Come on, I'll help you up the stairs." Caroline leaned closer still to him for a moment and kissed him just underneath his ear. "Poor boy, I'll look a...ter you..."Simon growled, but inside it was good to hear.They struggled up the stairs, making more noise than Simon would have wished. As he feared his mother's voice came from his parents' bedroom, "Simon? Is that you?" It's me, Mrs. Cook, Caroline. I'm helping him up the stairs."Instantly his mother answered in a worried tone, "Is everything. The food was delicious, drinks enjoyable and she was at her social finest, chatting, laughing, dancing. Her smile made the star atop the tree look dull. I teased that I was going to have to start calling her 'Harold' because that laugh of hers could embarrass the angelic choir!She was just being herself, so beautiful and lovely and sweet. She looked so fantastic. To me, she always looks the way love feels.Her festive dress was giving me naughty ideas, but my visions were not of sugar plums! I. There was no path to victory in open conflict with the Union juggernaut. That opportunity, if it ever existed had passed after the last Y’All invasion. If the Galactic Council and the Kermac could not beat and conquer the Union back then, what chance did they have now? While the Kermac were seen, especially by Unions, as bumbling fools obsessed with their whiteness and their false beards, they were an old society, able to establish a substantial empire by the ruthless but unquestionably. In the short time that I’ve been on board we’ve grabbed three million dollars from ONE client, and others are queued up, waiting. Adding Dave Johnson to the western group is going to help us, as is getting a few field technicians going.The Alabama bunch just made a big kill with a client in Oklahoma.“We’re going to get an easy four or five million from them, but we’re going to do it at the expense of putting some people in Oklahoma for a while,” Alan said. “Key to our success is...”“ ....