One of These Nights Read online

  “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.

  Anybody had the right to a bad mood, she thought. And Ian certainly didn’t owe her any explanation beyond what he’d given—that it wasn’t because of her. But she couldn’t help feeling that it was, that somehow she had sent him into this mood, whatever it was.

  She frowned. Could simply disagreeing with his bit of Henry Ford trivia have done this? If he was that sensitive, then this, or something like it, would have inevitably happened sooner or later.

  She got up and crossed to the box that held the files for this case—a copy of Ian’s personnel records, along with some notes from Josh and Draven’s background investigation. The box was locked, since it was a strict Redstone rule that such things be kept safe and confidential.

  She got out the file, went back to the window seat and clicked on the floor lamp she’d set up next to the seat. She’d been through it all before she’d started this, but now that she had better than a week of contact with Ian under her belt, she wanted to read it again.

  Nothing in particular jumped out at her anew. She did find herself looking at the rather stark entry that he had been married at age twenty-two, and that it had lasted for less than a year. It had ended, she realized, about the time he had moved back into this house. But that had been nearly ten years ago. Surely he wasn’t still so gun-shy that he couldn’t deal with a woman at all?

  Perhaps it was just her, she thought.

  She hadn’t thought she would need to cultivate a different persona for this job, but perhaps she’d misjudged. Perhaps she should have acted less herself, and more…something. Someone else. Quieter. More reserved. Except that Ian was already so reserved himself that if she did the same they’d never get past it.

  She sighed, and leaned back in the window seat, staring at the dark house next door. Maybe Josh should have had Rand do this. Maybe she was threatening to Ian somehow. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But for all his reserve, for all his quietness, she just didn’t get the feeling that he was the kind of man threatened by a competent, confident woman. She’d run into that kind often enough to know them, and she’d swear Ian didn’t have the underlying insecurity and inherent double standards that caused that kind of reaction.

  No, she thought. Whatever had made him back off, it wasn’t that. And she had to trust that her boss knew what he was doing in sending her on this assignment. Josh had certainly earned that kind of faith.

  So, she thought, she would take Ian’s answer at face value and continue as she’d begun. Changing her tactics now would be too obvious. And she wasn’t about to start playing games with him, acting hurt that he’d withdrawn. She was a stranger, nearly, after all. And he had the right to do…whatever it was he was doing.

  And what she was going to do right now was take advantage of the situation and grab some extra sleep herself. Tomorrow was Saturday, and she had a busy day planned. Right in Ian Gamble’s front yard. And if he didn’t like it, he was going to have to come out and tell her to her face.

  Chapter 5

  The faint sound of humming was the first thing Ian heard. For a moment he just lay there, a bit groggy after more sleep than he’d had in a long time—and after a series of jumbled dreams that he remembered in detail and, he admitted blearily, a few he did not. He had the feeling he was better off not remembering those; his new neighbor had figured prominently in most of them.

  His new neighbor.

  Samantha.

  The humming was coming from his own yard.

  It was Saturday.

  Suddenly fully awake, he rolled out of bed. He went to the window where he could see toward the front yard, barely managing not to run. He couldn’t see a thing past the overgrown passionflower vine. But he could hear that light, lilting voice humming bits of a tune he didn’t recognize.

  Instinctively, he glanced at his wrist before he realized he wasn’t wearing his watch. He looked back over his shoulder at the alarm clock—the excessively loud one his mother had bought him when he’d started college, afraid he’d never get up without her to yank him out of bed—which read 7:20.

  Hastily he pulled on some jeans and a T-shi
rt, finger combed the heavy mop of hair that had been a nuisance since childhood, and started downstairs. He paused halfway down when he realized he’d pulled on his most ragged jeans, with blowouts at both knees.

  Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, and continued down.

  He pulled open the front door. She was beginning where she’d left off the other day. She was dressed in much the same way. And he was reacting the same way. For a moment he just stood there, marveling at the simple fact that she was there.

