The Orchid Affair Read online

  And beds.

  André and his supposed wife were the only ones left by the smoking remains of the fire.

  Rising awkwardly to his feet, André extended a hand to Laura. “Shall we?”

  Ignoring his hand, she made a show of gathering up the blanket, which might have been more effective if she hadn’t still been sitting on it. André thought about pointing that out and decided it would only make a bad situation worse. She didn’t like to show weakness, his governess.

  Laura hitched herself off the blanket and straggled to her feet, dragging up the blanket with her. “It is rather late,” she said, lurching down to grab the pillow. Her hair provided a screen for her face. “And we do have an early morning tomorrow.”

  “Very early,” André agreed. “Dawn, most likely.”

  He appropriated the pillow from her, tucking it under one arm, although he knew better than to offer his arm again. He held aside the heavy curtains screening the back of the wagon, making room for her to precede him.

  “We should probably get some sleep,” she said, not looking at him.

  The curtains dragged down behind him, shutting them into the narrow, dark chamber. The single lantern cast a dim light across the jumbled piles of cookware, the squat table, the pile of blankets. The bed.

  “Yes,” André agreed. “Sleep.”

  For a moment, neither of them said anything at all, both staring at the narrow pallet that was to be bed for both. One bed. One very narrow bed.

  Then they both turned and started talking at once.

  “Would you like—,” he began.

  “If we took some of the blankets—,” she said.

  Laura dropped the blanket she had been holding and pressed both her hands to her face. “This is ridiculous,” she said indistinctly. “Ridiculous.”

  “But necessary,” he reminded her. “It was your scheme to travel as husband and wife.” He made sure to keep his voice pitched low. The walls might provide the illusion of privacy, but they weren’t thick.

  She took a step back from the bed—and from him—practically tripping her over her hem in her haste. “I didn’t know we would be forced to interpret that quite so literally!”

  Was the idea really that distasteful to her? André found himself mildly irked. “I wasn’t planning to ravish you,” he said irritably.

  Laura bristled. “I didn’t expect you were.”

  Perhaps that hadn’t been the most politic thing to have said. André rubbed a hand over his eyes, doing his best to make amends. “I’m too tired to ravish anyone.”

  Laura plunked her hands on her hips. “Oh, is that supposed to make me feel better? I’m glad to know that it’s only fatigue that preserves my slender hold on virtue.”

  André blinked. “Do you want me to ravish you?”

  She sucked in air through her nose. “I want to go to sleep. Alone.”

  “I’m sorry not to be able to oblige.”

  She turned in a flurry of wool. “I don’t see why not. There are certainly enough extra blankets. If I made them into a pallet . . .”

  André held out a hand to stop her. She froze as his fingers touched her shoulder.

  He said, more gently than he had originally intended, “Those are to use on top of us, not under us. It’s going to get very cold overnight.”

  He could see Laura’s throat work as she swallowed. She pressed her eyes briefly together, as though searching for composure. “I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “This is just a very odd situation.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  “I’m used to . . .” She struggled for words. “I’m used to my privacy.” She tried, belatedly, to make a joke of it. “I don’t share well.”

  “Think of it as being comrades in arms,” André suggested. “Soldiers put their pallets together in the field for warmth. It’s only sensible that we should do the same. That’s all it is. Nothing more.”

  Nothing to be afraid of, he added silently. It wasn’t, he sensed, so much the threat of ravishment that she feared, but the rest of it. The intimacy of it. As she had said, they were both used to their privacy.

  Laura’s shoulders were very stiff beneath the red wool shawl. She nodded without looking at him, her head slightly bent. “It makes sense. In this camp, one never knows who’ll come barging in. It’s better to keep up the pretense, I suppose.”

  André tried for levity. “Unless we have a fight and you boot me out of the wagon.”

  He was rewarded with a slight quirk of her lips, the distant cousin of a smile. “It might be a bit soon for that. But I’ll bear it mind for later.”

  “Do you need help?” he asked. “With your laces or buttons or . . .” He gestured helplessly with his hands. It had been a long time since he’d had intimate acquaintance with the intricacies of feminine garments.

  Aside, of course, from buttoning his governess back into her gray dress in the dark dining room of Daubier’s studio. But that hardly counted.

  “No, thank you.” She backed away, clutching a rolled-up blanket to her chest like armor. “I thought I’d sleep in my clothes. For the warmth.”

  It wasn’t an absurd notion. Most people did. There were whole parts of the French countryside where André suspected people hadn’t changed their garments in years.

  “That makes sense,” he said mildly. He loosened the knot of his cravat, easing it out from around his neck, moving slowly and deliberately, like a gamekeeper trying not to startle the deer.

  Laura began spreading extra blankets along the bed, arranging the edges with finicky care. “Do you think the children will be warm enough?”

  There was something artificial about the very mundanity of the comment. André was reminded of children playing house, playing at being mother and father, with acorn caps for teacups and pinecones for children.

  “Jeannette wouldn’t have it otherwise. She’s a tough old bird.”

  André began unbuttoning his coat. He’d sleep in his shirt and breeches, but the buttons on the coat itself would be uncomfortable. His hand bumped against something hard and heavy, shoved into an inner pocket. He fished it out, the edge catching on the lining.

