Moonlight and Shadows (12 page)

She hadn’t vilified Robert; she’d left that
for his wife to do. But neither had she forgiven herself for being
fooled. She was smart, one of the smartest people she knew, and she
hadn’t seen through a two-timer. Loneliness and longing had clouded
her judgment.

She was still lonely, and she still longed
for the emotional and physical intimacy she’d had with her husband.
But she no longer trusted herself in matters of the heart. It had
been so easy with Danny, so very easy. There had been no other
loves, no lies, no complications, no pasts. Nowadays, it seemed
everyone she met had a past. She did, too, as of last year, and
only by the grace of a miracle had that messy past left her still
holding her job.

Robert had not only failed to mention he had
a wife, he’d failed to mention his wife was the daughter of a
congressman. A very messy business that, Lila had discovered,
acquiring the enmity of a congressman’s daughter. In the same way
the congressman had gotten Robert on the team of the NASA project,
he’d tried to get Lila out of her professorship. He’d almost
succeeded, if only because the head of her department had his own
political aspirations and feared the congressman would somehow hold
him responsible for Lila’s bad judgment. She’d held on to her job,
but the head of her department had made it clear that tenure or
not, as far as he was concerned she was on probation.

She wondered if Jack Hudson had any idea how
risky love could be at their age. He must not, or he wouldn’t be
bandying the term around quite so freely. It wouldn’t trip off his
tongue with such lightness. She was mere months away from thirty,
and he probably was a few years beyond her. Those first romances,
the true loves filled with promise and purity, were behind them
both. She didn’t know if she could ever accept less, though.

Her gaze settled on the novel she’d brought
in from the living room. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe it was
time to put a little fantasy into her life. Reality, in the long,
tall form of Jack Hudson, was getting too hot to handle.

* * *

The great thing about a shower, Jack
thought, was the near impossibility of running out of cold water.
Hot water was short-lived, fickle, unreliable, but good old cold
water never let you down. It was always there, ready to freeze your
body into immobility and your brain into a new set of desires,
mostly to get warm again.

He opened his mouth under the stinging spray
and shook his head, letting the shampoo lather sluice down his
chest. Knowing he was in for a long night, he’d decided to start
fresh with a head-clearing shower. Then he’d go to work and see if
he could channel his sexual energies into something creative.
Sexual energy ought to be good for something, he figured,
especially since using it for actual sex didn’t seem to be working
out. Lila Singer would be the death of him, if pneumonia didn’t get
him first.

Half an hour later, blow-dried and bundled
up, he stoked the potbellied stove in one corner of his
custom-designed, three-bay, two-story garage. Rolling his
oxyacetylene welding rig out across the concrete floor, he stopped
beneath an expansive half arch of hard steel. He looked up at the
structure through the web of surrounding scaffolding. Chains and
pulleys held much of the sculpture in place, waiting for Jack’s
torch to meld the massive pieces into a whole, into art.

“Right, Jack. Art,” he muttered, smiling
wryly as he lowered his goggles and struck a spark. He didn’t know
about art, not the kind they taught at the university, but he knew
when he got something right. He knew the emotional impact of line,
the strength of material. He knew where to put space and where to
put solid to build the vision in his head and heart.

He’d done metal sculpture since high school,
but hadn’t worked on a grand scale until after his divorce. He’d
started for the sheer challenge of trying to balance the tremendous
weight, make it do what he wanted. Over the course of the ensuing
months, he’d discovered a personal harmony with the big pieces, a
sense of power nothing under six feet in height had ever given
him.

After melting his first rod, Jack walked
over to a bank of stereo equipment protected inside a metal
shelving unit. Speakers hung from six places high on the walls of
the garage.

He pulled off one heavy leather glove with
his teeth and pressed a series of soft-touch pads. Within seconds
the aria from
Madama Butterfly
“Un bel di” filled the large
building. He usually wasn’t so emotionally sentimental, but then,
he usually wasn’t in love.

