Better that than admitting the real reasons. And it was cold. She could feel the tip of her nose turning blue.

“What about you? Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I was,” André said pointedly. His jaws stretched in a long, uninhibited yawn. Hitching himself up a bit, he unfolded one arm, stretching it out along the top of the pallet. “Here.”

Here what? Laura could see the shadowy outline of his sleeve, pale against the darker skin beneath. He had elected to sleep in his shirt, the strings untied at the throat, the cuffs open and folded back along his forearms.

She, on the other hand, was still entirely fully clothed, with the sole exception of her shawl. That was another problem. Her blouse itched.

When she didn’t respond, André stretched out his fingers. “Come here.”

Laura regarded his arm suspiciously. His arm couldn’t possibly be less comfortable than the pillow. But... “Why?”

Although she couldn’t see very well, she was fairly certain that he rolled his eyes. “For warmth,” he said, “only for warmth. And because your fidgeting is keeping me awake.”

Laura lowered herself cautiously into the crook of his arm, from sheer fatigue, she told herself, rather than anything else. They both needed their sleep. “All right. But I don’t—”

His hand pressed against the back of her head, smushing her face against his chest.

“—fidget,” she said into his shirt.

“Mmph,” said André into her hair. It wasn’t so much agreement or disagreement as a shorthand for All right, that’s all very well, can we go to sleep now?

Shaking free of his hand, Laura turned her face so that she could breathe. Asphyxiation was seldom the route to a good night’s sleep. She could feel the rub of much-washed linen beneath her cheek—like an old sheet, she told herself. It was best for all concerned if she thought of him simply as an extension of the mattress. A much warmer and firmer portion of the mattress. In fact, he made a much better mattress than the mattress. Mattresses, after all, seldom came with their own heating agents.

She scooted gingerly closer, finding a comfortable spot somewhere below his arm and above his ribs.

André moved obligingly to make room for her, adjusting the angle of his arm around her shoulders and tucking his chin against the top of her head.

His shirt smelled of soap and spilled coffee, thin enough that she could feel the faint prickle of the hair on his chest.

“Better now?” he asked sleepily.

“Certainly warmer,” conceded Laura, and felt his chest rumble with something that might have been a chuckle.

“Good,” he murmured. She could feel the dip of his chin against her hair. “Sleep.”

To her own surprise, she did.

It wasn’t a rooster that woke them, but Harlequin, shouting with appalling cheerfulness, “Wake up, lovebirds! It’s morning!”

Laura blinked her gummy eyes open just in time to see his head disappearing back through the curtains. Doors. Doors were a good thing, she thought hazily. Much less permeable than curtains.

She yawned, feeling her eyes drift shut again, every fiber of her body resisting the imperative to wake up. She was heavenly warm and incredibly comfortable, curled up on her side, cradled in a nest of blankets. Laura stretched, and felt the blanket stir in response.

“Mmm?” said the blanket, and Laura came jarringly and fully awake.

That wasn’t a blanket, that was a man. A man with one arm under her head and another around her waist. At some point in the night, they must have rolled over, because they were sleeping like two spoons in a drawer, the curve of his body mirroring hers, her back tucked up intimately against his front.

Very intimately.

It had been some time since Laura had had personal experience of the more masculine portions of the male anatomy, but she was fairly sure that wasn’t his knee.

Laura bounded out of the bed, trailing half the blankets with her. Her blouse had come unmoored during the night, and she hastily yanked it back up over her shoulder.

“Good morning!” she babbled. “Time to wake up!”

André groaned, burying his head in the pillows, which all seemed to have bunched up on his side of the bed. Bizarre that there was already a “his” side and a “hers” side, but his side it was.

“Are you always this terrifyingly energetic in the mornings?” he inquired.

“No, it’s just a special treat for our first night together,” she snapped, then realized just what it sounded like. Deciding to quit while she was ahead, she said hastily, “Thank you. It was very kind of you to serve as pillow for me.”

André propped himself up on one elbow. “It wasn’t entirely selfless,” he said. “Where did you put my portmanteau?”

“There.” Laura pointed to the bundle she had packed for him. She did her best to sound nonchalant. “Not entirely selfless?”

André paused in the act of digging through the bag. He cocked a brow. “It stopped you thrashing about.”

Laura plunked down on the small stool in front of their one table. “I wasn’t thrashing. I was just . . . restless,” she said with dignity. “It’s been an unsettling few days.”

“No argument there.” André yanked his old shirt up over his head, revealing an expanse of chest lightly fuzzed with dark hair.

Laura swiveled around on the stool, reaching for her hairbrush. What with one thing and another, she had forgotten to braid her hair before going to bed, and it was a snarled mess. She attacked a chunk at random, wincing as the bristles hit knots. “Do you think Monsieur Delaroche is after us yet?”

André’s head emerged through the top of the fresh shirt. He pulled the ties together. “I would be very surprised if he weren’t. He’ll be itching to get his hands on Daubier.”

“And you,” Laura pointed out.

“And me,” André agreed.

“You seem surprisingly unconcerned.”

“I slept well.”

Laura made a face at him.

“I’m not unconcerned. Believe me,” André said with feeling, “I couldn’t be farther from unconcerned. But I did take some precautions before we left.”

