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Anya breathed carefully through her nose. ‘He is. He just doesn’t have to be so—’ she searched for some relatively innocuous phrase to express her seething annoyance ‘—so odiously superior about it!’
‘Well, I guess it’s hard for him not to be…him being such a superior kind of guy and all…’
Anya stared at her for a blank moment before she realised she was having her leg gently pulled. ‘You know, when you use that sarcastic drawl you sound just like him. You want to be careful; it’s not good for someone your age to be too cynical.’
‘You really think I sound like him?’ Petra asked with a touch too much nonchalance.
‘Sometimes. You have his eyes, too. What’s your natural hair colour?’
Petra pulled a face. ‘Brown. Too ordinary. Mum went spare when I did this—’ she tugged at her locks ‘—but I want to be different.’
‘I think we can safely agree you’ve achieved your goal,’ Anya told her with a small smile of understanding. ‘On the outside, at least.’
‘Oh, I feel different on the inside, too.’ It was said with a quiet determination that was at odds with her impulsive brashness.
‘Different enough to make you want to run away from home?’
She shrugged. ‘Mum would never talk to me about Dad. Even my birth certificate didn’t have his name on it. I wanted to see him but I knew she wouldn’t help, so I looked through her old stuff and found a letter from before I was born. It asked for photos of me as I grew up but she never did send him any—I asked him. When Mum makes up her mind about something that’s it—you can’t get her to change it. Once I had his name it was easy to track him down on the Net and find out that he wasn’t some sleazebag of a loser that I was worried he might be—did you know that his law practice even has its own website? I didn’t let him know I was coming because he might have got Mum to stop me. I figured once I was here he’d have to see me, even if just to get rid of me, but it turned out that he’d wanted to meet me, too…’
‘You still took some pretty horrifying chances. Lawyers can be sleazebags too, you know. You could have just written him a letter—’
‘And risk it being binned or waiting ages for a reply, or Mum finding out? I had to see him now.’ Petra modified her urgent tone with a quick grin, ‘Before I started having a serious identity crisis that could screw up my entire adulthood. I’m glad he didn’t freak out on me or anything—he’s a bit heavy-handed with the new Dad thing but otherwise he’s real cool, don’t you think?—and pretty hunky for an old guy.’
‘He’s not old,’ responded Anya automatically.
Petra gave her a knowing look. ‘So you think he’s young and hunky?’
Anya wasn’t falling into that sly trap. ‘I try not to think about him at all,’ she said. ‘Do you want to put one of those on?’ She pointed to the CDs.
Petra accepted the change of subject with a shrug. ‘I was wondering whether I could borrow these four of Kate Carlyle’s. Dad said she’s your cousin—does that mean you get freebies?’
Anya laughed. ‘I did when Kate first started recording but now she’s become so blasé she doesn’t usually bother to send them to me any more.’
‘Bummer. So most of these—’ she ran her fingers over the rack ‘—you had to go out and buy them full-price like everyone else?’
‘Well, yes. But I do get lots of free opera recordings from my parents—see.’ She showed her the tapes and CDs. Actually it was Alistair Grant who despatched them to her, usually without an enclosure. ‘My mother is a guest soprano at leading opera houses all over the States and my father travels too, as a conductor.’
‘Wow, so music was real important in your family. I bet you got all the music lessons you wanted from the time you were little.’
‘The trouble was I didn’t want them,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘I showed no musical aptitude whatsoever, thereby convincing my parents they had a changeling in the nest. I would have sacrificed all my lessons for a bit more of their personal attention. Fortunately for their hopes of a musical dynasty, Kate came to live with us and showed herself to be such a piano prodigy it took all the heat off me.’ Petra was looking at her as if she couldn’t believe her pierced ears. ‘I take it you’re enjoying your piano lessons?’
Petra’s face closed up. ‘Yeah, but Dad only pays for one hour a week so I babysit to earn the money to pay for an extra lesson.’
‘Your father pays?’ Anya was taken aback. ‘But—I thought that there wasn’t any contact between Scott and your mother?’
‘Not Scott. My other Dad—Ken—who’s married to Mum.’
‘I didn’t realise your mother was married,’ she murmured, wondering uneasily if that had been the case at the time of her affair with Scott.
‘Yeah, they just had their tenth anniversary last week,’ said Petra, banishing the disturbing spectre of adultery. ‘I’ve got two little brothers.’
Anya thought she saw the light. ‘Is that a problem for you? Ken being their real father but not yours?’
‘Nah…Lots of my friends have more than one set of parents. The boys are pests, but they’re OK. And Ken’s an OK guy—he owns a sports store.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m the problem, not them.’
Anya was about to ask what she meant when a prickling of the hairs on the back of her neck made her turn around. Scott was standing inside the door with a stillness that suggested he had been there for some time, listening to their conversation.
‘You were quick,’ she said, thankful that his eyes were resting on his daughter as she remembered the words he had used to chase her inside.
