He smiled. “Open it.”
I felt weirdly nervous as I set my sandwich down and untied the bow. The lid popped right off and I pulled out one of a dozen framed vintage couture gown designs. Really, really old couture gown designs.
“Wow,” I breathed. “Where did you get these?”
“Mariana was apprenticed to a couturier once upon a time. I found them in the attic when I was a kid living at her old place in Paris, and she said I could take them.”
I looked in the corner of the sketch and found a date. “But—these are from 1923.”
He raised his eyebrow, as if waiting for something to dawn on me.
It finally did.
“Ha! Right. ’Cause Mariana’s, like, a hundred and fifty years old. Got it.” He smiled and took another bite of sandwich. “But wait, how did you know I was into sewing?”
It wasn’t really a secret, but I also didn’t broadcast it at school. All the sewing stuff I’d brought with me to Stony Creek was boxed up in my room, and as far as I was aware, he’d never been in there.
He looked a little uncomfortable. “When our father picked you as his next target, we researched your family—standard procedure. We learned that your mother was a seamstress and that you both donated quilts to the neonatal ward at the hospital.”
“Oh.”
I wasn’t really sure whether that was reassuring or creepy. We finished up lunch and headed back to the ranch. Adrian was right—it had been a fun day. But his comment about researching my family just drove home the fact that I was an assignment to him. Maybe we were actually friends, too, but we certainly weren’t anything more. That shouldn’t bother me—I tried to convince myself that it didn’t bother me.
But on some level, it did.
10
HYDROPHILIC INTERACTIONS, SIBLING RIVALRY, AND CHRISTMAS SHOPPING
I threw my pen dagger-style at my chemistry book, because my chemistry book deserved it. I was sitting in the de la Mara’s monstrous library on one of the many overstuffed couches, surrounded by bearskin rugs and spiraling, two-story bookshelves.
“What in particular do you not understand?” Adrian asked, rappelling down from the ceiling and hovering above the coffee table where my homework was spread out. He was wearing military-issue pants, fingerless black gloves, and a tight black T-shirt. I’d spent the entire afternoon trying not to laugh at how absurd he should have looked rappelling around a library in partial military gear. Somehow, he pulled it off without looking like an ass. In answer to his question, however, I pointed at the textbook.
“That. I don’t understand that.”
He looked over at me, his body completely parallel to the ground. “You don’t understand the entire book?”
I looked sad. “Yeah.”
He nodded contemplatively, then grinned. “All right,” he said, grabbing me. “Up.”
I yelped as he pushed off from the coffee table, propelling us twenty feet in the air. Coming to a stop, he grabbed on to the lip of a bookshelf, bent his knees (while I clung to his neck for dear life—he was the one strapped in, not me), and catapulted us across the library toward the door, landing gently. Setting me down, he opened a large steamer chest and pulled out a harness similar to the one he was wearing, except ten sizes smaller.
“Put this on.”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
He looked at me like the answer was obvious. “We’re going to study.”
I’d recently had the epiphany that when Adrian said things that didn’t make sense, it was faster to just go along with it—eventually he’d always come around to explaining himself. I stepped into the harness and pulled it on. He helped cinch the straps so that I wouldn’t fall out, then grabbed a connected pair of cords hanging from the ceiling and attached them to the carabiners at my hips.
Still holding on to the cords, he looked down at me. “When you want to ascend, just jump and the line will recede with you. If you want to go down, release the tension by pressing this button,” he said, pointing to a shiny black button on the side of the harness. “I’ll be moving us around the room, so you don’t need to worry about that. You ready?”
I blinked at him. “I think so?”
“Good.”
He grabbed my harness and threw me in the air like I weighed nothing. I rose almost thirty feet before gravity finally slowed me down. Adrian got a running start and jumped off the back of a couch, climbing through the air like a militarized Peter Pan until he was hanging opposite me.
“This is fun,” I said with a happy smile.
“You’re studying hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions, right?”
“Yep. Hey, can you do a somersault in these?”
I leaned forward hesitantly, and the harness allowed me to pivot. Suddenly I lost my balance and fell forward, hanging upside down, and instantly realized I should have asked Adrian if the harness would stay on upside down. Luckily, it did. He grabbed hold of my ankle and pushed me upright, looking amused.
“Are you having fun?”