She lingered and listened, barely comprehending a word, as he extolled the virtues of TriCef, GEM’s brand-new third-generation cephalosporin antibiotic. When he finished his pitch she accepted a glossy index card and promised to give TriCef a try. But the pheromones wouldn’t release her, so she asked about GEM’s generic line. When he finally exhausted that subject and nothing was left to say, at least about pharmaceuticals, she thanked him and forced herself to turn away.

“Say, isn’t that a 486?” Doug had said, pointing to her laptop. “I haven’t seen one of those in a dog’s age.”

He wasn’t letting her go! Nadia remembered feeling giddy with relief.

Playing it cool, she’d told him that at the moment it was an overpriced paperweight. She hadn’t been able to get it to boot up this morning. Doug took a break, sat down with her, and within minutes had it up and running, booting faster than she could ever remember. He explained something about her system.ini and win.ini files being “junked up,” which meant nothing to Nadia. Computers were like cars to her: she knew how to operate them, could make them do what she needed, but had no idea what was going on under the hood.

They got to talking and she learned that Douglas Gleason thought of himself not as a pharmaceutical sales rep but as a software designer. He even had his own start-up company: GleaSoft; it didn’t have a product line yet, but that was why he was working as a sales rep: research. Well, research and a way to pay the rent while he was learning the ins and outs of the pharmaceutical trade in order to program a new tracking software package that would revolutionize how drugs were marketed to physicians.

He’d offered to take her out to dinner—strictly business on his GEM sales account—and she’d accepted. They wound up at Vong, a French Vietnamese place she never could have afforded on her resident’s pay. The meal had been fabulous, and their hours together magic. Doug was bright and funny, with wide-ranging interests, but it was his entrepreneurial spirit that captured her. Here was a man with a dream, a need to take control of his life, to call his own shots, and the drive and tenacity to pursue it until he’d achieved it. If he had to be a sales rep for a few years to get started, he’d do it. But he wouldn’t—couldn’t—do it halfway. He threw himself wholeheartedly into everything he did, and as a result he’d achieved GEM’s top sales record.

One dinner led to another, and another, and soon they were sharing breakfast. Lately they’d been talking about marriage.

But right now Nadia was worried for him. She pushed herself back to arm’s length.

“Doug, this is a secure area. How did you get in?”

He held up a MasterCard. “With this.”

“A credit card? How?”

“It’s an old one. I hacked your swipe card and copied the code from its magnetic strip onto this one.”