The Family Game by Catherine Steadman (13)

“Who’s going to be there, again?” I ask.

His eyebrows lift. “The usual crowd, I’m guessing. Mom. Dad. Matilda. My brothers and their partners.” His younger brothers, Oliver and Stuart, and their partners. “Then there’s Nancy, my dad’s general counsel—”

“Wait, wait, wait. Your dad’s general what?”

Edward smirks. “General counsel. Nancy, she’s head of legal at ThruComm Holbeck.” He takes in my incredulous face. “She’s been around awhile. He trusts her.”

“I see. And his legal counsel comes to family functions. Okay, good to know. I hadn’t realized we were living in Wolf Hall. Please continue. Anyone else?”

“Nunu will be there too, I’m guessing, with the kids.”

“Don’t understand any part of that sentence.”

He laughs. “The family nanny, Nunu. She’ll be there but at the kids’ table.”

“Family nanny, Nunu, right,” I say, making a mental note to remember these names. “Wait, the kids have a separate table?”

“Trust me, you’ll want to be at the children’s table too once you’ve experienced the adult one.”

“Okay,” I say with a smirk. “There’s a lot to unpack there. I’m going to want to hear a lot more about this whole family nanny/Nunu situation later—you never said you had one growing up. But put a pin in that…who else might be there tonight?”

“Marty Fullman’s usually there. COO of ThruComm. And his dog, Grog.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“So twelve adults, four kids, and a dog. Plus the staff, but I’m not counting them.” I feel my eyebrows shoot up before he adds, “You know what I mean, it’s house staff, maids, kitchen staff, a chef…”

“Right, so basically, I’m meeting everyone. But your brothers’ partners will be there, right? How did their first dinners go?”

Edward takes a moment before answering. “Varies, but it was sort of different for them.”

“Different how?”

“Well, because I’m the eldest. The firstborn.”

I can’t repress a laugh. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Bingley.”

“Ha, ha. Yes, very good. But technically, and legally, lineage is still very much relevant. Certainly, in my family. Primogeniture is part of the family trust. It’s like entailment but it doesn’t matter what gender the firstborn is—whoever they are they get the lion’s share. You can refuse to be part of the family business but you can’t get away from genetics—or the law. Unfortunately.”

“So it matters more who you marry than who they marry?”

“Yeah. It does. To my family…and to the outside world.”

“To the outside world?”

“Who I marry has repercussions. I’ll control it all one day and they’ll be part of that. It affects shareholder confidence, market valuation, future projections—our reliability, sustainability,” he says with unvarnished simplicity.

“Oh,” I answer, and though I try to stop myself from asking I can’t. “What will marrying me indicate?”

“To the world: that times are changing. To my family: that I love them but they will not hold me back from doing what I want with my life. I waited a long time to find you. And now I have. You can read any story in a million different ways but I think my family and the world in general will understand the story of us. Don’t you think?”

“Um, yeah. If I’m honest, I’m really glad I bought a new outfit for this now,” I say, half joking, then I catch his expression. “You are worried about what they’ll think of me too, aren’t you? Honestly?”

“Honestly? Of course I am. They’re my folks. I want them to like you. I want you to like them. Mom likes what she hears about you. There’s no way she’d have handed over Great-Grandma’s ring otherwise. And what Mom thinks trickles down to the rest of them eventually. Dad’s trickier. But it’s going to be fine. Matilda didn’t say anything weird about it all, did she? When you met?”

Aside from flexing her undeniable power in a single phone call to my publisher and then tricking me into meeting every single person in her family, no, she didn’t say anything weird.

But clearly weird is a relative term, excuse the pun.

I wonder if he suspects that Matilda asked me to help bring him back into the family.

That thought sparks another: After all, Matilda is second in line to everything directly after Edward. There could be more going on here for her, in particular, than I had ever previously considered.

I realize Edward is waiting for my answer. “She didn’t say anything that strange, no. It was nice…meeting her, she wasn’t anything like I expected her to be. She seemed to be happy, about us, the idea of us. And I’m guessing she isn’t someone who’d shy away from brutal honesty if she had real issues.” I give him a reassuring smile, even though now I’m not so sure at all. “I think it’s all going to be fine, Ed,” I tell him.

And it will be, I just need to stay on my toes. Which is never a bad thing, especially now that I have a growing family to protect.

And with that warm thought in mind I lean in and whisper softly into his ear, “Hey. We’re going to have a baby.”