  And then she did it again, straightened, turned and looked right at him, as if she had felt his gaze. And as before, it unnerved him slightly.

  “Morning!” she called, pulling off her sunglasses. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  So she was going to act as if nothing had happened, he thought. Either she’d taken his explanation to heart, or it didn’t matter to her enough to worry about.

  If you’re smart, you’ll choose selection B, he told himself firmly.

  “I was awake,” he said. He went down the porch steps. She’d already made considerable progress, at least another two feet of the perimeter flower bed. “You’re doing it all at once.”

  She blinked, glanced at where she’d been working, then back at him. “All at once?”

  “Weeding, clipping…” He paused, trying to remember what his mother had called it, pulling off the dead flowers. “Deadheading,” he said as it came back to him, and he waved a hand rather vaguely at a couple of the more faded blooms.

  She smiled. “Let me guess. You’d do the weeding all the way around, then go back to the beginning and do the clipping, then back again for the deadheading.”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I need the sense of finishing a section as I go. Otherwise it seems too big a task.”

  He nodded. That made a certain amount of sense to him. And he was used to being the one who took a different approach from the rest of the world, anyway.

  “I’ll keep going, then, if you like how it’s coming out,” she said.

  “I like it. I just feel guilty, you doing all this work here,” he admitted.

  “So take a break and dig in. It’s good for the soul. And it helps you think,” she added.

  Now that was an aspect he’d never thought of before. His reaction must have shown, because she went on.

  “You just throw your problem into the pot on the back burner and let it stew while you’re working.”

  Even though he’d learned long ago that some of his clearest thinking happened when he was doing something totally unrelated to whatever problem he was working on, he usually did that while thinking about some other project. He’d never really tried something completely nonwork-related. Even when walking or working out he was usually still concentrating on the puzzle at hand.

  He wondered if it would work, if he could keep his mind occupied enough at a routine task to free up his subconscious to work on a pressing problem. If he could solve a problem by just not thinking about any problem at all.

  He certainly couldn’t do any worse than he had been doing.

  After an hour of trying to settle into his indoor routine, he discovered that whether it would do him any good or not, he was going to be out there doing the garden tasks he’d always tried to avoid as a kid. He simply couldn’t just sit inside, or even pace, as was his wont, while she was working so hard outside. And he didn’t know if he was doing it out of guilt or because of some idiotic fantasy in his head about spending the morning with her.

  Didn’t you learn your lesson last night? he asked himself sourly.

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t be friendly,” he said out loud to the empty room. “Just get your mind out of places it doesn’t belong.”

  I’m not sure I trust people who don’t talk to themselves….

  He couldn’t help it; he laughed out loud.

  And then he pulled on a pair of boots and headed outside to join in the clipfest.

  “I didn’t mean to force you into this,” Samantha said when she saw him.

  “You didn’t. And maybe this will save me a lecture from Mom next time they drop in on their way to wherever, about letting the house go,” he said.

  “So, what work is it I’m keeping you from?” Sam asked after he’d begun the daunting task of tracking down the lengthy and tangled runners the wisteria had sent through every other shrub in the garden. “More research?”

  He was beginning to regret that he hadn’t just told her the truth in the beginning. And now that he knew her a little better, he had a feeling she just might understand. At least, he was fairly sure she wouldn’t get that funny look on her face that others did, the look that said they equated the word inventor with crackpot.

  He took a deep breath and then took the plunge. “Research is the socially acceptable term for what I do. Really I’m…an inventor.”

  She smiled. “Really? That must be a great job.”

  That simply, it was done. She knew, and there hadn’t been a trace of that look he’d come to expect from people. He smiled back at her.

  “It is. Even when it’s frustrating.”

  “Like now?” she asked.

  He nodded. “We’re trying to solve a problem with a new product, without much luck.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “It needs to stick to specific metals, and it won’t.”

  “Stick like glue, paint or like bubble gum?”

