Megan craned her head back, looking up into the open sky.
“One last time,” she said after a moment, still staring upward. “My feelings for you aren’t predicated on whether UpLink obtains the clearances. But I’ve got my job obligations, too. Gord isn’t about to take no for an answer, and he’s got heavyweight contacts from the president on down. I’d prefer we not have to make an end run around you. And I hope that if we must, you’ll understand and won’t let it pull us apart.” Her voice caught. “That would be a waste. And make me sadder than I can begin to express.”
Silence.
Lang gazed out at the brown-and-green-splashed mountains in the distance.
“Tell Gordian he’ll have my decision by the end of the week,” he said.
Megan nodded without looking down.
He turned to her, studied her upturned face for several seconds.
“It must be hard sometimes being a woman and strong,” he said.
Her eyes lowered. Met his again.
“Sometimes,” she said.
He leaned close and touched his lips to her shoulder. Brushed them along her neck, the line of her chin, the soft flesh below her ear, caressing her face, stroking back her hair with his fingertips, leaving behind traces of white gooseflesh.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered and slid his arm around the bareness of her waist to draw her closer, kissing her on the cheek, on the corner of the mouth. “I’m in for whatever happens.”
She made a low sound in her throat, her lips parting against his.
“Let’s make something happen right now,” she husked, and kissed him, smiling as their mouths and tongues joined. She put her hand on him under the water, closed it around him under the water, moved it with quickening intensity under the water. Lang’s hand slid down over her hip, down over her thigh, lower, finding her, touching her, matching her rhythm, their eyes locked, their bodies pressing together, moving together, swaying, locked…
The two of them losing themselves in each other, making something happen there in the water on the deck beneath the wide and borderless blue sky.
In a sense, Gordian was right about his building of the corral having a therapeutic effect on him. He knew a doctor would not have condoned it. Might have strictly disallowed it. But he felt the warmth of the sun on his back, the smells of mown grass and freshly dug earth, and the robust physical workout helped carry him through most of the day.
Standing in his daughter’s backyard now, Gordian inspected his workmanship and nodded to himself with approval. He’d developed and patented scores of breakthrough technologies, pioneered advances in communications that had transformed governments and economies, but his justifiable pride in those achievements had never topped his pleasure in building something with only wooden boards, a box full of nails or screws, and a handy set of tools.
It was a feeling that was no less keen today than it had been when Gordian was a thirteen-year-old boy pounding together a tree house in Racine, Wisconsin. The ordered routine of readying his tools and construction materials relaxed him and gave him a chance to organize his thoughts. He enjoyed the way a number of careful and methodical steps that followed a proven design would yield visible results within a relatively short time frame. And he enjoyed the direct connection between hands-on effort and outcome, especially when they were for the benefit of someone he loved.
While it was a bit of a damper to realize he was inexplicably getting on that particular someone’s nerves, he’d almost come to accept that as status quo.
Gordian removed his safety goggles, slipped them into his tool belt, and flapped his T-shirt to dry the perspiration on his chest and armpits. Certainly he’d been functioning at well below 100 percent. He was breathing hard, his sore throat bothered him, and a nagging, raspy cough had developed over the last few hours. Every so often he would get a pang between his shoulder blades and down at the base of his spine as a reminder not to push too far. But that sun felt great, and there hadn’t been a recurrence of the vague dizziness and shakes he’d experienced the night before, and he hadn’t looked for trouble by mentioning any of it to Julia. She would surely overreact and push him into a lawn chair, where he’d spend the rest of the afternoon shooing away flies and mosquitos.
No thanks, he thought. He could decide for himself when he’d had enough. Parental privilege.
Gordian blotted the sweat from his eyes and forehead with his sleeve, put his cordless power drill into its belt holster, folded his arms across his chest, and continued to look over his handiwork. The fencing’s interwoven board construction required more fuss than, say, an ordinary stockade, but the wider spaces between its boards allowed enough wind filtration to keep it upright during the worst imaginable coastal blow. And gave the greyhounds convenient openings to peep through.
Each side of the square corral was to measure twelve feet by six feet, its horizontal plywood strips sized at a little over four feet long — any longer and they would tend to weaken. Gordian had needed to start off the first side by installing four posts at four-foot intervals. After he’d plotted the corral’s measurements with a tape ruler, twine, and temporary stakes on his last visit, he had dug the first row of postholes, filled their bottoms with gravel for drainage, and then driven the posts into the ground with a heavy mallet, repeatedly checking their vertical line with a carpenter’s level, packing soil into the holes as he went along. It had been vigorous work that left him streaked with dirt and sweat and with a blistered finger or two in spite of the gloves he’d worn. But it wasn’t supposed to be easy, and he hadn’t minded.
This morning, Gordian had resumed where he’d left off, using his power tool to fasten the horizontal strips to alternating sides of the posts, moving from bottom to top and right to left. What he was presently looking at was the open space between the last two posts. Once he got the horizontals up to close that gap, he’d be done with an entire side of the corral, his modified goal for the afternoon. Well, almost done with it, since that would still leave him having to thread the vertical spacers through the strips. But it was a relatively quick and undemanding task, and he could ask Julia to help him with it before leaving for home.
Gordian had another brief spate of coughing and cleared his throat but didn’t bring up any fluid, and he was left a bit winded afterward. It was odd, that dry shortness of breath. He didn’t seem to have any of the accompanying mucus and watery congestion that was usually symptomatic of a cold. Not even a runny nose. It was as if he’d sucked in a handful of plaster dust and couldn’t expel it from his lungs.
He cast a guarded look over at Julia’s back porch, afraid she might have heard his latest hack attack. Fortunately, though, she was busy with the tuna and sword-fish steaks on her gas grill. When Ashley had called to report that she’d been met by her pickup car at the airport, Julia had gotten into an instant rush to prepare dinner. Maybe too great a rush. The drive from San Jose International would take about an hour in light traffic, and on Sundays, Highway 1 ordinarily became crammed with bumper-to-bumper mall-goers. This close to Thanksgiving, you could count on it. Much as he was anxious to see his wife, Gordian estimated they had a good forty minutes before she arrived, and Julia knew the Bay Area traffic situation as well as anyone. Besides, Ashley would want to relax for a while before eating dinner.
Gordian sighed. Call him oversensitive, but he thought Julia’s glued attention to the barbecue seemed an excuse for her utter and deliberate inattention to him. Whatever was bothering his daughter, her emotional state was always best revealed by her attempts to conceal it, to appear calmly preoccupied with her chores and projects, to veer off on her own and peripheralize everything and everyone around her. It was an exasperating quality Gordian found easy to recognize, given that the river from whence it flowed happened to bear his name, first and last.