It sounded French, the way he pronounced the man's name. Like ray-NO.
Michael Reneault. A name that had been only words for two years had finally clothed itself in flesh. Had turned into a man who'd actually gotten to his feet just because this Jim had brought a stranger into his office.
Had turned into someone French and polite - and black as a snake's eye.
Sara teetered between laughter and tears, understanding neither, shrinking inside her anonymous narrow black slacks and shirt.
He stood an inch or two over six feet, and wore dark green cotton workclothes and she didn't know why she'd instantly thought he was a big man when both shirt and slacks fit so loosely they retained knife sharp creases from the laundry. Inside the neat clothes, he looked all sharp edges, the wide shoulders flatter than they should be.
Rolled up shirt sleeves exposed forearms thinly padded by long ropy muscles and networks of knotted veins. Big, long fingered hands had neatly clipped nails. Her mind leaped crazily from one small point to another, playing cat and mouse with the real issue, only she didn't know if that were that were his identity or his race.
He wasn't shiny black but rich chocolate brown, with gray peppering his short hair and startling green eyes. Michael Reneault. Man and name fused together so distinctly, Sara was surprised there was no thunder clap.
Not that her startlement at seeing him MEANT anything, she told herself quickly. Just because she saw him with an odd clarity, like a room revealed by lightning... Scar tissue alone protected her from any romantic notions. Never would she count those she'd loved as unworth the price, but neither would she, of all people, lose awareness that there WAS a price. Always.
And high.
No. What puzzled her was why, since she somehow lacked other people's sense of racial aversion and liked the richness of black skin, his race appeared to be a factor at all.
His features were closer to Jamaican than African, wide brow, high cheekbones, stubborn jaw all as thinly fleshed as the rest of him, all stark and sculptured.
And she'd been standing there, checking him out, not even seeing the hand that had been extended for too long. His impatience with her delay had drawn the elegant lips tight and the narrow brows level, accentuating the hollow of his cheek.
She stepped forward and reached out. Her hand slid into his and locked into place. "I'm sorry. You reminded me of someone," Sara said.
Unconsciously, his grip on her hand tightened and the green eyes peered closely before her escort intruded. Her hesitation HAD gained his attention and he wasn't buying her excuse.
Which was odd. Without thinking, she'd reached for anything to offer as reason and had grabbed onto unexpected truth. He DID remind her of someone...
She just didn't know who.
"That's good then," Jim said. "I'll leave you to explain what you need," he said.
Escaping, he left her with her hand trapped in that of the man threatening to destroy her life - the same man who appeared to be her new boss - and as far as what HE needed...
In spite of herself, maybe because so much had happened so fast, Sara had to grin.
Wary from her first recoil, Michael watched the transformation of closed control into gamin charm, as though a small laughing child burst out of a silent cave.
Folds of smooth black hair framed a pointed golden face where opaque black eyes warmed to dark amber. Straight charcoal brows slanted up at the outer corners of wide apart eyes and generously curved lips crinkled into firefly mobility.
"Sounds like you need a miracle," Sara said. His fleeting grin startled her as much as her words did him. His dark sharp edged face - opened.
Was that what Andrew had meant when he said she usually looked 'closed'? Like a light bulb went on flashing 'open' when she grinned? 'Click' - here. 'Click' - gone away again? But she didn't need questions like that, not ever and not there. At least whatever had surprised him let her free herself without ridiculous tugging.
Looking around her, she went the rest of the way. "I take it he's a close personal friend."
The furtive watcher almost grinned again before the 'gone away' light went back on. She could practically hear him move back, away from some door. The demarcation lines between his moods had a life of its own. She just didn't know if her awareness sprang from his blackness or from her knowing what he did not - this man who'd set himself to interfering with her life.
Whatever it was, he played by outmoded rules. He still believed that a person didn't speak badly of anyone in a superior position. Since the other half of that was that higher level people treated those below them with respect, an idea that did NOT look accurate there, he leaned upon a flawed sword whose mere existance tarnished Jim's image of himself.
"I'm sorry, that was out of line," Sara backed off first, before he could need to take some party line. "I doubt very much that I'm what you need, but my work experience is - broader - than he realizes. I learn quickly and I'm not afraid of getting dirty."
"You certainly dressed for this place," he said, speaking for the first time. At the - breadth - of the deep voice, as though he barely need whisper for sound to roll up from his chest, Sara's eyes flicked to him and then away even faster.
