As he stood over the sink, it occurred to Gordian that a couple of aspirins might help him. He reached for the bottle in the medicine chest, shook a couple of tablets into his hand, and gulped them down with his water. Then his eye fell on the thermometer inside the chest. He should take his temperature. If Ashley were home, she would insist on it. But a fever would mean he’d probably have to can his visit to Julia’s, and he had looked forward to seeing her and making progress on that dog pen. Besides, Ash would be meeting him there with her purchase-laden suitcases, each doubtless weighing a ton. She was counting on him to help load them into the trunk of the car and drive her home. All he needed was to be sick and useless to everyone.
Gordian made up his mind to take his temperature if his condition didn’t improve by morning. Well, later in the morning, he thought, remembering the hour.
In fact, he’d slowly begun to feel better on his return to bed. The chills abated, and he found that his muscle cramps were likewise easing. Maybe he’d caught some kind of twenty-four-hour bug, and it had peaked overnight. Or maybe the aspirin had done the trick.
At around three-thirty, Gordian again fell asleep and did not reawaken until the alarm buzzed four hours later.
Sunday came on warm and radiantly clear. With his face turned into the golden sunlight flooding his bedroom window, Gordian started to think he might not need that thermometer after all. His lower back was still aching, and his throat hurt a little when he swallowed, but there were no signs of feverishness or nausea.
He got up, went into the kitchen to fill the coffee-maker, then decided tea might be a smarter pick. He carried it to his screened-in veranda and sat looking out at Ashley’s hillside arbor gardens, sipping from his cup, a gentle, rose-scented breeze wafting over him. Perfect weather for working outdoors. He’d finish the tea and then see how he was doing before reaching a conclusion about whether to go on with his plans.
By eight, Gordian felt considerably recuperated from whatever had hit him the previous night. No sense treating himself as nonfunctional. He would push forward on the corral, take it slow and easy, maybe get a bit less of it done than he might like. He’d always believed moderate physical exertion was a better remedy for a cold than lying around the house. Better for him, at any rate.
Gordian went back into the kitchen and rinsed his cup and saucer in the sink, thinking he should have a bite to eat before leaving for Pescadero. Food didn’t tempt him, though. As he turned toward the bathroom for another quick hop under the showerhead, he heard an inner voice argue that skipping breakfast was far from advisable for a person who’d been as sick as he was a few hours ago, and who was looking ahead to a long, active day. But he was sure he’d regain his appetite once he reached Julia’s. He could fix himself some toast, an English muffin, risk incurring her wrath and sneak a morsel or two to Jack and Jill. Like old times.
What he wanted right now was to wash up and hurry into his clothes. He was anxious to get moving with things, and the worst of his illness really did seem to be behind him.
“Megan, I’m wondering if it’s appropriate for us to discuss a matter of Bureau policy under these circumstances.”
“Is my nearness bothering you? Because I can slide over the other way. No offense taken.”
“It isn’t how close you are per se—”
“Then what is it you find questionable? That we’re in a hot tub together? The whole idea of conducting business exclusively in sterile office settings is fossilized, and that isn’t just my opinion. There are a million and one studies that show — empirically prove—relaxed and stimulating environments are the places to confer—”
“Come on, help me out here—”
“I’m trying, Bob. What do you think Bohemian Grove is about except the intersection of government and private af—?”
“Forget Bohemian Grove. We’re both naked, or haven’t you noticed? And I won’t get into the subject of our intersecting the past couple of days.”
That brought a smile to Megan’s face.
“Get into it all you want,” she said.
Her emerald eyes met his gray ones.
Lang looked back at her in speechless silence.
They were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the curved bench of the hot tub, neck deep in 108-degree water, steam rising into the 45-degree Shenandoah Valley air around them in vaporous ribbons and curlicues. Over and beyond the lattice rail screening their room’s rear deck, the redwood hot tub upon the deck, and their nude, soaking bodies in the tub from the eyes of their hosts and fellow weekenders at the Virginia B and B, over and beyond on the forested Allegheny mountainsides across the valley, the hardwoods in autumn foliage were watercolor dashes of cinnamon brown against the sweeping dark green brush strokes of the predominant pine cover.
“Bob?”
“Yes?”
“You seem to have blanked out.”
Lang sighed.
“My problem,” he said, and then paused. “That is, what I believe may be unseemly is that you are making a substantial professional request of me while we’re very busily engaged in an extraprofessional relationship. Asking that, in my capacity as Washington Bureau chief, I seek to waive or broaden existing security classifications to give UpLink International access to privileged investigative files.”
She shrugged. “We were entirely clothed when I made the request. Neither of us had yet seen the other unclothed at the time. Truthfully, I hadn’t begun to entertain the notion that we would, though the fantasy did arise one dark and lonely night.”
He shook his head in consternation.
“Be straight,” he said. “You can see how there might be at least an appearance of impropriety.”
“Sure I can,” she said. “But do you believe I’ve been sleeping with you to cloud your objectivity, compromise your integrity, entice you to violate national security, whichever perception concerns you—?”
“That’s ridiculous—”
“And do you think I’d stop sleeping with you as a consequence of your denying us access, if that proves to be your determination?”
“No, of course not—”
“So why don’t you help me get things straight,” she said. “Give me a rational explanation why the farther along we’ve come in our friendship, the farther away you’ve tilted from opening the databases. Since I know who I am, and you seem to know who you are, I can’t see either one of us violating our principles for a tumble in the sack.”
“Or a splash in the tub, I suppose,” Lang said. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t have a clear and sensible answer for you. But I’ve always kept my personal life separate from my responsibilities to the Bureau. Mixing them is something new to me. It throws the formula out of whack.”
“Would you rather limit your mating prospects to women you meet in bars and nightclubs?”
He looked at her.
“I think you’re being a little unfair.”
Megan was shaking her head now, her face dead serious.
“What isn’t fair is putting boundaries on what we’ve got going because you’re jittery about messing with some artificial formula,” she said. “The workplace is where adults meet. Where they get to know one other, sans hackneyed pickup lines. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Or how our having grown close suddenly makes us Mata Hari and Benedict Arnold.”
He was quiet. They sat there alongside each other, steam billowing around them into the chill air, shimmering in the sunlight.