Some moments of walking toward the corner passed before Mandi asked, "And..?" "And what?" "That's it?" With a shrug, Cade said, "Yes'm, that's about it. I've been treating you like a beautiful woman because that's mostly what you are to me. If you need more than that -- or less than that -- you'll probably have to look elsewhere." "Mostly?" "Yeah, mostly. I'm not forgetting that you can speak other languages and fly, but at the moment you're just walking beside me and being good company. Seems to me that I should respond in kind; that is, to make every effort to be good company in return. If you wanted more, you'd probably be somewhere else with someone who'd feed your ego." With a grin, Cade added, "With the guys on the fourth floor, for instance, who'd either be waiting on you hand and foot and fawning all over you or avoiding you." Sighing, Mandi said, "That gets old fast, you know. People either weigh and measure every word they say or they babble. There's almost no middle ground." "The price of fame," said Cade, "However clandestine." "Screw fame," said Mandi. "I haven't had an intelligent conversation with anyone but John since Wednesday. Well, not until you showed up, anyway. All anyone wanted to talk about was me. Same old questions, over and over." Making a suitable sigh of pity, Cade said, "Well, I'll try not to disappoint you, milady. I won't ask where you're from, how you got here, how fast you can fly, or anything like that." Peering sharply at him, Mandi said, "Yeah, you've managed to avoid those questions so far. Why?" "Because I don't really need to know the answers. It's enough that you're on my arm and sharing time with me." Continuing to regard him askance, Mandi asked, "Or is it that you already know the answers? Did John or someone else brief you about me?" "Nope. You appeared out of nowhere today when you hopped over a car and jumped into the sky with it. A little while later I ran into you at the elevators." "So when you jumped on that guy, you just assumed -- without knowing anything else about me -- that I'd do something about the other two?" "Yup. I figured all you needed was a distraction to provide a reasonable opening. You'd just survived a major explosion, so it didn't seem likely that bullets would slow you down much, and all the guns were pointed at me at the time anyway. I'd have been real surprised if you hadn't done what you did." "Surprised?" asked Mandi. "You'd have been dead." Snapping his fingers as if just realizing that fact, Cade grinningly said, "Well, then, it's a damned good thing I guessed right, isn't it?" Mandi's face was stern as she stopped to face him and said, "You certainly put a hell of a lot of faith in that guess." "Correction; I put a hell of a lot of faith in you." "You know what I mean, Ed. What if I hadn't lived up to your expectations?"