ot a sec?” Martell asked, knocking on Ric’s office door. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were sleeping.”

“No, that’s all right.” Ric waved him in. “I was just closing my eyes. It’s a little hard to sleep with”—he pointed to the ceiling—“elephant woman upstairs.”

They’d spent the afternoon moving Annie’s things out of her beach house and into his extra bedroom, which was directly above his office. She was up there right now, either moving things around or herding cattle or maybe tap-dancing. Ric wasn’t sure which.

“Bro.” Martell sat at Ric’s desk. “I’m not any kind of relationship expert, but even I know that when there’s a woman you want to get with, you don’t describe her as elephant-like.”

“I meant she was heavy-footed,” Ric said. “And I don’t want to get with her, thanks.” Maybe if he said it enough, it would be true.

“Yeah, you really don’t want to use heavy, either. Not unless you want her living off of cans of Slender and getting so skinny, she’ll look like a ten-year-old boy. You’ll have to put a paper bag over your own head, in order to hit that… ”

Ric sighed. “Can we not talk about Annie, please? Unless you’re here to apologize for making a move on her in front of me.”

“I was just doing that to piss you off.”

“Is that supposed to be an apology?”

“If it makes you feel better, you can call it that. I know it’s been a tough day,” Martell pointed out. “You’ve always lived in terror of the girlfriend moving in.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” And it wasn’t as if she’d moved in moved in. Still, Ric had to admit that lugging Annie’s stuff upstairs to his guest bedroom, and making room for her in his single bathroom, freaked him out a little bit more than he’d expected. She was going to be around. Night and day.

Day and night. And night and night and night…

“Before we close off that topic of conversation,” Martell said, standing up, “I just need to…” He came over and slapped Ric upside his head.

“Ow!”

“That’s for subscribing to that shit Annie’s brother told you,” he said. “Far as I can figure, you really must’ve wanted to believe it. But you did, because it kept her nice and safe, didn’t it?”

Ric laughed. “Yeah, from what, me?”

“Nailed it on the head, Dr. Evil. I see you lying there, worrying about how you’re going to be able to keep your hands offa her, her living in your less-than-spacious apartment. Lying in your bed every night, knowing that Annie’s mere yards away, right down the hall, knowing that she’s attracted to you, too. Maybe bumping into her in the bathroom when you get up because you can’t sleep, and she’s like Oh, hi, Ric.” His made his voice breathy and high, sounding more like a transvestite stripper than Annie. “I can’t sleep, either. Maybe if we both go into my room—”

“Thanks, man,” Ric said. Mother of God, he was so screwed. He had one of those bathrooms with two doors—one that led into the hallway, the other that went directly into the master bedroom. His bedroom. He was going to have to leave that door permanently locked and get used to using the hall entrance or the chances of them coming face-to-face in there at an inopportune time was a real possibility. “That’s really helping.”

“Nah, actually,” Martell said, “that’s not going to happen. Not that easily. You took care of that when you messed around with Crazy McShotmycar. Good job, Enrique. Annie’s safe. At least until you convince her you’re not a total dick.” He stood up. “I gotta go. You gotta get ready for that party. By the way, delivery came. Your tux is hanging out front. Plus there’s some box with Annie’s name on it.”

Ric sat up. “Is it her dress?”

“Like I open boxes that aren’t addressed to me?”

Ric went into the outer office, and there it was. A very large box on Annie’s desk. “She told Cassidy that she didn’t have anything to wear to a formal party, and he asked her dress size and said he’d take care of it.”

“I guess that’s one of the benefits of working with a gay FBI agent,” Martell said, slumping into one of the waiting-area chairs. “You end up looking fabulous. Damn, my shit is tired.”

“You really think he’s gay?” Ric asked.

“I don’t know. You’re the one who said the word first. I believe I used brainiac. You had to bring mirror balls and disco music into the equation.”

“Xavier Sanchez, the drummer in my father’s band,” Ric said. “He’s gay.” The box for Annie was sealed with tape.

“No shit?” Martell thought about that. “Dude can play.”

“Not just drums, but soccer, too.” Ric finally found Annie’s scissors.

“Sanchez?” Martell’s disbelief no doubt came from the fact that the drummer was well over six feet tall and built like a grizzly bear.

