The Director cleared his throat and stared disbelievingly across the desk at his two - arguably best - operatives. Those bushy white eyebrows made it difficult to discern whether he was going to applaud their tenacity or admonish their stupidity. "Tell me how you managed to obtain the thumb drive?"

As if he hadn't just read the debrief, thought Max, and somehow found the information therein woefully lacking. She curbed the desperate urge to look over at Alec. She didn't want to have to speak out loud the details not in the report - the details she hadn't even had a second to go over with Alec. It'd been an emotional couple of hours and they both needed some rest.

"As I understand it," began Alec coarsely, but showing no other signs of discomfort, "Max saved my life."

A flood of emotions washed through her as she remembered acutely the events of the evening.

_

Five Hours Prior

She treaded water for the few seconds it took to locate Alec, and felt her heart nearly burst out of her chest when she realized something was very wrong. He wouldn't have just been pretending to be dead for the sake of those two nimrods who'd blown up The Genevieve; no, his stillness as he started to sink into the angry water, red and orange with the burning wreckage's reflection, was something she couldn't quite bring herself to recognize at the time.

She wasn't sure if she could swim-blur, but if that was a thing X-5s could do, then that's what she'd done. She had pulled his solid rag doll form out to a buoy platform sea lions typically used to sunbathe and sleep on during the day, hoisted him up onto it, and began CPR.

Remember to check the passageway for obstruction. Feel for breath. Chest compressions. Add air.

With these thoughts running a loop in her mind, she set to work, ignoring the cold water sluicing down her arms and onto his chest as she began compressions. Droplets fell from her nose onto his face when she neared it. She pinched his nose and pushed her open mouth against his to fill his lungs.

It was only two minutes before Alec coughed up some water onto his already wet chest. Max helped him to sit upright while he came to and looked around. "Max," he asked, confused.

"Welcome back, soldier." She smiled wide, truly happy the man before her was breathing again, and tried to cover the look of worry she knew she must have been sporting. She tamped down on those telltale warm tears and forced herself to ask through staccato breath, "What happened? I thought you were right behind me?"

His left hand reached out for her face and he brushed the tears from under her eyes. His brows scrunched up as he realized what must have just happened, and his irises softened to their honeyed hazel color. "Max," he began, staring into her relieved eyes with new understanding. "Did I...?"

Max pressed her lips together and she mustered up courage to continue staring right into him. Did you die?

His face stayed still, motionless as a ship on idle waters, but the hazel storm raged and crashed in his eyes, and she deciphered that look in an instant: furious embarrassment that he almost died by drowning, something so inanely ordinary.

"And you...?" He let the rest of that question hang in the air, too, and she cast her eyes downward. He lowered his head, maneuvering into her field of vision, if only to try to read the truth. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw as pain came over him.

A new wave of panic coursed through Max. What was wrong with him now? Had she broken a rib while doing chest compressions? Or maybe he was injured another way while swimming away from the boat? She hadn't exactly had time to check him over.

His hand moved from her cheek to grasp the back of his head. He grunted and his hand came away with a little blood.

Well, shit, thought the dark haired woman, checking behind her to see how far they were from the docks and whether or not those two henchmen were still there. Luckily, where once argued the two men now showed a half-destroyed but otherwise empty dock. She kind of hoped those idiots had fallen in.

"Think you can swim?" she asked, turning back to her patient. Hauling him to the another slip that wasn't damaged would be a bit taxing with the cold water, but she could do it if needed.

"Yeah." Alec scooted toward the edge of the buoy and winced, grunting in pain. He understood they really needed to get to dry land. "I'm okay," he offered, willing that to be the case, and answering her unasked question.

They slipped off the platform and back into the icy cold water and swam back at normal speed. If Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb were nowhere in sight, they could afford to slow down from a blur, but not slow enough to freeze from those temperatures.

Just to be sure he was okay, Max kept her handler in sight and watched his long arms slice through the water in front of her. It was too dark to see his head injury out there, but she'd check it as soon as she could.

Once back on land, Alec stood to his full height and winced again, nearly doubling over to grasp his hamstring.

"Did you hurt your leg?"

"I don't know. Feels like I got bit or something." He prodded at the area to no avail.

"Let's get you to the car. Med kit still in the side compartment? We need to get out of these clothes." Words flowed from her mouth like sentence association. The car would have some lights she could use to assess his injuries. There'd be a med kit in the trunk somewhere if anything needed immediate attention. Dry clothes and the promise of a heater propelled them. Max scooped up under his arm and he leaned on her gently as they walked back to the SUV.

With the hatch up, Max pulled both hers and Alec's bags to the foot of the trunk area and started to undress hastily. They'd have to take everything off. Wet underwear was not comfortable. No longer having his arm around her made her keenly aware of the cold, and her teeth began to chatter, shivers pebbling her skin with goosebumps.

Alec stood right next to her and peeled his sweater and shirt off in one movement, revealing his torso. He knew she was watching to verify where he'd been hurt. With the exception of a small bruise on his ribs, the expanse of his chest was uninjured.

When his agent mirrored his movements, dragging her black shirt up her back and pulling her head and arms out of the fabric, he checked for her wounds, too, but she didn't seem to have any.

