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 herquestion 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!”
“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 toface 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.”
