“You don’t fit the stereotype for coding geeks—I’ll give you that.” His penetrating look made her want to touch her hair and see if it was falling out of its knot. He certainly was unraveling her.
The maid exchanged their soup for plates of barbecued stingray.
As Luli scraped a tiny morsel of meat from the wing and dabbed it in the sauce, Gabriel asked, “Are you concerned about your weight?”
“I don’t care for seafood. And these portions were obviously meant for the butler.”
“Order something else.” He looked for the maid who had already carried their dirty bowls away.
“I don’t see how acting too good for the chef’s food will improve my social standing. It’s fine. I like the chili sauce with the rice.”
He tucked into his own. “The nurse said you were wearing a weight-loss patch on your tongue when you came here. Why?”
“For weight loss.” He was not a man to be played with, she knew that, but she knew where this was going and would really rather not.
“Why did you want to lose weight?”
She bit back a sigh.
“Advantage. My mother requested the school attach it and I went along with it. Many girls had liposuction or nose jobs. The tongue patch was nothing.” She dismissed it with a twitch of her shoulder.
“What kind of school would arrange such things?”
“One that trains pageant contestants.”
“You were training for a beauty contest?”
She lifted her gaze, mildly affronted. “Why is that shocking? I was a front-runner.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing. This is the same school where you were making websites?”
“To build our online presence from the earliest age, yes. I was eleven when I started and built it into something that would have been a decent calling card today, but it’s long been taken down.” She was still annoyed at her hard work disappearing into cyberspace.
“This is why you wanted your site to stand out from the crowd?”
“Everything was a contest.” Understatement of the decade. She tasted another bite of stingray. It was smoky and stringy, but tender and not too fishy. Tolerable.
“Which means no friends there, either?” he guessed.
“Some girls were friendly, but my mother’s view was that a consolation sash like Miss Congeniality is for those who need consoling—something winners don’t require, so there was no need to aspire to achieve it. She once played a vicious mind game with a rival, though, by pretending she was trying to win that particular title.”
“Your mother competed?”
“Won every major title, yes.”
“And yet she had no money for an apartment?”
“She has expensive tastes. And she was angry with my father. Me, too, I think.”
“Why?”
Luli sighed, hating to face this head-on.
“There’s renown in keeping the crown in the family and the prize money I won paid for my school, but how can you claim to be the most beautiful woman in the world if your own daughter is threatening to take the title from you?”
“She sounds like a lovely person. Did no one notice you dropped out and disappeared?”
“She told people I’d gone to live with relatives. A few schoolmates inquired online and I backed her up. The reality was too...”
To this day, thinking of her mother’s casual divesting of her sent a lightning strike of agony into her heart. Her mother had been purely self-serving. It was why she’d had an affair with a married man in the first place. Getting pregnant had probably been one more way to squeeze support out of him. One more thing she hadn’t thought through and wound up regretting. She had considered her daughter a commodity and certainly never loved her the way mothers were supposed to love their children. It had left Luli with a gaping emptiness in her soul, one Mae hadn’t filled, but had at least acknowledged and attempted to paper over.
“I wasn’t sorry to be away from my mother,” Luli admitted quietly. “I saw no point in telling people what had really happened. The best-case scenario would have been that she was arrested and I would be living as an orphan there, without prospects. Not even at school any longer.”