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Number Five.”
    It didn’t matter what she did. God knows she tried being good, doing what she thought he wanted, but it soon became clear that the very thing she was praised for on one day would invoke his wrath on the next.
    It was an awful way to live.
    Only one thing was certain.
    After he’d been gone for so long, he’d tell her it was time to get cleaned up. He’d get out his hose and spray her with water that stung and bruised her, that left her soaked and colder than ever. He’d toss her the key that would unlock the chain around her ankle.
    But before that, he’d say the words she dreaded hearing, words she could count on hearing, words he spoke to her now.
    “I’ve brought you a new friend.”
    S AN D IEGO , C ALIFORNIA
F RIDAY , D ECEMBER 2, 2005
    Dave brought two mugs of coffee into her office.
    “Did you make that?” Sophia asked.
    He nodded as he slumped down into the chair across from her desk. He had terrible posture. Maybe his brain was just too heavy, and he didn’t have the strength to hold his head up for great lengths of time. “Yeah. I arranged for an accident with the previous pot.”
    “So,” Sophia said as she took a sip. “She can’t make coffee, she can’t work the voice mail system, the copies of my report went out missing page five…”
    “She’s only been here a few days,” Dave said mildly. “Give her a chance.”
    “The Phoenix client was on hold for twenty minutes,” Sophia said. “And I’m sorry, but it was a six-page document. How hard could it be to make sure page five was there?”
    “I’ve taken a nonscientific poll. Lindsey hates her as much as you do.” Dave leaned even farther back in his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Alyssa grits her teeth and Tess rolls her eyes whenever her name is mentioned. The
men,
on the other hand, all agree that the job just might be harder than it looks.”
    “So what are you saying?” Sophia asked. “That we’re insecure and jealous? Or that you’re all just blinded by the wonder of Tracy’s sweater?”
    “It is a lovely sweater,” he agreed. Out of all the people she’d met since coming to work for Troubleshooters Incorporated, David Malkoff was the most unassuming. He dressed like tech support, in stoner T-shirts and baggy shorts, with long hair waving around what was very definitely not a long-haired face. “It matches the color of her eyes.”
    Sophia laughed. “Yes, I’m sure the color was what everyone noticed.”
    “I did,” he told her. He looked, in fact, like an accountant dressed up as Jerry Garcia for Halloween.
    “Right.”
    Dave sat up slightly, blinking at her in mild offense. “I
did
.”
    He looked, well…silly, to be honest. Ignorable. The gelding in a stable of stallions.
    He was, in fact, a former CIA operative—brilliant and extremely capable.
    “You know, you’ve got a shirt that you sometimes wear,” he continued earnestly. “It’s kind of like a T-shirt only fancier. It’s the same color blue as
your
eyes. It’s striking. And of course the fabric manages to…hang isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. It clings. To you. As does the shirt you’re wearing right now, which is…” He was actually starting to blush. “Also very nice. But it’s the color. Blue. Of the T-shirt. It’s the same color as your eyes, that…I noticed. First.”
    It was quite possible that Sophia was blushing now, too. Considering her checkered past, she made a point never to dress provocatively. The blouse she was wearing today was nothing special. It covered her—even with the top button comfortably undone. Yet it wasn’t a cardboard box. The fabric did drape around her body.
    A body that Dave—among plenty of others—had seen, completely unclad. It wasn’t something they’d ever discussed, but there were times—such as this one—where Sophia could see the memory of her nakedness in his eyes.
    “You can’t not know that your…figure is…what it is,” Dave