“Nothing,” she snapped. Then she took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Okay, maybe I am bugged. I get bugged when men, who are supposedly adult, professional, and intelligent, turn to quivering towers of jelly when they get around a woman like her.”
“ ‘A woman like her’?”
“Come on, Hammond,” she said, with even more vexation than before. “Fluffy kitten on the outside, panther on the inside. You know the type I’m talking about.”
“You typed Davee after meeting her only once?”
“See? You’re defending her.”
“I’m not defending anybody.”
“First Smilow goes ga-ga over her, if you can believe that. Now you.”
“I’m hardly ‘ga-ga.’ I just fail to see how you could draw a complete personality profile on Davee after—”
“All right! I don’t care,” she said impatiently. “I don’t want to talk about Lute Pettijohn and the murder and motives. It’s all I’ve thought about for almost twenty-four hours. I need a break from it.”
She left her chair, put her fists into the small of her back and stretched luxuriously, then came around the table to sit on Hammond’s lap. Looping her arms around his neck, she kissed him.
Chapter 9
After several quick kisses, Steffi sat back and ruffled his hair. “I forgot to ask. How was your night away?”
“It was great,” Hammond replied truthfully.
“Do anything special?”
Special? Very. Even their silly conversations had been extraordinary.
“I played football in the NFL, you know.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, but after winning my second Super Bowl, I went to work for the CIA.”
“Dangerous work?”
“The routine cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“Wow.”
“Actually, it was a yawn. So I enlisted in the Peace Corps.”
“Fascinating.”
“It was okay. To a point. But after I was awarded the Nobel prize for feeding all the starving children in Africa and Asia, I started looking around for something else.”
“Something more challenging?”
“Right. I nar
rowed my choices down to becoming president and serving my country, or finding a cure for cancer.”
“Self-sacrifice must be your middle name.”
“No, it’s Greer.”
“I like it.”