"I won't delude myself. I'm too old to continue to romanticize my relationship with Vincent. I got him to love me, more or less, and that's all that mattered to me. I engineered that."

"You didn't care that he was married?" Mike said. This was the thing that almost surprised him about her. As cynical as he was, there were some lines he could never cross, and it surprised him that Nadine, with her unshakeable moral compass, would dissolve those lines completely.

It hadn't occurred to him that he might not know her at all.

She shook her head. "I saw it as a surmountable hurdle, and I'm ashamed of that. I should have cared, but I didn't."

"Because you loved him back," he said softly.

"An oversight on my part," she admitted. "But it wasn't like that in the beginning."

Perhaps she had lost herself, the heady excitement and tumultuousness of it all slowly weathering away at the boundaries she'd originally created for herself. Mike is sure that she no longer made that mistake in life.

"You were just seducing him," he guessed, "in the beginning."

"Yes. And that's all it was. It wasn't hard." Her voice held no arrogance, no self-congratulatory pride. No apology, either. "I'm excellent at my job. I'm easy to talk to. I'm reasonably attractive—"

Mike made a noise low in his throat, but Nadine ignored it, talking over him.

"—and all of the late nights in the office, the work trips away, the congressional functions and galas—that took care of the rest." She waved her hand dismissively. "Becoming Vincent's confidante was practically inevitable. And then I turned his screws as needed."

"To what end?"

She smiled ruefully. "I was molding him into a man whom I would be proud to serve. Someone I could believe in." She paused, and then admitted, "He kind of shit all over that, in the end."

Mike raised an eyebrow. For the first time since the microloans shitstorm, he was unimpressed. Disappointed? "You chose to mold him with sex."

Nadine barely reacted to his tone. He didn't think he'd be surprised to discover how little she regarded his opinion of her in any matter; and in that of her reputation least of all. "He was the most suggestible when I manipulated him with sex." She smiled then, and it held no warmth. "Most men are."

"You're very cavalier about this," he muttered.

She shook her head. "No," she said, "I'm not. But neither do I have any delusions about what I wanted, or what we were. What we became."

"And the Iran debacle, you didn't..." he trailed off.

She shook her head vehemently. "No. I didn't know about any of that. If I had, I would have—"

"You would have reported him," Mike finished. He knew her. Whatever else, Nadine was an unwavering patriot. "You would have turned him in."

"I would have ruined him," she hissed. He could see her working to control the memory of her anger and grief, of Marsh's betrayal. Her eyes met his, fiercely clear. "My loyalty has always belonged to my country first."

"I know that," he said. He did. What she would have done to Marsh had she discovered his treason, Mike can scarcely imagine.

She took a sip of her drink, quietly contemplative. "I didn't know him quite as well as I thought I did, and I wasn't manipulating him quite as well as I thought I was. Obviously."

"He'd been playing you, too."

"And he was better at the game than I ever could be. My ignorance costed me."

She would never make that mistake again, Mike knew. "You could have gone about it another way—" he began tentatively.

She cut him off. "I chose this way."

"In politics, you—"

"Oh, Mike. Sex is politics."

He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but then closed it again. She was right.

When he stretched the silence, she continued. "I did what was easy. It was easy to teach him to consider me. Easy to make him want me."

He resolved, then and there, to exercise greater professional caution around her from now on. And personal restraint. Since it seemed she liked to blur those lines. He did too, but not to this degree.

There was a glint in her eye. She leaned into him, so close that he could feel the heat of her breath against his skin, and a tingle ran all the way down to his toes.

In his ear, she whispered, "Now think just how easily I could teach you to want me."

Oh, Mike thought but didn't say. I think I already do.