Paul absently rubbed his jaw, with its strong lines and deep creases. Then he looked over at his wife, lying on her side.

God bless Sharon. She always managed to sleep the sleep of the just. But then, she was married to him and that would exhaust anyone. Or drive them to see an attorney. Or both.

He resisted the urge to touch her strawberry-blonde hair. At the very least her hair. The full June moon cast her slender body in a sharp white light, making her look like a Greek statue. She was forty-one, NordicTrack slim, and looked ten years younger-- and she still had the energy of a girl ten years younger than that.

Sharon was amazing, really. When he was the Mayor of Los Angeles, he would come home and have a late dinner, usually talking on the phone between salad and Sanka, while she got the kids ready for bed. Then she would sit down with him or snuggle on the couch and lie convincingly-- tell him nothing important had happened, that her volunteer work at the pediatrics ward of Cedars went smoothly. She held back so that he could open up and dump his day's troubles on her.

No, he remembered. Nothing important happened. Only Alexander's terrible bouts with asthma or Harleigh's problems with the kids at school or hate calls and mail and packages from the radical right, the extreme left, and, even once, Express Mail from a bipartisan union of the two.

Nothing happened.

One of the reasons he opted not to run for reelection was because he felt his kids were growing up without him. Or he was growing old without them he wasn't sure which disturbed him more. And even Sharon, his rock, was starting to push him, for the sake of all of them, to find something a little less absorbing.

Six months before, when the President offered him the directorship of Op-Center, a largely autonomous new agency that the press hadn't quite discovered, Hood had been preparing to go back into banking. But when he mentioned the offer to his family, his ten-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter seemed thrilled by the idea of moving to Washington. Sharon had family in Virginia-- and as Sharon and he both knew, cloak and dagger work had to be more interesting than check and dollar work.

Paul turned onto his side, stretched a hand to just an inch above Sharon's bare, alabaster shoulder. None of the editorial writers in Los Angeles ever got it. They saw Sharon's charm and wit, and watched her charm people away from bacon and doughnuts on the half-hour weekly McDonnell Healthy Food Report on cable, but they never realized how much her strength and stability enabled him to succeed.

He moved his hand through the air, along her white arm. They needed to do this on a beach somewhere. Someplace where she wouldn't worry about the kids hearing or the phone ringing or the UPS truck pulling up. It had been a while since they'd gone anywhere. Not since coming to D.C., in fact.