His little gun went sliding across the floor under Ian’s desk as he hit. Sam’s knee came down over his kidneys, and he grunted in pain. She didn’t increase the pressure, but neither did she let up; the sight of Ian at gunpoint was emblazoned into her memory forever.
Moments later the thud of footsteps in the outer hall told her the cavalry had arrived. Rand’s run slowed to a walk, then a stop as he saw everything was under control. He stared down at Chilton.
“Boy, this is going to tick Josh off in a big way.”
“That,” Sam said levelly, as she yanked the man to his feet, “is Mr. Chilton’s problem.”
Another figure appeared in the doorway, tall, lean, black-clad and lethal looking. Draven. For a long moment he simply stood there, looking at the former boss of Redstone Safety R&D. Chilton looked back at Draven, into his eyes. He began to shake, then slowly sank down to his knees on the floor. Draven nodded to Sam, Rand and Ian, then turned and walked away without ever saying a word.
For a few minutes Sam was occupied as they collected Chilton’s weapon and Rand called in help to start searching the man’s office for anything related to the now solved case of industrial espionage.
Finally she and Ian had a minute alone, and Sam turned to him. “Nice move, Professor. What was that alarm?”
He gave her a lopsided grin that told her he hadn’t taken offense at the appellation he normally hated. “My backup alarm. It goes off whenever power to my computer system is interrupted.”
She frowned. “Don’t most people just have a battery backup that discreetly beeps?”
He colored slightly then. “Yeah. But sometimes I don’t hear it. Or I do, but I get involved again and forget. This one gets my attention.”
“I can see that,” she said, returning his grin at last. “I gotta say, though, you gave me some rough moments. I wasn’t sure what you were doing. I was afraid you were going to try and jump him.”
He looked surprised. “You were the one with the gun. And the one who’s trained for this. Not me. I was just trying to distract him so you could…do your thing.”
Sam tried not to gape, but she wasn’t certain how successful she was. She was aware of a tightness deep in her chest, a sort of ache that threatened to spread throughout her body. She’d never, outside of the team, come across such simple acceptance of what she did. Especially from a man.
That it was this man seemed somehow monumentally important. And there was only one reason she could think of for that, only one explanation for that squeezing tightness that made it hard to breathe.
She loved him.
The realization hit her with the force of a blow. She was stunned, apprehensive and nervous. What she was not was surprised. She knew she must have been aware of her feelings on some level, somewhere hidden and protected where she kept hopes she was afraid to acknowledge.
Oh, God. She loved him. Now what?
Now, nothing, she told herself. Just because you’ve lost your mind doesn’t mean he has.
“Samantha?”
Not knowing—or wanting to know—how long she’d been standing there staring at him, she tried to gather herself.
“What?”
“What will they do with him?”
“That’s up to Josh.”
“Can he really ruin him, like you said?”
“I’m sure he could. He carries a lot of weight in a lot of industries. If he puts the word out on Chilton, he’ll be lucky to find a job sweeping floors.”
Ian shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he risk it? He had the perfect setup here.”
“Some people need their egos stroked more than others, I guess. It takes a dedicated person,” she added, “to think the work itself is glory enough.”
“A workaholic, you mean,” Ian said, the bitter tinge to his voice telling Sam he’d been accused of that before.
“Only if work is the only thing you make room for in your life.”
“What if you haven’t had much luck with anything else?”
“Then you treat
it like one of your projects. Find the pattern, figure out why it goes wrong. Then you can fix it.”
A startled look crossed his face. “I never thought of that.”
She shrugged. “It’s what you’re best at. It’s natural to you. No reason you can’t apply the same principles outside the lab.” She gave him the best smile she could manage. “As long as you don’t start treating people like lab rats, of course.”
Ian became very thoughtful after that. And quiet. But, she thought as she finished up her report to Josh, it wasn’t a bad, tense sort of quiet. It was the kind of silence she’d come to know, when Ian’s prodigious mind was working on a problem. She found to her surprise that she rather enjoyed watching it, knowing what was going on behind that faintly absent expression.
Oh, God, she thought, I’ve got it bad.
She forced herself to concentrate on her own work at hand, using the small details of what had happened to occupy a mind that kept wanting to stray into dangerous territory. Impossible territory. She could just hear it now, jokes about the absentminded professor and his bodyguard….
Of course, Ian was probably doing just as she said, working out why he’d had problems with his life outside of his work before. And she doubted very much whether a woman with a job like hers and a brother like Billy would be the answer he came up with. Yes, they’d found an unexpectedly fiery passion together, but you couldn’t build a life on that alone, and she knew Ian was smart enough to know that. He and Colleen had had that and it hadn’t worked.
His presence was making it hard for her to concentrate, so she was glad when her cell buzzed and the cleanup team requested he come to his office to help them determine what Chilton had removed from his computer. After he’d gone, she set about finishing her lengthy report.
Much later, finished and calmer, she headed for Ian’s office. He was alone, the cleanup apparently finished. He was resting his elbows on his desk, and his forehead in his hands. He looked weary, and Sam’s chest tightened at the sight.
“Ian?” she said softly
He lifted his head. The weariness in his posture was echoed in his eyes.
“Bad?” she asked as she stepped quietly into the office.
“Bad enough. He wasn’t kidding when he said he’d ruined the work here.”
“But you have a backup, right?”
He gave her a smile that warmed her. “Yes. But it’s going to take a lot of re-inputting. And I’m not sure Rebecca’s going to want to do the drudge work, after what I suspected her of.”