  He laughed. “Right now I think we’d settle for any one of those. We’ve tried the paint and the glue, maybe we should try bubble gum. Or the equivalent.”

  “Desperation is the mother of invention,” she said.

  Ian just managed not to gape at her as she tossed off his mother’s favorite misuse of the old cliché.

  “That’s why gardening is perfect,” she went on. “You have to watch what you’re doing, but it doesn’t take much thinking, so it frees up a lot of brain cells to go work on, say, that nonstick problem.”

  He smiled, then dug into the honeysuckle. He soon discovered the long sucker he’d been tracking originated there rather than the wisteria, and was annoyed that he hadn’t noticed the difference.

  “Needs to be cut, anyway,” Samantha said, reading his mood accurately. Which she seemed to do rather well, he thought as he took the clippers she offered, snipped the tough, woody stem and started to yank at the offending vegetation.

  She was perceptive, that much was obvious. But he’d never met anyone who seemed so totally aware of what was going on all around her, even behind her. And suddenly he was curious, curious enough to overcome his innate shyness—which seemed oddly magnified around her—and ask. She’d asked him about his work, after all.

  “So when you’re not hacking through the jungle, what is it you do?”

  For an instant she looked startled. Her gaze flicked to the overgrown honeysuckle, and her expression changed as if she’d just realized he meant the city jungle they were standing in. Wondering what other jungle she could have thought he meant, he waited.

  “I’m a consultant of sorts,” she said. “I run around a lot, picking up loose ends or trying to solve small problems before they become big ones.”

  And I’ll bet you’re good at it, he thought. “Sounds challenging,” he said.

  “I figure it’s sort of like being a firefighter, without the heavy lifting.”

  He laughed. And when he heard it, he realized he’d laughed more since she’d moved in next door than he had in months. Maybe even years. His life, he thought, had truly become a glum, dry, humorless thing.

  And he had better be very, very careful around the woman who had brought laughter back into his life.

  Sam dropped the cordless phone receiver in her lap and lifted the binoculars to her eyes once more. The dark sedan still sat across the street. One of the first things she’d done was take an inventory of the cars normally on the block and make a note of make, model, color and what house they were connected with. Like any neighborh
ood, some strange vehicles had come and gone, temporary visitors to the various residences, but this was a new one.

  It had arrived well after dark, unusual enough in itself in this quiet neighborhood. But when the driver didn’t get out after five minutes, she’d grabbed her high-power binoculars and taken up a position to watch. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, and the driver still sat in the front seat. She wondered what he was waiting for, or if he was just watching. At half an hour she had picked up the phone and called Rand for a check on the license number.

  She knew she could see the car from upstairs as well as here. So she turned out the downstairs lights, ran upstairs, checked from the window seat that the car was still there, turned on the bedroom lights briefly, then turned them out. If the driver had been waiting for every house on the street to go dark, she’d do her part.

  Moments later the light in the passenger compartment of the dark sedan came on as the driver finally opened the door. Sam leaned forward, focusing intently through the binoculars, wishing she’d checked out some of the spiffy infrareds Redstone Tech made.

  It was a woman.

  While she of all people wasn’t one to assume being female meant being harmless, it did make her readjust her thoughts slightly.

  The phone rang. She picked it up.

  “It’s a woman,” she said without preamble. No one else had the number but Redstone.

  “Yes. Rebecca Hollings.”

  Sam drew back slightly. “The assistant?”

  “The same.”

  “Hang on.”

  Sam picked up the binoculars again. The woman below was standing next to the car, staring across the street. At Ian’s house. She’d never seen Rebecca Hollings in person, but from the photo in the file, this woman could easily be her. The height and build were right, and although hair color was harder to tell in the faint glow that spilled over from a streetlight at the corner, it wasn’t obviously wrong.

  She freed one hand to pick up the phone again. “Could be,” she told Rand.

  “She could be our leak,” Rand said.

  “Nothing in her background check would indicate a high level of recruitability.”