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had gotten caught up with such a judgmental Neo-Nazi was beyond her.
    "I know where you're going with that fertile imagination of yours, so just stop it now,"
    Peyton said. "Nick is not Wells."
    "Who says?"
    "I do."
    "Like you know so much about it."
    "I know enough. I hear how you talk about him."
    "I can't stand him." That he was an always-right know-it-all with insightful ideas that made her and everyone else in the agency envious had nothing to do with her dislike, of course.
    "My point exactly. You can never stand the men you usually wind up in bed with."
    Fertile imagination? Did Peyton Carlyle have to have such a fertile memory, dammit?
    "You make it sound as if there've been all that many."
    Peyton smiled and put an arm around Slany's shoulder. "I know very well the chaste existence you've been living the last decade."
    "It's only been two years, smart-ass!"
    "Nevertheless, I know you've been abstaining since you hit thirty—not that you were all that active and wild when you were indulging—and I want you to know there's no need for you to continue. You've atoned for any number of sins and misjudgments you think you committed.
    Time to get back on the horse. Or the stallion, as it were." Peyton wiggled her eyebrows.
    Slany playfully elbowed her in the ribs, and Peyton fell back in the grass, clutching her middle with the appropriate amount of histrionics.
    "I think you broke a rib," she gasped as she sat back up.
    "C'mon…" Slany slapped Peyton’s thigh. She got to her knees, then stood, Coco immediately at her side. "I've got some leftover Chinese in the fridge. It's more than enough for two."
    "Well, why didn't you say so? You know the only reason I trek out to your house in the
    'burbs as often as I do is to bum a free meal." Peyton bounded to her feet and left the patio, following behind Slany's heels on the way to the house. "You're going to have to start learning how to throw down in the kitchen if you're even thinking of taking up with Nick. You know how Italians are about their food. I bet his mama makes her pasta and tomato sauce from scratch."
    Slany didn't even turn as she gave her friend the finger over a shoulder. "How horribly stereotypical of you."
    Peyton just chuckled behind her.
    Coco ran by both of them to get to his big dish in the far corner of the kitchen floor.
    Slany peeled off her gardening gloves and tossed them into the bucket by the basement door, then walked to the cupboard to retrieve Coco's food. She filled the bowl to the brim from the large bag of dry food, and Coco went to work emptying it as she went to the fridge a few feet 16
    Terms of Surrender
    away. She pulled out several white cartons and put them on the Formica counter adjacent.
    "There's Egg Fu Yung, sweet-and-sour broccoli, white rice, and fried chicken wings."
    "How you stay in shape on a diet like this…" Peyton hefted herself up and parked her shapely derriere on the counter beside the food cartons, opened a couple, and leaned in to sniff.
    "It's a good thing you don't do this too often."
    "A rare indulgence, I assure you."
    "Good. I taught you well, Grasshopper."
    Slany giggled at the preposterous statement. Peyton was the biggest Twinkie addict this side of the Mason-Dixon line, but no one would ever know it to look at her slim, but voluptuous figure.
    She took a fork out of the silverware drawer and apportioned the contents of each carton onto two disposable plates, then heated one plate in the microwave.
    "I didn't realize I was starving until you started doling out the MSG."
    "Stop belittling the food of which you are about to partake." Slany playfully swiped at her head. Peyton laughed and hopped down from the counter as the microwave buzzer sounded.
    Slany removed the plate and placed it on the counter in front of Peyton before she put the other plate in. "You want to eat out on the patio?"
    "It's nice enough out, sure. But in the meantime…" Peyton dug into a gravy-laden egg-and-shrimp patty with her fork,