Despite herself, Laura was intrigued. She lowered the hairbrush. “What sort of precautions?”

“I planted a few false trails. Delaroche should be getting reports of a man answering my description heading with two small children in the direction of Austria.”

“Austria?”

“In the fireplace of my study in the Hôtel de Bac are the charred remains of a series of letters with the Austrian foreign minister, bargaining for safe conduct. Such a pity the fire went out before it could burn down completely.”

“Isn’t that too obvious? Won’t he suspect?”

“Trust me, it’s very artful charring. He’ll also receive conflicting reports about a fishing boat.”

“Meaning,” said Laura, “that he’ll assume that the Austrian documents are a façade, but the fishing boat is worth following.”

André looked smug. “Or the other way around. Delaroche’s mind is just twisted enough to assume that the obvious falsehood must be real and the real-seeming option false. There should be enough there to keep him busy for some time. You, by the way, have accepted new employment in Provence and are on your way there even as we speak. It’s a very old family. And very hard to find, given that they died out two generations ago.”

“And Daubier?”

“Went to ground, presumably with Cadoudal. Someone is going to go to his studio to make it look as though he snuck back to get necessaries for himself.”

“Someone?”

“I do still have some friends in Paris. The point is that it ought to look as though we’re all in separate groups, with Daubier still somewhere in Paris. They won’t be looking for us all together, and certainly not here.”

“Unless Governor Murat saw,” Laura countered.

“After your extraordinary efforts to prevent him doing so?”

André’s voice was mild enough, but Laura felt a rush of warmth at the memory. After a night spent pressed together, body to body, it was absurd that the recollection of a bit of playacting could make her blush. That was all it had been, playacting.

Now, if only her body would remember that.

“There was nothing so extraordinary about it,” Laura muttered. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“Somehow,” said André dryly, “I doubt Jeannette could have pulled that off in quite the same way.”

“Well,” said Laura. She tossed her brush aside and rose from the stool. “Let’s hope my acting skills prove equally good on the stage.”

“Nervous?” asked André.

“Nonsense,” said Laura. “All one has to do is act out a scenario. What can possibly be so hard about that?”


“Ruffiana? If you could, a little to the right?” called Pantaloon, for at least the third time in ten minutes. “You’re blocking Harlequin.”

Laura moved obediently to the right, knowing that it would be the left next time, or the middle the time after that. No matter where she was, it wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

Apparently, dissembling and performing weren’t quite the same skills after all. Leading a double life didn’t seem to have prepared her for the exigencies of the stage. Lying one’s way into someone’s household didn’t necessitate such skills as projecting one’s lines or remembering to cheat out towards the audience. Upstage, downstage . . . Laura’s head swam with it.

None of the others seemed to be having the same problem. André, it seemed, was a natural on the stage. She would have accused him of practicing on the sly but for the fact that he hadn’t known about the acting troupe until after she had. It must be his background in debate, Laura decided. Like Commedia dell’Arte, being a public representative was an art form that demanded thinking on one’s feet and speaking very, very loudly.

Being a governess didn’t provide quite the same training.

Excuses, excuses. No matter how she attempted to parse it, the result was the same: She was an unmitigated disaster on the stage. Even de Berry had done better than she. He, at least, remembered to address his lines downstage.

“Shall we begin the scene again?” suggested Pantaloon wearily.

“What makes him think the tenth time will make any difference?” murmured Rose to Leandro.

Leandro blushed and scuffed his feet, torn between his innate good nature and the attentions of his goddess.

“Is it time for supper yet?” Laura asked hopefully.

Harlequin checked his watch. “It’s four o’clock.”

Blast.

Pantaloon sighed and rose from his perch on an overturned log. “Again, I think. We must have something to perform when we reach Beauvais.”

Beauvais was to be their first stop, roughly a week hence. They were rehearsing in the open, in a clearing in a wooded copse. It had been deemed a good place to camp, largely due to the small pond nearby.

From Leandro, who did manage to string together complete sentences as long as Rose was out of eyeshot, Laura learned that they were taking something of a detour. Under normal circumstances, the troupe would have traveled by the major roads, stopping to give performances along the way, staying as many as three nights if the town were large enough and the take good. With so many new troupe members, Pantaloon had decreed it more prudent to take to the back roads, using the opportunity to put the new cast members through their paces. By avoiding the inns, they broke even. There was no revenue, but little in the way of cost.

It also meant they had no witnesses. There was no one to comment on the man with the strangely broken hand, the actor with the oddly aristocratic accent, or the two small children who just happened to have the same names as the small children of a wanted man.

According to Leandro, the decision had been Pantaloon’s. Pantaloon was, after all, the nominal head of the troupe. Laura had a fairly good idea who had first broached the plan.

Laura wondered how much the Pink Carnation was paying Cécile. Whatever it was, she deserved double.

Laura thought back over the rehearsal. Make that triple.

“From the beginning, then,” said Pantaloon. “Ruffiana, you have intercepted Harlequin, who is returning from a rendezvous with Columbine, who has given him a note from Inamorata to be delivered to Leandro. You want him to play go-between on your behalf with Il Capitano, but first you must feel him out to make sure he won’t betray you to your husband. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” said Laura. It wasn’t the scenario she had trouble with. She could summarize it perfectly well. It was acting it that was the problem.