Page 46 of Best In Class (Savannah's Best #7)

Ember

“ A nd that’s his girlfriend,” Mama tells me, tilting her head toward the beautiful blonde standing next to Dr. Ransom Marchand. “She’s editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar .”

Of course, she is.

They look right together. Her light to his dark. She’s sunlit polish: blonde hair, blue eyes, perfect posture. While Ransom…he is everything .

I’ve always loved his stormy gray eyes, the way they shift like the weather. His dark hair, now streaked with just enough silver to make him look devastating instead of old, falls in an almost careless way.

I remember how he looks with a red and black bandana—his lucky one, the one he always ties before surgery. With it, he doesn’t just look good. He looks like a god. I remember a time in his on-call room when?—

“I believe he’s going to propose,” Mama drops the bomb effortlessly.

I swallow the searing pain her words bring.

“Good for Ransom,” Aunt Tanya agrees. “He’s been heartbroken since his divorce.”

“ Not so heartbroken when five years ago, a year after his divorce, he was fucking me against a wall in his living room, demanding I be his good girl ,” I refrain from saying.

“Ember.” Mama studies me thoughtfully. “Have you thought about getting LASIK?”

That came out of somewhere absolutely not good!

I push my glasses up my nose… and wait.

“Or contacts,” Aunt Tanya suggests. “Four eyes is not a good look, especially for a single woman.”

I don’t even bother to frown. “Aunt Tanya, no one calls people who wear glasses ‘four eyes’ anymore. And I can’t wear contacts. Gives me an eye infection.”

Mama sighs deeply.

On cue, my sister, the famous news anchor, walks in. She’s flush with rosy cheeks, having just come back from skiing.

“What?” she asks, looking at all of us who are staring at her.

“We were just talking to Ember about getting her eyes fixed,” Aunt Tanya supplies cheerfully.

“Fixed?” Freja’s scowl goes full-on nuclear.

“Not everyone can have perfect eyes like yours,” Mama continues with an indulgent smile.

“Perfect eyes?” Freja spits out as if she’s having trouble saying the words.

“If only I looked more like you.” I roll said eyes.

Freja growls.

“Calm down.” Her husband, Jonathan, runs a hand over her arm to soothe her.

Yep! My big sister is super protective. As is my brother, but he’s more subtle than Freja.

“I didn’t say that .” Mama has a hand on her heart as if reeling from the betrayal she believes I’ve inflicted by misconstruing her suggestions about how I can improve my looks.

“Cut it out, all of you.” Freja shrugs her husband’s hand off and glares at Mama and our aunt. “Ember’s allowed to look any which way she likes.”

Mama protests defensively, “We just said she should do something about her?—”

Freja focuses on our mother as she cuts her off, “ Nothing ! She’s beautiful as she is.”

“I know,” Mama says with satisfaction. “Which is why if she could get rid of those glasses, she’d look?—”

“As beautiful as she does now,” Freja snaps.

I make puppy dog eyes at my sister, and she narrows hers at my mother and aunt.

I suppress a grin. She’s going to rip them a new one.

“Stop getting me into trouble with Freja,” Mama admonishes me.

“Then stop making comments about her looks,” Freja snaps.

When I was younger, it was hard for me to live in the shadow of my physically beautiful, high-achieving siblings. Now, not so much. We’re different.

I’m an introverted nerd, while my sister is an extrovert. A vivacious journalist, now married to a sexy-as-hell congressman. Freja is who you think of when you think of a Rousseau.

My brother, Aksel, holds a senior position at the World Bank and is often seen on television discussing global policy, possesses pure charisma, is fluent in three languages, is photographed at Davos, is invited to meet heads of state, and so on and so on and so on.

I’m stuck in a lab in Boston working on gravitational wave signatures in black hole mergers involving rogue stars. It’s less Star Trek and more analyzing faint, chaotic gravitational wave data from potential rogue star collisions with black holes. Extremely rare. Barely detectable events.

I love it!

I mean, what’s not to love about studying unseen forces colliding in silence and working on the edges of detectable phenomena? And the best part? My work is a mostly solo endeavor.

The only hitch is when I have to come up for air to write grant proposals or pitch my research to committees who care more about funding optics than theoretical astrophysics.

I spend almost as much time begging for money as I do mapping rogue star collisions.

Glamorous, I know. But that’s how my world works.

