second time ten minutes, and only that long because she’d held him off. Muscles of a different sort, she thought. But no less powerful. When they were done he lay on his back, panting, his chest and face slick with sweat. She rolled off and snuggled into his shoulder, exhaling heavily.
“Wow,” she murmured. “That was . . . Wow ...”
“Yeah, it was,” he replied.
Steve wasn’t a bad-looking man, with curly reddish-blond hair and light blue eyes, but he was too skinny for her tastes, and his beard made her face and thighs itchy. He was clean, though, and he didn’t smoke, and his teeth were straight, so all in all she knew it could be worse.
As for his lovemaking skills ... They were almost nonexistent. He was an overly considerate lover and too gentle by far, always worried he was doing something wrong or should be doing something different. She did her best to reassure him, saying all the right things and making all the right noises at all the right moments, but she suspected in the back of his head he was worried about losing her—not that he “had” her, really.
It was the quintessential beauty-and-the-beast syndrome. He wasn’t going to lose her, of course, at least not until she’d gotten the answer her employers needed. Allison felt a momentary pang of guilt, imagining how he would react when she disappeared. She was fairly certain he’d fallen in love with her, which was the point, after all, but he was so ... harmless it was hard not to occasionally feel sorry for him. Hard but not impossible. She pushed the thought from her mind.
“So how’s work?” he asked.
“It’s fine, the same old thing: making the rounds, giving my pitch, handing out my phone numbers, and showing the doctors a little cleavage. ...”
“Hey!”
“Relax, I’m kidding. A lot of the doctors are worried about the recalls.”
“On TV, the pain meds?”
“Those are the ones. We’re getting a lot of pressure from the manufacturer to keep pushing them.”
As far as he knew, she was a pharmaceutical saleswoman based in Reno. They “met” at a Barnes & Noble, where, at the in-house Starbucks, she’d found herself a nickel short in paying for her Caffè Mocha. Behind her in line, Steve had nervously offered to cover the difference. Armed with his dossier—or what little of his dossier they felt she needed to have—and well aware of his habits, the meeting had been easy to arrange and easier still to exploit when she’d expressed an interest in a book he was reading, something about mechanical engineering that she actually cared nothing about. He hadn’t noticed, so thrilled to have a pretty girl paying attention to him.
“So all that engineering stuff,” she said. “I don’t know how you do it. I tried to read one of those books you gave me, but it went right over my head.”
“Well, you’re plenty smart, that’s for sure, but it’s pretty dry stuff. Don’t forget, I went to four years of college for it, and even then I didn’t really learn anything practical until I got on the job. MIT taught me a lot, but nothing compared to what I’ve learned since then.”
“Like what?”
“Ah, you know, just stuff.”
“Such as?”
He didn’t reply.
“Okay, okay, I get the point, Mr. Important Top-Secret Guy.”
“It’s not that, Ali,” he replied in a slightly whiny tone. “It’s just that they make you sign all this paperwork—confidentiality agreements and all that.”
“Wow, you must be important.”
He shook his head. “Nah. You know how the government is ... paranoid to the end. Hell, I’m a little surprised they haven’t polygraphed us, but who knows?”
“So what is it, then? Weapons and bombs and stuff like that? Wait a second. . . . Are you a rocket scientist?”
He chuckled. “No, not a rocket scientist. Mechanical engineer—average, run-of-the mill engineer.”
“A spy?” She propped herself up on an elbow, letting the sheet fall away to reveal a pale breast. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re a spy.”
“No, not a spy, either. I mean, come on, look at me. I’m a nerd.”
“The perfect cover.”
“Boy, you’ve got some imagination there, I’ll give you that.”
“You’re dodging the question. That’s a giveaway—a telltale spy move.”
“Nope. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Then what? Tell me. ...”
“I work for the DOE—Department of Energy.”
“Like nuclear energy and all that.”
“Right.”
The truth was she knew exactly what he did for a living, where he worked, and what went on there. What she was looking for—what they were looking for—was much more specific. They were confident he had