“She’ll get over it. And if she doesn’t, then Josh will get somebody else to do it. Come on, it’s nearly ten, let’s get out of here. We can toast the end of this mess.”
She didn’t say what else she was thinking, that the end of this mess also meant the end of their forced relationship. She didn’t want to think about what would be left afterward, if anything.
Much later, after a glass of the wine they were sharing over a rich, Italian dinner, Sam gave him an unusually intent look over the rim of her glass.
“So, whatever happened to that friend of yours and his father after their house…er, blew up? Did they get away clean?”
The abrupt non sequitur startled him. “Why?” he asked, warily.
“Don’t worry,” she said with a smile. “Your secret is still safe. It seems to me you did the best thing anybody could do to help.”
“What makes you think it was me?”
“Because,” she said softly, “you would.”
“Blow up a house?” He’d thought it incredibly wild at the time, hardly something expected of quiet, geeky Ian Gamble.
“No. Use your best strength, your brain, to help a friend.”
He grimaced. “Just how many people know besides you?”
“It doesn’t matter. None of us would give you up, even if it mattered after all this time. Draven would skin whoever did.”
“Draven.” Ian shook his head. “That’s one scary guy. Those eyes…”
“He is intimidating.”
“That’s an understatement,” he said wryly, lifting his wineglass, “about a guy who makes bad guys break down just at the sight of him.”
“Someday,” Sam said, “he’ll meet the woman who can take that look out of his eyes.”
Ian lowered his glass slowly to the table. All the panic he’d been fighting off came back in a rush. He took a deep breath to steady himself, hesitated a moment longer, then plunged in.
“Are you saying that woman…isn’t you?”
“I told you, Ian. I don’t love him. And he deserves a woman who will love him madly, passionately, with all her heart.” She set down her own glass, ran a finger around the rim in a way he found suddenly maddening. Then she raised her gaze to his. He saw the hesitation, the trepidation in her eyes before she added in a voice so low and husky it sent shivers through him, “Sort of the way I love you.”
Ian’s breath stopped. It was just as well, since his throat was too tight to let even a whisper of air through. He swallowed with an effort, and managed to suck in enough air to keep himself going.
She’d saved him. Again. He’d been afraid to risk it, afraid to do what she had just done, afraid of making a fool out of himself telling her how he felt. He hadn’t even been able to tell her that he’d given up trying to stay mad at her for how they had begun, under false pretences.
And now, with those simple, wrenching words, she’d turned his sometimes drab world into a brilliantly colored place. And for the first time, he knew how his parents must feel, living with all this joy every day. And what had once bothered him, that intuitive side that clashed with his methodically scientific mind, was now simply one fascinating facet of a woman who could hold him spellbound for the rest of his life.
“You’ve got more guts than anybody I’ve ever known,” he said softly.
To his amazement she blushed. “You know, I was hoping for something more along the lines of ‘Gosh, Samantha, I love you, too.”’
“Gosh, Samantha, I love you, too,” he said instantly.
The smile she gave him then did things to his insides that seemed physically impossible. “Can you accept that I’m not the traditional kind of woman, who does a traditional kind of work?”
“And I’m not a traditional kind of man, with a traditional job. I’m a hermit when I’m in the middle of a project, which is most of the time, while you’re out bouncing around the world.”
“When I’m home, I like to stay at home,” she said. “But when I’m gone, it’s any and everywhere. Can you deal with that?”
“I’m my mother’s son. What do you think?”
That got him a grin. “There is that,” Samantha said.
“Maybe I should be asking you if you can stand her as a mother-in-law.”
Her eyes widened. “Was that…a proposal?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “In that, I’m traditional. I’m not like my parents, but I want what they have.”
“So do I,” Samantha answered, so fervently his gut contracted pleasurably.
“Was that a yes?”
She smiled at the parroting of her words, and used his own back. “Yeah,” she said. “It seems in some things I’m traditional, too.”
But after a moment her smile wobbled slightly.
“What is it?”
She lowered her gaze to the table. “There’s one thing we haven’t dealt with, Ian.”
“There’s probably more than one, but we’ll work it all out.”
“But this is a big one.”
“Who drives?” he quipped. “You got it. You’re better than I am at it, anyway.”
She laughed, but he could tell there was still reservation behind it. He tried to be serious, not wanting her to think he was belittling whatever her concern was.
“You traveling for your job? I’ll save up new ideas to start when you leave, so I won’t hate you being gone so much, or worry so much that you’re doing something dangerous.”
; “You’ve really thought about this,” she said.
“I’ve thought of little else since the day I realized how we met didn’t mean a damn thing,” he said dryly.
She picked up her fork, then set it down again. She reached for her glass of wine instead, and took a large enough swallow that he knew she was still wound up about something.
“What, Samantha? Are you thinking about where we’ll live? We can keep my house or move. I don’t care, as long as I have an office. It would be nice to have room for my parents. Or then again, maybe not,” he said, grinning, hoping to get a smile out of her.
“I like your parents,” she said softly.
“I know. So I’ll live with it. And of course, we’ll need a room for Billy. He does come visit you now and then, doesn’t he?”
The tiny gasp that broke from her told him he’d managed to hit a nerve. Maybe even the very nerve that had her on edge. He should have guessed sooner, he thought.
“Is that what you’re worried about? Billy?”
Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded.
“Then we’d better go see him. I’d like to ask his permission to marry his sister.”
Samantha’s joyous expression and her fierce hug told him that for once in his life, he’d done it exactly right.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6789-7
ONE OF THESE NIGHTS
Copyright © 2003 by Janice Davis Smith
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
One of These Nights Page 22