Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
Two hours later and the royal reception was still in full swing and showing no signs of winding down.
With Leo and his mother watching Emilia like a hawk because she had taken an obvious interest in a handsome officer dressed in his full regimental finery, and Abigail ensconced in a serious conversation with two equally serious-looking young women, Portia decided to seek some respite in the retiring room.
She needed a few moments to sit down, regroup, and rest her aching head.
It was exhausting being on her best behavior while being judged by all and sundry.
And judged she very much had been by almost everyone who pretended to be delighted to make her acquaintance.
She was also exhausted by the weight of her silly court attire, which now seemed to drag her down more with each passing minute, and thoroughly sick to the back teeth of the awful feathers practically riveted to her head.
Thanks to them, she had no choice but to keep her chin up and her shoulders back as there was no way of supporting the precarious structure otherwise.
Despite her discomfort, her gaze still drifted to Leo as she escaped.
Just as it had repeatedly since they had arrived.
And just as it had each time she had looked at him since, her pulse quickened and an odd yearning engulfed her.
One that no amount of her practical, logical, and cynical lectures to herself would stop.
She blamed the kiss for her current preoccupation with him. It might not have been as thorough a kiss as their first one, but it was just as potent. That brief peck had certainly affected her enough that her mind couldn’t dislodge it. It was genuinely all she could think about.
Maybe that was why he had done it?
Simply to distract her so that she wouldn’t feel quite so intimidated by her surroundings and the alien company?
In which case, common sense dictated that she shouldn’t read too much into it or expect it to happen again.
Or worse, weave fanciful, romantic notions about it meaning something that common sense dictated she had no place even contemplating.
The only problem was that her common sense had chosen today of all days to desert her, and something uncharacteristically hopeful had apparently taken its place. Thanks, no doubt, to all the silly romantic notions Kitty had put in her head.
Alongside Leo’s kiss.
And that off-the-cuff and likely wholly innocuous “my darling” that her stupid heart wanted to believe was significant.
Urgh! What the hell was the matter with her?
Fortunately, the retiring room was blessedly quiet, even the usually hovering maid was missing, so she found a spare chair, pulled the privacy curtain around her, and gratefully rested the side of her confused and aching head against the paneling.
As the cool wood took some of the unwelcome weight off her shoulders, Portia used her fingers to massage the parts of her throbbing scalp that she could get at in between all the hairpins and wondered why none of the other ladies present were also here doing the same.
She had not expected to develop any respect for the king’s many female hangers-on, especially the really pompous ones, but it took a special kind of fortitude to sport one of these ridiculous court headdresses for hours on end and still keep the small talk flowing.
She even quite admired some of them for being able to converse animatedly about nothing in such a prolonged and seamless manner.
That was not a talent she possessed.
She could lecture, she could educate, she could be pithy, she could be curious, and she could argue, but Portia couldn’t be effortlessly charming.
She was just, as Leo said, too prickly. Whereas he could, despite his loathing of this sort of gathering.
That made her question if the aristocracy were born with such a gift or if they received lessons from the cradle?
Perhaps, if they did end up stuck together for all eternity, he might give her some lessons? She would feel less out of her depth in his world if she could be both pithy and charming like his mother was.
An errant thought that made her smile.
A distant clock struck the hour, reminding her that she really couldn’t spend much more time in the retiring room, no matter how tempting a prospect it was.
With a sigh, she lifted her heavy head from its wooden pillow and rose, only to discover that one of her dratted feathers was caught on a splinter or a proud nail or something.
Instinctively, she tugged her head to release it and managed to dislodge half of her headdress in the process.
Instantly, her artful but hideously stiff coiffure shifted as the cumbersome feathered monstrosity listed ominously to the left, wrenching yet more pins from her scalp as it did so.
To stop gravity taking over, she had to grab the dratted thing with both hands as she stumbled to fix the damage in the mirror.
Her refection confirmed what she could already feel and that a landslide had occurred on her head. One doomed to get worse unless she could quickly reverse the subsidence.
While supporting the full weight of the feathers in one hand, she used her other to extract as many pins as she could from her hair before she tried to reuse them to resecure it.
A feat that took ten minutes at least and that, when she finally let go to inspect her handiwork, hadn’t actually worked at all because the hated feathers refused to stay upright and drooped.
That was when Portia admitted defeat and decided that her giant, dead pet ostrich needed the help of someone else if it stood any chance of coming back to life.
However, with still no maid in sight, the only way to summon help without making a public spectacle of herself was to urgently seek a palace servant.
Preferably one with experience in collapsed coiffures.
Once again steadying her feathers with both hands, she gingerly poked her head out of the door of the retiring room to locate one and was confronted with a worried-looking Leo instead.
“Hallelujah!” He threw up his palms. “You have been in there forever and I was worried sick that someone had upset you!” Then he must have noticed her expression because he frowned and looked ready to kill someone. “Have they?”
“There has been an incident with my headdress.” To prove that, she let go and watched his eyes rapidly follow the feathers on their descent toward her ear. “I need help pinning it back in place.” She beckoned him to come into the retiring room and he shook his head.
“I can’t enter the ladies’ retiring room!”