What the hell was she doing, standing there trying to reassure HIM that she could do a job she'd only taken to stop him? But with the other man gone, this one seemed to be reviving.
More words came rolling up from some deep, rich cave. Shaped words, deliberate and rounded. "I'm sorry I'm not more prepared," he said. "I wasn't aware I was being - helped - today."
Sara grinned before she remembered why she should be backing away.
"How did you come to hear about this job?"
"From someone who knows - Jim."
"Undoubtedly another close personal friend," he said dryly. She wasn't that small a woman, five foot six barefoot, but as he came out from behind the desk, he loomed over her. In spite of herself she took a step back out of his way and then made herself follow him around a wall cutting the loft in half.
Between box filled shelves and stacks of larger cartons, a table squatted beneath more containers and he started to clear it.
He nearly dropped the first box, and did drop the second one he locked onto, swearing under his breath for a moment, before bending and locking onto it stubbornly, setting it in the far corner atop the first, before coming back for another.
Sara'd already picked up the next, waiting for him to be out of the way so she could add it to the stack. "I banged up my arm a couple of days ago," he said after a moment. "I'm not generally that much of a klutz."
From the way he eyed the box she held, she was treading on some male ego thing. From the length of the scrape she saw extending below his rolled up sleeve, that was a bit of an understatement.
"I'm not stupid enough to tackle something I can't handle," she said.
He finally moved back so she could set that box and the last on that corner pile.
Glancing around at the miscellany that had wound up there, she found an old office chair and tugged it ruthlessly free of the clutter. Another good grab netted her a beat up light that clamped onto a desk. Grabbing onto the table end suddenly, she moved the whole thing maybe two feet and within reach of a plug outlet. The lamp lying on its side on the table came on when she plugged it in.
"There. Looks like that's taken care of," she said, straightening up to catch an odd and newly wary expression on the clever dark face that was as quickly erased.
"Are you connected to the local tribe?" he asked suddenly.
That question startled her. "Excuse me?"
"I just - you look - foreign," he said lamely. "I didn't mean to offend - I just wondered."
Images of a blond giant and small blond Frenchwoman slid through her mind and away. "No. I'm not connected to them." Not in any way he meant. "But why would I be offended?"
It was his turn to look uneasy. "The local tribe is trying to get permission to build a casino on land they got back from the government and the town around them isn't too happy about it. Indian blood is a tricky subject around here right now."
Sara shrugged. "If its their land, they should be able to do what they want with it."
"Don't get me wrong," Michael said quickly. "I'm on their side. Not in the casino part, but in their having a chance to get something for what they lost."
Sara stared at him, totally confused at how they'd gotten into this. "Everybody loses. Whatever they 'get', it won't make a difference to that."
That time, the wary expression flickered past so quickly, she almost thought she'd imagined it.
But later, sitting very still on the back step in the half dark, listening to the tiny squeakings of the bats overhead, Sara knew she had indeed seen caution flare up in him then. She knew because she had felt herself shoring up her own protective walls.
An instinct that did not pass. Even allowing for normal paranoia in a new place, that wary look cropped up again over the next few days. The green eyes were sharp, not missing the smallest nuance. But even as she scrambled to learn some basics, Sara saw that that keen green perception studied everything with the same intensity. That helped.
As did realizing that for Michael, reality could be reduced to numbers, equations, charts in a book, formulas. If it were real, it could be measured. Judging from the beautifully precise drawings he produced, the degree of detail in the huge addition going up behind the front building, so far that philosophy worked for him.
"Basic math and consistency," he told her the third day she came to work, "that's mainly what I'm after. Along with accuracy and attention to detail. If you can handle those, everything else is easy."
Easy? Single minded maybe. Farmers were single minded creatures. They had no choice. But easy - that was NOT the right word.
"What?" He interpreted her look with uncanny accuracy.
"Easy's the wrong word, Mr. Reneault."
"Mister - shit!" he said harshly. "Try Michael - or just about anything else close, but no mister."
But then they'd sound like friends, Sara thought. And that would be a mistake. Like one of the crucial stones in a dam, small of itself but in a pivotal position, it would remove one of the small barriers she needed to maintain.
She worked for him. He - threatened - her. She'd only come back to do whatever she needed to silence that threat. He NEEDED to stay some kind of stranger. She NEEDED distance between them.
