He sat on the edge of the hot tub, stuck his feet in the warm water, and nodded in their direction. “You ought to do that,” he told his girlfriend, Lieutenant Commander Shari Towne. “You know, take off your top for a while. Looks comfortable.”

“No,” she said, protectively adjusting the top of her red bikini.

“You’re already way out of uniform, ma’am.” Her long black hair lay wet against her dark shoulders, and just looking into her black eyes made his stomach do flips, because he considered Shari to be the most delectable intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy. She had been born in Jordan to an American father and a Jordanian mother, both of whom worked for their respective governments. Shari was only six years old when her father, a young diplomat based in Amman with the State Department, was killed in a plane crash. Her mother was a public relations and tourism specialist and worked at embassy postings in Cairo, Paris, and Tokyo before her current assignment as head of the public relations department for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington.

Shari was fluent in several languages by the time she entered George Washington University and accepted a U.S. Navy commission upon graduation. It did not take long for her to land in Naval Intelligence, where, after compiling a sterling record, she was snapped up to be an analyst for the National Security Council. Her office was only a desk in a basement cubicle, but the address was still the best in town, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the White House.

“Go away,” Shari told Kyle, closing her eyes and leaning against the high-pressure jets that churned the water into frothy bubbles around her. She lifted her face to the sun.

“Hey,” Swanson argued. “Your boobs are real! We ought to show them off.”

“We? You don’t get a vote on that. You want tits, go over there and ogle the Desperate Housewives.” Her breathing rate had not increased and her eyes remained closed as she insulted him. She added, in Arabic, “Screw you.”