As she passed a waitress in a tuxedo that was just a hair too tight for her hips, Cally drained her champagne and added the empty glass to the woman’s tray. Another tray she passed had Oysters Rockefeller, and mission or no mission, she couldn’t resist taking two. Three would have been conspicuous. Not that she wasn’t anyway. She could feel the male eyes on — well, on her everything, really. Rounded butts were apparently the thing, courtesy of some starlet or other. And the captain she’d been impersonating when the slab went away had also been not quite wasp-waisted, but close enough. In the little black dress she’d checked out from Wardrobe, it showed. Goddamn conspicuous slab job. She simpered past some guy with a Kirk Douglas chin and a martini, who moved just enough to be standing way too close, resisting the impulse to spike him in the instep with her heel. It didn’t help that her last stolen weekend with Stewart — she still didn’t understand why he insisted on her using a name that had been an alias in the first place and wasn’t even his current one — had been damned near six months ago. Between that and the overcharged female juv hormones, which must have been somebody’s idea of a bad joke, she was getting downright cranky. Well, a secret marriage sounded romantic at the time.

She carefully didn’t sigh with relief when she finally reached the door. She nodded to the door attendant as she slid past a couple who were presenting their invitations, and ducked out of the building through a fire exit. Holding her PDA up to her ear, she pretended to be dictating a voicemail to a friend, rounding a corner before telling her buckley to page the team.

A few moments later, an antique limousine pulled up and the rear door opened. She climbed in, gratefully slipping off the evil high heels and massaging her sore feet. The glass between the driver’s seat and the passenger compartment lowered slowly. A man in a green and black chauffeur’s uniform that contrasted nicely with his properly spiked red hair glanced up into the rearview mirror and met her eyes. The slight bulge in his cheek and the faint but unmistakable whif of Red Man tobacco was out of character for a chauffeur, but didn’t surprise her in the least.