“I lean with you there. I can also shift my reading to mail.”
“I’m tossing some to Peabody, but depending on how much there is, and if your slate’s clear, I could toss some at you.”
“Who doesn’t enjoy reading other people’s mail? And my slate’s clear enough. An hour with a good book, prying into someone else’s mail, comfort food? All a good antidote, as I came home irritated.”
“Irritated? You didn’t seem irritated.”
“Likely because I found my wife reading in the library with the cat on her lap. The lovely homeyness of the picture collapsed irritation.”
“So if I’d been huddled at my command center you’d still be irritated?”
“Potentially.” He shrugged it off. “I’d thought to beat up a sparring droid, as that works so well for you, or talk you into a bout.”
“Sparring or sex?”
“I like the combination of both.”
She sat back, nudged the nearly empty casserole away. “Now I’m too full of the pie that isn’t pie for either.”
“The night’s young yet.”
“If you tell me why you were irritated, is it going to irritate you?”
“I’m over it, so no. Just a very, very slight miscalculation in R&D that formed the basis of a series of miscalculations and bollocksed up an entire project until I happened to catch it. And then spending a large portion of my day working with the team to unbollocks it.”
“Did heads roll?”
“At a few points I might’ve pulled out the axe, but this particular head is known for the meticulous, the deadly accurate, and the innovative. A mistake,” he said with a slight shrug. “They happen.”
“You probably scared the crap out of him.”
“I may have, but he was so busy flagellating himself I’m not sure he’d have noticed. And a good book, a glass of wine—you and the cat—spared me the trouble of replacing yet another sparring droid.”
“We could go down and take turns beating hell out of it before bed, but I like to save doing that for when I’m really pissed off.” She downed the last swallow of her wine. “Have we ever had sex in here?”
“I’m sure I’d remember if we had, so no.”
“We need to come back, definitely need to come back before the Return of Summerset, take care of that.” She made a check mark in the air with her finger.
“Consider it on the schedule.”
Now she frowned, looked around. “It’s a really good room, but it just hit me there’s no kitchen. We’re going to have to haul the dishes up or down.”
He rose, took her hand. “I’ll activate a droid to deal with it—a domestic one.”
“I forget you’ve got any around here.”
“Domestically, you and I are failures. Something has to deal with such matters when Summerset’s gone.”
“I used to do my own,” she said as they started out. Thought back to it. “I sucked at it.” She gave him a hip bump. “Makes me smart for hooking the rich guy.”
“Makes the rich guy smarter for not having a cop wash his underwear.”
“When I was actually washing my own underwear, the machines always ate a sock. Just one sock. Every frigging time. Why is that?”
“We’ll ask a droid.”
“But he’s not back for another week.”