Sam woke slowly, feeling groggy but also uneasy, although unsure why. Then her foggy brain noticed that she was not alone in her bedroom. It had been such a long time since she had been involved with anyone, she panicked for a moment. Thoughts of an intruder raced through her mind as she forced open a gritty eye. Whoa. There was the side of a man's very nicely muscled naked chest immediately in her field of view, tapering down to impressive abs. Her eyes moved up over the admittedly yummy, if confusing sight, to Daniel's face. Her eyes flew open and suddenly she remembered everything.

He noticed her stirring and turned his head to smile at her. "Good morning, Colonel Doctor Carter."

She smiled back. It was impossible to resist that sweet smile, reflected in his clear blue eyes, no matter how crazy the situation. She stretched and asked, "You don't suppose I need to start going by Dr. Samantha Jackson, do you?"

"That would freak people out." He laughed and tousled her hair. "You are not the kind of woman who takes her husband's name."

That was an interesting insight into his image of her. "I'm not, uh?" she asked, sitting up as he stood up. She saw that he was wearing running shorts and couldn't help but notice a very nicely muscled pair of legs. It had been quite a long time since she'd seen his legs. For that matter, she couldn't remember ever actually having seen them. He wasn't a shorts wearer, not at least when he was around her. He leaned over to tie his shoes and her attention was drawn to another pleasing part of his anatomy. This sharing a bedroom with a coworker certainly put images into your head that would be a little unsettling in the workplace. Then she thought, "Need to adjust your thinking, Sam. For the time being this particular co-worker is your husband."

As he was pulling on a t-shirt, she asked, "What's up? It's," she shuddered, looking at the clock, "before 6:00 AM."

"I'm going for a run. You want to come with?" he asked.

She responded, laughing, "I promised myself at the Academy that I was not doing exercise voluntarily in pre-dawn hours ever again." She picked up a pillow and hugged it. "You seem to have had an attitude adjustment during the night. Tell me how I can get so happy about this mess too."

He turned and looked at her, regarding her seriously. "I don't know Sam. I didn't sleep for hours last night, thinking about everything. I guess I'm probably running on about 3 hours of sleep right now. What works for me is to worry a problem to death and then go to sleep. When I wake up, it often just falls into place. When I woke up this morning, I thought, 'What's so bad about spending a little more time than usual with one of my oldest friends?' Sure, there'll be some awkward parts but our circumstances are better than Teal'c's and SG-10. That should be our focus. Getting them released." He reached down and touched her shoulder a moment. "Go back to sleep for another hour or so. We don't need to be at the Mountain before 8:00."

She lay back down but didn't go back to sleep. He returned from his run and entered quietly, apparently believing that she was asleep. He shed his t-shirt and his socks and shoes, dropping them where he stood. They were going to have some problems with general messiness; she could tell. That thought was immediately wiped away when he removed his shorts – thank God his back was to her - and she watched him bare-assed, padding into the bathroom. Some women went for chests, but she had always been particularly taken by male posteriors. "Oh… my… God," she thought, "that is one prime piece of real estate." She pulled the covers over her head to prevent any more inadvertent Peeping Tom behavior and stayed that way until he came back out of the shower, dressed, and left the bedroom.

When she came downstairs, he gave her a second good morning. She searched his face and couldn't tell if he realized he'd started the day by flashing her. She blushed and he looked at her curiously. "You, um, need to be more careful about, um," she stopped.

"Yes?" he asked, waiting patiently, his coffee half way to his lips.

"About taking off your clothes. I, um, wasn't asleep. Just now. I wasn't asleep." She blushed again, feeling like an inexperienced school girl.

"Oh," was all he said, his expression a curious mix of embarrassment and what looked suspiciously like a smirk. "I made some coffee," he said, waving in the direction of the pot. Sam filled a mug and stood, leaning against the counter, sipping it. Daniel cleared his throat and said, his eyes on his coffee as he swirled it in the mug, "It occurs to me we need to map out our strategy for work. If the general public isn't supposed to know this isn't a real marriage, we need to think about what we would be doing if we HAD impulsively married someone we were head over heels about." He looked up and studied her speculatively. "Just imagine I'm, oh I don't know, Jack. How would you be acting?"

"Jack! I'd be staying home. Even in his new position, you could still argue I'm in his chain of command," she protested. Where was he getting this from?

