It had been an expensive day for Dr. Kate Calder.
First she had the unexpected expenditure at the Books and Bachelors Luncheon, now she was paying for the installation of an extremely high-tech safe in her corner of the lab at the Nichols BioTech research laboratory. There was no shortage of safes and locked, fireproof file cases at Nichols, but Kate had insisted on having her own strongbox, and she was determined to pay for it out of her own pocket. In paying for her own security, Kate bought the right to have sole knowledge of the combination. The expensive, electronic safe—it was absolutely top of the line—was known around the institute as “Kate’s Folly,” and already engendered a certain amount of resentment; it suggested that Kate did not trust her colleagues with her precious research. But that was par for the course with the difficult Dr. Calder.
Kate made no secret of her dislike for her associates, and it was only the quality of her work that allowed her to be tolerated by the management of the institute and those around her.
Science labs are frequently studies in contrasts. There is almost always intense personal competition between individuals or even between teams of researchers working on the same project. But the opposite can also be true. Inside the lab there might be competition, but there is also a sense of belonging, a sense that, in the end, it is all about teamwork. They are, after all, a band of professionals engaging in serious work—work that might have a significant impact on the greater world.
But Kate was not a part of that team. Competition was the driving force behind her work, which left no room for friends. She never had any friends. Orphaned at two, she had no recollection of her parents. She had never felt a part of anything. She was sent to live with an elderly aunt, her sole living relation, who followed her parents to the grave several years later.
Her first experience with foster parents was a disappointment. After the recent loss of all of her blood relatives, Kate searched for a place to belong and for someone to love her. Still struggling with her grief, she firmly believed that her foster parents could provide the home she longed for. However, the adoption of a beautiful six-month-old baby girl replaced her standing in her new “family” and she was passed along to another foster home. By that time Kate was a sullen, hardened eight-year-old who did nothing to endear herself to would-be adoptive parents.
By her early teens she was a ward of the state and was sent to live in an orphanage, living in a dormitory with thirty-two other morose, tough girls. But instead of going down the path of most of the other girls—rebellion, drugs, fights, early pregnancy, repeated attempts to escape— Kate worked out her own, more subtle code of defiance. She had been determined to escape that dispiriting place, but she wasn’t going to do it by crudely knotting together her bedsheets and making a break for the nearest boy, bar, or bus station.
Young Kate had a plan. And she was smart enough to see that her plan would work. The young, friendless girl took a good, hard look at her world and discovered that it was the winners who got what they wanted in life. Rebelliousness, blindly striking out at authority, might feel good for a moment, it might even make other sulky, disaffected girls look up to you and think you’re cool. But Kate knew that to really get away, to really escape the system, you had to play the system against itself.
She knew she had to play it cool and obey all the rules to the letter, no matter how petty or silly she might consider them. She had to risk the goody-two-shoes image and the taunts and ostracism that went along with it.
Kate threw herself into schoolwork, racing through grades at ridiculous speed. She skipped grades twice, once in junior high and once in high school. By the time she was a senior she was auditing classes at a local college.
A girl of no background, money, or even parents, Kate was courted by colleges all over the country, all of them offering full scholarships. She chose MIT, went to Johns Hopkins Medical School, and did her residency at Peter Bent Brigham in Boston. Once she was a newly minted doctor, she turned her back on lucrative private practice and went into pure research. This brought her to Nichols BioTech, her research, and her absurdly complicated safe.
If anyone had bothered to think about the makeup of Kate’s cranky disposition, they would have been forced to surmise that she was this way because she had been alone much of her life and had fought tooth-and-nail for everything she had. But they would have overlooked one simple thing about this tough young woman: she had never known a moment of love. No one had ever loved her, and she had never loved anyone else. There was an empty space inside of her where those feelings should have been . . .
She was wearing a white lab coat over the suit she had worn to the luncheon and was watching the man installing the safe put the final touches on the LED display lock. The safe was certainly an impressive-looking one and yet another way Kate telegraphed to her fellow workers: I’m better than you are.
“Okay,” the installer said, standing up. “You’re all set. Just type in your password—I won’t look— and that’ll lock this baby up tighter than Fort Knox.”
Kate looked around the room, making sure that no one was watching her. Beth was working at the far end of the lab, but seemed to be ignoring the little ceremony. Kate punched the code into the keypad. The sequence of numbers were the only ones from her past that meant anything— the date of the death of her parents. This was as close as she would ever get to raising a memorial to them. That done, she stood up and regarded the strongbox as if it were something sacred, like an altar or a reliquary.
