It was almost noon when Louisa finished reading Pete’s file on Stuart Maislin. Spike was back to sleeping on the kitchen table, amidst the piles of news clippings and handwritten notes. Pete was slouched in a padded office chair, staring at the computer screen. He leaned forward and began typing. The soft click of computer keys carried across the room.

Louisa crossed her arms on the table in front of her and watched him, thinking writing was a very quiet, very solitary profession. She’d expected the creative process to be more flamboyant, but Pete Streeter went about his rewrites in an orderly businesslike fashion. There was no hair pulling, no ranting, no empty whiskey glasses littering the work area, or balled-up, discarded sheets of paper spread across the floor. Sometimes his lips moved, but the sounds he made, if any, were soft, polite murmurings as he listened to the music of his written word. All this was very much at odds with the image she’d formed of him, and she found herself fascinated by this serious, introspective piece of his personality.

He finished his typing, stood, stretched, and looked over at Louisa. He raised his eyebrows in silent question.

“I’m done,” Louisa said.

“Find anything?”

She tore the top two sheets off a yellow legal pad. “I have two pages of possible connections between Maislin and Bishop. Most of the connections are pretty obscure.”

He moved behind her to pour himself a cup of coffee. “What looks good?”

“Actually, nothing looks good. It’s possible that Nolan was just bowing to Maislin’s wishes.”

He looked at her over the rim of his coffee mug. “Is Nolan that much of a wimp?”

“He’s that much of a politician. There’s a lot of information here on Maislin’s finances and business associates. Why?”

“I have an option on Judd King’s book, Power Players. It suggests misconduct among some of the most influential members of Congress. The book is fiction, but supposedly King knew what he was talking about. He died three weeks after the book hit the stores. Brain tumor…maybe. When I took the option on the book, I decided I needed to gather background information. Maislin’s profile fits one of the men in King’s book.”

“How does the pig figure into all of this?” Louisa asked.

“I haven’t a clue.” He took a jar of chunky peanut butter and a jar of marshmallow fluff from the refrigerator. He set out a couple plates and a loaf of white bread.

Louisa slid a glance at the gooey marshmallow and peanut butter.

“Lunch,” Pete said, smearing a thick coating of marshmallow onto a slice of bread. “This stuff is great. You can use it in everything.” He added a slice of peanut butter bread and slapped the two halves together. He put the sandwich on a plate and set it front of Louisa. He poured her a glass of milk and gave her a banana.

Louisa bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. She felt as if she were back in grade school with her Snoopy lunch box and red plastic thermos. “Thank you,” she said politely.

Pete gave a sandwich to Spike. Then he made another for himself, settling into the chair across from Louisa.

“This is an interesting sandwich,” Louisa said, struggling to keep her tongue from sticking to the roof of her mouth. She drank half a glass of milk and secretly felt her fillings to make sure they were intact.

“If I get bogged down in a script, peanut butter and marshmallow always picks me up. It’s sort of inspirational.”

Louisa continued to chew. It wasn’t bad, but it needed chocolate. “So, did you eat this all the time when you were a kid?”

“Never. I was too tough to eat this sissy food. I ate burgers and beer and bologna sandwiches.”

“I mean when you were seven.”

He stared at her and for a moment his face lost its usual animation. His eyes seemed flat, his mouth tightened. Then the humor returned. “I was talking about seven.”

“You’re serious.”

“Pretty much. My mother died when I was five. I was raised in an all-male household.”

He thought back to the ugly yellow clapboard house on Slant Street in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. It hadn’t been a terrible childhood, but it hadn’t been great, either. Mostly, it had been lonely and lacking the soft touches a woman brought to a home. By the time he was in first grade, his two older brothers had already quit school and gone to work in the steel mill with his dad.

Back then, in his neighborhood, nobody cared about latchkey kids. Kids grew up fast on Slant Street, and it didn’t matter that no one was home to supervise homework. The future was preordained: The men worked in the mill. They married young, and there were no subtleties to the mating process.

It was a matter of personal pride and masculine obligation for every Slant Street male past the age of puberty to get his hand and whatever else he could manage under as many skirts as possible. When a girl got pregnant, she singled out her best prospect, they got married in full regalia at St. Stanislaus, had the reception in the firehouse, and settled into the tedium of premature old age.