* * *

Lila reached for the book and settled
herself back against a pile of pillows. The cover held her
attention even longer than the first time she’d seen it. The Hawk
did bear a striking resemblance to Jack. They both had the kind of
average looks that were somehow made extraordinarily appealing by
the personality behind them. They both had sandy brown hair and a
lean muscularity. She scrutinized the cover more closely and began
to wonder if Jack had the same enticing pattern of chest hair
narrowing to a sleek band down the middle of his abdomen. She
wondered about it for nearly five minutes before she snapped out of
her daydreams and turned to the first page.

Fifteen minutes later she knew she was in
for the long haul, and forced herself to put the book down so she
could make a snack run. Fortified with cookies and a big glass of
milk, she arranged herself back into the cozy warmth of her bed.
Poor Jack, she thought, all alone in his bed without a good book to
keep him company.

Poor Jack
. . . she thought again, a
little more slowly, with a little more feeling.
All alone in his
bed.
She raised a cookie to her mouth and nibbled off an edge.
She wondered if he was sleeping. He might be watching television,
or a movie, or doing anything.

He suddenly seemed very far away. Every time
he left, she missed him more than the time before. She didn’t know
what his home looked like, or if he’d even gone there after leaving
her. She had his phone number, but calling him was out of the
question. She couldn’t remember ever having called a man for purely
personal reasons, simply because she missed him, except for Danny,
of course.

What if she called and he wasn’t home? She’d
only feel worse, which was a terrible thing to have to admit to
herself. Jack Hudson was taking up far too much of her thinking,
and he was turning it all upside down.

Calling him was out of the question.

* * *

Jack pushed his goggles to the top of his
head and used his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his brow. A cup of
coffee rested near his elbow, precariously balanced on a slight
wedge of steel twelve feet above the floor. He took a sip.

It had been a good idea to spend the night
in the garage working, figuring, meeting the challenge of getting a
lot of big pieces of metal to look like one piece. He’d almost
forgotten about Lila once or twice, especially since he’d changed
the music to hard-driving rock and roll. He’d used the energy of
the music to pull him through the more technically difficult welds,
but he’d had enough energy and needed to listen to something of
substance, something he could think about instead of just feel.

Of course, there was danger in thinking,
because he inevitably ended up thinking of her. Was he really in
love? he wondered. Or were his hormones doing a number on his
brain?

Nice try, Jack, he thought, quietly laughing
at himself. Nice try, but it’s love, you fool.

He finished his coffee in one swallow and
lowered his goggles back over his eyes. After a moment of summing
up his next move, he struck a spark and flamed his torch.

* * *

Lila, hung up the phone by her bed for the
third time and calmly told herself she wasn’t upset. It was none of
her business what he did when he wasn’t with her. It was none of
her business what he was doing at ten-thirty on a Saturday night.
It was none of her business whom he was talking to, smiling at,
laughing with. None of her business at all.

She fluffed up her pillow behind her back
and buried her nose in
Night of the Hawk
, where no matter
how dangerous the situation or troubled the relationship, love
always conquered doubts. The book was sexy too. Probably too sexy
for her state of mind.

She hoped Jack wasn’t smiling at another
woman. His smiles were lethal, charmed, unsafe at any speed when it
came to the female heart.

She flipped back a couple of pages,
realizing she’d been thinking of Jack again instead of reading. She
hoped he was having the same problem getting her out of his mind.
She hoped he remembered their last kiss with the same unnerving
clarity she did. She hoped she was driving him crazy.

By midnight she knew who was driving whom
crazy, but she decided to avoid the fact by going to sleep. When
she woke up at two o’clock, she chastised herself for senseless
infatuation and rolled over. At four o’clock, she admitted to
having a real problem and maybe something more than infatuation. At
six o’clock she got up and fixed a big pot of coffee, and every
time she paced by her telephone bulletin board, she looked at his
business card and the address printed across the bottom.

