The Orchid Affair

Chapter 29

Laura was already in bed by the time André ventured into their room.

Aside from their difficulties onstage, this past week had been surprisingly peaceful. They had fallen into a pattern as if they were the married couple they had claimed to be, and if he had woken up a morning or two—all right, every morning—feeling uncomfortably, er, wooden, that was something he had been prepared to ignore. Or douse with cold water.

But then, today . . .

André felt strangely off balance, as confused and callow as an adolescent confronted with the first stirrings of desire. All of a sudden he didn’t know what to say to her, or how to behave. He had almost elected to stay downstairs in the coffee room with Pantaloon and Leandro, drinking cheap house wine and bemoaning the high cost of lodgings (Pantaloon) and the vagaries of women (Leandro).

Just the fact of their being in a proper room made it strange. In the makeshift confines of the wagon, with theatrical props stacked all around them, it was easier to play make-believe. The pallet on the ground did feel a bit like a soldier’s billet, rendering the whole comrade-in-arms argument somewhat more plausible.

Laura had changed out of the clothes she had been wearing for the past few days, exchanging the voluminous blouse and skirt for a white nightdress.

The nightdress wasn’t the least bit revealing, but just its being one was enough to make André sweat.

He seized on the book Laura was holding as a suitably neutral topic. “What are you reading?”

She looked down at her hand as though surprised to find a book attached to it. “Oh. This? Just some poetry. Ronsard.”

André cleared his throat. “He’s a good poet. Ronsard.” Ronsard might be old-fashioned, but he never went out of vogue. He had captured certain universal truths about life, love, and the fleeting nature of time.

Laura’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes. Quite good.”

That exhausted the extent of their literary analysis. André leaned with his back against the door and wondered whether he ought to have stayed downstairs after all. Laura stared down at the book in her hands as though waiting for the paisley pattern on the cover to rearrange itself to her satisfaction.

Hitching herself higher against the pillows, she twisted her braid over one shoulder. “It’s quite warm in here, isn’t it? I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to have a proper fire.”

“Not to mention walls,” André agreed.

Laura folded her hands primly on top of the coverlet. “It does have a salutary effect on the temperature.”

“I guess that means you don’t need me tonight,” André said, only half jokingly.

Laura thought about that comment for an alarmingly long period of time. “I don’t need you,” she said at last.

André felt the words like the first stages of a wound—not quite fully comprehended yet, but with the awareness that it was going to hurt like hell in a few minutes when the reality of it registered. What sort of idiot was he? He had handed that one to her. He should have just behaved as though nothing had changed, splashed his face in the water from the basin, pulled back the covers, and climbed into bed next to her as he had these past five nights in their pallet in the wagon. The pallet was considerably smaller than the bed.

But something had changed that afternoon. It wasn’t just that this was a proper bed in a proper room with a proper fire. After that kiss, there was no way of pretending they were just colleagues of sorts, maintaining a deception for safety’s sake. He wasn’t that good a dissembler.

Laura ran her thumb abstractedly along the leaves of the book, making the pages rustle. “I don’t need you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you here.”

Her face was turned away from him, leaving him only with her profile, the strong angles of cheek and chin, the slender line of her neck, the dark hair curling against the nape of her neck where it had escaped from her braid. She looked like the lady on an antique cameo, and just as unreadable.

André heard the words as though from very far away, through the roaring in his blood.

“What are you saying?” André asked hoarsely.

Laura’s eyes shifted warily away. “What do you think I’m saying?” she hedged.

André knew what he’d like her to be saying. On the other hand, they had shared a bed for the better part of a week now. She could be offering him nothing more than a pillow for the night.

He tried to find a euphemistic way to signal what he meant. “Don’t ask me to stay unless you mean it.”

Laura hoisted herself up against the pillows. “Do you not want to stay? I should have thought a bed would have been preferable to a bench.”

An act of mercy, then, designed to keep him off the common-room floor? He didn’t want her charity. He didn’t think he could survive her charity.

“There’s one thing we should clear up first,” he said harshly. “About this afternoon—”

“The part of the day that comes after noon but before evening?”

“Yes, that one.” How to say this? For once in his life, André was entirely at a loss. All his skill at rhetoric had deserted him.

He took a deep breath. “If I were a gentleman,” he said, “I would say I was sorry for what happened today. But I’m not.”

“A gentleman?”

“Sorry.”

“Oh.”