And that would have been his future, Pete thought, but thanks to his good luck, none of the women who’d gone past his doorstep had gotten pregnant. And by the time he was eighteen, his reputation was so bad, his police record so lengthy with misdemeanors that he couldn’t get a job in the mill. Take it to the limit. Never do anything halfway. He’d been a truly rotten kid. Even his own brothers, who’d been pretty bad in their times, couldn’t touch him.

Louisa finished her sandwich and ate her banana. “You ever been married? You ever live with anyone?”

“Only Spike.”

That explained it. She was beginning to understand the origin of some of his more annoying habits. He was severely lacking in female guidance. He didn’t know any of the niceties of life. Dollars to doughnuts he left the toilet seat up.

She put her dishes in the dishwasher and stacked the files in the cardboard box. “I’m off to the Post.”

“Be careful.”

“Of what?”

“Mean dogs, dirty old men, drunk drivers…” He sighed with disgust at his own foolishness, grabbed hold of the front of her baggy University of Maryland sweatshirt, pulled her to him, and kissed her.

She tasted like dessert. Life didn’t get much better, Pete thought. This was the filet of existence. He opened his eyes and realized she was staring at him.

“Something wrong?”

Her face had turned scarlet. She looked down at the sweatshirt still bunched in his hand. “You’ve accidentally unhooked the front closure to my bra.”

His grin was lazy, his eyes soft with a mixture of sensuality and amusement. It had been no accident. He had one of the most talented thumbs in the country…maybe in the world.

“Sorry,” he said, releasing the shirt. “Guess I got carried away.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He was finally in love. No doubt about it.

Louisa buttoned her navy pea coat up to her throat as she left the Post building and walked west to the Farragut North Metro station. She would have been done with the papers a lot sooner if Pete hadn’t kissed her after lunch, she thought. Her mind had been stuck on it all afternoon. The kiss had been warm and friendly with just a suggestion of passion. In fact, it had been almost playful. Just what you’d expect from a man who ate marshmallow goop for lunch.

Still, it had surprised her. She’d been mentally prepared for a different sort of kiss…a much more aggressive sort. She’d been ready to firmly reject his advances, and it hadn’t been necessary. She reluctantly admitted she was experiencing an emotion that felt a lot like disappointment.

She took the escalator to the underground lobby, bought a fare card, and passed through an electronic gate, telling herself there was no reason to be depressed just because she didn’t inspire flaming passion in the man. After all, she’d told him on several occasions how much she disliked him. And she’d warned him against groping. It was just that she didn’t know what to make of the kiss, she told herself. It had been so…happy.

She was still thinking about the kiss when she knocked on his front door a half hour later.

“Reporting in on the newspaper assignment, sir,” she said when he opened the door, the theory being when discombobulated over a sexual attraction, resort to juvenile behavior.

He closed his front door behind her, unbuttoned her jacket, pulled her to him by her lapels, and lowered his mouth to hers. It was a hello, welcome-home kiss. It was an I-like-you kiss. It was pretty damn happy. It was grossly disappointing. All lips and no tongue and much too short. Louisa swayed a little when he stepped away from her. “Darn,” she said.

“Something wrong?”

“You unhooked my bra again.”

“Must be a faulty clasp.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t trust you.”

“Boy, Lou, that really hurts. Here I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all day, making a nutritious home-cooked meal for you, and I get nothing but insults.”

Louisa sniffed the air. It smelled wonderful-like spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. She trudged up the stairs and crossed to the kitchen area. The table was set for two with a white linen tablecloth, wineglasses, and lavender candles. There was a daisy on her plate. It only had one petal left. Without thinking, she automatically played the game and plucked the remaining petal, silently chanting “He loves me.”

“It’s true,” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Not for an instant.”

Smart woman, he thought. He could hardly believe it himself. He dropped spaghetti into a pot of boiling water, took two salads from the refrigerator and garlic bread from the oven. He filled the wineglasses with sparkling water. “Did you find anything interesting in any of the papers?”