Applied Electromagnetism Read online

  “Did you ever see the original Poltergeist?” Adam asked, interrupting her anxiety spiral.

  “Yeah.” Olivia’s friend Esther was a horror movie nut and had dragged her to a revival showing a couple years ago. It had been cheesy as hell, but still scared the living shit out of her.

  “My sisters used to babysit me, and they let me watch it when I was way too young. You know that scene where the kid is in bed listening to the storm and counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder to track the storm’s approach?”

  “Oh yeah, and then the tree outside—”

  “Yeah,” Adam interrupted tightly. “It basically scarred me for life.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Like eight or something.”

  “That is way too young for that movie.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  There was another flash of lightning and they both fell silent, counting in their heads. One, one thousand…two, one thousand… This time the thunder wasn’t quite as deafening.

  “The storm’s moving away,” Olivia said, stifling a yawn.

  “Thank god.”

  “We’re so fucked.” She wasn’t talking about the storm anymore. “This whole project is a disaster.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  She turned her head toward him, but it was too dark to see anything. “How can you say that?”

  The mattress squeaked as he rolled onto his side. “Because it will be, one way or another.” He sounded a lot closer, now that he was facing her, but she knew there was still a good two feet of empty mattress between them. No-man’s-land, where none dare to tread. “No one’s going to die or lose their job if we miss a deadline because events beyond our control conspired against us.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “You’re not going to lose your job.” His tone was gently chiding.

  “Maybe not, but it sure isn’t going to help me get ahead.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t let them blame you for any of this and I meant it.” His voice was feather-soft. A hushed promise made in bed late at night.

  Olivia reached up to rub her tired eyes. “Thank you.”

  “It really is going to be okay.”

  She could almost believe him. Outside, the storm howled and raged, overturning all their best-laid plans, but lying there next to Adam in the dark, she felt strangely secure. Maybe his confidence was contagious.

  Another flash of lightning glowed through the curtains, momentarily lighting up his face. Their eyes met just before the room plunged into darkness again.

  One, one thousand…two, one thousand…three, one thousand… As she silently counted the seconds between the lightning and thunder, she knew Adam was doing the same. Four, one thousand…five, one thousand…

  Sometime between six and seven, she fell asleep.

  Olivia came slowly awake to the ghostly gray light of a new day leaking through the blinds. The storm had died down, but she could hear a steady rain still falling outside, which meant the roads probably weren’t even close to being clear yet.

  She didn’t want to get up, because she was too warm and cozy in bed.

  Mostly on account of the warm body spooning with her.

  Adam’s arm was draped over her waist. His breath warmed the back of her neck, his chest was pressed against her back—and she was pretty sure that was his morning wood she could feel on her ass cheek.

  It had been an embarrassingly long time since Olivia had woken up in the arms of a man. She’d forgotten how nice it was. Heat rolled off his bare chest, soaking into her skin through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. The pressure of his body against hers was intensely comforting, like a weighted blanket, but instead of a blanket it was a half-naked man in her bed.

  She tried not to move, so she could enjoy the sensation a little longer. The scent of his skin enveloped her like a dream. He smelled like sunshine and fresh air. Zesty and sweet, with just a hint of spice. They should create a Yankee Candle based on him, because Mountain Lodge had nothing on Adam Cortinas.

  Any second now, he would wake and realize what he was doing, and it would be all over. He’d spring away from her, mortified, and try to pretend he wasn’t grossed out and appalled.

  Which was exactly what happened.

  He must have sensed a change in her breathing, or maybe her muscles had tensed from trying so hard to stay still. Whatever it was that alerted him, she felt him stiffen behind her, and he rolled away with apologies spilling out of his mouth.

  “It’s okay,” she said, refusing to look at him as she swung her feet over the edge of the bed. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Can we just pretend that didn’t happen?” His voice was agonized, and it hurt more than she expected it to.

  “Already forgotten,” she assured him and fled to the bathroom, exhaling in relief as she shut the door between them.

  Unfortunately, she’d left her phone by the bed and the power was still out, which meant it was pitch black in the windowless bathroom except for a faint strip of light leaking under the door. She had to feel her way to the toilet and then feel her way to the sink to wash her hands.

  When she came out of the bathroom, Adam was sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing his face. His skin looked ashen when he glanced her way, but maybe it was just the wan gray light coming through the blinds he’d thrown open.

  The rain was still coming down at a steady rate outside, but at least the wind and lightning seemed to have abated. It was definitely past dawn, but how long past was impossible to tell under the low ceiling of pea-soup clouds blotting out the sun.

  Adam got up and shuffled past her without a word, clutching his phone as he disappeared into the bathroom. When the door clicked shut, Olivia went to get her own phone and check the time.

  It was almost eight and her battery was at ninety percent. Hopefully it would last until the power came back on—and hopefully that would be soon. If she let herself think about all the work waiting for them that wasn’t getting done, she might actually throw up.

  Her phone showed one whole bar of reception, up from zero last night, and when Adam came back out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste she was attempting to download her email.

