Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.


All That Glitters Part 2

The bathing suit had left little or nothing to the imagination, and not for the first time, he had wondered uneasily how hard he would have to work to emerge from this assignment unscathed. Clearly she had not changed, and she had expected him to have remained the same as well. He had needed to extract himself — gently, he hoped — from her arms within five minutes of seeing her for the first time in five years.

She had said she would tell him anything, if he would tell her who had him on a string these days. But it wasn't a string, it was a ring — and Elisa Danton did not deserve the truth.

When he had gotten back to the Q Bureau, Amanda had greeted him with a cheery, "Hello, stranger."

He had felt like a stranger. He felt all wrong. He wasn't the Scarecrow anymore, but going to another woman's house and sitting beside her pool as she lounged in the sun — that wasn't something Amanda's husband did, either.

"That's too close to the truth to be funny," he had said, feeling utterly out of his depth.

To his chagrin, he now found himself on his way back to the Danton estate for a business dinner, with the warnings of Francine and Billy ringing in his ears.

You know what they say about leopards and their spots.

I'm not a leopard, Francine.

He hated that he deserved every bit of his reputation. He had told Amanda, when they were doing the peacock dance with Sonja Chenko, that it was an agent's prerogative to spend the night. He had acted on that prerogative more times than he cared to remember, and Elisa Danton had been present for several of those times.

Stay away from the oysters.


She went upstairs to slip into something more comfortable — which was making him distinctly uncomfortable. Maybe he could stay a little longer, get her to tell him more information. But the longer he thought about it, the more he realized that was not an option.

She had already started shedding her clothes, leaving her shoes on the floor beside him. He picked one up, thinking of the agency training Amanda had undergone to allow her to fight off unwanted advances.

Use a stiletto shoe as a weapon, the handbook said. Insert the heel forcefully into an assailant's eyes, then bring a knee upwards in a lifting motion.

He smiled a little, wondering if the maneuvers would be the same for a man fighting off a woman, and using her own shoe against her. He shook his head, a little amused at the change his thoughts had taken since the last time he had been sitting on Elisa's couch after a dinner together, then he dropped the shoe as if it suddenly burned his fingers. He chuckled softly, imagining the incandescent fury that was guaranteed to be on Dr. Smyth's face when Elisa told him that Scarecrow had rejected all her advances. Seeing Dr. Smyth so completely put out would be almost worth the agony the day had been.

He wrote her a note on a blank leaf from her own handwritten edition of the Washington Who's Who, promising to call her tomorrow. Then he tore it out of the book, leaving it on her glass of cognac, next to his untouched one. He rose and headed out the front door without so much as a goodbye.

He would not allow Elisa Danton to take up his entire evening.