Resistance (Replica) (21 page)

Nate frowned in confusion, but Nadia understood right away what Agnes meant. “Your stock in the marriage market,” she said, and Agnes nodded. Agnes looked at her as if hoping Nadia would continue the thought, but Nadia smiled softly and waited.

Agnes licked her lips and did that not-quite-meeting-his-eyes thing again. “Your prime value right now is that you’re the undisputed Chairman Heir. That’s why my father wants this engagement so badly, even though he’s … uneasy about marrying me to a Replica. He expects his grandchild to be the Chairman of Paxco someday.”

Nate tried very hard not to shudder or make a face at the idea of providing Chairman Belinski with a grandchild. The idea of trying to perform his conjugal duties with Nadia was bad enough, but he’d
never
be able to overcome his distaste enough to do it with Agnes.

“There’s already a comfortable alliance between our states,” Agnes continued. “We have good trade agreements with each other, and there are very few strings attached. But if you and I marry, the balance of power between our states will change. We won’t be quite so independent anymore, and we’ll lose some of our more lucrative trade agreements with states that are your rivals. If the next heir to Paxco is going to be a Belinski, then the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but if not…” Agnes shrugged. “The arrangement heavily favors Paxco under those circumstances, and my father might decide he can make better use of me.”

“By marrying you to that marketing director you told me about?” Nate asked incredulously. The idea that a man like that would make for a more favorable marriage prospect than Nate seemed almost insulting.

“It would be a financially advantageous match,” Agnes said, “and would come with none of the same strings. So why would your father announce the existence of another potential heir
now,
of all times? If he’d waited just one more week, I’d have signed the papers to make our engagement legally binding and it would have been nearly impossible for Synchrony to back out.”

Nate stared at Agnes in mute astonishment. He didn’t think he’d ever heard her string so many words together before. And somehow, it had never quite occurred to him that Paxco might be getting the better out of their marriage arrangement. He’d focused on the relative size and wealth of their two states—and on Agnes’s lack of personal charms—and decided Agnes was marrying above herself. He had never considered that in marrying above herself, Agnes might have been making her state into a vassal of Paxco, and that that might not be so advantageous for Synchrony. Never considered that Chairman Belinski might have been anything other than ecstatic about the match.

Maybe if he’d paid more attention to business and politics, instead of putting it all off until “later,” he wouldn’t be standing there gaping like an idiot.

Nadia was not similarly surprised by Agnes’s assessment, but then she’d always been more politically aware than he.

“You’re right,” she told Agnes, nodding while her frown announced she was trying to figure out the mystery. “The timing is very strange. It seems like a serious blunder. But Chairman Hayes doesn’t make blunders. Perhaps Dorothy or her mother have been putting pressure on him to bring her out in public.”

Nate dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “First of all, you know from personal experience how hard it is to put pressure on him.” He immediately wished he could take the words back, even before he saw Nadia’s warning look and the spark of interest in Agnes’s usually dull eyes. He couldn’t afford to be careless with his words. Agnes was shy, not stupid, although before now he’d been too hostile to notice.

“Besides, Dorothy can’t really put pressure on him because she isn’t really his daughter. Blackmail doesn’t work unless you actually
have
something.”

Once again, he braced himself for Nadia to argue about Dorothy’s paternity, and once again, she didn’t.

“Your father would hardly cave in to blackmail just to keep the world from knowing about an illegitimate child,” she said. “And it wouldn’t explain the timing, unless someone is hoping to sabotage the marriage arrangement.”

“No one knows about it yet,” Agnes pointed out. “No one who doesn’t want it to happen, at least.”

“Do you believe me?” Nate asked Nadia. “When I say Dorothy is an impostor?”

“Yes,” Nadia said, without hesitation.

The relief that flooded him made him feel weak in the knees, and he finally decided it was time to sit down. He moved over to an armchair and practically collapsed into it.

“If Dorothy were the real thing,” she continued, “your father would have been holding her over your head from the moment you were old enough to understand what you stood to lose.”

