Justine Davis - One of These Nights

She gave an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Ditto,” she assured him. “You can even talk to me.”

“I don’t mean to be…uncommunicative. I just never got used to talking about…inconsequential things.”

“So everything has to be important?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” he said, sounding a bit defensive. “I mean I never acquired the knack.” His mouth quirked. “My mother and father were both born with it, but neither of them passed it on to their only offspring, I’m afraid.”

“Your parents sound fascinating.”

“They are,” he said. “And charming. They can hold court for hours, and people still hate for it to end.”

There was nothing but admiration in his tone, but Sam couldn’t help wondering if he’d always appreciated his parents like this. It would be hard to grow up with two larger-than-life parents if you didn’t feel you were able to live up to their example.

But it was harder to grow up without parents at all.

“That made you sad,” Ian remarked.

A little startled at his perception, she shrugged. “I was just thinking of my own parents. And how much I miss them.”

“They’re gone?”

She nodded. “Over seven years ago now. Car accident. It’s not raw, but it still hurts.”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. My folks may not be around much, but I can’t imagine a world without them in it.”

“Treasure them, Ian. While you have them.”

She shocked herself with her own words. She rarely spoke of her loss, and wasn’t sure why it had popped out now.

“You must have been young when they were killed. What happened to you?”

Somehow she hadn’t thought about what she would tell him about herself. She’d always prepared cover stories before, but this was different, guarding one of Redstone’s own, so she hadn’t done it this time. After a moment she decided the truth would be okay.

“Since I was only nineteen it took some doing, but I won the battle to keep my little brother with me.”

“Little brother? That must have been tough.”

“It would have been tougher if he’d lost me, too. He’s…pretty sensitive, and he was already devastated.”

“I’ll bet.” It wasn’t until after they’d made the turn into the Redstone driveway that he said, “Not every nineteen-year-old would take on a kid like that.”

She slowed the car. He pointed to the side door that was closest to the lab. She nodded and pulled over to the curb there.

“You do,” she answered finally, “when you love him and there’s no other acceptable option. I’ll pick you up six-fifteenish?”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know, but I can, so why not?”

He gave in. “Thanks.”

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.”