"But I'm an amateur."
"Not for damn long."
Wonder of wonders, this actually won a smile of increasing self-confidence. "All I did was assemble some pretty standard design elements."
"So, ten percent of that is for the design elements. The other ninety percent is for knowing how to arrange them."
Hah, she didn't argue with that . You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.
This was, he recognized, a good bright note on which to end. He didn't want to linger to the point of boring her, as Vormoncrief had evidently done. Was it too early to . . . no, he'd try. "By the way, I'm putting together a dinner party for some old friends of mine—the Koudelka family. Kareen Koudelka, who is a sort of prot?g? of my mother's, is just back from a school year on Beta Colony. She's hit the ground running, but as soon as I can determine a date when everyone's free, I'd like to have you come too, and meet them."
"I wouldn't want to intrude—"
"Four daughters," he overrode this smoothly, "Kareen's the youngest. And their mother, Drou. And Commodore Koudelka, of course. I've known them all my life. And Delia's fianc?, Duv Galeni."
"A family with five women in it? All at once?" An envious note sounded plainly in her voice.
"I'd think you'd enjoy them a lot. And vice versa."
"I haven't met many women in Vorbarr Sultana . . . they're all so busy . . ." She glanced down at her black skirt. "I really ought not to go to parties just yet."
"A family party," he emphasized, tacking handily into this wind. "Of course I mean to invite the Professor and the Professora." Why not? He had, after all, ninety-six chairs.
"Perhaps . . . that would be unexceptionable."
"Excellent! I'll get back to you on the dates. Oh, and be sure to call Pym to notify the House guards when your workmen are due, so he can add them to his security schedule."
"Certainly."
And on that carefully-balanced note, warm yet not too personal, he made his excuses and decamped.
So, the enemy was now thronging her gates. Don't panic, boy. By the time of the dinner party, he might have her up to the pitch of accepting some of his wedding-week engagements. And by the time they'd been seen publicly paired at half a dozen of those, well, who knew.
Not me, unfortunately.
He sighed, and sprinted off through the rain to his waiting car.
* * *
Ekaterin wandered back to the kitchen, to see if her aunt needed any more help with the clean up. She was guiltily afraid she was too late, and indeed she found the Professora sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and stack of, judging by the bemused look on her face, undergraduate essays.
Her aunt frowned fiercely, and scribbled with her stylus, then looked up and smiled. "All done, dear?"
"More like, just started. Lord Vorkosigan chose the backcountry garden. He really wants me to go ahead."
"I never doubted it. He's a decisive man."
"I'm sorry for all the interruptions this morning." Ekaterin made a gesture in the direction of the parlor.
"I don't see why you're apologizing. You didn't invite them."
"Indeed, I didn't." Ekaterin held up her new credit chit, and smiled. "But Lord Vorkosigan has already paid me for the design! I can give you rent for Nikki and me now."
"Good heavens, you don't owe us rent. It doesn't cost us anything to let you have the use of those empty rooms."
Ekaterin hesitated. "You can't say the food we eat comes free."
"If you wish to buy some groceries, go ahead. But I'd much prefer you saved it toward your schooling in the fall."
"I'll do both." Ekaterin nodded firmly. Carefully managed, the credit chit would spare her having to beg her father for spending money for the next several months. Da was not ungenerous, but she didn't want to hand him the right to give her reams of unwanted advice and suggestions as to how to run her life. He'd made it plain at Tien's funeral that he was unhappy she hadn't chosen to come home, as befit a Vor widow, or gone to live with her late husband's mother, though the senior Madame Vorsoisson hadn't invited them.
And how had he imagined Ekaterin and Nikki could fit in his modest flat, or find any educational opportunities in the small South Continent town to which he'd retired? Sasha Vorvayne seemed a man oddly defeated by his life, at times. He'd always made the conservative choices. Mama had been the daring one, but only in the little ways she could fit into the interstices of her role as a bureaucrat's wife. Had the defeat become contagious, toward the end? Ekaterin sometimes wondered if her parents' marriage had been, in some subtler way, almost as much of a secret mismatch as her own.
A white-haired head passed the window; a rattle, and the back door opened to reveal her Uncle Vorthys, Nikki in tow. The Professor stuck his head inside, and whispered dramatically, "Are they gone? Is it safe to come back?"
"All clear," reported his wife, and he lumbered into the kitchen.
He was burdened with a large bag, which he dumped on the table. It proved to contain replacements, several times over, for the pastries that had been consumed earlier.
"Do you think we have enough now?" the Professora inquired dryly.
"No artificial shortages," declaimed her husband. "I remember when the girls were going through that phase. Up to our elbows in young men at all hours, and not a crumb left in the house at the end of the day. I never understood your generous strategy." He explained aside to Ekaterin, "I wanted to cut their numbers by offering them spotty vegetables, and chores. The ones who came back after that , we would know were serious. Eh, Nikki? But for some reason, the women wouldn't let me."
"Feel free to offer them all the rotten vegetables and chores you can think of," Ekaterin told him. Alternately, we could lock the doors and pretend no one is home. . . . She sat down glumly beside her aunt, and helped herself to a pastry. "Did you and Nikki get your share, finally?"
"We had coffee and cookies and milk at the bakery," her uncle assured her.
Nikki licked his lips happily, and nodded confirmation. "Uncle Vorthys says all those fellows want to marry you," he added in apparent disbelief. "Is that really true?"
Thank you, dear Uncle , Ekaterin thought wryly. She'd been wondering how to explain it all to a nine-year-old boy. Though Nikki didn't seem to find the idea nearly as horrifying as she did. "That would be illegal," she murmured. "Outr?, even." She smiled faintly at By Vorrutyer's jibe.
Nikki scorned the joke. "You know what I mean! Are you going to pick one of 'em?"
"No, dear," she assured him.
"Good." He added after a moment of silence, "Though if you did , a major would be better than a lieutenant."
"Ah . . . why?"
Ekaterin watched with interest as Nikki struggled to evolve Vormoncrief is a patronizing Vor bore , but to her relief, the vocabulary escaped him. He finally fell back on, "Majors make more money."
"A very practical point," Uncle Vorthys observed, and, perhaps still mistrusting his wife's generosity, packed up about half of his new stock of pastries to carry off and hide in his basement laboratory. Nikki tagged along.