“Exactly!” Nate exclaimed, sitting up straight once again. He realized that, deep down inside, he’d worried his reasoning had been nothing but some form of denial, but hearing Nadia echo his own thoughts made it seem less outlandish.

“If she’s not his daughter,” Agnes asked tentatively, “then who is she?”

“I’m going to find out,” he said, though he had no idea how. He wished like hell Nadia’s family would let her come home, would let the two of them put their heads together to solve the mystery. Together, they’d been able to find Kurt, despite Kurt’s vehement desire not to be found, but Nate could take very little credit for their success. Nadia, with her cool head and her sharp mind, had been the brains of the operation. He needed her if he was going to figure out who Dorothy was—and prove that she wasn’t the Chairman’s daughter.

“Maybe Agnes can help you,” Nadia suggested.

Nate hoped his face didn’t look as ridiculous as Agnes’s when his jaw dropped and his eyebrows climbed, but he suspected it did.

Nadia turned to Agnes. “You immediately figured out the irregularity of the Chairman introducing Dorothy today. You obviously have a head for the twists and turns of politics.” She flashed Nate a rueful smile, and he felt the heat rise in his neck. As the Chairman Heir of the most powerful of the Corporate States,
he
should have been the one to understand the implications at the drop of a hat. “And because you’re so quiet and unobtrusive, I bet people would say things around you that they wouldn’t say around Nate.”

Agnes gave an undignified snort. “Quiet and unobtrusive?”

Nadia shrugged. “Well, you are.” It was Agnes’s turn to be on the receiving end of one of Nadia’s knowing looks. “Tell me you don’t spend a lot of time quietly listening to other people’s conversations.”

Agnes’s familiar mottled blush gave her away. To his surprise, Nate found himself squirming in his chair, almost as uncomfortable as Agnes.

“You don’t have to help me,” he mumbled, taking a page from her book and staring at his shoes. “I’ve treated you like shit.” Now it was his own turn to blush, because that was
not
the kind of language to use when speaking to an Executive girl. Agnes was not Nadia, and he couldn’t allow himself to get so relaxed with her. “Sorry.”

“For treating me like shit? Or for swearing?”

Blinking in surprise, Nate looked up and saw the faintest of smiles on Agnes’s face. Nadia was grinning like a proud mama. Maybe she was right and there
was
a personality under Agnes’s bland exterior.

“Both.”

He couldn’t tell from the expression on her face whether his apology was accepted or not. “I’ll see what I can find out about Dorothy. If there’s a chance she could be named Chairman Heir…”

She let her voice trail off, but Nate had no trouble filling in the blanks, especially when she couldn’t hide the hope in her voice. He’d more than satisfied his initial aim to make her dislike him, and the thought that she might not have to marry him after all had her heart all aflutter.

Outside the parlor, there was a swell of sound—the porch door swinging open, footsteps, murmuring voices.

The service was over, and Nate had missed the whole thing.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nadia
would have loved nothing better than to have stayed in that quiet little parlor talking to Nate and Agnes until it was time to return to Tranquility. She didn’t want to face her parents, didn’t want to face the crowd, didn’t even want to face Gerri, who would almost certainly try to push her into revealing what was on the recordings again, having had a whole night to plan out a new argument. But with the service over, there was no use trying to hide away anymore.

Nate allowed Nadia to do up his collar and tie while Agnes stashed the open whiskey bottle behind a tall ornamental clock on the armoire. Not that anyone at this gathering would dare rebuke Nate for drinking, but it was rather undignified to swig straight from the bottle. Nadia didn’t mention that she could smell the alcohol on both Nate’s and Agnes’s breath, because there was nothing they could do about it.

With a collective deep breath, the three of them opened the door and plunged out into the crowd. Nate was instantly swarmed by people desperate to convey their condolences. Nadia wasn’t sure what they made of his failure to appear at the service. Perhaps they’d thought he was too prostrate with grief to face it, and that was why they were so sure he was in need of their sympathy.

