A Gift of Grace

by Sarah Wynde

  A flush of heat ran through her veins as she raised a hand in solemn promise. “Never.” She should stop there. She shouldn’t say another word. But his eyes were holding hers, and she had to add, “Not at work, anyway.”

  Damn it. She shouldn’t be flirting with him. This was not a date. She was helping her nephew and that was it. But his lightning grin raised her temperature another few degrees as he dipped his head in her direction.

  “A tour,” he conceded. “We’ll see how it goes.”

  18

  Noah

  Noah rubbed a hand over his eyes. He wasn’t imagining what he was looking at, was he? He opened his eyes again.

  A tennis ball floated before him.

  He ran his hand above it, below it, around it, searching for the hidden forces keeping it in the air. Could it be held up by an air current, a fan with enough force to keep the lightweight ball elevated? Not if he couldn’t feel a draft. Magnets? Maybe the tennis ball wasn’t really a tennis ball. But he couldn’t see anything that looked like a magnet, either on the ball or in the rather plain, mostly empty room in which they stood.

  Maybe the ball had an engine in it, a tiny, soundless jet-propelled engine, working like a helicopter. Without blades. But drones floated in the air, right?

  Of course, that had to be it.

  “You guys working on drone technology?” he asked Grace.

  She gave him a look. The look said something along the lines of, “Are you blind?” but her verbal response was a much more delicate, “Something like that.”

  He eyed the ball again. Floating, it was definitely floating. And he couldn’t hear a thing.

  “Why is he such a skeptic?”

  “He’s logical, that’s not a crime.”

  “He watches the wrong kind of television shows. He should watch more science fiction.”

  Well, he couldn’t hear a thing except his usual repertoire of hallucinatory voices. Right on cue, Joe chimed in with a grumpy, “Shush. All of you.”

  Grace — the only person who was truly present — was talking, too. “On night shift, you’d be expected to patrol. Our scientists often work late, sometimes through the night, although they’re not expected to. But inspiration doesn’t always arrive during normal business hours. You’d need to learn the names and faces of the people who work here. I realize some security jobs don’t require that, but we can’t rely on ID cards and thumbprints.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good memory,” Noah said, still staring at the ball. He’d seen drones. They usually had propellers of some sort. If it was solar-powered… no, that made no sense. Some kind of anti-gravity?

  “It might not be for long, anyway. Once Akira and Zane get back…” Grace let the words trail off, opening the door across the room from the ball. “Looking good, Dr. Winkler.”

  “Thank you,” the small woman in the adjacent room said. Sounding apologetic, she added. “We’re still not managing much in terms of weight yet, and the energy expenditure makes no economic sense. I can’t say that this will ever be practical in terms of—”

  Grace interrupted her. “No worries, I’m just showing a new employee around.”

  New employee? Noah still wasn’t sure how he’d gone from planning to get out of town as fast as possible to starting work on Monday, but it was beginning to feel like a done deal.

  “Oh, of course.” The woman peeked around Grace and shot Noah a quick smile. “Welcome to the company. You’re going to love it here.”

  “Thanks.” He ducked his head in a nod.

  “We’ll leave you to it.” Grace led the way back to the hallway and toward the elevator.

  The floor plan wasn’t complicated, nothing Noah would have trouble remembering, but the place was much bigger on the inside than it looked. From the outside, the parking lot led to several independent buildings resembling the small town versions of modern office suites. The kind of places that ought to have a dentist on the first floor, an orthodontist on the second, maybe a lawyer on the top. But as soon as they’d entered, Grace had taken him into an elevator that dropped down and opened into a sprawling complex of underground labs with tunnels connecting the buildings.

  “So I wanted to show you some of the projects we’re working on, give you an idea of the kind of things that we’re doing.” Grace shot him a look. “Any questions?”

