She stirred against him. “I love giving you a heads-up.” She slid down, her hands gripped his naked hips. Her head bent and she took him into her mouth. His head arched back and his eyes closed. She began to hum. Then, all at once, she let him slip out. His eyes opened and he looked down. There was a curiously sly smile on her face that caught his attention. His eyes narrowed. “What do you know that I don’t?”

She held him in the palm of her hand. “Hemingway lied to you. NSA knows precisely where Seiran el-Habib is; he’s still in his heavily protected villa.”

“Then why—?”

“The rapidly morphing crises in the Middle East has turned them into children with ADHD; their collective eye has moved on from Seiran el-Habib. The situation in Lebanon has become too volatile. It’s too compelling to ignore. Worst of all, it’s affecting POTUS’s numbers. The president is in trouble at home, he’s given them an action directive: ‘Look for high percentage situations and bring me major successes I can sell to the American people.’”

His hand on her head directed her back to work.

Afterward, wiping her lips on the sheet, she languidly rose up. “You’re Omar’s lethal right arm.” The caterpillar curl of a smile inched across her lips. “Red Rover’s being sent into the briar patch to come out with Br’er Rabbit.”

“A show trial.”

“A major triumph.”

In truth, Julie was tired of talking business, but she suspected King would drop her if she stopped feeding him intel on NSA policy as it pertained to Universal Security. The thought of spending nights alone was more than she could bear. Even these embers were better than an empty hearth.

Though she could feel him against her, his gaze was far away. A dull ache started up around her heart. She placed his hand on her breast, but it might have been a plastic cast for all the life and warmth it provided.

* * *

“I have not gotten better,” Charlie said. “I’ve gotten wiser.”

“So that’s what’s different about you,” Whitman replied.

She was curled up on her living room sofa, bare feet tucked under the Japanese robe she had changed into as soon as they had gotten home. Fierce-looking green and gold embroidered dragons chased one another over a frothy sea of blue silk. She held a glass of Pappy in one hand, the other lay flat against her thigh. She watched him out of the corners of her eyes, which, so far as Whitman was concerned, was a step in the right direction.

“I wonder,” she said in a voice scarcely above a murmur, “whether you’ve changed.”

“Everyone changes,” he said.

“Not everyone,” she said with a razor’s edge to her voice.

“You promised to tell me,” he said, to take his mind off her mercurial shift in tone, “how you beat Milt.”

She stared down into her glass like the bar flies at The Right Cue. “You shouldn’t have come back, Whit.”