  He looked at it bemusedly. It looked very different, somehow, in the shadowy light of the small wagon than it had in his bedroom that morning. “Oh. I almost forgot.”

  “Forgot?” Laura glanced at him quickly, pausing in the act of plumping pillows that were already as plump as they could get.

  André held out the book he had brought. He had taken it up on a whim that morning, before he left for the Temple. It had been by his bedside, along with the Ronsard, and he had stuffed it in his coat pocket, for reasons not entirely clear even to himself. “I brought this for you. I didn’t know if you had your own copy.”

  Laura stood there, staring at the book in his hand. “I don’t.” She started to reach out for it, then abruptly dropped her hand. “But I can’t take yours. Doesn’t this . . . Isn’t it? . . . Sorry. I don’t know where my wits are.”

  “Back in Paris with mine?” he suggested. “Take it. I brought it for you.”

  “But it has your wife’s drawings. I would have thought that”—she paused, as though looking for the right words—“that you would have wanted something of her.”

  “I have Gabrielle and Pierre-André.” He winced at the sickly sweetness of the sentiment. It might be true, but it still sounded mawkish.

  Laura didn’t seem to notice. She was absorbed in reflections of her own, her attention focused on the book.

  “I’ll keep this in trust, then, for Gabrielle.” She ran a finger over the faded gold lettering, lingering over it. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Silence fell between them as each looked at the other, waiting for a cue, the book still clutched in Laura’s hand.

  Well, there was no time like the present.

  André gestured to the bed. “Would you prefer the right side or the left?”

  Chapter 26 />
  Laura couldn’t figure out what to do with herself.

  It was dark in the wagon—true dark, a world away from the diffused light of the city, with the embers of a fire still an orange-red in the hearth. Laura knew that André Jaouen was next to her, knew it from the regular rasp of his breath and the way the pallet dipped off to the side where his body pressed it down, but she couldn’t see him.

  Would it have made it better if she could?

  It was a very strange thing, this having another person in bed beside her. Maids might have to share quarters, but a governess never did. Laura couldn’t remember the last time she had shared a bedroom with someone, much less a bed, and a bed of proportions that would insult the average pygmy.

  André Jaouen didn’t seem to be bothered by it. It was safer to think of him by his full name, using the extra syllables as a wall to ward off the fact that there was no wall between them at all.

  Her putative husband, on the other hand, had said his good-night, rolled himself in one of the blankets—they had separate blankets, at least; there was that much between them—snuffed the lantern, and gone to sleep. As simple as that. While she suddenly seemed to have too many limbs, all of which took up far too much space on the narrow pallet. Her elbows extruded, her knees stuck out, her forearms seemed to have expanded until they required an entire mattress unto themselves.

  Laura tucked her knees into her chest, lying on her side with her back to the blanket-covered bundle that was André. Her left arm, scrunched up beneath her, was beginning to go numb. She cautiously wiggled her fingers, hoping her bedmate wouldn’t feel the pull on the blankets. In and out, in and out went his breath, peaceful and even.

  Laura scowled. How did he manage to sleep so easily? And why couldn’t she?

  It had been an exhausting few days. She should be exhausted. She was exhausted. So why wasn’t she asleep? In peasant households, people piled six in a bed for warmth. In this very camp, Cécile was curled up beside Rose, de Berry stacked in with Leandro and Harlequin. She would be willing to wager they were all snoring peacefully away, dreaming their respective dreams, not a one of them lying awake monitoring the movements of the person on the pallet beside him.

  Laura eased onto her back, wincing at the crinkle of straw. As pallets went, this one wasn’t too terribly uncomfortable. The straw tick had been bolstered with enough blankets to keep scratchy bits of hay at bay. She had slept on worse over the course of her various employments. But alone. She had always slept alone.

  One would think, in the dark, André Jaouen would be easy enough to ignore. It wasn’t as though she could see him, other than as a shadowy blob of blanket. But she was ridiculously aware of his presence, of his breath, his smell, the warmth of his body through the blankets. He made the small space seem even smaller, the walls narrower, the roof lower—as though there weren’t enough air for both of them to breathe.

  Laura clamped her elbows against her ribs, making herself as narrow as her limbs would allow, neck stiff, legs straight down, arms at her sides. Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . breathe in.... If they made decent time on the road, they were to have their first rehearsal the next evening. Cécile had filled her in on the scenario, which was simple enough: Leandro was in love with the fair Inamorata, who was, in her turn, being courted by Il Capitano, whose suit was favored by her father, Pantaloon. In . . . Out....

  Her neck hurt.

  With a sigh, Laura rolled over again, trying to pummel the pillow into some semblance of comfort. The feathers had all but disintegrated with age. Whatever ducks had given their feathers for this pillow had died so long ago that their ponds had probably already silted over. The pillow felt like it was filled with grit. Maybe it was. Maybe she was just being difficult.

  For heaven’s sake, why couldn’t she sleep?

  “Laura?” The voice came from the next pillow over. It was little more than a murmur, but it sounded unnaturally loud in the small space.

