“You may speak freely in here, Chief. The bridge officers have all sworn allegiance to me.”The Engineer frowned. “Are you certain?”“Absolute...y.”“So, you are taking command after all?”“No ... I am only performing my duties, but without some of the – shall we say – interference I have encountered in the past. I do not want to be a rogue Captain.”“Nor do I wish to be the Chief Engineer on a rogue ship, but do we have a choice – really?”The First Officer sighed. “Hopefully, our Captain will come to. We are sitting next to each other talking about our day when the waiter shows up to take our drink orders. You place you order and I order a white wine. After he lists the specials of the day he walks off to give us time to decide on our order. As we are looking over the menus. I take you hand and place it on the seat between us so I can hold your hand and not make a public display of it. Soon the waiter returns with our drinks and we place our orders. The entire time I am holding your hand. We would have liked to have booked a double but because Jenny was travelling with us, we had to keep up appearances, just in case she visited our room for any reason. Incidentally, I had had a brief affair with Jenny a number of years ago, before she married, but that’s another story. I confirmed the arrangements and started counting down the days. Looking forward to a stressful meeting seemed strange but it was the fringe benefits I was really looking forward to. On one occasion, when. Everyone knew what had happened to her, and people still couldn’t believe she had the courage to come back to work after only four months away. Tyler wondered why a person would do something like that to another human being. He and Nyla had been really close friends until she had gotten married, Tyler had sensed Shawn’s dislike of him since the moment they had been introduced. So he had just backed off and chalked it up as Shawn being territorial about his woman, because if he had a woman as.