André spoke in a rush, knowing that if he didn’t speak now, he would never have the nerve to do it. That bench in the coffee room was looking damned attractive just then. “I know our marriage isn’t a real marriage. I know I have no claim on you. And I know I have no right to say what I’m saying.”

“And that might be? . . .” Her eyes were as hard and bright as stars. Not the pretty sort that poets mooned about, but the kind that made men’s destinies.

“If all you’re offering me is a bed,” he said bluntly, “I’ll take the bench.”

On the plus side, she didn’t run screaming from the bed. On the other hand, she didn’t jump up and down and fling her arms around his neck, either.

Instead, she took up the book of poetry and looked at it thoughtfully, saying, in a conversational voice, as if they were discussing the likelihood of rain and whether the wagon might need an extra coat of paint, “Ronsard has several useful things to say on this issue.”

When had they gone back to Ronsard? André felt that he had missed something somewhere along the line. Probably his wits. He had left them back there in that alleyway, along with one large playbill and the remains of his dignity.

“Ronsard?” he ventured. One thing was for sure, Ronsard would have managed this far better, at least if his poetry was any indication. Ronsard wouldn’t be sleeping on the bench in the coffee room.

André was beginning to feel pretty bloody unkindly towards Ronsard.

“Ronsard had a great many interesting reflections on the topic. This, for example.” Opening the book of poetry, Laura thumbed through until she found what she had been looking for. “ ‘What comes to-morrow who can say? Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day.’ ”

“Very... poetic,” André agreed.

“And then there’s this.” She checked to make sure he was listening, and declaimed, “ ‘Gather, gather the flower of your youth, / Take your pleasure at the best; / Be merry ere your beauty flies, / For length of days will blight it / Like roses that were loveliest.’ ”

She looked up at him from under her lashes. He had never noticed before just how long those lashes were. “I don’t want to wither on the vine,” she said quietly. “Even if I have little beauty to blight. Ronsard had a point, don’t you think?” She took a deep breath. “Shall we take our pleasure at the best?”

André made a concerted effort to control his breathing. “Are you sure?”

“Do you really want to sleep on the bench?”

André emitted a strangled laugh. “If you put it that way . . .”

He closed the space between the door and the bed, taking her face in his hands. She was so familiar to him by now, the slope of her nose, the slight dent above her upper lip, the one beauty mark above her right eyebrow. How had he ever thought her plain? It was as if she were an entirely different woman from the one he had interviewed on a rainy day in January.

André dropped a kiss on her shoulder, where the nightdress listed to one side. “Between you and the bench, it isn’t much of a contest.”

Laura rolled her eyes. “The lengths to which I had to go to seduce you.”

André found himself grinning like a schoolboy. “I like you,” he said, in between kissing her and kissing her again. “I like you so damn much.”

“I don’t entirely dislike you, either,” Laura conceded, although the words were rather impeded by his mouth being in the way.

André reached up to yank off his cravat. “No second thoughts?”

Laura spread his collar open, pushing the edges of the shirt aside to kiss his throat. “None. Nor third nor fourth. When I make a decision,” she said firmly, “it stays made.”

She looked so adorably smug that André had to kiss her again, just because.

Propping himself up on one elbow, he traced the lines at the side of her eyes. “You really are rather terrifying, you know. But in a good way.”

The lines crinkled beneath his finger. “You certainly do know how to flatter a woman.”

André dipped in for a kiss. “I’m not so inadept as all that.” He tugged at the tie holding the neck of her nightdress together. “If I were flattering you, I would have told you that your skin is like honey.”

He ran a finger down the side of her breast and felt her shiver in response.

“Or I might have said that there’s witchcraft in the curve of your neck.” He suited action to words, tracing the area in question with his lips. He tugged with his teeth at her earlobe. “Your ears are rather nice too.”

She laughed, but shakily, since by that point he had moved from the lobe to exploring the inside of her ear with his tongue.

“And then there’s your hair,” he said. He didn’t bother with anything so complex as untying; he simply eased the tie off the bottom of her braid, his fingers moving to separate the interwoven strands, fanning it out around her. “You have beautiful hair.” He ran his fingers through it, tracing the wild curls and waves. “Like Eve’s wild, wanton locks.”

“I thought Eve was blond,” said Laura breathlessly.

“Not in this version,” said André firmly, following the contours of a curl down to her breast. He brushed the nipple with her hair, watching it pucker in response. “In this version, the temptress was quite definitely brunette.”

“Are you mocking me?” There was something uncertain in her voice, uncertain and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable.

