“What the hell was she doing on the nonhostage side of a handgun?”

“She smiled at him, the way she always did, even when he woke up at oh-what-the-fuck-hundred.”

“During the last few hours of the trip, he and Tess had drilled procedures and done a whole lot of worst-case-scenario type war-gaming. He was now as convinced as he'd ever be that she knew what to do and where to go if Godzilla attacked Kazabek...”

“What do you think, Ronnie? Do you think we could stop after just one kiss?”

“Do you think,” she said, “instead of having sex, we could make love?”“I’d love that,” Ken whispered.”

“I’m not a big drinker and I’ve had enough secondhand smoke for this decade and the next, so . . .”Great. All she had to do was complain about the deafening volume of the music, and she might as well slap a sticker on her forehead saying old next to the one that already said nerd.“Band’s good, though,” she added. “Country’s not my thing, but the players are . . . proficient.” And great, now she sounded like a professor. Proficient. God.But he was nodding. “Country’s not my thing, either.”“But you have a cowboy hat,” she said, and as soon as the words left her lips, she realized how stupid she sounded, no—not that she sounded, but that she was.”

“What if I told you that you were a hundred percent wrong?’‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You are good. Talk about not being the bad guy in your own movie. 'You are a hundred percent wrong,’ she repeated, with a horrendous, over-the-top-Yankee-fied imitation of his barely-there drawl.”