A faint smile curved her lips and she looked away, shaking her head. “I don’t know how you got so unlucky to have been paired with me, but that’s probably the only reason you didn’t get fried. That doesn’t mean if a lightning bolt suddenly comes out of the sky and strikes somewhere in our vicinity, you aren’t going to die.”
“We’re going to form a partnership, Jonquille.” He poured confidence into his voice. “I’ve been working on ideas for a long time. If you came to the conferences, you had to have heard some of them.”
“Theories aren’t the same as practical knowledge, Rubin, you know that. One mistake and you’re dead. Just one. Lightning kills. Electrical charges kill. The amount of volts is beyond anything anyone really imagines. You talk about directing lightning. Do you know how fast it is?”
“Why, yes, I do, Miss Jonquille, now that you ask,” Rubin said. “I happen to be well versed in my facts on lightning. Each bolt of lightning can contain as many as one billion volts of electricity.” He flashed her a boyish grin. “The lead stroke from air to ground is much slower and can come in steps, a microsecond at a time. It’s the return charge that’s fast, traveling at speeds of 320,000,000 feet per second. We also know how hot you can get.”
“Don’t be cute. This isn’t funny, Rubin. Were you really going to experiment?”
“That is exactly what I came up here to do, and I intend to do it. And it isn’t my first time. Now that you’re here with me, it will be fun. Don’t get all grim and foreboding on me like Diego. He’s all gloom and doom, sure we’re both going to go up in smoke.”
“You probably are.” This time when she said it, she sounded a little more amused.
He sent her another quick smile. “We know you’re hot as hell. How fast are you when you’re not cheating?”
One silvery eyebrow shot up. “I don’t cheat.”
“Drawing energy from others and using it against them isn’t cheating? If we’re racing, you can’t take my energy for yourself.”
“I think you do that,” she pointed out, giving him a little haughty chin lift.
He did do that, specifically with her. He could drain off quite a bit of that dazzling white-hot energy sizzling through her, but he wanted to see what she could do with it when she wasn’t using it to call to the clouds.
Deliberately, he set a faster pace, breaking into a sprint through the brush, leaping over the first of a series of low bushes and choosing the ground with the least amount of foliage to run through. He was a big man, tall, with long legs and a long stride. She was short and her legs couldn’t possibly cover the ground he could. He knew he was taking advantage, but she’d been so confident so many times and he wanted to see the skills she had.
A flash of light overhead distracted him for a moment and he nearly stumbled as he tilted his head to look up. She was so fast, gliding from tree branch to tree branch, her weight barely making the leaves shiver as she skillfully landed and took off for the next one. She outdistanced him fairly quickly, making her way to the cabin unerringly, as if she had been born in the mountains. Few others could have done that, found their way without a map or consulting a GPS, but she had some built-in chart in her head.
He arrived right behind her. She was waiting for him, standing right outside the mudroom, looking smug.
“If we were racing, I’d call that a win for the ladies,” she announced.
“I’d have to agree.” There was color in her normally pale cheeks, and her blue eyes were even brighter than normal. Rubin resisted pulling her into his arms, but he was blocking the door to the mudroom.
You two going to stand out there staring at each other like two lovebirds or come in here and eat while it’s hot?
She’s looking particularly beautiful, so standing out here and staring at her, deciding whether or not to kiss her, seems like a better idea than having you lecture me about taking precautions like leaving the cabin without my rifle.
Good grief, Rubin. Kiss her already and then come inside and eat before it gets cold.
Rubin sighed. “He’s whining about the food being hot.”
“Why aren’t we going inside?”
He was blocking the door. “I’m debating whether or not kissing you again would get us in trouble.”
Diego flung the door open. “Enough already. Pancakes taste like cardboard cold. If he has to talk about kissing, the moment’s passed. I’ll explain that to him later, Jonquille.”
Rubin sighed and followed them inside, the sound of Jonquille’s laughter lodging somewhere in the region of his heart.
7
The trail many hikers liked to take to the campground was one that had signs posted everywhere cautioning to check the weather forecast for storms. Diego, Rubin and Jonquille took a shortcut through the woods to get to the trail more frequented by hikers in order to reach the clearing near the top of the mountain. The place was perfect for the kinds of experiments Rubin hoped to conduct.
Rubin and Diego had traveled that route on their way to the cabin, posting warning signs and closing the area, hoping to keep any backcountry campers from hiking to the clearing for the spectacular views. They had the government credentials to close the area, but didn’t want to use them unless it was strictly necessary. There was still a lot of distrust for the government among the locals in spite of a rise in education. The poverty level was still one of the worst, and neither man wanted the local people to quit trusting them as doctors when they returned to check on them year after year.
“I’m not certain what you want to do, Rubin,” Jonquille said when they’d reached the large, mostly bald area rising over the top of one side of the mountain. Trees and brush were sparse. The grass was closely cropped as if it struggled to grow amid the rocks and dirt. “I did read all your published papers. And some that weren’t published.” She admitted that under her breath.
Rubin glanced at her sharply. “Any other papers I submitted were to the military or they were private.”
She bit her lower lip and looked up at him for a full fifteen seconds. “I know,” she finally admitted.
“You hacked into a military site?” he prompted.
“Not exactly. Well. Sort of. Your personal site.” She mumbled the admission. “I’m sorry, I know that’s bad. A terrible invasion of privacy.”
Both men stared at her accusingly. Color stained her cheeks. She squirmed under their gazes. “Look, no one was going to help me. If I was going to be saved, I had to do it myself. The only way to do that was through research. I did as much on my own as I could. I pursued two different avenues, but both dead-ended. That’s when I heard you give a talk. It was inspiring, and I was hopeful again. The only way I was going to learn anything was to find everything you wrote on the subject.”
She sounded defiant and not in the least remorseful, but Rubin couldn’t exactly blame her. He just didn’t understand how she’d managed to hack his research site. He had two of the best computer experts checking his computer and ensuring his password couldn’t be broken. He couldn’t be hacked.
“How?” It was absolutely vital he know.