Janice Johnson - The New Man

“You know, there are no redheads in my family?” She sounded outraged at the genetic betrayal. “Not one. Dad still teases my mother about having a changeling. But, she insists his great-grandmother looks like her hair is auburn, too, in a couple of old pictures.”

“Which are black-and-white.” Alec stopped beside his car, unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her.

“Mm-hmm. And if my great-great was a redhead, she didn’t have freckles either.”

Helen was buckled up by the time he got in.

“This is nice.” Helen stroked the leather seat. “I’ve never been in a Mercedes before.”

“I felt like I’d arrived when I could afford one.” She could see the boyish pleasure he felt owning the luxury sedan. “I’m not a car guy, but growing up, I used to look at them and think, now, that’s status.”

Her big brown eyes held curiosity. “I didn’t think to ask what you do for a living.”

“I manage a small company working on wind turbines.”

“Wind?” She sounded as mystified as if he’d said he made thingamajigs.

He’d gotten the same reaction often enough to have a practiced explanation. “Same concept as windmills. Have you been to eastern Washington lately? Seen the rows of turbines on ridges?”

“No.”

“I’ll have to take you,” he said absently, backing out of the parking spot. “They’re quite a sight. Some people think they’re ugly. I don’t. In that barren country along the Columbia River, they seem to belong. There’s something spare and clean about them, like the landscape.”

“I vaguely knew that the utility companies were buying some wind power. I guess I hadn’t thought about how it was generated.” Her brow furrowed. “And your company builds them?”

“We don’t actually install them. Or manufacture the tower. What we’ve done is to design a turbine with flexible, hinged blades that reduce fatigue, so the turbine can be quite a bit lighter and therefore cheaper.”

“Are you an engineer, then?”

He shook his head. “Financial management. I have degrees in economics. I’m a C.P.A.”

“Oh, dear.” She cast him an embarrassed look. “Our little business must seem like awfully small potatoes to you.”

“All businesses start small.”

“Did your wind company?”

“We had big financial backing, but we faced a lot of the same challenges. We needed to manufacture our turbine and then prove it worked as well if not better than existing ones. It was several years after start-up before we actually had any commercial success.”

“You mean, before you sold one?” Helen sounded horrified. “Several years?”

Alec laughed. “That’s normal, believe it or not. The investors were gambling. We could have spent all that money and never made a sale.”

“Good heavens.” She gazed at him in awe. “How terrifying.”

“It was a little scary,” he admitted, merging onto the freeway. “But I’ve worked in the wind industry before, so I recognized the brilliance of my partner’s concept. I thought it could help bring wind energy into the mainstream by reducing costs. Think about it.”

No matter how many times he’d given this speech, genuine passion still infused his voice. “We’re running out of fossil fuels. Dams cause ecological damage. But wind…it has all the power of a great river like the Columbia, and we can’t use it up. We borrow it, then let it whip on its way, unharmed by having spun the blades. It’s a nonpolluting source of electricity, it’s indigenous…” He glanced at her. “We don’t have to buy it from foreign nations. What’s the down side?”

She smiled at his fervor. “You tell me.”

He grimaced. “Well, the wind does die down sometimes, so it’s not a steady flow like a river. Better storage could solve that, though. The turbines do make some noise, and they can kill birds.”

“And they’re ugly,” she finished.

“Alien, maybe,” he conceded. “The beauty of it is, the land where the wind blows hardest is the least populated. Yeah, if we had a row of turbines climbing Capitol Hill or Queen Anne in Seattle, people would protest. But on a bare lava ridge beyond Vantage…why not?”

“The person who lives there might not agree,” she argued.

“That’s true. But what are the alternatives? More dams? Atomic power plants? They’d look like hell rearing above the Columbia River.”

Helen nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true, of course.”

He’d chosen a Greek restaurant right off Broadway on Capitol Hill, near the Harvard Exit Theater, which showed foreign and independent films. He and Linda had come here often, before they’d had children and started going to Disney movies at the multiplex instead.

Parking was always tricky here, but he got lucky and found a spot only a couple of blocks away. Walking the short distance, he asked Helen what movies she enjoyed, and found her tastes were similar to his.

“Actually,” she admitted with a sigh, “I don’t see very many rated much above PG. Sometimes, Kathleen or Jo rent something for us to watch after Ginny has gone to bed. They both like blockbusters. You know, lots of special effects, sex, big-name actors. I’ve always preferred small movies.” She said it almost timidly, as if embarrassed by her tastes. “The kind where nothing huge happens, but you’re left feeling good. Like, a while ago we rented Italian for Beginners. It’s actually Danish. Have you seen it?”

He shook his head.

“It was…sweet.” She laughed. “Okay. Now you can tell me you love Jerry Bruckheimer extravaganzas. Or you’re a James Bond fanatic.”

Alec grinned and took her arm as they crossed the street. “Not me. Hey, I already admitted I was never a car guy, didn’t I? I like numbers and computers. I was a geek.”

She gave him a look that raised his spirits considerably. “I can’t believe you were ever a geek.” Then she blushed as if realizing what she’d given away and added hastily, “Besides, some of them probably live vicariously by watching Terminator and what have you. After all, if Clark Kent can turn into Superman…”

“They, too, can jump from a helicopter onto the roof of a speeding car to rescue the damsel in distress?” He laid a hand on her lower back and steered her into the doorway of the restaurant.

Her chuckle was a delicious gurgle. “Something like that.” Then she looked around. “Oh, this is nice. I don’t go out often.”

“Single parents don’t.”

The hostess approached them with a smile. “Two for dinner?”

They followed her to a corner table in a room with dark beams, murals on plaster walls and tile floors. He liked the atmosphere here as much as the food.

Helen opened her menu. “I suppose you wine and dine customers and investors all the time.”

“Sometimes. But these days, we do most of our business by e-mail or conference call. Why waste hours to get together face-to-face when you can make decisions or discuss a problem in a few minutes?”

They glanced through the menu and ordered in between snatches of conversation. Alec watched her sip wine, her fingers slender on the stem of the glass, her hair shimmering as she tilted her head back to swallow. Her neck was long and slim, her throat white. He imagined kissing her in the hollow at the base, perhaps tasting that pale creamy skin. He would tangle his fingers in her riot of hair as he worked his way to her delicate chin and soft, full mouth. Perhaps by then her cheeks would flush the color of wild roses.

Captivated by the sight of her across the table from him as well as by his parallel fantasy, he took a moment to realize she seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“You’re so pretty.” His voice came out husky.