the far end led to a living room larger than most suburban houses.
The furniture was all nineteenth-century revival, Duncan Phyfe and John Henry Belter mostly. Four separate conversation areas quartered the huge space, couches, love seats, and chairs arranged around identical tables like defensive fortifications. The paintings were predominantly American primitives with the exception of a portrait by Sargent of a mother and daughter and a Grant Wood landscape. A bar had been set up along one wall, guests lined up and chatting away their wait for service.
The musicians were in the center of the room. Mercer watched them for a moment. There was something erotic about a female cellist, he thought. This one, not particularly pretty but eye-catching nevertheless, wore a deeply slit cream gown. Her stunning legs were wrapped around her instrument like a lover’s embrace. He felt like a voyeur as he watched her fingers working the strings and turned away before his expression got him into trouble.
Through the series of French doors at the far end of the room, Mercer saw a huge marquee tent and clusters of tables that the two hundred guests had used for dinner. He was just noticing that the bartender had lime juice to make a vodka gimlet when a hand grasped him on the shoulder.
“What’s a rogue like you doing at a place like this?”
Mercer turned, smiling as he recognized the distinctive voice. “Looking to ravage a Cabinet-ranking bureaucrat.”
Connie Van Buren stretched up to give him a kiss on the cheek. “God, you’re good-looking, and you smell nice too.”
“Ah, but Connie, you’re married.”
“My husband’s in New Mexico,” she teased.
“And my libido’s in storage.”
“Forever the bachelor,” she chided him mildly. “When are you ever going to get married?”
“I’ll marry the first woman who leaves the seat up for me.”
They had first met years before when Connie was working at the Interior Department and Mercer consulted for a German mining concern called Koenig Minerals. At the time, she was devoting a great deal of energy to blocking the company from opening a mine in Utah. They had one of the worst environmental records in the world. Mercer had stepped in at Koenig’s request and to Interior’s great relief, smoothly worked out a compromise that was acceptable to both parties. Connie and he had stayed in touch, keeping track of each other’s rise through their chosen professions.
“I noticed you were absent from dinner. You were supposed to be on my left side. Instead, I had to suffer through some mealymouthed lawyer who spoke in press releases.”
“I figured it would be bad, but I never imagined Max would invite the lawyers too.”
“Max invited everyone he knows in the city. It’s not every day you endow a forty-million-dollar think tank, and he wants to make sure no one forgets it.”
Mercer looked around as more guests filtered in from the tented patio. Connie was right. The room was filling with some heavy hitters. The Speaker of the House was deep in conversation with the President’s Chief of Staff, and behind them, several nationally recognized television journalists were hanging on the words of a very drunk senior senator. The Johnston Group was certainly getting a big endorsement from Washington’s elite.
“Where’s our host?” Mercer scanned the crowd, looking for Max Johnston.
“Oh, he’s here, basking in the glow. He and the President played golf this afternoon, and the Old Man gave his official endorsement. Max is throwing this party just to let everyone else kiss his ring.” Connie paused as she recognized a man tracking across the room toward her. “Damn. Robert Baird.”
“Who’s he?” Mercer noted the man striding through the crowd.
“He’s a lobbyist for the nuclear research division of Petromax Oil, one of Max’s lackeys trying to curry favor. Excuse me while I duck into the ladies’ room.”
Baird actually made an “aw shucks” arm gesture as he watched Connie’s ample bottom waddle from the living room. He looked at Mercer for a moment, deciding if he was someone worth presenting his case to since he had been talking to the Secretary of Energy. Mercer flashed a dull smile, and Baird went in search of more powerful prey.
Mercer was watching him slink back through the center set of French doors when he saw her. Her back was toward him, angled away as she spoke with last year’s Nobel Prize winner for chemistry. In the staid Washington social circuit, a revealing dress was seen as an affront to everything the city stood for. The women present, though formally dressed, still exuded an air of conservatism that precluded any ideas of sex.
But she looked as if she’d just come from a Hollywood awards show. Her dress, deeply black against her white skin, was cut so low in the back that with a little imagination, Mercer could almost visualize a shadow where the two halves of her buttocks split into tightly rounded hemispheres. The skin on her back was flawless. She was tall, but her height was not a distraction; rather it was a pedestal to admire her from. She turned and he saw her eyes.
The mineral beryl is a relatively common stone of little or no interest; in fact it’s considered a by-product of mica and feldspar mining. Yet when aluminum is present in its makeup, beryl becomes aquamarine and is considered a semiprecious stone. And when nature adds traces of chromium rather than aluminum, beryl becomes emerald, one of man’s most coveted gems. The depth of an emerald’s color is determined by the amount of chromium. Too much and the stone is dark, inky, and dead. Too little and an emerald is pale and faded. This color difference is called kelly. A perfect stone, one with depth to its color while maintaining its brilliance, is considered to have good kelly, and its value soars proportionately.
Her eyes were green. A perfect kelly green that shot through Mercer like a live wire. She looked at him for a moment, scraping her nails through short hair that was dark yet blond and auburn at the same time, held to her neat skull with just a trace of gel. Mercer felt like he was drowning.
Individually, the features of her face were perfect, softly rounded lips framing a sensual mouth that seemed just on the verge of laughter. Her cheekbones swept down the sides of her face with the grace of a gull’s wing, and her chin was strong with a slight cleft. Above her stunning eyes, her brows were wide and dark, shocking on such a delicate face but adding an undeniable magnetism. Her nose was small and gentle, very feminine.
From her high, broad forehead to her narrow throat, she was exquisite. There was no comparing her to the brassy trophy women that many of the men here called their wives. She had the looks of a fashion model, daunting and unobtainable, but he thought he noted a charm that those women didn’t possess.
She shifted her weight from one long leg to the other. Her dress clung to hips that curved from her narrow waist with unmatchable grace. The slit up the front swept aside to reveal one smooth inner thigh and, had Mercer been able to breathe, the sight would have taken his breath away. The front of her dress covered her body completely from her calves to her throat, but he noted that her unsupported breasts were small and high, the chill of the damp night forcing her nipples against the fabric.
“What can I get for you, sir?” The bartender distracted Mercer.
By the time he’d ordered a gimlet and turned back toward the French doors, she was gone. Damn.
He took his drink, absently muttering a thanks. It was then that he became aware he’d been physically aroused just by that quick glimpse of her. That hadn’t happened to him since his eighth-grade class had a twenty- one-year-old substitute for a week.
“You can put my clothes back on.”
“Excuse me?” Mercer turned and his breath jammed in his throat. She was even more beautiful up close. Her lips had an enticing pout that he unconsciously felt himself swaying toward.
“You just undressed me with your eyes, and I’d appreciate it if you put my clothing back on, Dr. Mercer.” The mischievous glint in her eyes showed that she was relishing Mercer’s discomfort. He guessed her age at early thirties, that perfect moment in a woman’s life when she retains the beauty of youth but tempers it with the knowledge of experience.
“You know who I am?” Mercer was incredulous. He was certain that he would remember her if they’d met before.
“My, how quickly they forget.” She laughed and started to walk away, her backside switching from side to side while the narrow ridge of her spine remained straight. A few paces away, she turned back. “We met yesterday morning.”
She was lost in the crowd by the time Mercer realized who she was. He had been so enraptured by her looks
