She shrugged disinterested shoulders, told him, "It's a job." She yawned, unabashed, added irrelevantly, "You know, boss, the trouble with you is you look like a gladiator. They won't take you seriously unless you wear specs and a harness."
"Over my dead body," he told her. "What's wrong with athletes anyway? I play damned good tennis when I get time to practice."
"Athletes are lousy lovers," she said. "Your correspondence is on your desk." She nodded toward it. "Get it signed, will you? I've got a dinner date."
Lindsay restrained an impulse to ask her with what and signed the letters dutifully.
Nina was a spy, of course, or she wouldn't have the job. In view of his own assignment and the delicacy of Terro-Martian relations at the moment, she must be a good one.
He handed her the letters, noted the slight sway of her thick body as she walked toward the dispatch-chute. A pity, he thought, that the rest of her failed to match the long perfect legs she had so unexpectedly put on display.
"Oh, Miss Beckwith'" he called after her. "You don't have to list my appointments on the teleprompter when I'm making a speech after this."
She stopped, cast him an oblique glance over one shoulder and said without much interest, "I didn't know whether you'd get back here or not—and it wouldn't do to forget the Secretary General."
"All right," he said in resignation. When she had gone he wondered if he should have told her what du Fresne had said about his possible assassination, decided it was just as well he had kept mum. He went up on the roof for a copter.