As if she knew that it was now safe to take in what was going on there on the far side of the room, Beth looked up from her work and gazed over at Kate and her new, state-of-the-art safe. It was plain that Beth was offended that Kate trusted no one at Nichols and thought her colleagues would stoop to stealing data.
And besides, weren’t they all working toward a common goal? Weren’t they supposed to be teammates? Beth walked over and looked at the safe, then at Kate, who clutched some files to her chest, as if she were afraid Beth would snatch them from her.
“That’s pretty heavy security, isn’t it?” asked Beth. “I think it’s a shame that you think you need it.”
“Well, at least I have something to protect,” Kate replied, a little smirk playing on her lips.
Beth shook her head and walked away. Her story wasn’t quite as dramatic as Kate’s, but there were similarities. She lived alone—except for her big dog, Bruno—in a little house in Westchester, a county just north of the city. She had few friends; she had been bookish as a child and had excelled in college when her classmates chose to do just okay and have some fun. Beth didn’t have a lot of fun, but she didn’t have the anger that Kate possessed.
As she left she heard Kate asking the installer a question that showed the depths of her paranoia.
“What if somebody tries to break in?” she asked. “Could that be done?”
He shook his head and laughed at the question. “Houdini himself couldn’t break into this baby, lady. If somebody starts guessing the code and punches in the wrong numbers, the whole system will freeze up for a full twelve hours. Even you won’t be able to get in until the time is up.”
Kate put her files into the safe, then punched her multidigit code into the keypad. Instantaneously, the readout came up on the LED screen: “System Locked.”
The safe installer looked around the lab and sort of mock-shivered in fright. “This is the first time I’ve ever done an installation in a place like this,” he said. “Mostly I do offices and jewelers.”
“Really,” said Kate, indicating that she did not have the slightest interest in the man’s conversational gambit, and even less interest in his profession.
The poor fellow didn’t know that, of course, so he sailed on. “So, whaddya got in there?” the workman continued, with a smile on his face. “One of those scary viruses that kill people in about two minutes flat?”
Kate did not have much of a sense of humor even at the best of times and, as one might expect, she never joked about her work. She did not respond directly to the weak little joke the workman made.
“Thank you for your help,” she said with a sour look on her face—a look that did not escape the workman. Now he knew all he needed to know about Dr. Calder. He shrugged, picked up his toolbox, and headed for the door. As he left the room he passed Andrew coming in. It took a moment for Kate to look up and notice him, but, when she did, she was not at all pleased to see him.
“Oh, really. This is too much,” Kate said wearily. “What on earth are you doing here? I really did not expect to see you again. You are persistent—I’ll give you that.”
The sudden appearance of the man Beth knew as Dr. Andrew Friend in the Nichols BioTech lab gave rise to a strange feeling again. It wasn’t as strong as love or longing—it was more like a sudden and bright happiness one feels when one unexpectedly runs into an old friend.
Kate noticed Beth’s interest in her visitor. She was aware that her fellow researcher could not take her eyes off Andrew, and that gave Kate a small frisson of pleasure. But beyond that she did not need to have this guy around, mooning over her and, worst of all, keeping her from her work.
“I know you said to forget about dinner,” he said, “but it just doesn’t seem fair. I mean, think about what you’re missing.”
Kate gave him a quick once-over look and Andrew knew that she wasn’t crazy about what she was seeing. She shook her head and rolled her eyes.
“You have got to be kidding,” she said acidly. “That’s a joke, right?” Kate might not have a great sense of humor, but she could at least identify a joke when she heard one.
“Well, I didn’t mean me,” said Andrew quickly. Modesty came naturally to him. “I mean . . . not necessarily.”
“You didn’t?” Kate snapped back. “Surely you aren’t thinking of bringing another eligible bachelor along?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.” Andrew smiled.
“What then?” Kate countered. “Explain to me what I might be missing.”
Andrew took a deep breath. “What I mean, Dr. Calder, is really quite simple.”
Kate couldn’t help but be intrigued. “How so?”
“Well,” said Andrew, “wouldn’t you like to have the satisfaction of coming into work tomorrow after a six-thousand-dollar date and letting everybody go crazy wondering if it was worth it?” He glanced around the room at the others working there and lowered his voice. He found that he enjoyed teasing her.
“And . . . it will be,” Andrew said. “But you don’t have to tell them that. You’d just keep ’em guessing. Which, I suspect, is something you like to do a lot.”