"I'm not kidding - Sara," he said. "I have no intention of spending the next three months calling you Miss Beldon."
"Fine. Easy's still the wrong word. What you want might be POSSIBLE but there is no way for it to be easy."
"I don't see why not," he said stubbornly. "Just a few pieces, a couple of simple rules - it really IS simple. Sara," he added deliberately.
"Maybe for a fanatic - Michael." There. One battle yielded and forgotten as soon as the word passed her lips. "And even then, its a sophisticated kind of simple. My people were farmers so I can understand the fanatic streak, but that still doesn't make it easy."
Working in her garden that night, Sara remembered his words, the way he dissected ideas and named the bones, and smiled without realizing.
Andrew would have appreciated him.
Rocking back on her heels, Sara let her dirty hands hang limply over her knees and shook her head, hard. This was NOT the time or place to recognise qualities that, under other circumstances, she might have respected.
Nor was it the time to identify with the problems of people around her. Understanding the wrong things was always easy. Carrying Michael's messages introduced her to Don and Minh from that plant, and Milt, the contractor's lead man. Between Michael and Milt, was the small machine shop below their loft. A shop presently doing double duty, supporting both the normal ongoing plant activities and any sudden needs of the contractor out back. That added a rawboned man called John and a useless toady called Phil, to her list of names. Learning how to find the basic pieces of a paper world introduced her to Donna, a designer sharing the plant's engineering office who handled the consultants' supplies.
So many places, so many people, and in every job, every place, every new group of people, there was one minor prickle that worked under her skin. One annoyance. One sharp edge.
In that place, it might be Donna. Or maybe the man who worked with John. But he was so outrageous, it almost neutralized him. To REALLY annoy, it took something subtle and difficult to nail down.
There'd been so many places. So many Donna's. Whatever had dragged her back there, the similarities and the differences smudged time into one vague blur...
Tracking purchase orders was how she found out something was going on with John from the shop below. That and getting a date for Michael who'd muttered something about her asking 'chuckles' downstairs if his project was ready.
Frowning faintly, she heard a couple of other remarks he'd made referring to John. Sharp edged cracks that just missed meanness. One way or another, he seemed obliged to find fault with an easy going man over not much of anything. Not that he hid it. She'd heard him bug John to his face about a couple of things and it'd seemed to roll right over him without bothering.
But for someone who took pains in being polite...
"Its not going to be ready by tomorrow morning?" Sara knew she didn't want to hear the answer before she finished asking the question.
"I'm sorry," John said, shaking his head.
And he was. Sara knew that. His bony, homely face looked completely woebegone, more suited to a little boy caught stealing cookies than to a supervisor in his forties admitting a scheduling problem.
Behind her, she could sense Phil's malicious interest and she moved away, nearer the outer doors, drawing John with her.
"What happened?" John reddened and looked around the shop for clues to the right answer. Obviously something had complicated things. She could read it in his furtive, half embarrassed expression. Sara fought back impatience and the overflow of Michael's driven intensity. "To make the job late," she amplified.
His face cleared in relief. "Oh, you mean that. The material didn't come in."
That didn't make any sense. "Michael said it got ordered two weeks ago." Just before she'd gotten there. "That he figured out the material list. Did you forget to put the order in?"
Instantly, she swore at herself for attacking so directly. John seemed like a nice guy. He'd stood on his head to help her with the questions she'd brought to him, trying to save bits of Michael's time for the big questions.
"I mean, I'm just curious about how we got behind," she said.
"I ordered it right then." His homely face brightened, finding himself on firm ground. "I mean, I gave the requisition form to Vinnie in the office that same morning. I guess it - got lost - on his desk."
Purchasing agents didn't lose things by accident. At least none she'd ever seen.
"Are you having a problem with Vinnie?" she asked curiously.
John reddened again even as he shook his head, denying the existence of problems anywhere.
Upstairs, she stepped back into silence.
She'd taken this job to stop him. Downstairs, some man she didn't know had a problem. And up here - how could she find out enough to influence this Michael if he didn't speak except to describe a new task?
Seducing a stranger to derail him had seemed straightforward enough. It was only flesh, and had little to do with intimacy, even at the best. But crawling inside someone's head, into the silence he pulled shroud-like around him - that reduced the distance between observer and observed.
