"Look, Malcolm, I'm sorry, all right?"

Malcolm Reed, armory officer of Enterprise, sighed wearily and leaned against the desk in Captain Jonathan Archer's cabin. "Sorry? Sorry, Jonathan? I don't quite know if 'sorry' cuts it. We have men down—security *and* MACOs. We have a damaged airlock. We have—oh, I haven't even got all the reports in; who knows what else is damaged. *And* this woman's gotten scans for the Xindi of human anatomy, Vulcan anatomy…" He looked down at Archer's pet beagle, Porthos. "Probably even canine anatomy."

Reed crossed his arms and stared angrily at Archer. "And *why* did all this happen, I ask you? Why? Because a certain ship's captain couldn't stop drooling at the blasted slave girls right in front of his own lover. You got so wrapped up in trying to track the bloody Xindi that you let that blonde strumpet get you right into her clutches. And *I* had to stand there and watch you make a bloody arse out of yourself through the whole revolting production."

Archer raised a hand. "All right, Malcolm, I made a fool of myself and I got us into a mess. There's no doubt about that. I'm sorry."

But Reed was on a roll now and not to be assuaged. "All right, you're sorry for putting your ship and your entire crew in danger. Wonderful. What happens if the next thing the Xindi throw our way is a redhead with green eyes and legs up to her neck, hmm? Are we going to have to have people die and a hole in the side of the ship for you to quit trying to cat around with pieces of fluff that get thrown at you?"

"Malcolm, I wasn't *trying* to do anything like that, I was *trying* to get information about the Xindi, and that slaver threw her at us as part of a plot to get biological information about us."

"Well, she certainly did *that,* didn't she?" Reed sniffed. "It's not as if it were anything *important,* is it?" He adjusted his perch, still glaring at Archer with a look that could freeze an overheating warp engine. "And just how, may I ask, did she get your, ahem, *biological* information? Was it an…er…*oral* report, or did it get *handed* over? Or am I missing something here?"

"Look, Malcolm," Archer sighed, moving to his bed and easing himself onto its edge. "I haven't got a clue what she did. All I remember is that she came in, and everything went foggy, and then she was standing in front of me and I felt like I'd just woken up. I thought at the time that we'd been talking and that I'd started to fall asleep standing there. I thought I remembered that she'd touched me in some way, but then I thought I'd started drifting off and dreaming."

Reed crossed his arms and glowered in even more irritation. "So we've been together for what, eight months now, and you meet some blonde trollop and have no qualms that you think you're dreaming about her? Oh, bloody wonderful, that is."

Archer stood up, crossed the room, and slid his arms around Reed. "Malcolm, I apologized. I don't know what else you want me to do." He pressed a kiss into Reed's hair, relieved that Reed didn't fight the touch.

"First it was you and that lady druggist on that one planet. Now it's some sleazy tart who's no better than she should be. Really, what *am* I supposed to put up with?"

"We weren't even together when I met that apothecary."

Reed relented, his rigid stance easing slightly within Archer's embrace. "Very true. I'm sorry."

"You didn't have to drool quite so badly at the slave market."

"I was not drooling."

"Close enough," Reed snipped.

"Malcolm," Archer protested feebly, "you *know* I like women."

"Well, you don't have to be so bloody obvious about it in front of my face, do you?" The shiver Reed gave caused Archer to suspect that this was the root of the whole discussion. "I mean really, it was all I could do *not* to look. And there *you* were with your jaw on the floor—where did you think you were, locked up with a harem of Orion slave girls?"

"A man can dream—Ouch! Malcolm!" Reed's elbow had strategically punctuated Archer's first part of the remark.

"Sorry." The smirk on Reed's face indicated that Archer's lover was anything but sorry. He wriggled out of Archer's arms. "And on that note, I think I'm going to bed. In *my* cabin." Crossing his arms again, he continued. "Maybe a couple of nights alone will make you think about it, hmm?"

"But Malcolm—" Archer slumped as Reed turned to him while heading for the door. "Please?"

Reed looked first at Archer's wide eyes, then down at Porthos, who was the ship's expert at wide-eyed pleading. Like dog, like owner. "Porthos, you're a pretty well-trained boy. Maybe you can give your master some lessons in behaving, hmm?" Another smirk, and an amused look back over at Archer. "Don't worry, love, I'm not going anywhere. I'm just waiting for *you* to learn 'stay'. Once you've got *that* down, we can get back to 'lie down'." He headed out the door, chuckling, as Archer stared at Porthos, who looked up in sympathy at his less well-trained owner.

"Looks like we've got a couple of nights to ourselves, huh? Okay, boy, you can sleep on my bed tonight. But no cheese, okay?"

Porthos' tail thumped on his pillow before he jumped up on Archer's bed. If the blonde lady could control his owner with her thoughts, surely he could manipulate him into some cheese. After all, as Lieutenant Reed said, daddy wasn't very well trained.