  “Do you have a signal?” he asked. “Because I’ve still got nothing.”

  He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which she’d known from their bout of inadvertent morning cuddling, but this was the first time she’d seen his bare chest in the light.

  He was all taut muscle and smooth skin. Broad shoulders narrowed to a flat stomach framed by two perfect hipbones. Square pectorals stacked above the ridges of his abs like building blocks, with a narrow trail of dark hair running down the midline to his navel and below.

  Of course she’d known he had a good body before—it had been obvious from the way his clothes clung to him—but there was something much too real and too raw about seeing him exposed like this in the feeble daylight coming through the window.

  He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, which kept running over his forearms in a way that made him seem vulnerable and unsure of himself. When he lifted his eyes to her face, she saw that same vulnerability in them, and it made her want to hug him.

  But she was pretty certain that was the exact opposite of what he wanted, so she looked back down at the phone in her hand, which was struggling to display the images in a sale email from…

  Adam and Eve.

  There was a photo of a bright pink vibrator on her phone.

  And now Adam was coming closer like he was going to peer at the screen.

  Holy shit. Delete.

  Her panicked thumb missed the trash button twice before finally hitting the mark and making the accursed photo disappear—just as Adam drew close enough to see what she was looking at.

  “More like half a signal,” she answered in a voice that sounded like it had been squeezed out of a dying frog. “So far I’ve downloaded two whole emails, both of them junk.”
r />   He paced to the window and gazed out at the rain. “I hate being cut off from information like this. How the hell are we supposed to know what’s going on?”

  “We go find some other people, that’s how.” She got up and went to her suitcase. “Lemme put on some clothes on and we’ll try the lobby.”

  Other people would be good. Other people would provide a buffer between them, and more importantly, a distraction from the memory of Adam’s erection pressed against her ass.

  Chapter Twelve

  Olivia remembered to take her phone into the bathroom with her this time, so she could actually see to brush her teeth and do something with her hair.

  When she came back out a few minutes later, Adam had pulled on a T-shirt, to her simultaneous disappointment and relief. But mostly relief. It was a hell of a lot easier to deny her attraction to him when he wasn’t flaunting his beautiful bare chest in front of her.

  Unfortunately, he was still wearing his heather gray sweatpants, which were a lot to take. They clung to his hips and other assorted parts of him—parts that had recently been snuggled up against her, Olivia’s unhelpful brain reminded her—in an almost indecent way that did not leave as much to the imagination as she would have liked under the current circumstances.

  Not that any clothes would be able to fully mask his attractiveness. The man would probably look sexy in a garbage bag.

  But not as sexy.

  So that’s what she imagined on the wet walk to the lobby—Adam wearing a garbage bag instead of those stupidly hot sweatpants of his. It almost sort of helped a little.

  There were a bunch of other motel guests gathered in the lobby, listening to a local news station on an old battery-operated radio like the one Olivia’s dad kept for hurricanes.

  “Morning, you two!” Linda, the motel manager who’d checked them in last night, greeted them with a raised hand and a wiggle of her nicotine-stained fingers. Her smile grew wider, a hint of mischief bleeding into it as her gaze flicked from Adam to Olivia and back to Adam again. “You poor thing. Did you manage to get any sleep at all last night?”

  “Yeah, some,” he mumbled, staring at the floor.

  Was Olivia imagining it, or was he blushing?

  Linda waved at the coffee bar where the promised continental breakfast had been set up. “I’m afraid the power outage has made for slim pickings today. There’s instant coffee and hot water—thank heaven for gas stoves. No pastry delivery today, but we’ve got cereal and yogurt and fruit. And bread and bagels, but of course the toaster doesn’t work.”

  “Thank you,” Olivia said, already dumping a packet of instant Folgers into a styrofoam cup. “This is great.”

  “What’s the word on the storm?” Adam asked, grabbing a couple yogurts and a banana.

  “Highway’s still shut down and they’ve extended all the warnings until two,” Linda said. “Sounds like there’s another band headed our way.”

  Adam set his food on an empty cafe table and looked at his phone. “Still no signal. What about you?” he asked Olivia.

  She joined him with her coffee and a yogurt, and pulled her phone out of her purse. “Still just the one.”

  “See if you can send Gavin a text to let him know what’s going on.”

  While Adam went to make himself an instant coffee, Olivia composed a text to Gavin, updating him on their latest crisis. She hit send and offered a silent prayer to the gods of the cellular network as the progress bar slowly ticked across the screen.

  “Well?” Adam asked, sliding onto the seat across from her.

  She held up a finger. “Hold please.”

  Only a little bit more to go. Come on, come on…

  “Yes!” she announced with a fist pump when the text went through with a whooshing sound.

  Adam’s jaw tensed as he swallowed a yawn. “Let’s hope the signal stays strong enough to receive any response he sends.”

  Olivia gulped down her instant coffee and grimaced at the taste. “What’s he going to say? Swim there? It’s out of our hands.”

