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“This just went to DEFCON Worse, didn’t it?”
“Oh, hell.” Reader had his head in his hands. It was catching.
“What? James, what?”
He looked around. “Oh, well. Not like it’s a secret to anyone in this room.” He sighed. “Kitty, Jeff wasn’t the only one who, ah . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shot an uncomfortable look toward Christopher.
Who went pale. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! We’re past that!” He shot a look at Martini. “Really, we’re past that.” What we were past was the fact Christopher had also wanted me when we’d first met, and we’d had a brief, wild moment in an elevator. Martini had had a hard enough time letting the incident go, but Christopher and I had been very careful since then and hadn’t done anything remotely romantic; in fact, we acted like opposing magnets when something potentially romantic loomed.
“Yeah, yeah, doesn’t matter,” Martini shot back. “Reynolds is going to be a bigger problem.”
“Me? Why?” Chuckie sounded confused for the first time.
Martini spun around. “Because you still want to marry her if you can. It’s complex, and it’s not pretty, and I need to get the rest of the details.” He looked at Gower. “We need everyone on high alert. Everyone’s going to have to be briefed, in shifts, key perso
We all looked at each other. “Richard, you mind telling us what’s going on? I mean, it’s that, or we all just go ru
White took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Alfred and my late wife were cousins, not as close as Christopher and Jeffrey are, but about as close as Jeffrey and Paul and Michael, are.”
Interesting, hadn’t known that. “Okay . . . so, cousins married a brother and sister. Not totally unusual.”
“No, not at all, on either one of our worlds.” White didn’t want to go on, it was obvious.
Michael, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet this entire time, spoke up. “You want me to explain it?” He was a smaller version of his older brother—big, black, bald, and gorgeous. He was also a major womanizer, but I doubted that had relevance here.
“How do you know?” White sounded shocked. Gower looked as shocked as White sounded.
Michael shrugged. “My mother told me about it. She was . . . concerned I would use our Unity Necklace . . . inappropriately.” Oh, wow, so him being a womanizer was relevant. Doubly interesting.
“What did she tell you?” White sounded guarded.
“That we were close enough from a blood standpoint that it could affect us.”
“What could affect you?” I figured the rest of us were getting as impatient as I was.
Michael gave me a wry smile. “Jeff and Christopher are part of the Alpha Centaurion royal family.”
I sat there. This didn’t compute. At all. “Come again?”
“Royal family. You’re marrying into it.” Michael seemed to find this fu
I looked at White. “He’s kidding, right?”
“No, he’s not.” White looked as though this was a conversation he’d never wanted to engage in. “Alfred and Theresa were the grandchildren of the reigning monarch when we all left.”
“They exiled their own grandkids?” Oh, I did not want to meet this part of Martini’s family at all.
“No. Alfred and Theresa made the choice to come with us to Earth.”
“Hang on. Paul and Michael aren’t that close to this bloodline, from what you all told me. You and Lucinda have another sister, and their father is her husband’s brother. So, what’s the co
“Our other sister also married into the royal family,” White admitted.
“Farther away from the monarchy,” Michael added. “More like a distant cousin of the reigning monarch’s, versus his direct grandchildren.”
“Is your home world a lot less populated than ours?”
“No, more populated, at least it was when we left,” White replied. “Why?”
“It’s a little odd to have this many people married into the monarchy, at least around here.”
“America doesn’t have a monarchy,” Michael reminded me.
“England does,” Chuckie said. “Were you all in someplace smaller like that?”
“I suppose, maybe smaller. Think of it more like living in Washington, D.C. Our families were politically involved, after all.”
I turned to Christopher. He looked as shocked as I felt. “You didn’t know?”
“Not really. My mother never talked about her family. She only spoke about the family here on Earth—she told me and Jeff they were the only A-Cs who mattered.”
“I can understand why.” I looked back to Michael. “So, what else?”
He shrugged. “My mother was worried this sort of thing would happen. When a member of the royal family declares for someone, it’s a huge political deal. It’s never done lightly.”
“Your mother’s an Earth woman. How did she know this?”
Michael laughed. “How to put it? She’s a lot like you. She badgered our dad until he gave her all the history.” I resolved to meet Mrs. Gower sooner as opposed to later.
I thought about the one image of Terry that Christopher had created for me in the air. She was in a tiara. For whatever reason, that hadn’t seemed odd to me at the time, possibly because I was half-dressed and trying to figure out how to hide what had happened from Martini and marveling over Christopher’s imageering talent. Christopher had called me princess, too—I’d never made the co
Christopher hadn’t, either, if his reactions were any clue. “Dad, why didn’t you tell us?”
White sighed. “It just didn’t seem . . . relevant. You boys had so many other pressures. Why tell you that in addition to everything else, you were related by blood to the monarchy? What good would it have done?”
“Did they put the PPB net up to keep humanity in, or to keep Martini and White on Earth?” Chuckie had recovered the quickest, and I could hear the conspiracy theories whirling through his brain.
“Both,” Martini snapped from his corner. “Almost done here.”
“So, I’m just spitballing here, Richard, but I’d have to guess Terry’s family were no more thrilled with you marrying her than your father was.”
“Less, if you can believe it.”
“How excited were they that Alfred married Lucinda?”
“Much less so. They married well before Theresa and I did. Alfred was disowned, it was a huge controversy.” White shook his head. “They did offer to let Alfred and Theresa rejoin the family if they renounced their marriages to us and remained on our home world while the rest of us went to Earth.”
“So, since they both passed on that offer, why would they care about whatever Jeff’s doing now?”
“I have no idea,” White admitted.
Martini slammed his phone closed and turned around. “I do. And it sucks.”
CHAPTER 5
MARTINI RAN HIS HAND THROUGH HIS HAIR and leaned against the wall. “My father figures there’s some kind of issue with succession back on the home world.”
“How so?” White asked. “There were plenty of other children and grandchildren.”
“When you left. Maybe not now.” Martini managed a weak grin in my direction. “You wouldn’t like the succession rules.”
“Male lines, male children only, right?”
“Right.”
“Similar to Earth, Jeff.”
“Only, on Earth, if there is no male child, they’ll allow a female to rule.”
“Not so on the old home world?” I asked White.
“Not so far as we know.”
“And since Christopher’s male, there’s a chance he could be involved in the succession issues.” Martini was so upset he could barely talk. “So they’re coming here. But it’s not to attend the wedding, most likely. At least, that’s not the main goal.”