Free At the Midnight Hour by Alicia Scott

nipped at her earlobe. She sat up with a small gasp of surprise, the electric jolt of desire catching her completely off guard. Her skin felt hyperaware, every nerve ending attuned to his touch. She wanted to taste his skin, she thought suddenly. She wanted to run her hands through his hair, flatten her palms on the warm flesh of his chest.
    She wanted. Oh, God, she wanted...
    Nick had never touched her like this.
    The thought penetrated out of the blue, and all at once, her eyes flew open.
    “Oh, God,” she whispered, and the next thing he knew she was pushing him away with desperate hands. She didn’t even stay on the couch, the shocked energy propelling her off the sofa until she was standing before the fireplace, wrapping her arms around herself tightly. In her face he could see a kind of dazed horror, the kind one might experience after awakening from a nightmare.
    And then it hit him. Of course. She was horrified that she was attracted to him, horrified that he, a man thought to have murdered his wife, would dare to kiss her.
    Why shouldn’t she be horrified? he thought harshly. He was a man who’d lost all hope of redemption long ago.
    His eyes became the cold blue slate developed from years of practice, his bearing suddenly stiff and straight. He drew back into himself completely, and in a matter of mere seconds, was once again Richard Campbell Louis Keaton, III. Distant. Proud. Cold.
    Liz still hadn’t said anything. She could only stare at him, this dark man before her. And then she found herself looking at his lips, the shocked attraction fizzling through her once again. Angrily she told herself to stop it. She wasn’t supposed to be feeling these things. She didn’t want to feel these things.
    All her life her emotions had belonged to one man. From those first awkward moments of adolescence to those that had marked the pure joy of maturation, all her attention had been for Nick. Yet here she was, just one year later, riveted by a stranger and the way he’d touched her. She found herself shivering, and wrapped her arms tighter around herself. What was wrong with her? She and Nick had been so in love, and certainly, she had enjoyed his touch a great deal. They’d shared sweetness and passion, the gentleness of two young people falling in love. Yet compared to what this man had just done to her senses, what they’d shared might as well have been from a Disney movie.
    Richard Keaton was not a boy. No, he had kissed her like a man.
    She couldn’t take it. The guilt and doubt and confusion swirled inside her like a suffocating mist. She needed to leave the room.
    She didn’t want to go yet.
    What was she doing? What in the world was she doing?
    She turned away completely, approaching the fire as if its heat might afford her some kind of protection against the tension that was slowly strangling the room.
    “I should be going now,” Richard said curtly behind her, his face still ominous. But he didn’t move.
    She nodded, her eyes stricken as she took in the golden flames. “Yes. It’s getting late.” She didn’t step away.
    She needed something to hang on to, she realized. Some small, simple conversation to restore her view of the world. Then she could pretend this entire evening had been filled with nothing but casual conversation, getting to know her charge’s father. The rest, well, she could write it off as a flukish event brought on by an overly tense atmosphere. Perhaps Wuthering Heights wasn’t the best reading material for her....
    But she needed to say something, anything, to get the evening back on track. Normalcy. She needed normalcy. When nothing better came to mind, she latched on to the question of his work.
    “So,” she began, the word slightly shaky while her back remained to him. “When, when you find this...dielectric thing, what will you do?”
    Richard didn’t answer right away, he was still watching her, still feeling the raw anger and tight passion in his gut. But then he let