“You suspect?” Kate countered. “What do you mean?”
“Well, take that safe, for example. It’s a really impressive one, by the way.” His eyes swept the room. “You know, I’ve seen a lot of vaults, and that is by far the most sophisticated one I’ve ever seen. You must be the envy of your coworkers. They don’t seem to have safes as nice as that one.”
Kate half smiled—she knew that Andrew was needling her, and she was surprised at herself. Surprised to find that she actually liked it, or rather, almost liked it. She snuck a quick peek at the other scientists in the lab, all of whom were working away at their lab tables and giving the impression of purposefully not looking at Kate and her six-thousand-dollar date.
Kate found that Andrew’s words were already coming true. She discovered, to her surprise, that she was enjoying the curiosity that seemed to absolutely radiate from her diligently nonchalant coworkers. How much more intense would their interest be after her big night out with the date she had purchased? Kate sort of liked it already.
“Come on,” Andrew urged her. “It’ll be lots of fun. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you look like the kind of person who has a definite deficiency in the fun department.”
It wasn’t the first time Kate had been told that she was no fun, and she didn’t mind. What she did mind was being deceived. And she was pretty sure that Andrew was trying to trick her into a date. Men, Kate thought, just had no clue. And the male ego was unassailably stupid— something that had to be drilled through with industrial-strength tools. Kate had learned these lessons long ago.
“Is that it?” Kate countered hotly. “Or is it your insufferable male ego? You just can’t imagine, just can’t believe, that there’s a woman on earth who wouldn’t want to go out with you.”
“I can assure you,” said Andrew in mock solemnity, “that male vanity has absolutely nothing to do with my wanting to take you out on the date you paid so dearly for.”
Kate thought that he was lying. But, of course, he was telling the absolute truth.
“Yeah, right,” said Kate. “You further think that because of the price I paid I secretly want something from you—that I would be a pushover.”
Andrew’s face turned an embarrassed shade of pink. “I assure you that is not the case either,” he said earnestly.
This time, Kate believed him, though she would not have been able to say why. There and then, she decided that she would go out with Andrew—she would not have been able to explain that either. Something in this young man had melted at least the first layer of permafrost in Kate. But she was still Kate Calder and he would have to go a long way and work very hard to get her completely thawed out. Still, the thaw that had progressed this far would have astonished Beth and the rest of Kate’s coworkers.
What Andrew did not know was that if Kate was going to go out with him there were going to be some hard-and-fast conditions. Of course, it was perfectly in keeping with that no-nonsense character of hers that the date would take place on terms that she would lay down, or it would not happen at all.
“Okay,” she said firmly. “Here are my terms.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow. “Terms?”
Kate nodded. “That’s right. Terms.”
“Fire away.”
“It’s got to be a nice place,” she said firmly. “Expensive and exclusive.” Kate rarely went out, and when she did she wanted to make it count. Furthermore, she had already laid out six thousand dollars for this date, and it was in her nature to get value for her money.
Andrew nodded. “It will be very nice,” he said, knowing that Tess would be handling the details.
“And this is very important,” Kate said resolutely. “I get there myself. I go home alone. Don’t get any ideas that because I paid for this, you are entitled to anything else.”
“Of course not,” said Andrew with a nod. “You’re perfectly safe with me. I can assure you of that.”
“As long as that is understood,” said Kate. “So, where are we going? Chanterelle? Lespinasse? Gramercy Tavern? Some place like that? I assume you made reservations before the auction, because if you try to get something tonight you are out of luck.”
The names of the restaurants meant nothing to Andrew and he did not know how hard it was to get a table in one of the famous places. Getting a dinner reservation at one of New York City’s top restaurants was not something that could be procured at the last minute—not unless you had a lot of pull or a very famous name. Not that it was a problem.
“I had someplace else in mind. The address is 508 Madison. Top floor. And don’t worry about it—I made reservations.”
“Five hundred eight Madison,” Kate repeated, her brow furrowed. “That’s a new one to me.”
“You’ll like it,” Andrew said. “Trust me.”
“Seven o’clock?”
“Great,” Andrew said, turning to leave. “See you there.”
“Wait!” Kate almost shouted. Andrew stopped. “Is it true—do you really rumba?”
“I will by seven,” Andrew said with a wink.
In spite of herself, Kate smiled. She couldn’t help it.
Beth watched Andrew go. But she was not smiling. As he went she felt a strange twinge, a sharp jab of sorrow and loss.