  Noah couldn’t interpret the look. Did she want him to ask if they were magic? Because he was tempted, but the words were so incongruous in the setting of sleek walls, tiled floor, that there was no way they were escaping from his mouth. He’d spent a lot of years hiding his insanity from everyone he knew. He wasn’t giving in to it now.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath, inhaling as if she were girding up for some unknown battle. She didn’t fuss with her hair or pull at her clothes, but she lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders before pressing the button to summon the elevator. “Let’s visit the security station and meet some of your future co-workers.”

  “Would these be the same guys who, ah, came running this morning?”

  “The very ones.” She didn’t meet his eyes as the door slid open and she stepped inside.

  He followed her, trying to bite back his smile. It probably wasn’t funny to her. No CO wanted to get caught in a compromising position. But she saw it on his face and her own relaxed.

  “You might hear about it,” she warned him. “Our morning, um, adventure.”

  “I’d expect so,” he replied comfortably. The ribbing would probably start the minute she wasn’t in hearing distance. If it didn’t, it would mean they hated him on sight. Either way, he’d manage.

  “Bear jokes forever,” she said with a sigh.

  “What do you call a wet bear?” he asked her.

  “Seriously?”

  He kept his face straight. “A drizzly bear.”

  She gave a pained grimace, but she laughed, too, and the tension in her shoulders disappeared.

  “Dad jokes. He tells Dad jokes,” the Dillon voice said, sounding disgusted.

  Noah wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. But he did stop trying to hide his smile as Grace led him past the reception desk and into the small office behind it.

  “This is the security station,” Grace said, stating the obvious. The room held a wall of monitors, showing scenes inside and outside of the facility. As he watched, the scenes shifted.

  The guard at the desk jumped to his feet. Young, clean-cut and muscular, his eyes raked over Noah in a comprehensive sweep that looked less than welcoming. “Afternoon, ma’am.”

  “Jensen.” Grace nodded at him. She gestured toward Noah. “Noah Blake. He’ll be coming to work for us. With you. At least for a few weeks.”

  The temperature of her voice had dropped by about ten degrees. Not hostile, not cold, but edged with a fine chill that said, ‘Fuck with me and you’ll regret it.’

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jensen didn’t quite snap to attention, but it was damn close.

  Noah was torn between sympathy for the guy and a rush of unexpected lust for Grace. He wanted to melt the frost from her tone, bring back the warmth in her eyes, even turn it into heat.

  But then Jensen offered him a friendly smile and said, “You’re going to love it here.”

  Hadn’t that scientist, Dr. Winkler, said the same thing?

  “So I hear,” Noah replied warily.

  Grace shot him a smile over her shoulder. The chill was entirely gone from her voice when she confided, “I pay them to say that.”

  His brows rose and he blinked, before he said, “What?”

  “Not big bucks or anything. Just a gift certificate for the local spa. Who doesn’t like a massage or a manicure, right? And the extra business is good for the spa.”

  Jensen guffawed, his moment of intimidation clearly over. “The look on your face.”

  “I don’t ask them to lie,” Grace elaborated. “But when I give a tour, it’s usually for a scientist I’m t
rying to recruit. Tassamara is remote and General Directions doesn’t have the academic credibility some of them want. We pay well, but I like to make a good impression, so when an employee says something positive during the tour…” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Gift certificate.”

  “So someone else already said you were going to love it here?” Jensen shook his head. “I’ll have to come up with a new line. But it is a great place to work. We get gift certificates.” He laughed.

  “And terrific employee benefits. Good health insurance, the usual vacation time, a 401K, contributions to continuing education… although that last.” Grace tipped her hand back-and-forth in an equivocating gesture. “We haven’t had too many employees take us up on that. We hire a lot of PhDs and they’re not usually interested in more school. Plus, it’s a long drive to the nearest university. We’ve got a couple people doing online programs, though.”

  “Cafeteria’s good,” Jensen contributed. “And the people are friendly.” He cast a sideways look at Grace, before adding in a tone almost neutral enough to hide the mischief, “Real friendly.”

