Flash

possibly get."
    "You keep telling me that."
    "It's true." She started back toward the kitchen. "Come on, let's get dinner on the table. I'm starving."
    He watched her walk around the corner. Through the opening above the counter, he could see her moving a little too quickly between the refrigerator and the stove.
    There was a nervous quality about all of her movements today, he reflected. He could not attribute it to her caffeine intake. She appeared to have cut back on her coffee consumption lately.
    He thought that she had been acting a little strange ever since he had made that maybe not-so-subtle reference to marriage last night at the museum reception.
    Maybe his timing had been off again as it usually was in this kind of thing. Or maybe he hadn't been quite so clever after all. He wondered if she was panicking, and if so, what he should do about it.
    The truth was, he had been as stunned as she was when he had heard himself make the crack about not marrying him to boost his career. But the instant the words were out of his mouth, he had realized that there was a deep truth imbedded in them.
    Now that truth lay between them, a white-hot incandescent lamp that neither of them dared to pick up and handle with bare hands.
    "How far did your staff get with the preparations for the Lancaster fund-raiser?" he asked, keeping his voice deliberately casual.
    "Bolivar's team got the flag into position on the ceiling beam and completed the electrical connections this afternoon. They also installed the speakers and set up the sound equipment. Everything's ready to go." Olivia opened a drawer. "Just flip a switch, and you get the twenty feet of glowing flag unfurling to the glorious strains of a military marching band and chorus."
    He lounged in the doorway. "Sounds impressive."
    "It would have been." She went to work slicing hothouse tomatoes. "Now it will all have to be taken down and stored someplace until I can talk someone else into using it. I wonder if the Stryker campaign would be interested."
    Jasper raised one brow. "You could always rent a locker at Pri-Con Self-Storage."
    "Bite your tongue." She put down the knife and reached for the bottle of balsamic vinegar. "I never want to hear the word
self-storage
again as long as I live."
    "How about the word
marriage
?' " he asked quietly. "Do you think you might want to hear it again one of these days?"
    Her fingers clenched convulsively around the vinegar bottle. Very carefully she released it. "That's the second time you've mentioned marriage in the past twenty-four hours. Can I assume this is not a coincidence?"
    "I promised myself I wouldn't bring it up again for at least another week, but I can't seem to help it. You know me, I've got a thing about neatness and order. A place for everything and everything in its place."
    "Things seem to be going along quite well the way they are."
    He nodded thoughtfully. "We could probably go on like this for a long time. But it feels—" He broke off, searching for the right word. He did not find it. "Like one of the file drawers in your office at Light Fantastic."
    "Messy?"
    He smiled, pleased that she had grasped the point. "Yes. Messy."
    "What makes you think marriage would be neater?"
    He met her eyes. "I think that in spite of our cluttered, untidy pasts, you and I both know how to make commitments and keep them."
    "We've both made mistakes in the commitment department," she reminded him.
    "I've thought about that. I've decided that our previous mistakes can be attributed to the fact that we made commitments to the wrong people. People who didn't have the same understanding of the word
commitment
that we have."
    "I see." She looked down at the vinegar bottle as though it were a lit firecracker.
    "I figure that two people who have a mutual, shared definition of the concept of commitment have a much better chance of making a marriage work."
    "You once said something about a marriage of convenience. If you're under the impression that things might be simpler all the way around at Glow if we got married—"
    "Don't get me wrong," Jasper said quickly. "I don't think that a marriage between us would be all that convenient. I have a nasty feeling that there will be times when we drive each other crazy."
    She smiled slowly. "We might make it if neither one of us brings any filing home."
    The look in her eyes made him think that he ought to invest in a red cape and blue tights. He had the feeling he could leap over tall buildings and