Very few people even acknowledged Nadia’s presence, much less spoke to her. It was like there was an invisible force field around her. Every once in a while, she caught someone sneaking surreptitious glances her way, and she felt sure she was the subject of more than one conversation. And this was how her fellow Executives treated her
before
they knew she was no longer destined to be Nate’s bride. When that scandal hit, they’d do more than just ignore her—they’d flee her presence as if a leper had just stepped into the room.

Agnes, however, stayed by her side as the crowd cut both of them off from Nate. People greeted her easily enough, but they always seemed to spot someone across the room they absolutely
had
to talk to. Agnes’s expression of long-suffering patience told Nadia she was used to such behavior, and she was making no effort to change things. Her body language and facial expression were both just this side of forbidding, and once she’d shared basic pleasantries with someone, she seemed to have nothing else to say. She’d seemed much more friendly, and less … sullen when they’d been in the parlor.

“Maybe the crowd is thinner out on the porch,” Nadia suggested. If there were fewer people, maybe the two of them could hang out together and avoid the stilted and uncomfortable conversations Agnes’s shyness and Nadia’s disgrace brought on.

“My father will get mad at me for being ‘antisocial,’” Agnes said, making air quotes. “I’m already in for a lecture if he saw me standing in the corner earlier. I’m supposed to mingle.” She sighed heavily. “I’m not any good at mingling, but I need to at least pretend I’m making an effort.”

Nadia decided then and there that she didn’t much care for Chairman Belinski. There were ways to help draw Agnes out of her shell, but calling her antisocial and then ordering her to mingle wasn’t one of them.

“Well, stick with me,” Nadia said. “We can pretend to mingle together. And if we see your father, we can bend our heads together and pretend to be having an earnest, important conversation.”

That won her another of Agnes’s rare smiles. “You’re pretty cool.”

Nadia grinned back. “I’m glad
someone
thinks so.”

Nadia’s grin faded when she spotted her parents threading their way through the crowd, headed in her direction. She met her mother’s eyes across the distance and cringed internally. Esmeralda Lake was not happy with her, and Nadia suspected the two of them were about to have a pitched battle in the middle of a crowded room as they both smiled pleasantly so that no one would notice.

She was wrong.

*   *   *

Nadia
hated to leave Agnes alone in the midst of the crowd that so clearly made her uncomfortable. However, her mother wasn’t about to give her a choice in the matter. Ignoring Agnes as if the girl didn’t exist, she marched up to Nadia and said, “We need to talk. In private.”

No hug, no kiss. Hell, no greeting of any kind. Nadia glanced at her father, who was trailing in her mother’s wake. He met her eyes only briefly before looking away.

This didn’t bode well.

Nadia was tempted to insist they have their private conversation right here and now. She was tired of being ordered around, and maybe if they talked in public, the conversation—or lecture, because Nadia knew that her mother would be the only one doing the talking—would be over sooner. The only thing that kept her from protesting was that she didn’t want to subject Agnes to the unpleasantness.

“Fine,” Nadia said, her voice no warmer than her mother’s. “If you’ll excuse me, Agnes?”

“Of course,” Agnes said with a resigned slump of her shoulders.

“There’s a place we can talk down this way,” her mother said, turning toward a hallway off to the side.

“What’s going on?” Nadia asked her father in a voice just barely loud enough to be heard over the chattering of the crowd.

This time, he wouldn’t even make brief eye contact. “We’ll talk when we have some privacy.”

There was a flutter of panic in Nadia’s stomach. Her father looked positively
guilty,
and she was struck by the premonition that he had lost his battle with her mother and she was to be sent away for good. Her chest tightened, and it was suddenly hard to draw a full breath.

Her mother led the way into a small sitting room, just big enough for a sofa, a couple of chairs, and a coffee table. There were a handful of retreat brochures on the coffee table, along with a box of tissues.

The sitting room door closed with a solid thunk, and Nadia noticed there was a second door located on the opposite side of the room. A door that had a discreet electronic card reader set into the frame.

“Sit down, Nadia,” her mother said, putting her arm around Nadia’s shoulders and trying to guide her to the sofa.

Nadia refused to budge. Her father was fidgety, his gaze darting nervously around the room, and her mother was stiffly dignified. The kind of dignity that felt forced and artificial.