  Adam’s eyebrows lifted as he licked yogurt off his spoon. “You seem uncharacteristically chill this morning, considering our current circumstances.”

  She shrugged, concentrating on her own yogurt so she wouldn’t have to watch his tongue sexily caressing his plastic spoon in a way that was probably illegal in the Bible Belt. “It’s a new thing I’m trying, in order to keep from going completely insane.”

  If she let herself think about it, she would seriously lose her shit, and she couldn’t afford to do that. Nature had conspired to put them in a temporary time-out, and there wasn’t a damned thing either of them could do about it. The only way to bear it was to ignore it.

  They ate their yogurt and sipped their coffee while the local news radio station regaled them with tales of flooded roadways and washed-out bridges, and of the next band of storms expected to hit that afternoon.

  Since it was their only available caffeine source, they stayed for a second cup of instant coffee before bidding Linda goodbye. She told them to come back at noon, when she’d have some sandwiches for lunch. At her urging, they took a few extra pieces of fruit and fun-size boxes of cereal to snack on later.

  Back in Olivia’s room, the door closed behind them with an ominous thud.

  They were alone again. Just the two of them, in a small motel room with a giant bed and nothing to do.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Adam announced, and disappeared into the bathroom with a bundle of clothes from his suitcase.

  Thank god. He was changing out of those damned sweatpants. Hopefully that would alleviate some of Olivia’s distraction. And it gave her a few minutes alone to breathe without feeling like she was being watched—or having to worry about accidentally being caught watching him.

  Only when she heard the shower turn on did it occur to her that Adam was completely naked in the next room. Which of course caused her to imagine the water running in sheets over his smooth, muscled torso and down his legs. His hands lathering up the soap, and rubbing it over his body—

  Nope. Stop.

  She needed something else to focus on. Something to take her mind off the hot naked man on the other side of the bathroom door.

  She got up and dug out her knitting. It wasn’t exactly bright in the room, but if she sat on the floor by the window, there was just enough light to knit by. Fortunately, she was far enough along on Penny’s shawl that she’d internalized the pattern and could practically do it with her eyes closed.

  When Adam came out of the bathroom, all dewy-skinned and damp-haired, wearing jeans but no shirt, Olivia was grateful to have something to look at that wasn’t his glistening bare chest.

  “Man, it’s dark in that bathroom with the door closed. And it gets hot in there fast.”

  “Uh huh.” She breathed in the steamy, shampoo-scented air billowing out of the bathroom and tried not to imagine droplets of condensation collecting on Adam’s skin and trickling down the valley between his pecs. Instead, she repeated the shawl’s pattern in her head like a mantra: Knit three, knit two together, yarn over. Knit three, knit two together, yarn over.

  He was walking back and forth across the room, from his suitcase to the bathroom and back again, and he still hadn’t put his shirt on. He must be trying to cool off first, but she wished he’d hurry up and do it. She caught a whiff of that spicy, woodsy scent she’d smelled on him before, and glanced up to see him rubbing product into his hair in front of the bathroom mirror.

  She lowered her eyes again quickly, but the scent had filled up the small room, and she inhaled slowly through her nose, enjoying the comforting Adam-ness of it.

  He came back out of the bathroom and paced to the window, standing beside her as he stared out at the rain. “This weather is bullshit.”

  “Uh huh,” she said again.

  His bare foot was next to her knee, his leg so close it was practically touching hers, and the scent of his hair product was making her dizzy
. Also, he still hadn’t put his shirt on. He had it draped over his shoulder like a dish towel, and it required all her willpower not to gaze up at him wistfully.

  “You really lived with storms like this all the time growing up?”

  “Not like this.” Her knuckles were white as she gripped the knitting needles. Knit three, knit two together, yarn over. “A storm this bad used to be an every ten to twenty years kind of event. But with climate change they’re practically an annual occurrence these days.”

  She could feel his eyes on her now. He was watching her knit, standing over her all bare-chested and hot in those jeans that hugged his thighs in a way she refused to let herself look at even though his thighs were at eye level and only inches away from her.

  Knit three, knit two together, yarn over.

  How much longer was he going to stand there watching her? And was he ever going to put his damn shirt on? Her fingers fumbled the yarn-over, and she nearly dropped a stitch.

  Olivia gave up and set her knitting aside. “If you’re done in the bathroom, I’m going to shower.”

  “Yeah, it’s all yours.” Adam stayed by the window while she dug through her suitcase for clean underwear. “Don’t forget to take your phone,” he added when she started for the bathroom, clutching her small bundle of intimate apparel to her chest—as if he hadn’t already gotten an eyeful of her underwear in the bathroom this morning.

  “Thank you.” Grabbing her phone out of her purse, she escaped into the bathroom and blew out a relived breath as the door closed between them, plunging her into total darkness.

  She used the light on her phone to start up the shower and undress, but turned it off before stepping under the water. Showering in the dark felt weird, but also oddly nice. It was a little like being in one of those sensory deprivation tanks, and it went a long way toward helping her relax.