"I meant hypothetically, Sam," he said patiently. "Okay. Make it someone else. I've noticed from your DVD collection that you are a big MacGyver fan. He looks a hell of a lot like Jack, but he's safe in terms of regs. So, imagine that instead of being married to me, you're married to MacGyver."

She rolled her eyes and then suddenly was struck with the thought that if he was trying to imagine how he would act, he must be thinking about his lost wife, about Sha're, and feeling sad. She answered in a much different tone of voice than had been on the tip of her tongue a moment before, "I guess you can't help but think about Sha're."

He laughed a little. "Actually Sha're and I had exactly the situation you and I do. It wasn't a marriage by choice and we weren't sleeping together at first, just keeping up appearances. I'll have to use someone else. I was actually trying to decide between Julia Roberts and Liz MacDuff."

"You mean Dr. Elizabeth MacDuff? The new scientist that Walter introduced us to in the cafeteria? Why her?" Sam asked a trifle belligerently, Daniel's choice of a much younger woman making her feel a little over the hill.

"Sam, surely you didn't miss how young and pretty and, how I do I say this, well put together she is?" Daniel said, regarding her over the top of his coffee. He put the mug down suddenly and stood up. "Our method acting techniques are actually our own business, but, however we motivate ourselves, we do need to act like professionals who are trying mightily to control themselves but not always succeeding. Longing gazes. Occasional touching when we think no one is looking, that sort of thing. Maybe getting caught out kissing once or twice, especially if we can time that when our observer will see it." He walked over to Sam and took her mug out of her unresisting hand. "So, I think we'd better practice a couple of times. We wouldn't want the awkwardness of a first kiss where someone might see it, right?

It made sense, but it was 7:15 in the morning. She wasn't even fully caffeinated yet. She felt about as romantic as a bus ticket to Terre Haute. She wrinkled up her face. "Now?" she said, not trying to hide her lack of enthusiasm.

He was undaunted. "We need to do it before we go to work. Think about MacGyver – or whomever else you came up with. You can do it, Sam."

She closed her eyes. For just a moment, she thought she heard a tiny sigh. She didn't think of MacGyver. What she actually found herself thinking about was Daniel vanishing into the bathroom, good old naked Daniel. They kept standing there and Daniel didn't do anything. What was he waiting for? They needed to get to the Mountain. She kept working the image of Daniel's backside and was more and more impatient. He moved closer and she felt his warm breath on her face. She opened her eyes ever so slightly and peeked at him. He was looking at her from out of half-closed eyes. His strong, warm hand came up and cupped her cheek and then he brought his lips within a micron of her own and hovered there. Time to get this over with. She took a fistful of his shirt and tugged. He completed the kiss then, gently, skillfully. He refrained from using his tongue and she was, curiously, a little disappointed. It was a good kiss but it was so, well, respectful.

"Daniel, I don't think that kiss would convince anyone we were newly married. It was too damn polite," she said, starting to break away.

"Demonstrate how you think I should be kissing you," he said, a note of challenge in his voice.

"Is that a dare?" she asked, laughing. "Okay. You ready?" He nodded. She wound an arm around his neck and ruffled the short hair at the nape. She slipped the other arm around his waist and then, as if her hand had a will of its own, a little lower. She covered his mouth with her own and teased his lips with her tongue. When he gave her an opening, she slipped her tongue inside. He laughed a little into her mouth and then his tongue answered hers. They were kissing hard and deep now and it was surprisingly good. He was the one that broke it off. He put his hands on her hips and set her away from him.

"I get the point, Sam," he said, grinning. "You ready to leave?" He walked off to pick up his knapsack and his jacket as if they had been discussing how to work the coffeemaker. She felt slightly miffed that he hadn't seemed that moved by what she thought was a damn fine kissing effort on her part.

The day was a disaster at the base. She didn't get anything at all accomplished because every five minutes someone else popped their head in to offer congratulations and pump her for information. There were a ton of questions, several of them things she and Daniel hadn't thought to dream up answers for such as why she wasn't wearing a wedding ring. She seriously considered printing up pamphlets, including a FAQ section. It would have two parts: the questions people actually asked and the questions they weren't asking but were hinting at answers for. "Are you pregnant?" fit into that second list. People wanted to know what she and Daniel wanted for wedding gifts. She found this excessively awkward and imagined the administrative nightmare of keeping everyone's presents straight and making sure they were all returned to the correct people after it was announced that they weren't really married.

