Beautiful Secret

But then we would be required to keep talking, and that definitely didn’t seem to be going well. Best to just leave it.

“Can I offer you a beverage before we lift off?” the flight attendant asked before setting a napkin down in front of me.

I deferred to Ruby, and she leaned closer to speak to the woman over the din of travelers boarding the plane. Her breast pressed to the arm of my shirt, and I felt my entire body go stiff, careful to not seem to lean into . . . it.

“I’ll have some champagne,” Ruby said.

The flight attendant smiled uncomfortably as she nodded—no doubt it wasn’t something they generally poured before five in the morning—and turned to me.

“I . . .” I began, haltingly. Should I order champagne, too, so it wasn’t odd for her to do it? Or should I set the example for professional decorum and order the grapefruit juice I’d planned for? “Well, I suppose if it’s not too much trouble, I could also—”

Ruby held up a hand. “I’m totally kidding, by the way. Sorry. Joke bomb! I mean no! Not a bomb, I’d never joke about . . . that.” She closed her eyes and groaned. “I’ll just have some OJ.”

I looked up, sharing a brief, confused expression with the flight attendant. “I’ll take grapefruit juice, please.”

With our orders noted, the flight attendant left and Ruby turned to me. Something about her face, the unguarded honesty in her eyes . . . it triggered a tender protectiveness in me I was wholly unaccustomed to.

She blinked away, moving to stare so hard at her tray I was afraid she would crack it through sheer intensity.

“All right?” I asked.

“Just—sorry about that. And yes. I—” She paused and then tried again. “I wasn’t going to order champagne. Did you really think that?”

“Well.” She had ordered it, even if only in jest. “No?” I hoped that was the right answer.

“And that whole bomb thing,” she whispered, waving a hand in front of her as if to push the thought away. “I am such an idiot around you.”

“Just me?”

She slumped and I realized how it had sounded.

“No. I . . . that is, I take issue with what you’re saying: I’ve never seen you act like an idiot around me.”

“The elevator?”

Smiling, I conceded this. “Well.”

“And right now?”

This twisted something inside me. “Is there anything I can do?”

She blinked up to my face and gazed at me with a familiar sort of fondness.

And then she blinked, shaking her head once, and it was gone. “I’ll be fine. Just nervous about a trip with the director of planning and blah blah.”

Wanting to put her more at ease, I asked, “Where did you do your undergraduate work?”

She took a deep breath, and then turned to face me fully. “UC San Diego.”

“Engineering?”

“Yes. With Emil Santorini.”

I acknowledged this with a small lift of my brow. “He’s tough.”

She grinned. “He’s amazing.”

A sharp curl of interest spiked through me. “Only the brilliant ones come out feeling that way.”

“Push through or break,” she said, shrugging as she accepted her orange juice from the flight attendant with a bright smile. “That’s what he said the first week in the lab. He wasn’t wrong. Three of us started in there at the same time. I was the only one still there by Christmas our first year.”

“Why are you in London?” I asked, though I suspected I already knew.

“Hoping to make it into the Civil program. I’m already in the engineering general but haven’t heard from Margaret Sheffield yet whether I’m in her group.”

“She doesn’t decide until just before the term starts. Makes the students completely barking mad, if memory serves.”

“We engineers like our calendars and spreadsheets and plans. Not the most patient bunch, I guess.”

I smiled. “Like I said. Barking mad.”

She pulled the corner of her lip into her mouth and smiled back. “You didn’t study with her.”

“Not officially, but she was more a mentor to me than my own mentor was.”

“How long after you finished did Petersen retire?”

I felt my eyes widen. How much did she know about my old department? About me? “I suspect you already know the answer to that question.”

She sipped her juice and apologized quietly after swallowing. “I knew you were his last student but I guess I was curious to hear how bad it was.”

“It was abysmal,” I admitted. “He was a drunk and more than that—a ruddy awful person. But that was nearly ten years ago. You were a child. How do you know all of this?”