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"And Mademoiselle Cole."

"Madame."

"Thank you for the man in the lobby."

It was not an effusive thing. It was a clipped thing. Leo took it the way it had been given, which was as a negotiation point resolved, and dropped her chin once in acknowledgement.

"I will earn it, Madame."

"You already have."

Vivienne returned to her office.

She closed the door. She sat at her desk. She did not turn on the screen; she sat for a minute with her hand flat on the wood. There had been a moment in the corridor outside the committee room when Leo had refused to look away, and Vivienne had noticed, inside her own body, a small quickness at the base of her throat she had not put a name to in a very long time. She had put a name to it in the corridor anyway, because she was not a woman who permitted herself not to name things.

Attraction.

She sat with it.

She felt attraction to Leo Cole. Leo with her tall broad presence. Vivienne could only imagine what fine musculature sat beneath her jacket and pants. Leo with her dark hair neatly slicked back in a low pony. Leo with the strong features of her face and those intense green eyes that never quit.

She did not like it. She did not intend to act on it. She recognized it as an inconvenience one acknowledged in order to disarm, and she also recognized, at the same time, that Leo's hands had been resting by her thigh in the reception ten minutes ago and Vivienne had, without meaning to, registered the shape of them. Strong hands. Long fingers. Short nails.

The kind of hands that could…

One of her assistants knocked.

"Your three o'clock, Madame."

"I am coming."

She stood up. She smoothed the jacket that did not need smoothing. She walked back out to work.

That evening, in the back of the car on the way to L'Ami Louis, Leo sat in the front again, and Vivienne, in the back, watched the set of Leo's jaw in the sideview mirror and considered, not for the first time that day, the manner in which the woman in the front seat read a room.

At the restaurant, Leo did the things a Blackthorn operative did when walking a principal into a public space. She checked the door, the maître d', the table, the exits. She placed Vivienne on the banquette facing the rear wall and took the chair at the end of the table facing the room. Isabella was already there, in a pair of black trousers and a silk blouse the colour of dark cherries, and she watched all of this with undisguised interest.

"Madame Devereaux."

"Mademoiselle Cole. Sit down."

"I am where I need to be."

"You are making me uncomfortable."

"I doubt that, Madame."

Isabella laughed. "She is delicious, Vivienne. You did not tell me."

"She is here on business."

"So am I."

Isabella waved the waiter. She ordered a bottle of something Vivienne had drunk twice in her life and loved both times, and a carafe of water, and a single glass for Leo that Leo, with a small incline of her head, declined.

"On duty," Leo said.

"Of course you are."