Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
“Well I certainly cannot go back out there looking like this.” She jabbed a finger at the packed royal court. “So you are going to have to. Or you go and find someone more useful who can rescue me in my hour of need!”
He hovered in indecision briefly. “Let’s find another room and I’ll give it a go.”
While she held her headdress, he bundled up her train and spirited them both along the quiet hallway well away from prying eyes, randomly checking doors as they went.
All were locked.
They hurried down a side corridor and after three more attempts, finally found a room that was not only open, but lit.
It was filled with green baize tables all with waiting packs of cards and gaming tokens piled neatly on them, but by the pyramid of champagne glasses, the chilling bottles in vast ice buckets and the freshly laid buffet, it would not be vacant for long.
Because this was clearly where the king and his cronies would soon come to gamble.
“What do I need to do?” Leo peered at the top of her head warily. “Only while I am happy to be your knight in shining armor in your hour of need, I shall give you fair warning that my only experience with hairpins comes from removing them. I have never ever had any cause to stick one back in.”
“How do you know how to remove a hairpin and not insert one?” That question popped out before she thought about it and they both winced at the same time.
In her case, because unwelcome images of him passionately undressing another woman immediately made her irrationally jealous.
“On second thought, don’t answer that.” She pushed her hair and feathers back where they were supposed to be with the same force as she tried to banish the flash of jealousy.
“There is this pocket contraption beneath the cap that you need to slide in between the hairpins and my hair to anchor it in place. It was too fiddly for me to do on my own.” She bent at the knees so he could inspect it. “Do you see?”
“Just about.”
Leo set to work, tugging out random pins that were doing nothing now and trying to reinsert them, but he quickly got frustrated. “This is like a Chinese puzzle!” He poked a pin in and stabbed her in the head.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry—but I can’t see. The pins are dark, your hair is darker, and I desperately need more light.
” He scanned the room, then spied two large candelabra on the mantelpiece that flanked an enormous Oriental vase filled with flowers.
Behind them was the added bonus of a mirror above it that amplified the candlelight. “Let’s move over there.”
They shuffled to the mantelpiece, she hunched, and he went to work again.
“Aha!” He grinned after a few more failed attempts.
“That’s better. I can finally see how this ridiculous contraption works.
” He stepped closer. Too close because she could feel the heat of his body and smell the subtle but seductively spicy scent of his cologne as he studied the still-pinned side of her headdress and meticulously tried to emulate it on the flapping side.
“It seems you have to bend the bottom of the pin over the top.” Which was all well and good, but each time he twisted a pin, the roots of her hair screamed in protest.
The front done to his satisfaction, he eventually turned her to face the mirror, then tilted her head forward over the mantelpiece so that he could pin the back.
“You were wrong about the five million pins.” He sounded frustrated as he repeated the awkward process.
“There are at least six million in here.”
“Your mother instructed her maid to put double the usual amount in because my hair is so slippery.” In the absence of his cologne, something in this room smelled seriously acrid, but not enough to stop her noticing every single time his hips accidentally brushed against her bottom as he struggled with a particularly stubborn pin.
It struck her as a good a time as any to ask him about the kiss because she didn’t have to look at him while she did it.
“Leo … before … outside…” His fingers paused as if he knew what was coming. “Why did you kiss me?”
“It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”
“Oh,” she said, still not sure what that meant. “So it was an act of mercy?”
“Not really.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know.” Unhelpful. “But I enjoyed it.” So had she, but that wasn’t the point. “Done,” he suddenly said stepping back. “Or at least I think it is. Test your feathers, wife.”
Off-kilter, Portia lifted her head to stare at his handiwork in the mirror and was relieved to see that her dead ostrich once again pointed north.
“Thank y—” She screeched as she spotted a worrying plume of gray smoke puffing out of the top of the tallest feather, then automatically tried to wrench the headdress from the six million hairpins that secured it to her scalp again. “I’m on fire!”
Something Leo had apparently already noticed too because with widened eyes and a yelp of his own, he immediately grabbed the vase of flowers, yanked the blooms out, and threw all the water at her.