A Quick Bite(5)

Suffering the same prejudice herself, Lissianna could sympathize with Thomas. She also never failed to enjoy watching her older brothers squirm with discomfort.

"So, where's the party, dude?" Thomas asked brightly.

"It has not started yet," Bastien said. "You're the first to arrive."

"No dude, you were the first to arrive," Thomas corrected him cheerfully, then confided, "You don't know how relieved that makes me. 'Cause if we'd been first, Mirabeau said we would have been unfashionable geeks. But we weren't. You were."

Lissianna coughed to cover the snort of laughter that managed to escape her as her brother recognized that he'd just been called an unfashionable geek. When she regained control of herself it was to find Bastien standing stiff and straight and appearing a tad annoyed. She took pity on him, and asked, "So, where's Mom? And are we allowed to enter, or are we to wait out here for another fifteen minutes?"

"Oh, no. Come in." Bastien stepped quickly to the side. "I just got here myself, and Mother went up to change for the party after letting me in. She should be down in a few minutes. Maybe you should wait in the games room until she comes down. She might not want you to see the decorations until everyone's here."

"Okay," Lissianna said agreeably, stepping past him into the entry.

"Want to play a game of pool, dude?" Thomas asked cheerfully as he followed Lissianna into the house.

"Oh… er… No. Thank you, Thomas, I have to watch for early arrivals until Mother is ready." Bastien backed away along the hall as he spoke. "I'll tell her you're here."

"He loves me," Thomas said with amusement, as Bastien disappeared from the hall, then he opened his arms to shepherd them toward the closed door on the right of the hall. "Come along. Let's go play. Anyone up for a game of pool?"

"I'll play," Mirabeau said, then added, "Lissi, you have a run in your stockings."

"What?" Lissianna paused and peered down at her legs.

"Back right," Mirabeau said, and she twisted to look at the back of her right leg.

"I must have got it caught on something on the garbage bin," Lissianna muttered with disgust as she spotted the long, wide ladder up the back of her right calf.

"Garbage bin?" Thomas echoed with interest.

"Don't ask," she said dryly, then made an irritated tsk and straightened. "I'll have to go change my stockings before the party starts. Fortunately, Mom insisted I leave spare clothes here in my old room when I moved out. I should have a couple pairs of stockings. You guys go ahead and play."

"Hurry back," Thomas called, as she jogged lightly up the stairs.

Lissianna merely waved over her shoulder as she reached the landing and started along the hall toward her bedroom, but she was thinking it was good advice. Marguerite Argeneau wasn't going to be pleased that they'd arrived early, but Thomas would quickly cajole her out of any irritation she might initially be feeling. For that reason alone, it would be better to be with Thomas and the others when she met up with her mother.

"Coward," Lissianna berated herself. She was over two hundred years old and well past the age where she should worry about upsetting her mother.

"Yeah right," Lissianna muttered, acknowledging that she would probably still worry about it when she was six hundred. All she had to do was look at her brothers to know that. They were independent, self-sufficient and… well… just plain old and still worried about pleasing or displeasing Marguerite Argeneau.

"It must be a family thing," she decided as she opened the door to the room that had been hers until recently, and where she still occasionally slept when she stayed too late to make it home before sunrise. Lissianna started into the room, but her steps halted, her eyes widening in surprise at the sight of the man on the bed.

"Oh, sorry, wrong room," she muttered, and drew the door closed again.

Lissianna then simply stood in the hall staring blankly around as she realized she hadn't accidentally entered the wrong room. This was her old bedroom. She'd spent several decades sleeping there and knew her own room when she saw it. She just didn't know why there was a man in it. Or, more importantly, why he was tied spread-eagled on the bed.

Lissianna considered the matter for a moment. Her mother would not have taken in a boarder, and if she had, she certainly wouldn't have done so without mentioning it to her children. Nor would she have put him in Lis sianna's old room, a room she still used on those rare occasions she stayed. Besides, the fact that he was tied down on the bed rather belied the possibility of his being a willing guest.