A jolt of warmth spread through him when she unhooked her bra and pulled it from her cold body. He caught sight of one perky breast, from the side, its pert nipple looking tight and hard from the low temperature. He coughed and turned away to give her some sort of privacy, wondering if she'd brought extra clothes - a question that was answered quickly when she pulled out the dress, slipped it on, and wrapped it around her waist to tie it on the side.

He retrieved his dress shirt and heard Max's sound of surprise, then felt her icy fingers on his back, nearly gasping himself from her freezing fingertips.

Max ghosted gently along his right scapula and under his ribs on the left side. His senses honed in on the places her skin touched his, and he stilled. "You're bruised here," she said in awe, prodding gently at his marked flesh. Just as fast as she'd touched him, she removed her fingers.

He tried to push an arm through his shirt, but her continued silent appraisal gave him pause again. He could feel her eyes tracing the muscles in his back and arms almost as if they were lead in a pencil, warming from friction of use.

Max reached up to his head and probed the edges of his wound. "You must have been smacked by some debris," she started, "because your bruises are quasi-linear, and your scalp looks like it has two lacerations. We should probably get you scanned just to be sure."

She referred to the two tests the infirmary would likely perform once they got back to Manticore and before their debriefing with Lydecker: a CT scan followed by an MRI. The government liked to make sure the brains of their billion-dollar genetically enhanced soldiers were unharmed after head injuries.

"I don't feel concussed," he offered, facing her, and finally able to slip on his shirt.

Max pulled up the sides of her dress to access her underwear, and let the fabric fall as she inched her panties over her hips and down her legs. For the second time tonight, she was sans underwear with her handler, albeit under very different circumstances. She caught him looking at the small lacy undergarment when she slid her ankles out of the leg holes, his careful features looking somewhat stoic, but his eyes giving away their dangerous darkness.

Again, her thoughts carried her to a fantasy of giving him complete control as he kissed her, pressed her against the luxury SUV, slid his curious fingers up her inner thigh to test her wetness. She could almost feel the heat of his breath on her breasts, the thickness of his tongue on her nipples, the weight of his dick as he pushed into her and dragged out torturously slow.

"Where did you go just now?" interrupted her blond commanding officer, his lips starting to tilt on one side.

God, those lips are fucking sexy. "N-nowhere," She stuttered. "Just trying to think warm thoughts."

He hummed as if in acceptance and then abruptly grabbed the cargo pocket on his pant leg. "I got the drive." He fished a baggie out of the pocket and held it up between them. "That's why I was close enough to get knocked out. It was taped close to the prop."

Not knocked out, Max thought sadly. The fact that one little fucking thumb drive could have meant the end for him infuriated her. She ground her teeth as he put the baggie in his duffel. "We don't even know if it has anything remotely pertinent on it."

He didn't look at her. With his eyes trained on the duffel and his jaw clenched, she could read him easily. Yeah, he was pissed, but so was she. That little fucking piece of old tech was not worth his life. They had other ways of ascertaining the info they needed. And who even knew if that thumb drive had the specific info the needed?

"It was my call, and I made it." Alec buttoned up his shirt a little over halfway in the uncomfortable silence. "You would have done the same thing."

"And you would've fucking dressed me down for it," she responded. He was right - she would have done the same thing had their roles been reversed; but damn it, she was right, too. He would have gone hoarse from lecturing her.

Quietly compartmentalizing something she couldn't discern, Alec deliberately closed his mouth and set to untying his boots, not at all eager to continue their arguing.

Max took it as a stalemate. For now, anyway.

When he stood, his fingers suddenly moved to his pants. "Whatever stung me feels like it's right below my right cheek," he gestured. "Can you take a look?"

Right back to business. "Yeah," she agreed, and then found herself taking several deep breaths. He was about to bare his naked ass to her and she needed to keep it professional. Medical. This was not how she imagined she'd see any part of him naked.

He unbuttoned and zipped down the fly of his jeans, and pushed the jeans and his boxer briefs down, turning to give her his backside just in time to not flash her with full frontal nudity.

Max squatted behind him, feeling the seemingly arctic breeze blow up her dress, and lifted the back of his dress shirt halfway up his muscular cheek so she could see the injury. "You have a very large splinter," she informed. "Hand me the tweezers from the kit?"

As he leaned forward to dig through the kit, Max caught shadowed sight of his shaft between his legs. File that away for later, she thought. It wasn't partial vision of his length that caused her to shiver again, it was the fact that she saw it so far down his thigh that made her glad his back was to her, because with the way she was blushing, he'd know right away the affect he had on her. It also didn't escape her that he should have had some serious shrinkage, but even in the shadows, his manhood looked weighty. How did he keep himself so warm when they both should have been damn-near frost-bitten?

He passed the tweezers back to her. She cupped the side of his thigh for balance, feeling the muscle tense, and quickly plucked out a three-inch piece of wood from just under his cheek. He nearly jumped when she placed her hand over the wound to wipe the little droplets of blood that escaped. "My hands are cold," she said too late.

"Yeah," he scoffed. "Thanks."

Rising up, Max shivered again. Her dress wasn't warm enough and she was eager to get in the SUV and run the heater. "I'll start the car," she offered.