Chapter 44
44
Where are you?
Wyd?
Hellllloooo
*2 missed audio calls*
Don’t you want Thai food?
*4 missed audio calls*
Orla was reading Erin’s messages as her phone began to ring again. Naked, and wrapped up in Jacques’s bedcover, she didn’t know what to do first – answer and get ready to lie, or not answer and get dressed and hope she could be more convincing a liar in person. At her age she shouldn’t be in this position – or any of the positions she had been in no more than moments ago with Jacques…
‘Leave it,’ Jacques said, an arm snaking around her waist.
‘I can’t leave it,’ Orla replied. ‘It’s Erin and if I don’t reply the likelihood is she will be knocking on your bedroom door.’
She jumped as there was a noise at the bedroom door.
‘Relax,’ Jacques said. ‘It is Hunter. He is not used to this door being closed and locked.’ He dropped a kiss on her shoulder. ‘So, do not worry. No one is coming.’
And that was in a complete contrast to the past hour also… She wet her lips, flooded with the hot memories, and then rapidly regrouped.
‘I have to answer or she won’t stop calling.’
He removed his arm from around her waist and lay back in bed.
She took a breath and answered.
‘Hello.’
‘Where are you?’ Erin exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you get my messages and other calls?’
‘Where are you ?’ Orla answered, playing for time as she eased herself off the bed, tucking her phone between shoulder and ear and searching for her clothes.
‘What? Hang on, I asked you that question.’
‘I know, but something’s telling me you’re not still in the cinema room with Tommy.’ She pulled on her underwear, then her jeans and picked her jumper off the floor.
‘And something is telling me you’re not in the kitchen, the lounge, the bathroom, our bedroom, or the weird, locked room that Tommy says is a gym thing.’
‘O-K,’ Orla said, foregoing her bra for just the jumper for now.
‘And I know that because I’ve been to all of those rooms and you aren’t in them.’
Think, Orla, think.
‘I’m in the barn,’ Orla said.
‘Oh really,’ Erin answered. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘Why?’ Orla asked, turning to Jacques. He had his eyes closed, beautiful body still nude in the bed.
‘Because I’m in the barn and you are not!’ Erin screeched.
She’d been caught out. But a good journalist never let her integrity be compromised until at least the bitter end. She took a breath. ‘Which barn?’
‘What?’
‘Are you with the chickens and Noble?’
‘Obviously!’
‘Ah, well, I’m in the other barn. Give me a second and I’ll come to you.’
Before Erin could say anything else, Orla ended the call, grabbed her socks and shoes and began putting them on.
‘Do you have another barn?’ Orla asked.
‘What?’ Jacques said.
‘Other than the barn with the chickens and Noble? Do you have any kind of barn-type structure I can pretend I was in?’
He didn’t reply but she could feel he was moving in the bed, perhaps rolling that athletic body upwards…
‘You would rather create an outbuilding than let anyone know you were in my bedroom with me?’
It sounded particularly horrible when he said it like that. But it wasn’t like that. It was simply practical. Erin would think… well, she didn’t really know what Erin would think; it could go one way or the other, from a whole cheer routine of support to a horrified child who had been told Santa wasn’t real. And really Jacques couldn’t want them walking out of here together hand-in-hand when nothing had been spoken about, when they hadn’t even actually gone on the date he had suggested…
‘Do you want Tommy to know we were here together doing… what we did here together?’ Orla asked.
‘I wouldn’t want to tell Tommy the exact full and intricate details of what we did here together but I’m also not going to make up agricultural storage like I’m ashamed of it.’
She tied her laces. ‘I’m not ashamed of it.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of it,’ Orla said. ‘Like you said.’
‘Orla…’
‘What?’
‘We had sex.’
‘I know,’ Orla said. ‘I was there.’ Yet her cheeks were now glowing as if they could light a path from here to Saint-Chambéry in the dark.
‘Me too,’ he answered, suddenly arriving from behind her and whispering into her ear.
She stood up. ‘I have to go. Because if I don’t then Erin will?—’
‘Know you were not in a barn that is not there?’
‘Well, yes.’
She didn’t know what else to say. It felt awkward. They had crossed a line and she didn’t know what happened next. She hadn’t thought, she had acted, emotionally and perhaps there was also a level of irresponsibility about it. She was here to work. Her very impressionable sister was with her. She usually ran away from connection. In a few days she would be leaving again…
‘Can we talk about this later?’ she asked.
‘Really?’ he replied. ‘Because I get the sense that you do not want to talk about this at all.’
‘No… well… I do but…’ She was running out of words and for a reporter that was the very worst thing that could happen.
‘It’s OK, Orla,’ Jacques said, springing from the bed and snatching up his underwear. ‘You do not need to say anything else.’
‘No, wait, I?—’
But her words were met by the firm closure of the en-suite door.