(And it is way, way out of sequence.)
_______________________________________________________________
White Haven
Planet Manticore
Manticore Binary System
Star Empire of Manticore
“Eat your peas, Raoul.”
Honor’s tone was supposed to be firmly commanding. It actually came out about midway between a command, a request, and an admission of defeat, and she tasted Hamish’s unbecoming amusement as his offspring shook his head stubbornly.
Again.
“No,” Raoul Alfred Alastair Alexander-Harrington said with the invincible stubbornness of his twenty-one months.
“They’re good for you,” she persisted. “Besides, you like them.”
“No,” he repeated, despite the fact that he did normally like them, and sent his spoon flying across the dining room table.
“Raoul —!” Her own valiantly suppressed laughter eroded the sternness of her tone.
“Want ’paghetti,” he announced.
“You’re having peas,” she informed him.
“’paghetti!” he insisted, and she tasted his very self-centered delight in expressing his independence.
“No spaghetti,” she said sternly. A mother, even one who spent so much time in space, had to draw the line somewhere, she figured. “Peas.”
“’paghetti!”
“Peas!”
She sat back, crossing her arms, and regarded him with a frosty maternal eye.
“You do realize they can sense fear, don’t you?” Hamish asked helpfully.
“You so do not want to go there, Hamish Erwin MacGregor Simpson Alexander-Harrington,” she told him ominously, never looking away from their son.