“I know.” Her hand was shaking slightly as she added white to her brush. “But I do speak of it. Have you?”
“Why do you think I have?”
“She stares at you as if she’d like to eat you.”
“Look at me, Juliette.”
“I’m too busy.”
“Look at me.”
Juliette glanced over her shoulder and inhaled sharply as she saw the expression on his face.
“No,” he enunciated softly and with great precision. “You don’t want to wander down that path. Not unless you wish to learn exactly what I did with Germaine.”
Juliette felt a hot flush rush to her cheeks. “I only wondered. I need no description.”
“Description? I wasn’t speaking of words.”
Juliette pulled her gaze away. “You’re teasing me again.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” She added white to the blue of the sky in the painting, hunting desperately for a change of subject. “If my presence is so boring, perhaps I should let Marguerite tend to your needs.”
“You would not be so cruel. How can you stand having that gloomy-faced harridan about? She stalksaround the inn like a crow scratching for worms. Does the woman never smile?”
His tone was teasing again and Juliette breathed a sigh of relief. “She smiles at my mother. She was my mother’s nurse since the day she was born and loves her very much. Most of the time I see very little of her when we’re at the palace.” Juliette kept her gaze carefully averted. “Marguerite doesn’t like being here, but the queen thought I should have a woman in attendance while I saw to your needs, so she sent Marguerite back to the inn to serve as my chaperone.”
“Quite proper. However, totally unnecessary. You’re scarce more than a child.”
Juliette didn’t argue with him though she couldn’t remember a time when she had thought of herself as a child—and it was not as a child that he had looked at her a few moments before. “The queen believes in being discreet.”
Jean Marc raised his eyebrows.
“She does,” Juliette insisted. “You mustn’t believe what those horrible pamphleteers write about her. She’s kind and a good mother and—”
“Foolishly extravagant and self-indulgent.”
“She doesn’t understand about money.”
“Then she had better learn. The country’s on the edge of bankruptcy and she still plays at being a shepherdess in her fairy-tale garden at Versailles.”
“She gave to the relief of the hungry from her own allowance.” Juliette put her brush down and turned to face him. “You don’t know her. She gave me paints and a tutor. She’skind, I tell you.”
“We’ll not argue about it.” Jean Marc’s gaze narrowed on her flushed face. “I have a feeling if I say anything more about Her Sublime Majesty, you may take a dagger to my other shoulder.”
“You’ll see for yourself when you go to Versailles,” Juliette said earnestly. “She’s not what she is portrayed to be.”
“Perhaps not to you.” Jean Marc raised his hand as she opened her lips to protest. “As you say, I’ll judge when I’m admitted to the queen’s august presence.”
Juliette frowned at him, not satisfied. “She doesn’t understand. She’s as a butterfly who always has lived in a garden filled with flowers. You wouldn’t expect a butterfly to understand why—”
“I wouldn’t expect a butterfly to be queen of the greatest country in Europe,” Jean Marc said mildly.
“Yet you have no hesitation about asking a boon of that butterfly just as all the rest of the world does. What do you wish from her? A patent of nobility? A great estate?”
“The Wind Dancer.”
