He made a shamefaced smile. “I forgot. The weighted boots aren’t all that much help. Please forgive me.”
“Nothing to it. Everybody needs a little time to get accustomed to lunar gee. How long will you be staying at Selene?”
“I leave tomorrow.”
“You won’t be talking to anybody from HSS?”
“No. Mr. Humphries has a reputation for swallowing up smaller corporations rather than helping them.”
Maybe he’s not from Humphries after all, Pancho thought.
She asked, “So you came up here just to see me?”
He nodded. “This alliance is very important to us. I wanted to speak to you about it face-to-face, not by videophone.”
“Good thinking,” Pancho said, coming around her desk and gesturing toward her office door. “That three-second lag in phone communication is enough to drive me loco.”
He blinked. “Loco? Is that lunar slang?”
With a laugh, Pancho answered, “West Texas, for crazy.”
“You are from Texas?”
“Long time ago.”
Pancho played it cool, watching how he tried to maneuver their conversation into a dinner invitation before she could shoo him out of her office. He smelled good, she noticed. Some sort of cologne that reminded her of cinnamon and tangy spices.
Finally he got to it. “I suppose a person of your importance has a very full calendar.”
“Yep. Pretty much.”
“I was hoping we might have dinner together. Actually, I don’t know anyone else in Selene City.”
She made a show of pulling up her schedule on the wallscreen. “Dinner engagement with my PR director.”
He looked genuinely crestfallen. “Oh. I see.”
Pancho couldn’t help smiling at him. “Hell, I can talk to her some other time. Let’s have dinner together.”
His smile grew even wider than before.
And he was good in bed, too, Pancho discovered. Great, in fact. But the next morning, once he was on his way back Earthside and Pancho had fed herself a breakfast of vitamin E and orange juice, she called her security director from her kitchen and told him to check the guy out thoroughly. If he’s not from Humphries, maybe somebody else wants to move into the territory.