Okay. Why don't I just lie down and die right now, he thought. It all seemed so frightening and insurmountable. Whatever it was Alex, or Alistair, was involved in. At the exclusive gentleman's club that would never have had Danny Holt as a member under ordinary circumstances, Scottie had translated for him the cryptic message from a former associate they met there. That not only was the MI6 involved, but the American CIA, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure of France, the Russian SVR, the Mossad, and several others Danny was unfamiliar with. Scottie had told him to affect an air of boredom, but he was not practiced enough. In his own sphere, the Vauxhall clubs where he held sway were like the ones where he had met Rich, the record producer he had become friends with, who had thought him beautiful one night and picked him out of the crowd; and from then on, he never had to wait in line. But he realized none of that made him happy anymore.
But a spy? Danny could scarcely believe it.
One Secret Service outfit was bad enough, but all of them? It was tempting to just bolt the door to his flat and give up, as he had been warned to. Or had he been? It was all making him understandably paranoid. But he could not give up. In his romantic, intuitive soul, he knew there was something there worth holding on to.
They were so very different. He was a warehouse stock boy who lived to party; Alex was a grey-suit wearing investment banker whose work was his life. Danny never made plans further ahead than a night; Alex's life had been planned since childhood - the right schools, the right sort, right down to his perfectly arranged files and sock drawer. Alex went for a morning run without fail; Danny was a chainsmoker, the only time he'd gone for a morning run was to try to help fate along by instigating a second meeting with Alex, at the Vauxhall Bridge where they had first met. An unlikely pairing. But looking at him from across the table at the restaurant at breakfast the next morning, he had found it difficult to concentrate on anything but Alex's beautiful lips as they talked. Danny had only wanted to find the real thing, like anyone else. The eternal optimist. Maybe that was a quality that they both shared; he was beginning to find out, and he was relieved, and overjoyed, to know now that Alex had not lied to him, at least about everything.