About 10:00 Hanna showed up with Cam. She greeted Sam quietly and didn't say much, but her eyes were moving constantly. She was obviously very much fascinated with everything Tauri. She spent the rest of the morning, sitting quietly on a stool and watching. Since Sam was writing a report, there wasn't much to see and it started feeling really creepy to Sam. She was relieved when lunch time arrived and they went to meet Daniel in the cafeteria. Daniel surprised her by playing footsy under the table. Sam noticed a faint smile on Hanna's face while it was going on so maybe it wasn't a totally bad idea. His approval rating went down when he spotted Dr. MacDuff on the way out of the cafeteria and greeted her as if it was Liz he had been kissing that morning, not Sam, or so it seemed to her anyway. Hanna went off to spend the afternoon staring at Daniel and she felt like he deserved it.

Shortly after arriving home, she strolled into the kitchen to find Daniel, bending over, rummaging in the refrigerator. Was she ever going to be able to see him bending over without flashing on this morning? It muted her slight irritation with him from lunch time. "Not much to eat in here," he said, glancing up at her. "Want to go to the grocery store?"

"If I bought food and brought it home, then I'd have to cook it," she said. "That seems like a complete no win proposition to me."

He looked at her intrigued. "So what, pray tell, do you do to keep from starving to death?"

She shrugged. "I eat a big lunch at work. In the evening, I drink a can of Slimfast or pick up some takeout on my way home."

He gave up on the refrigerator and started going through the pantry shelves. "I don't know about this," he said, and pulled out a package of DingDongs. "And they have an expiration date from two months ago," he said and dropped them in the trash basket.

"What do you think you're doing, mister?" Sam said, playfully. "I'll have you know I'm proud of my bad eating habits." She retrieved the DingDongs from where they were nestled in some junk mail and stroked them lovingly, saying, "Nice DingDongs."

"You don't really want those," Daniel said, chuckling. "I'm going to the store and get some groceries and make you a meal you'll never forget." He tried to take them from her hand. She held them away teasingly.

The next thing she knew he was chasing her around the downstairs, both of them laughing, trying to recapture the DingDongs. He finally caught up with her in the dusky living room and they started wrestling. This was her absolute favorite turn on and it seemed strange to be doing it with Daniel. Friendly wrestling with a guy she was involved with was programmed to end in a hot make out session, if not something more, and that sure wasn't going to happen with Daniel, was it? She managed to get away from him and they struggled for a moment before they were down on the rug again. They had stopped laughing. It was still fun, but had become somehow more intense.

One moment she was looking into his blue eyes, inches away from her, searching for a hold, and the next thing she knew, he was being hauled off her and punched in the face. Daniel was in great shape and knew how to fight but had been totally blindsided. He was sprawled on his back and starting to get up when the assailant grabbed him and punched him again. This time he gave better than he got and, in moments, had the other man pinned against the floor, his arm forced back and up to make him cooperate.

"Daniel," Sam said, distraught. "It's my brother. It's Mark. Let him up."

"Are you sure?" Sam knew he'd met Mark a handful of times but Mark wasn't a particularly memorable looking man and had cut his hair in a buzz and lost 40 pounds since the last time Daniel had seen him. Daniel asked. "What's his deal?"

"Hey, I'm here," Mark said, mouth ground against the floor. "I can talk for myself."

"Well, then, talk," Daniel said, easing up almost completely.

"I was in town on business and decided to drop by to see my sister. I came up the front walk and saw her struggling with some man in a dark room. What was I supposed to think?"

Daniel got off him, got to his feet, and offered him a hand. Mark took it and they stood, staring at each other. Sam took one good look at Daniel's face and ran to the kitchen for the first aid kit. "Daniel, you're bleeding," she said. Taking his hand, she pulled him away from his staring match with her brother to the couch. "Sit down and let me patch you up. I'm so sorry." She began to work tenderly on cleaning up his face.

Mark said, begrudgingly, "I guess I owe you an apology. You're Sam's teammate, Dr. Jackson, right? What the hell were you guys doing?"

They looked at each other. Sam said, "Daniel wanted my DingDongs."

Mark said sternly to Daniel, "If she doesn't want to give you her DingDongs buddy, that's her call."