  Laura stiffened, instinctively playing dead. Was it too late to pretend to be asleep?

  Punching the pillow had probably not been the brightest idea.

  “Yes?” she said cautiously.

  She could hear the rustle of blankets as he rolled over. Laura scooted even farther towards the end of the pallet.

  “Is something wrong?” André’s voice was heavy with sleep.

  Was something wrong? They were on the run through the countryside with two small children, a royal duke, and an injured painter in their care, and he wanted to know what was wrong?

  “I can’t sleep,” she said, and felt like a child. A cranky, petulant child. What was wrong with her? She hadn’t been that sort of child when she was a child. “This bed is very . . . crunchy. And it’s cold.”

  Better that than admitting the real reasons. And it was cold. She could feel the tip of her nose turning blue.

  “What about you? Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I was,” André said pointedly. His jaws stretched in a long, uninhibited yawn. Hitching himself up a bit, he unfolded one arm, stretching it out along the top of the pallet. “Here.”

  Here what? Laura could see the shadowy outline of his sleeve, pale against the darker skin beneath. He had elected to sleep in his shirt, the strings untied at the throat, the cuffs open and folded back along his forearms.

  She, on the other hand, was still entirely fully clothed, with the sole exception of her shawl. That was another problem. Her blouse itched.

  When she didn’t respond, André stretched out his fingers. “Come here.”

  Laura regarded his arm suspiciously. His arm couldn’t possibly be less comfortable than the pillow. But... “Why?”

  Although she couldn’t see very well, she was fairly certain that he rolled his eyes. “For warmth,” he said, “only for warmth. And because your fidgeting is keeping me awake.”

  Laura lowered herself cautiously into the crook of his arm, from sheer fatigue, she told herself, rather than anything else. They both needed their sleep. “All right. But I don’t—”

  His hand pressed against the back of her head, smushing her face against his chest.

  “—fidget,” she said into his shirt.

  “Mmph,” said André into her hair. It wasn’t so much agreement or disagreement as a shorthand for All right, that’s all very well, can we go to sleep now?

  Shaking free of his hand, Laura turned her face so that she could breathe. Asphyxiation was seldom the route to a good night’s sleep. She could feel the rub of much-washed linen beneath her cheek—like an old sheet, she told herself. It was best for all concerned if she thought of him simply as an extension of the mattress. A much warmer and firmer portion of the mattress. In fact, he made a much better mattress than the mattress. Mattresses, after all, seldom came with their own heating agents.

  She scooted gingerly closer, finding a comfortable spot somewhere below his arm and above his ribs.

  André moved obligingly to make room for her, adjusting the angle of his arm around her shoulders and tucking his chin against the top of her head.

  His shirt smelled of soap and spilled coffee, thin enough that she could feel the faint prickle of the hair on his chest.

  “Better now?” he asked sleepily.

  “Certainly warmer,” conceded Laura, and felt his chest rumble with something that might have been a chuckle.

  “Good,” he murmured. She could feel the dip of his chin against her hair. “Sleep.”

  To her own surprise, she did.

  It wasn’t a rooster that woke them, but Harlequin, shouting with appalling cheerfulness, “Wake up, lovebirds! It’s morning!”

  Laura blinked her gummy eyes open just in time to see his head disappearing back through the curtains. Doors. Doors were a good thing, she thought hazily. Much less permeable than curtains.

  She yawned, feeling her eyes drift shut again, every fiber of her body resisting the imperative to wake up. She was heavenly warm and incredibly comfortable, curled up on her si
de, cradled in a nest of blankets. Laura stretched, and felt the blanket stir in response.

  “Mmm?” said the blanket, and Laura came jarringly and fully awake.

  That wasn’t a blanket, that was a man. A man with one arm under her head and another around her waist. At some point in the night, they must have rolled over, because they were sleeping like two spoons in a drawer, the curve of his body mirroring hers, her back tucked up intimately against his front.

  Very intimately.

  It had been some time since Laura had had personal experience of the more masculine portions of the male anatomy, but she was fairly sure that wasn’t his knee.

  Laura bounded out of the bed, trailing half the blankets with her. Her blouse had come unmoored during the night, and she hastily yanked it back up over her shoulder.

  “Good morning!” she babbled. “Time to wake up!”

  André groaned, burying his head in the pillows, which all seemed to have bunched up on his side of the bed. Bizarre that there was already a “his” side and a “hers” side, but his side it was.

  “Are you always this terrifyingly energetic in the mornings?” he inquired.

  “No, it’s just a special treat for our first night together,” she snapped, then realized just what it sounded like. Deciding to quit while she was ahead, she said hastily, “Thank you. It was very kind of you to serve as pillow for me.”

  André propped himself up on one elbow. “It wasn’t entirely selfless,” he said. “Where did you put my portmanteau?”

  “There.” Laura pointed to the bundle she had packed for him. She did her best to sound nonchalant. “Not entirely selfless?”

  André paused in the act of digging through the bag. He cocked a brow. “It stopped you thrashing about.”

  Laura plunked down on the small stool in front of their one table. “I wasn’t thrashing. I was just . . . restless,” she said with dignity. “It’s been an unsettling few days.”