“No. Look, it’s still only been six weeks. Yuri will understand if the notification goes in a little late. He’s an okay guy.”

“Yuri?”

“Yuri Alster. My boss.”

“All right. So we both come clean together, then, as soon as we get back. Good plan, actually. You go ’fess up to Yuri, and I’ll notify Brixton HR. We’ll say it was a spontaneous thing. Right; this is it, okay? We met here on Barbuda, we fell in love, we got married. It’s not really a lie. If people are going to be that reckless about love, it’s going to be on an island like this one.”

Savi grimaced again. “Um, we might just have to wait.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s my current assignment.”

“What about it? Actually, what is it, this assignment?”

“Hey, no fair. You promised you would not ask about my undercover assignments.”

“Sorry.”

“There will always be aspects of what I do that I can’t tell you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.”

“You have no idea how hard it is for an Indian girl to make a decent career for herself in this business. I worked bloody hard to get into covert ops, and I love what I do. I can’t risk crashing it now.”

It’s exciting, too, which is what you really like, he thought, but he wasn’t going to say that to her face. “Sorry, sorry. You know I just get concerned for you.”

“I know. It’s very sweet. But your work is physically dangerous, too; one slipup, and you’ve got a disaster area on your hands. And I know how dedicated you are. So just think how you’d feel if I asked you not to take the worst assignment.”

“Emergency detoxification isn’t quite as extreme as the media plays it up to be. And I’m not asking you to give security up. I was just showing an interest in my wife’s work, like a good husband.”

“Nice try,” she mocked.

“Er, it’s not really unsafe, is it?”

“You judge: There’s this evil billionaire with a fiendish plan for world domination—no: solar system domination. My assignment is to use all my feminine assets to seduce him and steal the plans from his bedroom safe.”

Callum grinned lecherously. “That should work, ’cause those are amazing assets.”

She laughed and kissed him again. “Actually, this one is really boring. I go around university campuses pretending to be a student and showing up at anti-corporate rallies and meetings—with particular attention to anti-Connexion gatherings—seeing who’s there, who’s the angriest of them all, who’s the silent smoldering type, who’s all talk…We’re monitoring potential future troublemakers.”

“That sounds quite sinister, the company keeping profiles on a bunch of twenty-year-olds. Is it legal?”