Free Almost Forever by Linda Howard

you. If you have other plans…?”
    â€œI don’t,” she said hurriedly, suddenly terrified that now he wouldn’t call at all. The thought of a day without seeing him made her feel bleak.
    â€œThen have lunch with me. Is there a restaurant close to your office?”
    â€œYes, just across the street. Riley’s.”
    â€œThen I’ll meet you there at noon.” He touched her cheek briefly then left. Claire locked the door behind him, her eyes filling with unexpected tears and her throat clogging. She was in love with him, with a man who, by his own admission, wanted only the refuge of an undemanding friendship. What a stupid thing for her to do! She had known, by her unusual response to him, that he was a danger to her and the quiet, uncomplicated life she’d built for herself. By not making any demands at all, he’d taken far more than she would ever have offered.

Chapter 4
    W hen Claire entered the office, she saw at once that Sam had spent the night there again. File drawers were open, the lights were on, and a pot of old coffee was scorching on the warming pad of the coffee maker. Wrinkling her nose, she poured out the old coffee and put on a fresh pot, then set about restoring order to the office. The door of Sam’s office was closed, but she knew that he would either be sprawled on the sofa or slumped over his desk. He spent a lot of nights in the office whenever he was working on a new alloy; his delight was in the development of new metals, not in the day-to-day routine of running the business he’d founded. For all that, he was a cagey businessman, and nothing escaped his attention for long.
    When the coffee was finished, she poured a cup and carried it through to Sam’s office. He was asleep at his desk, his head resting on his folded arms. A legal pad crowded with numbers and chemical symbols lay beside him, and five Styrofoam cups with varying levels of cold coffee was scattered aroundthe desk. Claire set the cup of steaming coffee on the desk and crossed to the windows to open the curtains, flooding the office with light. “Sam, wake up. It’s almost eight o’clock.”
    He woke easily, yawning and stirring at her voice. Sitting up, he yawned again and rubbed his face, eyed the fresh cup of coffee with appreciation and drank half of it. “What time did you say it is?”
    â€œEight.”
    â€œAlmost five hours’ sleep. Not bad.” Five hours’ sleep was really a lot for him—he often functioned on less. Sam was something of an enigma, but she was fond of him and intensely loyal. He was lean and gray haired, and his face had lines that told of hard living sometime in his fifty-two years, making her suspect that he had quite an interesting past, but he never talked about it. She knew little about him other than that his wife had died ten years before and he still mourned her, having no interest in remarrying. Her photograph still sat on his desk, and Claire had seen Sam look at it with an expression of such pain and longing that she’d had to turn away.
    â€œHave you been working on something new?” she asked, nodding toward the legal pad.
    â€œI’d like to make that new alloy stronger, but so far all I’ve done is make it brittle. I haven’t hit on the right combination yet without making it heavier, too.”
    The challenge was to develop a metal that was both strong and light, because the heavier a metal was, the more energy was required to move it. The advanced metal alloys had practical applications more far-reaching than simply making a long-lasting I-beam for construction; the sophisticated alloys were used in space and opened up new opportunities in land travel. After an alloy was developed, ways had to be found to produce it cheaply enough that industry could use it. When Claire had first begun working, it had seemed like a routine job to her, likeworking in any steel mill, but she’d