“Well . . . yes. Doesn’t it?”
“Not really. You just told us, presumably because you’re scared. What if someone scared you about us?”
Ronnie sagged, and glanced at George hoping he had a bright idea. But George had gone to sleep, to snore in the irregular, creative way that made sleeping in the same room with him so impossible.
Chapter Seven
“Raffaele . . .” Her mother’s expression hovered between anxiety and annoyance. Raffa blinked. Her mind had drifted again, and the direction it had drifted did no one any good, and would infuriate her mother if she knew.
“Yes?” she asked, trying for a more mature boredom.
“You’re thinking about that boy,” her mother said. It was entirely unfair that mothers could, breaking all physical laws, practice telepathy.
“He’s not a boy,” Raffa said, in a counterattack she knew was useless.
“You agreed—” her mother began. Raffa pushed away the untouched breakfast which had no doubt given her mother the evidence needed, and stared out the long windows at the formal garden with its glittering statuary. The Lady of Willful Mien gazing scornfully past The Sorrowful Suitor. Boy with Serpent (she had hidden childish treasures in the serpent’s coils) in the midst of the herbs with snake in their names—a silly conceit, Raffa thought now. The group Musicians in the shade of the one informal tree (since no one could prune a weeping cassawood into a formal shape) and the line of bronze Dancers frolicking down the sunlit stone path toward the unheard music. She pulled her mind back from the memory that led straight from a child fondling the dancers’ bronze skirts, to the feel of Ronnie’s hand on her arm.
“I agreed to break the engagement. I agreed not to marry him secretly. I did not agree never to think of him again. It would have been a ridiculous agreement.”
“Well.” Her mother looked pointedly at the congealed remains of an omelet, and then at Raffa. “It will do no good to starve yourself.”
“Hardly,” Raffa said. She lifted her arms, demonstrating the snug fit of the velvet tunic that had been loose several weeks before.
“Still.” Parents never quit, Raffa thought. She wondered if she would have the energy for that when she was a parent herself. Assuming she became one. She supposed she would. Eventually. If Ronnie came back, and his parents quit quarreling with her parents, and so on. In the meantime, she was supposed to look busy and happy. Busy she could manage. She stood up, while her mother still groped for the next opening, and forced a smile.
“I’ve got to get to the board meeting. Remember that Aunt Marta asked me to keep an eye on her subsidiaries for her?”
“You don’t have to go in every day, Raffaele—”
“But I’m learning,” Raffa said. That was true. She had known vaguely what sorts of holdings her family had, had understood that whenever certain products changed hands, money flowed into the family coffers, but she had paid far more attention to what she spent her allowance on, than where it came from. “It’s actually kind of interesting.”
“I should hope so.” Delphina Kore had managed her own inherited corporations for years; of course she thought it was interesting. “I just meant—you have plenty of time to learn.”
“You used to say, ‘when I was your age, I was running DeLinster Elements singlehanded—’ ” Raffa reminded her.
“Yes, but that was before—when everyone knew rejuv was a one-time thing. Now you have plenty of time—as much as you want.”
And parents would live forever, the most effective glass ceiling of all. She would have rejuv herself, when the time came, but she didn’t look forward to a long, long lifetime of being the good daughter.
“We might get tired of running things,” her mother said, surprising her. Had she been that obvious? Her mother chuckled. “You’ll have your turn, and it won’t be as far ahead as you fear.”
She didn’t argue. She rarely argued. She thought about it, calmly and thoroughly, as she did most things.
Brun had wanted to be an adventurer. At least that’s what she’d said. Raffa wondered. All those years as a practical joker, a fluffhead party girl . . . had she really changed? Raffa remembered the island adventure well enough. She had been scared; she had killed someone; she had nearly died. She had done well enough, when you looked at the evidence—no panic, effective action—but she wouldn’t have chosen that way to maturity, if what she had now was maturity. She had always been the quiet one of the bunch, the one who got the drunks to bed, the injured to the clinic, the doors relocked, and the evidence hidden. She had imagined herself moving happily into an ordinary adult life—ordinary rich adult life, she reminded herself. She liked privilege and comfort; she had no overwhelming desire to test herself.
Now . . . Raffa looked at the serious face in the mirror and wondered why she was bothering. Brun, yes—not only her wildness, but her family’s flair, if that’s what you wanted to call it. Her own family had had no flair, not for generations. Steady hard work, her parents had always told her, made its own luck. Do it right and you won’t have to do it over. Think ahead and you won’t need good luck.
But Ronnie. Logic had nothing to do with that. She had argued with herself, but her mind had argued back: he was eligible on all counts except that right now his parents and her parents were on opposite sides, politically and economically. Otherwise—they were both R.E., they were both rich, they had grown up together. AND she loved him.
Word had spread that she and Ronnie were no longer an item. She suspected her mother, but it was not something they could discuss, not now. With the Royal Aerospace Service on something like permanent leave, there were more rich young men lounging around, lining the walls at social events, than she had ever known. Cas Burkburnet, who danced superbly and whose parents had something to do with the management of Arkwright Mining. Vo Pellin, a great lumbering bear who could hardly dance at all, but made everyone laugh. Anhera Vaslin and his brothers, all darkly handsome and eager to find wives to take back home. She knew better than that; Chokny Sulet had been a reluctant annexation to the Familias, and the women who went home with its young men were never seen offplanet again.
She had all the dancing, dining, and partying that she could absorb. If she had been a storycube heroine, it would have defined social success. And like a storycube heroine, she felt stifled by it all. She scolded herself for being selfish and silly, for remembering the feel of Ronnie’s head in her lap—his cold, muddy, unconscious head in her lap—when she was dancing with Cas. She had expected to hear about Ronnie from George Mahoney, who gossiped freely about everyone, no matter which side of a political divide you or they were on, but George had disappeared from social functions at the same time as Ronnie. No one seemed to know where they were, and Raffa couldn’t ask pointed questions without brows being raised and word getting back to her mother.
She was delighted, therefore, to get a call from George’s father Kevil, who asked her to meet with him and Lord Thornbuckle. She had not been in the Council complex since the king’s resignation. But she had grown up hearing about Kevil and Bunny, contemporaries of her parents, long before she had realized that they were important people. Now, as they settled her in a comfortable leather chair and offered her something to drink, she felt an odd combination of maturity and childishness. She was being admitted to adult councils in a way that made her feel even younger than she was.
“Ronnie and George went on a mission for us,” Lord Thornbuckle said, after she had accepted coffee and refused thinly sliced nutbread. Raffa clenched her hand on the saucer and set it down before it shook and rattled the cup. Ronnie and George? They had sent those two out together?