All Night Long

could hear a steel door slamming closed somewhere. So much for the lighthearted banter.
    “We spent the past two nights together,” he said evenly. “Did I get the wrong impression somewhere along the line?”

    She looked at him standing there in the doorway and felt as if he were asking her to make a life-altering decision. What was the big deal? They were involved in a highly charged affair fueled largely by the intensity of their recent shared experiences. This relationship probably wouldn’t last but while it did,
    Luke made her feel like a sex goddess. When was the last time any man had ever made her feel lik sex goddess?
    “No.” She smiled. “You didn’t get the wrong impression.” She stepped back to allow him to enter. The bleak, dark aspect vanished from his face. She sensed the steel door reopening.
    Luke moved into the room, looking oddly satisfied, looking like a man who was coming home.

----
    She awoke much later that night when she felt him slide out of bed. She did not move but opened her eyes in time to see him stealing silently down the hall into the front room of the cabin. He had his jeans
p. in one hand.
    When he disappeared she turned to look at the clock on the table. It was two-thirty in the morning.
    She gave him a few minutes, time enough to get a snack in the kitchen or use the facilities. He did not return.
    She sat up, tossed the covers aside and got to her feet. The man had a right to his secrets, she tol erself. But this was downright weird. If he couldn’t sleep, she wasn’t going to sleep, either. She sli er feet into her slippers and went down the hall.
    In the glow of the lamp that she had left burning on the end table she saw Luke sitting on the edge o he couch, his computer open on the coffee table in front of him. His intense expression told her tha e was riveted by whatever he was writing on the screen.
    “If you’re into any late-night Internet chat room hobbies you’d better tell me now,”
    she said.

    He raised his head. For a second or two, she got the distinct feeling that he was surprised to see her standing there. Then he smiled wryly.
    “Didn’t mean to wake you,” he said. “I got a couple of ideas. Wanted to get them down before they faded.”
    “Ideas about what? The Webb situation?”
    “No.” He leaned back against the cushions, stretched his legs out under the coffee table and hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans. “The book I’m trying to write.”
    “What book?” Curiosity flowered deep inside her. “A novel?”
    He hesitated just long enough to make her think he was not accustomed to talking about the book.
    “No,” he said finally. He studied the glowing computer screen with a basilisk stare.
    “It’s definitely nonfiction. You could call it a textbook or a manual.”
    “Really? What’s your subject?”
    “A way of thinking about and formulating strategy.”
    She moved closer to the coffee table. “Military strategy?”
    “Strategy is strategy regardless of how it is applied. Nobody believes me when I tell them that wha aved my team and my own rear on more than one occasion wasn’t just my military training, it wa hat work in philosophy I did before I went into the Marines.”
    She suddenly understood. “Philosophy didn’t teach you what to think, it taught you how to think.”
    “And war taught me . . . other things. I’m trying to pull lessons from both aspects of those two human endeavors.”
    “Certainly sounds impressive.”
    His mouth quirked. “I’m trying to get around that little problem. I don’t want people to think the boo s too esoteric or arcane.”
    “Esoteric and arcane. Fancy words. Jason warned me that beneath your laid-back veneer beat the hear f a natural-born scholar. What made you leave the academic world to join the Marines?”
    He looked deeply into the computer screen as though searching for the answer to her question. “It’ ard to explain. Part of me was drawn to that world. But there was another part of me that felt. . . unfinished. It was as if I needed a counterbalance to my academic side.” He shrugged. “Or something.”
    “You know what you are?”
    He raised his brows. “What?”
    “A twenty-first-century version of what they used to call a Renaissance man, a scholar-warrior.”
    “Now who’s using the fancy words?”
    “And this book of yours,” she continued, very sure of herself now, “is an effort to meld both side f your nature, isn’t it? It’s your