“Yep. Someone that big shouldn’t be able to move that fast, but he does. He kicks ass.” Ric carefully sliced the tape on all four sides of the box lid. He lifted the lid to reveal…Lots of tissue paper. “I guess I just wish Cassidy looked more like Sanchez. Or Bruce Willis from Die Hard. Instead of Jack from Will & Grace. ”

“Oh, Cassidy’s much cuter than Jack.” Martell laughed at him. “I’m kidding. Look at you—yeah, I’m gay. Bro, if you’re worried about him, talk to him. Find out what kind of work he’s done, who he’s worked with. This case? It’s probably not his first. Talk to the other agents. If there’s something wrong with him, believe me, they’ll tell you.”

“Whoa,” Ric said as he parted the tissue paper.

Martell stood up to look, too. “Damn.” He started to laugh.

So this sucked.

Annie rested on the bed in Ric’s guest room, spread-eagled on her back, staring up at a displaced spider walking across the ceiling.

It wasn’t the spider that sucked.

It wasn’t the room, either, even though it was filled with tired-looking furniture just a step or two up from college-dorm quality. It wasn’t Ric’s apartment, sunny and bright, with a kitchen that was small but recently renovated, a living room with a flat-screen TV and video-game system that looked identical to the one Bruce had in his basement, and a sundeck—balcony really, since it didn’t have any stairs—that overlooked a slightly overgrown but lushly gorgeous tropical garden.

It wasn’t even the bed that necessarily sucked, although it did. Ric had told her it was his old one. He’d upgraded to a king when he’d moved into this place. Annie didn’t doubt for one second that this mattress was haunted by the ghosts of girlfriends past.

It wasn’t the fact that she’d have to carry Pierre, every morning and night, up and down the slightly slippery stairs that led from the first-floor office.

It was Ric, who’d demanded she move in, but clearly hated that she was here. It was the preoccupied grimness with which he had done everything this afternoon. After trying in vain to start a conversation, Annie’d finally given up. They’d worked in silence, packing up her things and bringing them up to this room.

Ric had used the bug sweeper to check all of her earthly possessions for any surveillance devices that Burns’s gang might have planted on them while she wasn’t home. But then, after clearing space for her in the quirkily tiled bathroom, he’d finally gone downstairs, leaving her to rearrange the furniture because there was no way in hell she was going to be able to sleep with the head of her bed directly on the other side of the wall from the head of his bed.

Of course, moving the furniture had revealed a dire need for her to unearth his vacuum cleaner from the hall closet, which was good, because as long as she was moving, working, cleaning, she didn’t have to think.

About Ric—with Lillian. About the kind of person who would have sex just for the sake of having sex, with zero emotional connection.

About the kind of person—obviously an idiot—who would still have feelings of attraction to the kind of person who would have sex just for the sake of having sex, regardless of having seen him nearly having sex with another woman.

God help her, even though she’d cleaned and shoved furniture around the room, even though she’d unpacked and showered, Annie kept thinking about the fact that at the party tonight, she and Ric were going to pretend to be together.

And that was really going to suck. Especially when he put his arm around her. Or when he smiled at her. Or when his normally heavily lidded eyes did that sexy extra-hooded thing that she had quickly come to recognize as meaning he was going to kiss her…

“Hey.”

Speak of the devil. Ric was outside of her door, knocking softly, even though it was partly open.

Annie sat up, adjusting the sleep shirt and boxers that she’d thrown on after her shower. “Yeah,” she said.

He pushed the door open, saw her and looked away, as if he’d walked in on her in her underwear. “Sorry,” he said, holding out a box. “This came for you. It’s the dress for tonight.”

Annie slid down off the bed. “What color is it?”

“It’s, um…”

She took the box to the bed, opened it, and…It was metallic. Silver and shiny and…“Holy crap.”

“It’s definitely got some holy crap, with maybe a little Jesus thrown in,” Ric said helpfully.

She held it up. This was a dress? It was a sweep of fish-scale-like fabric—and not a whole hell of a lot of it, either—with what seemed like dozens of spaghetti straps. There were shoes, too, at the bottom of the box—silver sandals with a too-high, treacherous-looking heel that could double as a shiv during an unexpected knife fight.

