Mal shoulda known. He’d had experience with the type before. The girls who look all angelic but are actually quite the opposite. The ones who are all sweet and demure around their parents, but turn into hellcats the minute they are alone with their prey.

Hell, he’d gotten his cherry busted at the hands of one of them. And she was a preacher’s kid to boot.

Colonel’s daughter, Miss Katie, was no different. Sashayin’ past all the enlisted guys with that hip wiggle, chest thrust up and out. Knowin’ all too well just how long it had been since a one of ‘em – includin’ him, sad to say – had a taste of anything remotely like that. Heels and skirt just a tad too high and blouse an equal amount too low – not enough for the old man to notice, but he and the other fellahs surely did.

It was the contents of that blouse upon which Corporal First Class Malcolm C. Reynolds was contemplating as he leaned against one of the jeeps in the motor pool. He’d drawn the short straw and got stuck with motorpool guard duty during the fancypants ball for Miss Katie’s 18th birthday. All them young buck officers getting’ to eat fine food and dance with Miss Katie and her friends, while he got stuck with K-rations, cold stale coffee and having to keep a watchful eye on the colonel’s prized jeep lest it get even a single smudge on it’s blinding wax job.

He was of a certainty that even though the odds of any of them young buck officers getting a chance to actually undo any of the lacings holding Miss Katie in her party dress were about equal to his, they at least got better surroundings in which to contemplate their lack of luck. Mal shifted his weight and took another swig of the cold coffee. It was gonna be a long night.

At that exact moment, the object of his fantasies appeared in the doorway. Said fantasy was done up in an ankle-length pale turquoise silk cheong sam with a matching silk flower artfully perched atop a blond head. Strappy sandaly things in a silk fabric to match the dress that featured a slit running all the way up the