Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

Author:Rebecca Fraimow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 2024-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Of course she chivalrously paid my fare back up before she got on her hovercycle and rode away. That’s the kind of thing I mean about people who can’t figure out they’re not rich. But Sol grew up on the surface of New Monte, and folks up there throw their dough around as easy as breathing.

The place Esteban took me for dinner a few nights later was about as prime an example of New Monte waste-taste as you could find. It was called the First Star, and a meal there cost about as much as a personal spaceship would run you in some of the further systems.

The place was put together like some kind of carnival ride. You settled yourself into a tiny glass-windowed pod, velvet-cushioned seats all round the edges and a fancy table in the middle, and then made a stately circuit on a track that took you out the First Star’s own private airlock into space for the scenic view of Pluto. Booking a reservation at the First Star was committing yourself to a three-hour dining experience, minimum—and you couldn’t even take advantage of the setup to get romantic, because every twenty minutes your pod completed a round and rolled back through the kitchen so the chef could slide another bowl of expensive foam onto your plate.

Esteban told me that Sol had recommended it to him. Let nobody say Sol Mendez-Yuki didn’t know how to have her revenge. Esteban himself, he confessed with great candor, wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to take somebody for a fancy dinner; generally he thought eating out was a huge waste of time, but of course it was different where I was concerned, and so much more pleasant than spending time with all those awful people at all those shallow parties! I nodded seriously and told him I couldn’t agree more.

I can’t say a three-hour dinner with Esteban is the slowest time I’ve ever spent, but it sure was up there as a contender. By the time we were halfway through the seventh course, I was starting to wish that Esteban would start putting up a little resistance to being conned, just so my brain would have something to do with itself. At this point I could do a sympathetic murmur in my sleep.

How had Jules borne it all that time? I knew that she hadn’t been playing the same doe-eyed debutante I was now. I’d been around for enough of their conversations to hear her hitting him with her usual combination of bubbles and brine, and he’d looked…

Well, if I had to admit it, he’d looked a significant few degrees more starry-eyed than he did now, talking himself up to sweet little Evelyn Ojukwu.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t doing my job. Esteban liked me plenty. If I’d tried to pull Jules on him, he’d have backed away, and fast. The rebound factor was exactly what made him so easy to reel in. As far as he was concerned, a

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