Alien Diplomacy

me” vibes. This was rare when they were together, especially if they were together with me. Jeff still wasn’t quite over the fact that Chuckie had proposed, and I’d considered it, while Jeff and I were sort of broken up. Operation Drug Addict had some good memories attached to it, but not nearly enough to make me reminisce often.
    “Why aren’t we moving?” I looked forward, at the driver. There were two men up there, but they were facing front. No one I recognized from the back, but I knew for sure that whoever was driving hadn’t been the one who’d brought me to class.
    The driver looked fairly tall, big, and built along Jeff’s lines. The guy who had shotgun was bigger. They were both in suits.
    Chuckie grinned. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell your driver where you want to go?”
    I didn’t get it, but I knew that look. When you’ve been best friends with a guy since ninth grade, you know his looks. And this one was saying “I know you’re gonna like it” quite clearly.
    I leaned forward. “Excuse me, but can you take us back to the Embassy?”
    The driver turned around and flashed me a grin. “Of course. Trojan football always here to help.”



CHAPTER 4
    I COULDN’T HELP IT, I squealed. “Len!” The bigger guy turned around and grinned, too. “Kyle! What are you guys doing here?” Len and Kyle had been on the USC football team and, thankfully, in Vegas when Jeff and I were doing the pre-show entertainment of saving the world before we got married. They’d helped us, me in particular, in a big way.
    Len laughed. “We’re out of college and working for the C.I.A.”
    “Just like we told you we’d do,” Kyle added. “I’ve been completely clean, too. No drinking, no carousing, no threatening women, just studying and prepping.”
    “True enough,” Chuckie said. “He’s not only been clean, he spent the last year running USC’s Take Back the Night program, volunteering for their escort service and teaching girls what to look for to avoid a date rape situation and also what to do to get out of it safely.”
    “Excuse me—escort service? Kyle became a pimp or a gigolo, and you’re all okay with that?”
    Jeff coughed, Chuckie started laughing his head off, and Len leaned his head on the steering wheel he was laughing so hard, while Kyle turned bright red.
    “No,” Chuckie gasped out. “It’s the program where someone can get Security or similar to walk them back to their dorm, apartment, sorority house, and so on. It’s a protective service. We had it at ASU.”
    “Oh. Maybe we did. I never needed it—I used CPS.”
    Chuckie started laughing again, though Len got himself under control. Kyle was still blushing.
    “What are you talking about?” Jeff asked.
    “My campus escort was always handled by Chuckie Protective Services.”
    “I don’t want to hear about it,” Jeff said, with a half-groan and half-growl.
    “Also,” Len said quickly, “Kyle was one of the main representatives for our sports program’s preventive counseling service that works with athletes to keep them from becoming the kind of bastards who think they can do anything to any woman at any time.”
    “Really? Wow.”
    “Really,” Len said. “You don’t want to know what he did to anyone on any of our teams who even looked at a girl slightly funny.” Len sounded proud of Kyle. Considering he’d been more than fed up with him when we’d met, this, more than the listing of Kyle’s protective resume, impressed me.
    “You’d appreciate it, however,” Chuckie added.
    Kyle’s blush was still on full. “I just wanted you to be sure you could trust me,” he mumbled.
    “Nicely done.” I figured saying that I’d already trusted him would sort of diminish all his achievements, so I kept it to myself. I congratulated myself on the fact that I could be diplomatic, at least sometimes and with certain people.
    “So, meet your driver and bodyguard,” Chuckie said. “If you want them, of course.”
    “Totally! But, um, why them, why two, and why C.I.A. operatives and not Centaurion agents?”
    Jeff sighed. “I know why you haven’t liked the other drivers we’ve tried—you didn’t recruit them or go through a danger situation with them. They’re just random men to you. Human agents help us blend in more easily, and you’re away from me far too often these days—in addition to someone who can drive, I want someone with you I know will break necks if you’re threatened. I also