So, if I want time on the telescopes or access to high-performance computing clusters, which I do, I have to play by the rules.

Academia runs on prestige and funding. I’m just trying to make enough noise to stay in the room.

Funding of any kind hasn’t been an issue for anyone in my family. Besides the fact that Papa comes from a French aristocratic line (they didn’t lose their heads to the guillotine during the Revolution as they’d escaped to England), his and Mama’s careers have enhanced the family coffers.

Our father, Jean Rousseau, retired as the president of the European Central Bank only a year ago. Since then, he’s been leading a financial think tank, and moves through the world with the easy authority of a man who dines with the crème de la crème of society.

Half the people he associates it with are criminals in suits who have won elections (his words), the other half have not bothered with suits.

Our mother, Margot Adams Rousseau, once a supermodel and now a UNHCR ambassador, has cheekbones sharp enough to cut through anyone . She has a personal network of close friends that stretches across four continents.

She has a social media following of millions, where she posts filtered glimpses of refugee camps and fashion galas in equal measure. Her captions are always just the right blend of humanitarian concern and effortless glamour.

In contrast, I am the quiet daughter and sister that no one knows about.

Growing up, I spoke in terms of star charts instead of legislations, hid behind books and equations, and never quite learned how to deal with people, in general.

I hid during parties. I stayed in my room during the fancy vacations and holidays.

Now, I don’t go to parties, but I do spend a significant amount of time alone during family trips like this one, when we’re in the Rousseau Chalet in Chamonix for our two-week sojourn from before Christmas through after New Year’s Eve.

It’s tradition, and friends and family often join us, like Uncle Bob and Aunt Tanya. They’re both retired. Uncle Bob used to manage a hedge fund in New York, and Aunt Tanya was a PR guru who worked exclusively with politicians.

Besides Dr. Ransom Marchand and his lady friend, there are others who are spending the holidays with us.

Jonathan, my soon-to-be brother-in-law (the politician at our table this holiday), Freja’s best friend, Gisele, who is a journalist turned talk show host (think Barbara Walters when she was in her thirties), and Gisele’s wife, Heidi, who runs an organization supporting refugees and is in and out of meetings during this two-week vacation because humanitarian crises don’t stop for anyone.

It's a good thing the chalet comes with two fully equipped offices and a conference room.

My family lets me be. They know my social battery gets full faster than theirs, so when I slip away or go skiing solo, they don’t make a fuss.

“I’m not saying Ember isn’t nice looking—of course, she is, but beauty, like everything else, needs to be taken care of.

” Mama can’t imagine a woman who isn’t interested in looking her best, which in her mind, includes wearing makeup, not having glasses, and getting hydro facials at least once every two weeks, as well as a manicure and pedicure every week.

I chew on my nails when nervous, and find the whole act of spending an hour having someone do stuff to my hands and feet that I can do myself when I take a shower, a complete waste of my time.

Unfortunately, Mama thinks my lack of interest in my appearance has to do with me being single.

I think my family would fall off their chairs if I told them that five years ago, Ransom broke my heart, and since then, I’ve submerged said heart under a collapsed star’s worth of gravity—compressed, dense, lightless—because I don’t need to go through that big bang of emotion fallout again.

I still remember how I foolishly believed that Ransom found me attractive and interesting—I mean, we were having sex and spending a lot of time together.

Then one day, out of the blue, unexpectedly, he told me it was over. No explanation, no nothing. It had been a year since we began our relationship. A year where I juggled master’s program classes and Ransom, and he made time between his high-pressure job at Stanford Medical and me.

I was almost living with him.

I had been so stupidly sure that the important talk he wanted to have with me was about how we were going to inform my parents and his family about our relationship.

I was sure about so many things, which only proved how dumb I was. Here I was, madly in love, and he was…

“Now, let’s be adults about this, Em. Affairs end.”

“But…Ransom…I ? —”

“I’m fifteen years older than you. I’ve been where you’re going,” he says softly, his eyes already scanning the dining room for our server. He wants to pay and leave. I know him. He doesn’t like scenes, especially emotional ones.

“So, what?” I grip his hand. This is important. I want him to stop running away from something I know is beautiful and rare. Soulmate stuff.

He extricates his hand, and smiles at me. It’s a dull, banal smile. One you throw at someone who you want gone. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I need more in a partner.”

My heart cracks.