People and politics - God, she needed Andrew. He'd taught her so much, enough to see, enough to understand, but to involve herself? If that was what it took to figure out Michael?
Need for Andrew burned in her throat... A burn that slid to familiar pain and loss. She no longer had Andrew. There was only herself to depend on and that would have to do, as it had in the past. For the moment, she had to settle for figuring out if something was going down with John and Vinnie.
The only thing she hadn't scrounged from the junk around her had been a phone. That Michael had provided. But staring at the phone, she didn't see that she could just call Vinnie and ask if he'd sat on John's order to piss him off. So she tried going backwards.
Finding a copy of the material needed, she called the source on the requisition. On the pad before her, the intricately detailed outline of leaf and stem and flower of a common herb took shape on the bottom of the page. Once she'd worked her way to the people taking the orders, she got lucky and hit pay dirt with one question.
The order had been held back a week before being placed.
She hung up the phone and her pencil went on with the sketch while she wondered why it was that Vinnie had so badly fumbled an order. Something was definitely going on between the two men but John didn't look inclined to tell her and she was sitting there mourning her dead in the same room as a potential grave robber.
She had problems enough of her own. Pushing the pad with its numbers and leaves and stem and blossom away from her impatiently, Sara returned to checking invoices, in no hurry to tell him something that couldn't be helped or speeded up at this point.
She almost wished he were the type to throw a temper tantrum, do something stupid and childish and pointless. He wouldn't. Even after so short a time, she knew that. But it would have made things simpler.
At the end of her first week, she'd screwed something up royally. Frustrated by not doing something about the real problem, about being pulled in half a dozen directions at once, about having to admit she didn't mind working for him, she'd ordered too much of something from the wrong place.
When she'd caught her mistake and gone slowly around the dividing wall to explain what she'd done, she'd wondered if she were going to catch the hell that a couple of other people had been carefully cultivating. But he'd looked down, seen that she understood what she'd done and said it was okay.
"Its NOT okay."
"What it IS is history," he said interrupting her protest. "I'm not interested in history. I'm interested in your understanding what you did so that it doesn't happen next time. I don't care what's already happened. Only what CAN happen. Or WILL happen." He'd pushed the paper back at her. "Its okay. Don't worry about it."
Not worrying about history was an interesting concept, considering he rented her antique farmhouse and seemed intent on preventing things from changing.
For someone with zero tolerance for his own errors, his generousity toward other people's errors was one more thing to wish she didn't halfway admire.
The heat wave that had settled in a few days back, got to her that afternoon. She was thinking that she was getting basically comfortable with the job part of things when she stepped out the door and into the oven of the parking lot.
After a day spent in air-conditioning, the heat struck her like a blow, robbing her lungs, burning her eyes, scalding her skin.
Around her, dozens of people swarmed and scattered, cursing, enduring or ignoring, as their temperaments dictated. Those working in what were considered hellholes inside enjoyed the clean moving heat and were the ones running up the bank to the second parking lot, yelling and clowning around.
Except for John and Vinnie. Apparently, she wasn't the only one who remembered things. The rawboned toolmaker had confronted the burly purchasing agent beside Vinnie's new Chrysler. Vinnie made her think of all the things she'd heard about Republicans - ultra conservative, ultra clannish. Beside him, John's functional pickup truck was almost cartoon country, except that she'd heard him talk about his friends and the people he knew.
She stopped beside the coffee colored Volvo and watched, too far away to hear, seeing only gestures growing angrier on John's part and more contemptuous on Vinnie's. Vinnie was underestimating the man, differently than Michael seemed to, but still miscalculating. The toolmaker might not keep up with Michael in math and theory, but he had more class than Vinnie could buy. Something beyond chance was going on between them - but it was hot and she was tired of people...
And she was forgetting the wrong things if the heat could get to her like that...
Blinking for a moment, she reached out in her mind, hooking into the green shade of the maples edging the parking lot. The leaves were hot, thin, coated with dust, permeable. And beyond the leaf, branch led to trunk, trunk to root, root into dark earth where the same moderate cool existed year round. But in the summer heat, fluids moved more easily. The lifeblood of the tree raced, nourishing, nurturing, storing, preparing for later. For the cold. For winter when it was time to wait.