The sunrise spread a tapestry of
orange-pinks and robin’s-egg blue across the eastern sky and cast a
blanket of frozen crystal diamonds across the snow-covered
landscape. Lila slowed to a near stop on the icy country road and
checked the business card and her county map again.

Sure, she felt foolish, driving out to his
house at dawn on a Sunday morning, but between six and six-thirty
that morning she’d worked herself up into a real case of the
worries, especially when he hadn’t answered his phone for the
fourth time. The man had said he was falling in love with her. He’d
said, “Call me.” He hadn’t mentioned anything about disappearing
off the face of the earth.

Slick roads, a moonless night,
below-freezing temperatures . . . She’d thought of them all.
Anything could have happened to him, the same way something had
happened to Danny. She wanted to check on him, make sure he was in
one piece. Then she’d return home and go back to bed.

A windbreak of pines pinpointed a house on a
ridge, and she knew it had to be his. There was nothing else for
miles around. As she drove closer, any doubts she might have had
dissipated. A large deck on the western side of the house was
unfinished, and the front of the house looked as if it had been
under construction for years. The carpenter who had built most of
her office inside of a week didn’t have time to finish his own
porch.

The long, straight driveway led from the
county road to a graveled area between the side of the house and
the garage. And that garage was bigger than any Lila had seen
before. It had a wide door twice the height of the average garage
door. More unusual yet, the two windows cut into either side of a
person-sized entrance glowed and flashed with a strange light.

She stopped her car and sat staring at the
showers of sparks interspersed with darkness. What in the
world?

His truck was parked next to the house,
alleviating her initial fears, but those fears had been replaced by
a curiosity powerful enough to change her original plans. Not that
she needed much nudging to grab any handy excuse for seeing him.
She wished she did. She felt slightly brazen, showing up uninvited
to check on a man who had lived his whole life so far without any
help or interference from her.

But he’d said he was falling in love, and
the words had kept her awake most of the night. She was curious
about the strange light coming from his garage, yes, but not nearly
as curious as she was about how he’d come to be falling in love.
Truth be told, she had a sneaky suspicion the same thing might be
happening to her, and she didn’t have a clue as to how it might
have begun or how it might end.

What drew two people together? Unexpected
kisses on moonlit autumn nights? Unexpected kisses in half-finished
office additions? Or was it the total polarization of education,
experience, goals, and interests?

Nothing made sense. He had her breaking
rules faster than she could remember them: dating him, kissing him,
calling him, practically following him home.

Her car door creaked with the cold as she
pushed it open, then she stepped onto the gravel drive. A gust of
wind caught at her hair, blowing dark curls into her face. She
brushed them back with a gloved hand and slammed the door shut.

Furthermore, she added silently, he had her
doing things she’d never even thought to make rules against—like
knocking on frozen wooden doors to metal garages at dawn. She
didn’t get an answer, and after another moment in the frigid air,
she twisted the knob and pushed.

She immediately understood why he hadn’t
answered. The building was alive with music. Wagner’s Valkyries
thundered to the rafters and beyond on their way to Valhalla with
their fallen warriors. It was heroic music to match the heroic
sculpture half assembled and rising high from the middle of the
garage floor.

The size and power inherent in the sweeping
steel arches drew her gaze ever higher and caught the breath in her
throat. Stunned, she took a step forward, but when sparks showered
down from above, she hurriedly took a step backward. Keeping her
eyes averted from the welding flame, she closed the door behind her
and walked over to a table where she’d spotted an extra pair of
goggles.

He was high on the scaffolding, balanced in
the web of supporting steel rods with a safety harness around his
waist. His torch burned and flamed along a juncture of two of the
steel pieces. She didn’t have any trouble recognizing him, not even
in a backward baseball cap, goggles, and less-than-form-fitting
denim coveralls. She’d spent enough of the last few weeks watching
him work to know the unique authority he had in his hands, to know
his special sureness of movement.