  Grace looked amused. She let it go, nodding toward the monitors. “Any luck out there?”

  “Yeah.” Jensen sounded disgusted. “Smithson found it.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t think wandering around the forest was Derek’s speed.” She glanced at Noah. “He’s the head of research. Not the outdoorsy type.”

  “I think he cheated. He had these weird glasses on, and he had his head down staring at a screen most of the time.”

  “Hmm.” Grace tapped her lips. “Had the bear already abandoned the pack?”

  “Yeah, but he found the bear first. Then he backtracked.”

  “Thermal imaging to find the bear, I bet. We’ve got some glasses left over from Akira’s…” Grace paused and glanced at Noah. He could see her considering her words, before she finished, “…project. And I bet he used the variable threshold modeling AI we’ve been working on to look for its trail. I didn’t think that project was far enough along to be useful yet. I’ll have to ask him about it.”

  “Like I said,” Jensen muttered. “He cheated.”

  Grace chuckled. “Next time I send y’all out on a treasure hunt, I’ll make sure to make up some rules first. Do you know where he left it?”

  “In your office, I think.”

  “Great, thanks.”

  Noah followed as Grace led the way to her office, but he paused at the door when she crossed to her desk, taking it in.

  He wasn’t sure whether to be intimidated or impressed. Her desk was a work of art. Made of curved stainless steel with panels of stained glass in shades of pink and purple on the front and sides, it belonged in a museum of design. Or at the very least an office in Milan or Madison Avenue, not a sleepy small town in Florida.

  Behind it, she had a desk chair of pink leather: tall and imposing, but pastel. In front of the desk sat two over-stuffed lavender armchairs, positioned side-by-side at an angle for easy conversation whether she was sitting behind the desk or in one of the chairs. One wall was lined with bookshelves, filled with books and photos. The windows on the other two walls looked out into tangled forest.

  It was simultaneously ultra-feminine and imposing, comfortable and dramatically unconventional. In her casual jeans and fleece, she could have looked out of place. But she didn’t.

  The neat pile of his possessions on her desk did, though. She made a face as she looked down at it and picked up his phone, which sat on top.

  She held it out to him, her expression apologetic. “Apparently the bear didn’t like your phone.”

  “Wow.” Noah came forward and took the remains out of her hand. It was crushed, the screen shattered, the circuits inside visible through the broken plastic of the case. “I’m guessing there’s no Verizon store in town?” His lip curved at the look she gave him. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  “Small town, middle of a national forest,” she said. “We’re happy to get a signal.”

  His wallet was undamaged, Noah saw as he picked it up, but his pack was a lost cause. The bear had managed to tear the zippers out of their seams in its quest to eat his sandwich. He checked it for any other contents, retrieved the key to his room, and held the pack up. “Trash?” he asked.

  Grace bent and fished out a can from under her desk. His pack wasn’t the first casualty of the day, Noah saw. Her pink shoes were sitting in the can, mud spread halfway up their sides.

  “Sorry about your shoes,” he said.

  She shrugged. “My own fault. I should have changed before I went out there. I knew better.”

  Her eyes met his. The hum of attraction between them flared into heat. He knew they were both thinking about their encounter in the forest, about the feel of lips touching, bodies pressed together, the spark of desire.

  “Tsk, tsk.” The clean freak sounded disapproving. “A soft-bristled brush, that’s what she needs. Let the mud dry, then a good scrub.”

  Noah didn’t repeat her words to Grace. Instead he dropped the pack on top of the shoes and took a step back.

  19

  Grace

  Grace sat in her chair and gestured to Noah to take a seat in one of the chairs in front of her desk. She’d been as professional as she could be on their tour of the company, talking about the facilities and the job responsibilities, but the sight of her muddy shoes stirred up all her feelings again.