“Do you really think I’m mocking you?” He’d never been less inclined to mock anything in his life. “Here.” He grabbed her hand and lowered it to the placket of his breeches. “Feel. This is how much I’m mocking you.”

They stared at each other, frozen, each sizing up the other. Her lips were already red and swollen with kisses, her cheeks flushed. The feel of her hand against him was a Mephistophelean sort of torment.

“Do you think I’m a cad?” André asked.

“No.” Her hand tightened. André couldn’t tell if it was meant consciously or not. He gritted his teeth against a groan. “Just that you’re honest.”

“André gave a rough laugh. “That’s a strange word to apply, given what you know of me.”

She rose on one elbow, he hair falling about his face. “There’s honesty and there’s honesty,” she said. “If nothing else, this is honest, what we have together right now. Just us. No dissembling. No pretense.”

“Just us,” he agreed. “Right now.”

Sometime later, they lay together in the sweaty sheets by the dying light of the fire, André playing idly with Laura’s hair while she curled up against his chest. They had lain this way a dozen times over the past week, but never like this. Being naked did make rather a difference.

André yawned and pillowed his cheek against Laura’s hair. At this moment, he was a very happy man.

“I don’t think we should tell anyone,” Laura said abruptly.

“Hmm?” Sated and sleepy, André was only half paying attention.

“That we’re—well . . .”

“Lovers?” he contributed. “That would be rather odd if we weren’t, considering that we’re supposed to be married.”

Laura propped herself up, her hair falling across his chest. André reached out to toy with the ends of it. “That’s not who I meant. I meant our lot.”

“Daubier?” André curled a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “I doubt he’ll act the outraged father about this.”

“It’s not Daubier I’m worried about.” Laura absently untucked the hair he had just tucked. “It’s Jeannette and your children.”

“Pierre-André is a little young yet for the birds and the bees,” said André mildly. “As for Gabrielle—” That didn’t even bear thinking about.

Laura went doggedly back to her theme. “Children pick up on things, even if they don’t entirely understand them. Gabrielle and I have only just made our peace. I don’t need her coming after me with a dagger.”

“The daggers are pasteboard.”

“Paper cuts hurt.”

There was honesty and there was honesty, she had said. Odd that after playing a part for so long, this subterfuge should seem more repugnant to him than others.

“All right.” André smoothed back her hair. “If that’s what you want.”

With a contented sigh, Laura eased down against him. “Mmm-hmm,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his chest. “It shouldn’t be too hard. We’re already sharing a room and have been from the beginning. As long as we’re discreet outside of bed, no one need be any the wiser.”

“Let me get this straight,” said André. “We’re pretending to be lovers pretending not to be lovers.”

“Is that right? Or have you got it upside down?” Laura frowned into his chest. “I’m too tired to work it out.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to keep it under wraps?” he said meditatively.

“I don’t see why not.” Laura pressed the back of her hand against her mouth to suppress a yawn. “You’ve led a double life before. How hard can it be?”

“I wasn’t sleeping with Fouché.”

“I should hope not. His wife wouldn’t have been amused.”

André tilted his chin down to look at her. All he could see was the tangled mass of her hair. “You have a surprisingly bawdy sense of humor.”

Laura snuggled more firmly into his chest. “I had a surprisingly unconventional upbringing.”

“I did rather get that.” He thought of her as he had first seen her, the very definition of the word spinster. The image was unreconcilable with the woman in his arms, all lush curves and surprising talents. “How did you manage all these years?”

“What do you mean?”

“Being prim.” He tightened his arms around her, enjoying the squish of her breasts against his chest. “You do a very good job of acting prim, you know.”

“Years and years of practice.” Her hair tickled his chest as she turned her head, searching for a more comfortable spot. “It was sheer self-defense at first. After a time it became habit.”

“Hmm,” said André, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “I like your new habits better.”

Laura’s blurred voice emerged from the vicinity of his chest. “What makes you think you’re going to become a habit?”

“I’ll just have to make sure of it, won’t I? But not right now,” he added with a yawn. “I’m not as young as I used to be. Remind me in the morning.”

“Maybe,” she murmured. “If you’re very, very lucky.”

André rested his cheek against her head. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so peaceful or so comfortable. “I’m already very, very lucky.”

He was three-quarters asleep when Laura’s voice, so low as to be almost inaudible, drifted up to him.

“It’s nice not to have to,” she said, almost as if to herself.

“What?” André asked sleepily.

“Pretend,” she said.

André hugged her tighter, putting into touch what he couldn’t into words.

“Mmm-hmm,” he agreed, and together, they drifted into sleep.