The Earl nodded, very much as Lady Harrington would have if she'd been out of uniform, and gestured for the colonel to stand at ease once more. LaFollet relaxed, and White Haven, ears safely covered by his own protectors, crossed to stand beside him and watch Lady Harrington's demolition of her current target. LaFollet was more than a little surprised that Nimitz hadn't alerted the Steadholder to White Haven's arrival via their link. Perhaps she was simply too deeply focused on her shooting to be as fully aware of the 'cat as usual. It certainly wasn't because Nimitz shared LaFollet's sense of dismay. In fact, it was obvious to the armsman that the 'cat not only liked White Haven but actively approved of the Earl's attitude towards his own adopted person.
Which, in LaFollet's opinion, was yet another demonstration of the fact that, despite centuries of association with human society, treecat brains simply didn't work the way human ones did.
The colonel was far too professionaland discreetto permit his eyes to abandon their systematic scan of his environs. But he watched the Earl, very unobtrusively, from the corner of one eye, and his heart sank as White Haven's unguarded ice-blue gaze clung to the Steadholder and softened warmly.
Lady Harrington fired the final round in her current magazine, and her pistol's slide locked in the open position. She laid it carefully on the shelf at her station, muzzle pointed downrange, and pressed the button to bring her target back to her. She gazed at it thoughtfully for several moments, then pursed her lips in grudging approval of the single large, multi-lobed hole which had replaced the silhouette's "X" ring. She reached up to unhook the target from the carrier, then turned to set it aside and mount a replacement and froze as she saw White Haven.
It was only the briefest of hesitations, so fleeting that anyone who didn't know her as well as LaFollet probably would never have noticed it at all. But LaFollet did know her, and the heart which had sunk at the Earl's expression plummeted.
Against most people, the Steadholder's sharply-carved, high-cheekboned face was an admirable mask for her feelings. Very few of them probably appreciated the years of military discipline and self-discipline which had gone into crafting that mask, but those who truly knew her knew exactly how to read her expression anyway. It was the eyes, of course. Always the eyes. Those huge, chocolate-dark, almond-shaped eyes. The ones she'd inherited from her mother. The ones that mirrored her feelings even more revealingly than Nimitz's body language.
The ones which for no more than two heartbeats, three at the most, glowed with bright, joyful welcome.
Sweet Tester, LaFollet thought almost despairingly, each of them thinks no one in the worldincluding each other can tell what's going on. They actually believe that.
Idiots.
He took himself sternly to task the instant the thought crossed his mind. In the first place, it was no business of his who the Steadholder decided to fall in love with. His job was to protect her, not to tell her what she could or couldn't do with her life. And in the second place, she was obviously as well aware as LaFollet of all the manifold reasons she had no business looking at Earl White Haven that way. If she hadn't been, the two of them would undoubtedly have stopped suffering in such noble silence at least two T-years ago.
And Tester only knew where that would have led!
"Hello, Honor," White Haven said, and waved a hand at the perforated target. "I never could shoot that well myself," he went on. "Did you ever consider trying out for the marksmanship team when you were a middy?"
"Hello, Hamish," Lady Harrington responded, and held out her hand. The Earl took it, but rather than shake it in the Manticoran fashion, he raised it and brushed his lips across it as a Grayson might have done. He'd spent long enough on Grayson to make the gesture completely natural looking, but the faintest hint of a blush painted the Steadholder's cheekbones.
"In answer to your question," she went on a moment later, her voice completely normal as she reclaimed her hand, "yes. I did consider trying out for the pistol team. The rifle team never really interested me, I'm afraid, but I've always enjoyed hand weapons. But I was just getting really into the coup at that point, and I decided to concentrate on that, instead." She shrugged. "I grew up in the Sphinx bush, you know, so I was already a pretty fair shot when I got here."
"I suppose that's one way to put it," White Haven agreed dryly, picking up the target and raising it to look at her through the hole blown in its center. "My own athletic endeavors were a bit more pacific than yours."
"I know." She nodded and gave him one of the crooked smiles enforced by the artificial nerves in her left cheek. "I understand you and Admiral Caparelli had quite a soccer rivalry during your time on the Island."
"What you understand is that Tom Caparelli kicked my aristocratic backside up one side of the field and down the other," the Earl corrected, and she chuckled.
"That might be true, but I've become far too diplomatic to put it quite so frankly," she told him.
"I see." He lowered the target, and the humor in his expression faded just a bit. "Speaking about being diplomatic, I'm afraid I didn't hunt you up here in your hidey hole just to enjoy your company. Not," he added, "that your company isn't always a pleasure."
"You're not too shabby as a diplomat yourself," she observed, and anyone but Andrew LaFollet might not even have noticed the very slight edge which had crept into her voice.
"Decades spent as the brother of an ambitious politician do that to you," White Haven assured her easily. "In fact, the reason I came looking for you was that the aforesaid ambitious politician and I spent most of the morning together."
"Ah?" Lady Harrington cocked an eyebrow at him.
"I had to fly into Landing on business anyway," the Earl explained, "so I dropped by to see Willie...who happened to have just returned from Mount Royal Palace."
"I see." The Steadholder's tone had suddenly become far more neutral, and she ejected the magazine from her pistol, released the slide, and tucked the weapon into the fitted recess in its case.
"Should I assume he asked you to drop by to see me?" she went on.
"Not specifically. But Elizabeth had invited him to the Palace as the Leader of the Opposition to hear the official briefing on the latest inspirations to strike High Ridge and his flunkies." Lady Harrington looked up from the gun case to dart a sharp glance at the Earl, but he either failed to notice or pretended that he had. "The official message inviting the Opposition Leader to the briefing had somehow gone astray. Again."
"I see," she repeated, and closed the gun case with a snap. She reached for her accessory bag, but White Haven's hand got to it before hers, and smiling, he slung it over his own shoulder.
She smiled back, but her eyes were troubled. LaFollet wasn't surprised. The Steadholder had come an enormous distance from the politically unsophisticated naval officer she'd been when LaFollet first became her armsman. Which meant she was unaware neither of the fresh contempt in White Haven's voice when he spoke of the Prime Minister, nor of the pettiness of High Ridge's obviously intentional failure to advise Lord Alexander of the briefing.
Like the Steadholder, although to a lesser degree, the colonel had become better informed on Manticoran political processes than he'd ever really wanted to be. Because of that, he knew there was no specific constitutional requirement for the Prime Minister to invite the leader of his opposition in Parliament to the Queen's official weekly briefings. By long tradition, however, he was supposed to invite the Opposition Leader to the regular briefings, both as a matter of common courtesy and to ensure that if there were a sudden change of government, the individual who would almost certainly replace him as Prime Minister was as fully up to speed as possible.