Sam looked at him dumbfounded for a moment and then realized what he thought she had said. "No. It wasn't that. He really wanted to take some real DingDongs away from me." She pointed at the squashed package on the floor. She turned to Daniel. "When we were little kids, we had a special meaning for DingDongs. I don't know how it got started."

Daniel started to laugh. It was a small laugh at first, but grew and grew until he was hugging his sides and laughing so hard tears were running down his face. It would have been impossible to resist even if there hadn't been anything to laugh about. All of them were shrieking with laughter when Cam and Hanna walked in the door Mark had left wide open in his haste to rescue his sister.

Cam grinned at the spectacle in front of him and said, "I gotta ask. What is so funny?" He then got a good look at Daniel and said, "And what the hell happened to you?"

Daniel tried to answer a couple of times but couldn't really complete sentences. Then Sam tried but wasn't any more successful. It was Mark who finally said, "I was protecting my sister because I misunderstood something I saw through the window. They were actually just having fun."

Hanna said, approvingly, "This is very, very good. Having, how you say, vigorous fun is very, very good."

Mark looked at her as if she was crazy. The others were utterly stunned for another reason. Sam said, "You speak English."

"Of course. When your people first made contact, we asked for information to learn your language. I have been studying."

Cam said, "And you just didn't feel like sharing this information? Why did you let me translate for you all day?"

She looked upset. "This was rude? On my world, it would be impolite to be so ungrateful to you for your efforts as to stop you once you started."

Mark interrupted. "On your world?"

Three faces looked at him appalled at their carelessness. "Her English is obviously a little shaky," Cam said easily. "You meant 'in your world,' right?" he said to her, "like in your circumstances, your environment."

Hanna had been told of the need for discretion and it was clear from her expression that her transgression was dawning on her now. "Oh, yes, very much. I am so very, very, very sorry to make such a terrible mistake."

Mark said, "Listen, you should hear my Spanish. The word for pregnant sounds like the English word for embarrass. I really got myself in a pack of trouble with that once." He extended his hand and took hers and shook it. She, clearly bewildered, suffered the gesture. "I'm Mark Carter, Sam's brother."

Cam said, "I'm Cam Mitchell. I'm on Sam's team with her now. And this is a guest of the Air Force from an area near one of our remote bases in the South Pacific, Miss Hanna Bei."

Hanna said, "I am happy to meet you, brother of Colonel Dr. Jackson."

Mark said, "I'm sorry. I'm Sam's brother, not Dr. Jackson's."

Hanna nodded, "Exactly. Colonel Dr. Jackson, not Dr. Jackson."

Sam put a hand on Mark's arm. "Mark, Daniel and I got married yesterday." She hadn't planned on telling him at all, but Hanna was standing right there. She'd just have to leave him believing it since there was no plausible explanation for why she and Daniel would make something like that up.

Mark looked down at her hand. "Sam, is this all part of some crazy reality show or something?" He sounded half serious. "You aren't even wearing a ring."

Sam looked at Daniel. "That came up several times today."

He shook his head. "I started counting. I was asked about the ring 10 times and there were 11 other occasions when people looked at my hand so pointedly that they might as well of asked."

"Look, Mark. It was a very spur of the moment thing. There was nowhere to get rings that we would have wanted to have so we decided to wait until this weekend. Don't worry. We will both be clearly marked off limits within a matter of days," Daniel said.

Mark dropped back on the couch and said, "Wow." He shook his head and repeated it, "Wow."

Sam decided it was time to get this group up and moving. "How about we all go out to dinner? And Mark we insist you stay here tonight instead of going to a hotel."

Mark nodded and then returned to a couple more repeats of "Wow," before he could be pried off the couch and loaded up into the car.

That night, Daniel and Sam were a little less careful about being all the way on their individual sides of the bed. The wrestling had broken down the shyness about casual contact. Sam felt rather special. Her brother hadn't always acted like she was all that important to him and yet tonight he had jumped in to defend her. Daniel had been just wonderful at dinner, putting Mark at ease, paying her compliments, and heading Hanna off masterfully several times when she started to veer down paths of weirdness. Sam had noticed Cam sitting back after the first few minutes and watching Daniel like he was some sort of floor show. It was rather amazing how well Daniel was handling the whole thing. She resolved that tomorrow she'd try to take a leaf from his book and make this as much fun as possible for as long as it had to last.