“Am I holding it upside down?” she asked Ric.

He held up a flap of fabric. “No, I think this is the top.”

“That’s pretty skimpy.”

“It looks like some kind of halter,” he said. “All these strings probably crisscross in the back. I think you’ll have to tie it.”

Tie it? How? By looking in a mirror with her hands behind her back? “I don’t think I can wear this,” Annie said.

“Then don’t,” Ric told her. “You can stay home.”

Not a chance. “You better wait outside,” she told him. “I’m going to need help.”

This freaking sucked.

Ric stood outside of Annie’s bedroom door, wondering how his life had managed to get so totally out of control. Yesterday’s problems—convincing Annie to stay on as his receptionist—were laughably small. Damn, what he would give to go back to that place. Yes, there were huge misconceptions that came with it, but it was true—ignorance was bliss.

His cell phone rang, and he dug for it in his pocket. Great, it was his mother. No doubt she’d used her maternal superpowers and knew from an anagram of the combined initials of today’s guests on Oprah that a woman had moved into her only son’s apartment.

“Hey, Mom.” He braced himself.

“Is your father with you?”

“No,” Ric said, relaxing, but just a little. This could be a diversion—make him think he was safe, and then, bam, blindside him with so who’s your new girlfriend and why haven’t we met her? “Why, is he AWOL again?”

“He should’ve been home by now. He went to some meeting…”

“There’s technology for this,” Ric told his mother. “One word: microchip. You could probably implant it while’s he sleeping on the couch.”

“Ha ha,” his mother said. “Very funny. He’s my husband, not my basset hound.”

“He’s probably jamming with the band,” Ric reassured her. When his father sat down at a piano, time ceased to exist for him. He’d been better lately, though—ever since he’d gotten a new super-slim cell phone. He no longer had to take it out of his pocket when he sat down to play, so when his wife called to tell him dinner was ready, he felt it vibrate. Which didn’t mean that he still wouldn’t turn it off or even just ignore it if he were in the middle of a particularly good session.

“I know.” But his mother didn’t sound convinced. “If you see him, will you remind him that we have guests coming for dinner tonight?”

Man, but he hated it when his mother talked in code. Ric looked at his watch. “Mom, if you want me to swing past the studio, see if he’s there, just ask me.”

“I hate doing that,” she said. “I know you’re busy…”

“I’m working tonight, but it’s downtown,” he told her. His father’s rehearsal space was right on the way to the party at the Bijou.

She sighed. “Will you please stop and see if he’s at the studio?” She managed to choke the words out just as Annie pulled open the door. “And kick his butt home if he is?”

“I definitely need your help,” Annie said, then realized he was on the phone. “Oops, sorry.”

“Will do,” Ric told his mother, before she could ask who was the woman whose voice she’d just heard, and was Ric finally going to give her a grandchild. “Gotta go.”

And okay. This was interesting. Annie had put on a bathing suit—one of those same racing one-pieces that she’d been wearing since she was twelve years old. With it on, Ric could help her figure out how to tie the dress’s strings without any danger of embarrassing them both.

At least not too much.

Clearly Annie was already discomfited. “I should be able to do this.”

He saw right away what the problem was. “This needs to go around your neck like…” Together they made the adjustment. “Now everything just needs to be tightened, like a giant shoelace.”

She stood still, quietly, obediently—possibly for the first time in her entire life—in front of the mirror in her room, just letting him do it. He focused on the string—keeping both sides of it even—rather than on the smooth coolness of her sun-kissed skin beneath his fingers, trying to ignore the way the dress accentuated her curves.

“This tight enough?” he asked, looking over her shoulder at her reflection. She was still holding the top against her breasts, but now she let it go.

“Only if I want to be flashing everyone all night,” she replied as he started all over again. “Although maybe that’s the idea. I mean, God.” She turned slightly, and he realized there was a slit in the side of the skirt that went practically to her hip.

Yeah. God. That was going to be awful for all the people who hated tall, shapely women with gorgeous legs. “We should probably mark the string,” Ric told her briskly, businesslike. “So you can put it on again, after you take off the bathing suit.”

