Vixen 03 (Dirk Pitt 5)

"Ah . . . but your sexual excesses. Think what journalistic hay the media might make out of that. I may even expose you myself and write a best-selling book."

"As long as I don't keep my lovers on office payroll or entertain them on my congressional expense account, I can't be touched." '

"What about me?

"

"You paid your half of the groceries, remember?" She dried the pan and set it in the cupboard.

"How can I build a business out of being kept," Pitt said sadly, "if I have a cheap screw for a mistress?"

She put her arms around his neck and kissed his chin. "The next time you pick up a horny girl at a Washington cocktail party, I suggest you demand an accounting of her financial assets."

Good lord, she recalled, that awful party thrown by the Secretary of Environment. She hated the Capital social scene. Unless a function was tied in to Colorado interests or one of her committee assignments, she usually went home after work to a mangy cat named Ichabod and whatever movie was playing on television.

Loren's eyes had been magnetically drawn to him as he stood in the flickering light of the lawn torches. She had stared brazenly while carrying on a partisan conversation with another Independent Party congressman, Morton Shaw, of Florida.

She felt a strange quickening of her pulse. That seldom happened and she wondered why it was happening now. He was not handsome, not in a ' Paul Newman sort of way, and yet there was a virile, no-nonsense aura about him that appealed to her. He was tall, and she preferred tall men.

He was alone, talking to no one, observing the people around him with a look of genuine interest rather than bored aloofness.

When he became aware of Loren's stare, he simply stared back with a frank, appraising expression.

"Who is that wallflower over there in the shadows?" she asked Morton Shaw.

Shaw turned and gazed in the direction Loren indicated with a tilt of her head. His eyes blinked in recognition and he laughed.

"Two years in Washington and you don't know who that is?"

"If I knew, I wouldn't ask," she said airily.

"His name is Pitt, Dirk Pitt. He's special-projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency. You know-he's the guy who headed up the Titanic's salvage operation."

She felt stupid for not having made the connection. His picture and the story of the famous liner's successful resurrection had been headlined everywhere for weeks by the news media. So this was the man who had taken on the impossible and beaten the odds. She excused herself from Shaw and made her way through the crowd to Pitt.

"Mr. Pitt," she said. That was as far as she got. A breeze shifted the flames of the torches just then and the new angle caused a glinting reflection in Pitt's eyes. Loren felt a fever in her stomach that had come Only once before, when she was very young and had a crush on a professional skier. She was thankful the dim light shaded the flush that must have tinted her cheeks.

"Mr. Pitt," she said again. She couldn't seem to get the right words out. He looked down at her, waiting. An introduction, you fool, she yelled inside her mind. Instead she blurted, "Now that you've raised the Titanic, what are you planning for your next project?"

"That's a pretty tough act to follow," he said, smiling warmly. "My next project, though, will be one with great personal satisfaction; one that I shall savor with great delight."

"And that is?"

"The seduction of Congresswoman Loren Smith."

Her eyes widened. "Are you joking?"

"I never regard sex with a ravishing politician lightly."

"You're cute. Did the opposition party put you up to this?"

6

Pitt did not reply. He took her by the hand and led her through the house, which was crammed with Washington's power elite, and escorted her outside, to his car. She followed without protest, out of curiosity more than obedience.

As he pulled the car into the tree-lined street, she finally asked, "Where are you taking me?"

"Step one"-he flashed a galvanizing smile-"we find an intimate little bar where we can relax and exchange our innermost desires."