She anchored herself, saw herself stretched thin between the bleached hot sky and the cool patient roots. She hung there, blown clean by the sun and wind, until she WAS the tree, and the sun and the deep buried rock. In her, sweet waters ran from cool to hot and back again, evening out, balancing between the two, the very bulk of her absorbing the differences until hot and cold was all the same and it was simply water moving, and air and light...
And when it all blurred together, she moved apart again, rejoining herself and accepting of the heat.
No longer bothered by the shirt and slacks that clung to her damp skin, Sara opened her car door. The baked and lifeless air inside her car poured past her. This place, the machines, the controlled air - they bent nature's rules with the artificial coolness inside and forgot they would pay for it when they left. That they forgot did not surprise her. But that she had...
The gods forbade nothing. They only exacted a price.
And she was letting herself remember Andrew at inappropriate moments and forgetting what she'd come for. But past the danger of this Michael's threat to her, she was forgetting to be aware. To maintain a deliberate balance so that something could not surprise her and rip her fingers free of their precarious grip on sanity.
There were always worse things. Worse than dying, worse than living. There was madness where one did not know whether one lived or died. Or care.
She rolled down her car windows and gave the air a moment to freshen. Those around her - she watched a couple of the younger guys squealing tires, showing off for each other as they left the parking lot - she thought those around her were mostly protected by their very ignorance.
Most of them never learned there had been a danger, and the unlucky ones, they lost and never knew what happened. If she could have imagined giving up her one vote for self-protection without horror, she could almost have envied them. Almost.
A tall black man emerged from the side door. So, Michael Reneault had also had enough.
Unlocking a silver BMW, he popped the trunk and reaching inside, pulled out sneakers.
She'd seen other people do that. The ones with decent cars. And she'd seen enough to know the BMW was a very decent car. The difference between the engineer and the others she'd watched was that he never once glanced up or around him while he changed his shoes.
He didn't speak to the man three cars over, doing the same thing. Nor look up and see her watching. He just made the change, slammed the trunk closed, slid behind the wheel and drove out of the parking lot, a tall black man in an elegant silver car.
A quick, neat, self contained chore. A man detached from those around him. She had worked in so many places, for so many people and remained detached...
With her hand on the door, she stared unseeingly through the heat-hazed air over the parking lot and her hand tightened on the window's edge, the knuckles whitening.
This was the wrong job for the wrong man at the wrong time. Things were complicated enough, there were dangers enough on all sides. Letting herself respect this man, letting herself LIKE this man... was only a mistake. She released her deathgrip on the window and slid into her car.
Backing out of that space, she drove slowly through the already half empty lot and started home, wondering why seeing what she'd forgotten, past and present, suddenly gnawed at her.
The plant was only fifteen minutes from her house. It gave her fifteen minutes to wonder why she had worked herself into such a trapped angry space. The day before, she had been unthinking when she left the plant. She had stopped and picked up something for supper. Later she had gone out to browse through the small bookstore. It had been a hot, rich summer night.
She had worked in her garden for an hour or so before showering and settling in the front room to read for a while.
Yesterday and the day before had been little different. No one thing stood out and explained why suddenly her distress was more acute. Except that yesterday, she had not let herself go so far as to think about Andy at work. Or if she had, yesterday a whisper had not yet turned to a cry.
Sara parked the small car in the fenced alcove at the side of the yard and climbed slowly out of the car. The scent of lilacs blooming in the small front yard settled heavily over her. She stopped with her hand on the gate. Slowly she regarded the bronze of her fingers and then passed through the gate and swung it closed behind her.
There were chores to do. Gardening to take care of. Details. She made herself take care of what needed doing. Like Michael's mathematical absolutes, reality was a useful constant.
Something was gnawing on her tomato plants. With the folds of a long, threadbare bronze skirt folded around her bare legs and the briefest of coin-gold cotton tops that only barely covered her ribs, she knelt in the hot earth and reached into the green tangles, searching for the culprit until she found the first of the ugly green hornworms.
Some things didn't change. She dropped it into the container she'd brought and went on looking. In the garden, she was at home. There was balance in a garden. Absolutes like Michael's. Sowing and reaping. Justice. Things that made sense.
This early evening time, with the sun heating her spine, her bare toes burrowed into soft dirt, this was real. This had existed for time out of mind.
However decent a man Michael might be, he could not be allowed to bring strangers into her past. Some things were not meant to be dragged into cold daylight. He could NOT be allowed to interfere.
Whatever she had to do.