Mac had been at the top of her class of field agents for all the mental stuff. Having several advanced degrees in mathematics and related fields helped. And she’d trained just as hard as the younger candidates did on the physical side of things, coming in top third among men and women twenty and thirty years her junior.
It was only when she started measuring herself against Handsome that she felt bad, but he had been specifically groomed, recruited, and trained to transform into the man he was. She had woken up one morning and didn’t want to be a numbers nerd anymore.
Mac was happy to admit that almost any other boss besides Miguel Cabrill wouldn’t have let her have this kind of mid-life crisis and reinvent herself. Hell, this was the very thing that Carlota hadn’t been allowed to do.
Put out to pasture, because men thought that women were too old to be sexy after twenty-seven. Not that she still harbored resentment at Umberto for running off with a waitress because a smarter wife was more than he could handle.
He’d expected her to be quiet, pliant, and vapid. Certainly, that’s what he’d married, the second time around.
Mac had never married again. Had dated, but never found a man or woman who drew her like a moth to a flame. She’d been busy proving that a former fashion model, however accidental, could be a brilliant mathematician named Esmeralda MacTavish.
Mac had only come along later. Mid-life crisis and all that.
She sat in the bar at one of the local resort casinos and drank something floofy and long on juice instead of alcohol. Rob drank staggering amounts regularly, but that was training his liver to be able to drink anybody under the table. And he had pills he could take that caused a lot of the alcohol to pass straight through without being absorbed, if he had sufficient warning.
With her dyed hair, she was portraying a possibly lonely woman in her early forties without much to do except sit in bars and look stunning. She could still wear the same pants she’d done at twenty. It was the shoulders, lats, and breasts that had gotten bigger and wider over time.
She spent effort on machines to give her muscles. Menopause had caused her chest to…expand. Men and women alike seemed to appreciate it, as they stared often enough.
Tonight, she had poured herself into a sleek, silver sheath that made her look like a sword, with her dark blond hair up in a tail that left her shoulders bare and showed off her tan. She’d worked hard on the tan on the way here, getting everything perfectly smooth, in case she needed to show it off.
Not many men other than Rob had seen her nude. Nor touched her. None, really, other than a few flings in the five years or so before Rob stepped into her life as something of a…partner. However you wanted to quantify their relationship.
Dinner infrequently, back at Ramsey when both of them might be in town. Never more than that. The afternoon in orbit, just before landing, had been the first time they’d laid together in nearly a year. Since Shravishtha Prime and a mission that had called for it at the time to maintain their legends against enemy spies.
Did Carlota have anybody that might understand the need for touch, when you still wanted them to go away after cooking you breakfast in the morning?
So many questions she wanted to ask the woman, comparing her to the image Mac had crafted in her mind.
Tonight, she was bait. And a special kind, since the right people wouldn’t really want her, once they got close enough to determine that she wasn’t Carlota. If they could. Mac had a stunner tucked away in the folds of her dress where she could get at it quickly if she needed, plus the Service had required her to study unarmed forms of combat. Mostly softer versions of Kung Fu that focused on eluding combat rather than punching.
Her instructor referred to it as old people prison fighting. Where you didn’t have time for all that silliness, so you just wanted to knock someone down long enough that you could run away.
Or sidestep and throw them into traffic and let a bus hit them instead.
She sipped her drink and put out pheromones tonight. The bar itself wasn’t packed, but it was doing a brisk business. She was here to be seen. Noticed.
Hopefully, not touched. She could get that elsewhere if she needed it.
Carlota would be jealous. Would that be enough to bring her out of the woodwork, too?