“I don’t need to take off the dress to take off the suit,” she told him, laughing at his look of disbelief. “Really. I might need it to be tightened just a little, but I can do it. I once completely changed my clothes—underneath my clothes. It’s one of the few female-identified skills that I actually have. That and asking for directions. I’m good at that, too.”

Ric tied the string at the small of Annie’s back, where many women her age had a tattoo.

Not Annie. Her skin was smooth and soft and naked of all marks.

“So, no cracks about how this substantiates your case?” she asked, frowning at her reflection in the mirror. “My inability to dress myself. You know, reason number four hundred and thirty-three why you believed Bruce?”

“I don’t have much of a sense of humor about that,” Ric admitted as she began taking off her bathing suit, right out from under the dress, slipping one arm out from the tank suit’s shoulder strap and then the other. She had to wiggle it down past her waist and her hips, reaching up under the skirt to pull it off.

And yeah, he probably should’ve left the room instead of standing there gaping.

“See?” she said, tossing the bathing suit onto the bed.

Yeah, he saw. Without the suit containing her, the dress was even more amazing.

But she wasn’t as happy about that. She frowned at her reflection in the mirror—at the way the soft, pale sides of her breasts were exposed. “I’m guessing that throwing a sweatshirt on top of this isn’t an option.”

“You need me to tighten it again?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s okay. Just do me a favor and double-knot it.”

Ric did, careful not to touch her. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like us to leave a little early—I have an errand to run for my mother.”

“Of course it’s okay,” she said.

He nodded. “Thanks. I’ll get dressed.”

He was halfway down the hall when she said, “Ric.”

He turned to see her standing in the doorway, a shimmering vision, like some Annie from an alternate universe.

“Is our friendship over?” she asked. “I mean, the way you’re acting…”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I do know that it’ll be really hard to be friends with you if you’re dead.”

She nodded. “That goes both ways. But…wouldn’t it also be hard to be friends with me if I cared more for my own safety than the safety of our country?”

“Not everyone belongs on the front lines,” he pointed out.

“So…I don’t, but you do,” she said. “But it’s more than just because I haven’t had police training, isn’t it? It’s because I’m a woman.”

Did she really believe that?

She did. “It is, isn’t it?”

Ric tried to explain. “It’s more than that. I’ve got this thing where, I don’t know, I can’t say it without it sounding like, yeah, I’m sexist, but bottom line, I just want to protect you.” It wasn’t because she was a woman, it was because she was Annie. “And yeah, it has nothing to do with your ability or skill or—”

“You want to protect me, but it’s not because you’re a man and I’m a woman.”

His temper sparked at the attitude she was throwing at him. “No, it’s not.”

“Bullshit.” Her own temper didn’t just flare, it ignited.

“Are you going to let me attempt to explain or are you—”

She cut him off again. Of course. “Explain what, Ric? How your being sexist isn’t really sexist simply because you say it’s not?”

He threw up his hands. “Fine. I’m sexist. I believe women belong in the kitchen and in the bedroom, in bed, on their backs. Is that what you want me to say? Are you happy now?”

Fortunately, she wasn’t completely listening. She was too busy yelling at him. “I don’t want your protection. I don’t need it. I’m strong and I’m smart and I’m tough, and I’m not backing down—so you just go ahead and keep being an asshole. Just keep on with the silent treatment—with the pouting—it’s so attractive.”

“Yeah,” he hurled back at her. “And you should know. Because there’s nothing more attractive than a woman in an evening gown screaming bullshit. ”

“Says you,” she said indignantly. “Because you obviously only like women who are helpless and weak—or pretending to be. Lillian Lavelle—”

Great. They were back to Lillian.

“—outsmarted you,” Annie pointed out. “Push come to shove, she probably could’ve kicked your ass.”

“I don’t think so—”

“As will I”—she spoke over him—“if you piss me off enough. I didn’t haul rocks for six months for nothing.”

She actually flexed her right arm, and yeah, she definitely had some nice muscle tone. The sight of her standing there like that, while wearing that dress, should have made Ric laugh. But it didn’t. It was possible that he was never going to laugh again. At least not until this was over and he knew she was safe.

Instead, he turned and walked away. “Like I’m going to fight a girl.”

“I heard that,” Annie shouted. “You are such a—”

Ric closed his bedroom door.