Quinton Mann is CIA through and through. Mark Vincent is WBIS for life. There is no way they could end up as anything other than adversaries -- and yet, Quinn takes Mark out to dinner on his birthday -- the one no one is supposed to know about -- and gives him one hell of a present in the restaurant's restroom. Mark, not to be outdone, has decided to escalate this game, because it has to be a game, right? There's no way it can be anything else.<br><br>But as the game continues, as Quinn shows up to a WBIS funeral, as a friend of Mark’s penetrates the CIA computer network to get information on Quinn, as Mark breaks into Quinn's house and gives Quinn a very interesting encounter, both Quinn and Mark realize that this is becoming the most real thing in their lives.<br><br>Can they find a way to do their jobs and keep this surprising, intriguing connection?

Houseboat on the Nile

A nurse in blue scrubs parted the curtains and came in. She took Pretty Boy’s vital signs. “You’re with him?” She directed the question to me while she scrawled some numbers on a chart, and then squatted down to check the amount of drainage in the bottle and in the Foley bag that hung from the bed’s lower rail.


“Yes. How bad is he? When will he be transferred to a regular floor?”


She shrugged. “The hemothorax—that’s a collapsed lung resulting from an accumulation of blood in the pleural cavity—”


I scowled at her. I knew what a fucking hemothorax was.


“That’s the worst of his injuries. Four of his ribs are fractured, one was so bad it punctured his lung, causing the hemothorax. His shoulder was dislocated, and his nose was broken. The scalp laceration bled like a bastard. Sorry,” she apologized indifferently for her language. “That must have been one hell of a set of stairs he fell down. We’ll send him up to Medicine as soon as we can find a bed for him there.”


Chapter 96