“Is this the hotel?” Daniel questioned. “If it is, it doesn’t look much like a hotel.”

“Let’s hold our evaluation until we have a little more data,” Stephanie responded in a playful tone.

The light changed and the taxi leapt forward like a racehorse out of the gate. The driver only had one hand on the steering wheel as he accelerated through the turn. Daniel steadied himself to keep from being thrown against the car door. After a big bounce over the junction of the street and the hotel’s driveway, and then another sharp left-hand turn beneath the hotel’s porte cochere, the driver braked hard enough to put significant tension on Daniel’s seat belt. A moment later, Daniel’s door was pulled open.

“Welcome to the Four Seasons,” a liveried doorman said brightly. “Are you checking in?”

Leaving their luggage in the hands of the doorman, Daniel and Stephanie entered the hotel lobby and headed toward the registration desk. They passed a grouping of statuary fit for a modern art museum. The carpet was thick and luxurious. Smartly dressed people lounged in overstuffed velvet chairs.

“How did you talk me into staying here?” Daniel questioned rhetorically. “The outside might be plain, but the interior suggests this is going to be expensive.”

Stephanie pulled Daniel to a halt. “Are you trying to suggest that you’ve forgotten our conversation yesterday?”

“We had a lot of conversations yesterday,” Daniel muttered. He noticed the woman who had just walked by carrying a French poodle had a diamond engagement ring the size of a Ping-Pong ball.

“You know what I’m talking about!” Stephanie proclaimed. She reached up and turned Daniel’s face toward her own. “We decided to make the best of this trip. We’re staying in this hotel for two nights, and we’re going to indulge ourselves and, I would hope, each other.”

Catching Stephanie’s witty licentiousness, Daniel smiled in spite of himself.

“Your testifying tomorrow in front of Senator Butler’s Health Policy Subcommittee is not going to be a walk in the park,” Stephanie continued. “That’s a given. But in spite of what happens there, we’re going to at least take the memory of a nice experience back to Cambridge.”

“Couldn’t we have had a nice experience at a slightly less extravagant hotel?”

“Not in my book,” Stephanie declared. “They have a health club, a masseuse, and top-rated room service, all of which we’re going to take advantage of. So start relaxing and unwinding. Besides, I’ll pick up the tab.”

“Really?”

“Sure! With the salary I’ve been pulling down, I should give some back to the company.”

“Oh, that’s a low blow!” Daniel remarked playfully, while pretending to reel from a make-believe slap.

“Look,” Stephanie said, “I know the company hasn’t been exactly able to pay our salaries for a while, but I’m going to see that this whole trip goes on the company charge card. If things go really badly tomorrow which they very well might, bankruptcy court can decide how much the Four Seasons will be paid for our indulgence.”

Daniel’s smile erupted into a full laugh. “Stephanie, you never fail to amaze me!”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Stephanie said with a smile. “The question is: Are you going to let your hair down or what? Even in the taxi, I could tell you were wound up like a piano wire.”

“That was because I was worried about whether we were going to get here in one piece, not how we were going to pay for it.”

“Come on, big spender,” Stephanie said, urging Daniel forward. “Let’s get up to our suite.”

“Suite?” Daniel questioned, as he allowed himself to be dragged toward the registration desk.

Stephanie hadn’t exaggerated. Their suite overlooked a part of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal with the Potomac River in the background. On the coffee table in the sitting room was a cooler chilling a bottle of champagne. Vases of freshly cut flowers graced the bureau in the bedroom and the expansive countertop in the generous-size marble bathroom.

As soon as the bellman disappeared, Stephanie put her arms around Daniel. Her dark eyes stared up into his blue orbs. A slight smile played across her full lips. “I know you are under a lot of stress about tomorrow,” she began, “so how about letting me be the tour leader? We both know that Senator Butler’s proposed legislation would effectively outlaw your patented and brilliant procedure. And that would mean a cancellation of the second-round financing for the company, with obviously disastrous consequences. With that said and understood, let’s forget about it for tonight. Can you do that?”

“I can try,” Daniel said, although he knew it would be impossible. Failure was one of his worst fears.

“That’s all I ask,” Stephanie said. She gave him a quick kiss before breaking away to attend to the champagne. “Here’s the schedule! We have a glass of bubbly, then take refreshing showers. Following that, we have reservations at a nearby restaurant called Citronelle that I hear is fantastic. After a wonderful meal, we come back here and make mad, passionate love. What do you say?”

“I’d be crazy to offer any resistance,” Daniel said, raising his hands in mock surrender.

Stephanie and Daniel had been living together for more than two years and had developed a comfortable familiarity. They had noticed each other back in the mid-eighties, when Daniel had returned to academia and Stephanie was an undergraduate chemistry major at Harvard. Neither acted on their mutual attraction, since such liaisons were specifically frowned upon by university policy. Besides, neither had had the slightest notion that their feelings were reciprocal, at least not until Stephanie had completed her Ph.D. and had joined the junior faculty, giving them an opportunity to interact on more equal footing. Even their respective areas of scientific expertise complemented each other. When Daniel left the university to found his company, it was natural that Stephanie would accompany him.

“Not bad at all,” Stephanie said, after she drained her flute and put the glass down on the coffee table. “Now! Let’s flip to see who gets the shower first.”

“No need to flip a coin,” Daniel said, placing his empty glass next to Stephanie’s. “I concede. You first. While you shower, I’ll shave.”

“You’ve got a deal,” Stephanie said.

Daniel didn’t know if it was the champagne or Stephanie’s infectious buoyancy but he felt significantly less tense, although hardly less worried, as he lathered his face and began shaving. Having had only one glass, he suspected it was Stephanie. As she had implied, the morrow might bring disaster, a fear disturbingly reminiscent of Heinrich Wortheim’s prophecy the day he’d discovered Daniel was moving back to private industry. But Daniel would try not to allow such thoughts to dominate their visit, at least for that evening. He would try to follow Stephanie’s lead and enjoy himself.

Looking beyond his lathered image in the mirror, Daniel could see Stephanie’s blurred figure through the misted glass-enclosed shower. Her singing voice could be heard over the roar of the water. She was thirty-six but looked more like twenty-six. As he had told her on more than one occasion, she’d done very well in the genetic lottery. Her tall, curvaceous figure was slender and firm as if she worked out regularly even though she didn’t, and her dark, olive skin was nearly blemish-free. A mat of thick, lustrous dark hair with matching midnight eyes completed the picture.

The shower door opened, and Stephanie stepped out. She briskly dried her hair, totally unconcerned about her nakedness. For a moment, she bent over at the waist, allowing her hair to fall free as she frenetically rubbed it with the towel. Then she stood back upright, flipping her hair back in the process like a horse redirecting its mane. When she switched to drying her back with a provocative wiggle of her hips, her line of sight happened to catch Daniel’s stare in the mirror. She stopped.