  She’d had crushes before. For a solid three weeks in sixth grade, she’d drawn hearts around Charlie Kilpatrick’s initials in the margins of her notebooks, before he tried to convince her that Megadeth was musically superior to Alanis Morrisette. Crush over.

  Then there’d been the usual high school and college stuff. Infatuation that came and went, attraction that mysteriously appeared and then disappeared when the guy in question turned out not to be The One. Not that she knew who The One was, or even who she wanted him to be.

  And it would be ridiculous to think that the man sitting across from her was it. Him. The One.

  But there was something about him. Not just his looks. Sure, he was pretty, but she wasn’t that shallow. She’d met plenty of good-looking guys, and gone out with her fair share. He was different.

  Not that she knew him, not really. Oh, sure, she knew every detail a solid background report could pull up. She knew he responded well to surprise bear encounters. She knew he had a sense of humor. And she knew that he was a really good kisser.

  She wished she didn’t know that. It made talking about paperwork and W4s and insurance policies all the more difficult. But she persevered, only losing her train of thought once or twice along the way when his eyelashes distracted her.

  She finished with, “So, any questions?”

  His eyes met hers. “No, I…” His lips pressed together like he was holding back words.

  She folded her hands in front of her and waited.

  “A few,” he finally finished.

  “Go for it.”

  He did not leap into speech, but watched her. She couldn’t read his expression. Wary, maybe. Or skeptical?

  “Go ahead. Ask me anything. I promise I’ll answer.”

  He tilted his head in the direction of the door. “What were you going to say back there?”

  Grace frowned. “When?”

  “You were talking about thermal imaging glasses. You were going to say something and then you changed your mind.”

  Grace bit the inside of her lip. How perceptive of him. How unfortunately perceptive of him. But it wasn’t as if she was hiding some deep, unsavory secret. Her lips twitched.

  “What was it?” he asked again.

  “Honestly?” Grace opened her hand in amused self-deprecation. “Experiments. I was going to say ‘Akira’s experiments,’ but it sounded so creepy. Experiments. Like she’s a mad scientist or something. She’s really not.”

  He didn’t look convinced. He was watching her with a narrow-eyed intensity that made Grace think of a cat.
Not a house cat. More like a panther. She didn’t shift in her seat, but it took an effort.

  “Next?” she asked.

  Would he ask more about Akira’s project? She’d been trying to determine where ghostly energy might fall on the electromagnetic spectrum. Modern ghost hunters used electromagnetic field readers, but Akira scoffed at them. She said they were better at picking up cell phones and microwaves than ghosts.

  So far all of her results had been negative, though. The thermal imaging glasses couldn’t reveal a ghost even from a few feet away. According to Akira that proved ghosts didn’t emit radiation in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. She’d started muttering about wave-particle interactions instead.

  “Back in the restaurant,” he said. “You got a text.”

  “A couple of them,” she agreed.

  “Who were they from?”

  “My nephew,” she answered easily, but with a little inner trepidation.

  “Will you tell me what they said?” Noah asked after a long pause.

  Grace considered him. She could do that. It wouldn’t leave him less confused, she suspected. He wouldn’t know what they meant. Instead of answering, she pulled her phone out, called up the texts and passed it across the desk. “Go ahead.”

  He picked it up. She wasn’t surprised when he started to frown. “Vortex opening, plz get away,” he read aloud. “Nvm, it’s ok. What does that mean?”

  “Nvm? Shorthand for never mind, I expect.” Grace hid her smile. She bet he was a good poker player. He controlled his expressions well. But she could see the exasperation in the line of his mouth.

  “What’s a vortex?”

  Grace leaned back in her chair. Choosing her words carefully, she said, “In this context, I think it refers to an accumulation of energy. A certain type of energy. But Akira would be better at explaining. If you can just wait a couple of weeks until she gets back, I’m sure she’ll be able to answer all your questions.”

  “My questions about what? What is she supposed to be the big expert in? The redhead, she said I needed to talk to Akira, too.” His frustration wasn’t subtle anymore.