At the Midnight Hour (6 page)

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 attracted 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 like 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.

Damn it, she wanted to kiss him. She wanted to grab his head and savage his lips with all the rage and frustration boiling in her veins. And one look at his darkening eyes told her that he would give as good as he got.

“If you want to run,” he spoke suddenly, his voice low and curt, “you’d better go now. Or I won’t be held responsible for the consequences.”

With a small cry of distress, she whirled and fled from the fired atmosphere of the room. Because she just wasn’t ready for the consequences yet.

He watched her go, saying nothing, doing nothing. And he sat there in silence for a long while after, listening to the echoing remains of her anger in the vaulted ceilings of the library, watching the flames of the fire burn down, sipping his brandy.

His deepest darkest concerns?

No, he told himself. The words had only been said in anger. She wasn’t serious about them, and even if she was, what could she find out after all these years?

Still, he had to admire her conviction. And in all honesty, he was impressed by how she’d handled the boy thus far. If only she knew... But she didn’t know, and he would never tell. Alycia’s death had sealed so many secrets, there was no use in disturbing them now.

Finally, he rose, his eyes unreadable as he picked up the book she’d been reading, to put it away.
Wuthering Heights,
he read to himself as he crossed the room to the empty slot on the shelf. He had read it himself a good thirty years ago. The eternal love of Catherine and Heathcliff, storming through the Yorkshire moors. He hefted the book into place, his fingers resting for a moment on the fine leather cover.