Sinning with My Fiancé's Twin Brother novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: First Fall

Aurore runs Armand off with a shotgun, Varina is thrown on the back track and gets back up, and Odile's carriage comes for her.

Behind me, a floorboard creaked.

Aurore came past me in her nightgown with Papa's shotgun.

She didn't stop at the window.

She went straight out the front door and down the gallery steps barefoot.

"Aurore!"

She broke the gun open, looked at the shells, and snapped it shut.

The sound carried across the yard.

Armand straightened in his saddle.

"Now, little sister, put that down."

"I'm not your little sister." She raised the barrels at his horse's feet. "And this is still our gate."

"I was talking to Varina."

"You were threatening a horse. That's lower than talking to Varina." She cocked one hammer. "Go home, Armand. I shoot snakes off this porch every summer, and I don't usually warn them."

He looked past her at me in the window.

Then he laughed again and turned his chestnut up the road.

We listened until the hoofbeats were gone.

Aurore came back up the steps and leaned the shotgun by the door.

Her hands were perfectly steady.

"I'd have aimed higher if he'd said anything else," she said, and went back to bed.

I was at the Belle Rive barns before the sky turned gray.

Laurent was already there with Sable saddled.

It wasn't a sidesaddle.

It was a light racing saddle with short stirrups, the leather old and soft.

"It was my father's," he said. "He rode the Cup in 'fifty-two. Came third."

Sable shoved her head into my chest and blew.

I pressed my face against her neck and breathed in the smell of her.

"She remembers you," Laurent said.

"She'd better."

He looked at my trousers.

He looked a long moment.

Then he cleared his throat and held out his cupped hands for my knee.

The back track was a mile and a half of packed dirt cut through the moss woods.

In the half dark, the live oaks made a tunnel.

Laurent rode Gambit beside me for the first lap at a walk.

"Your legs do the work now," he said. "Not your hands. Squeeze, and she'll go."

I squeezed.

She went.

It was being shot out of the trees.

The wind tore my hair out of its pins, and I heard myself laughing.

At the far turn, a rabbit bolted under her nose.

Sable propped hard sideways.

I didn't.

I hit the ground on my shoulder and rolled into a mud puddle the size of a bathtub.

Laurent's gelding slid to a stop beside me.

He was off before it stopped.

"Varina."

"I'm fine."

"Can you move your arm?"

I moved it.

It hurt, and it moved.

He let his breath out and sat back on his heels.

"You went off sideways," he said. "You were sitting like a lady."

"I am a lady."

"Not on that track, you're not." He offered his hand. "Up."

I took it.

Sable had stopped twenty yards on and was eating grass with her reins hanging.

I walked to her with mud running down my back and got on without help.

Laurent watched me and didn't say a word.

We went again.

And again.

On the fourth run, I let her go flat out for the whole distance.

She was a black streak for a mile.

Then, just past the old cypress, she quit.

I felt it in my legs first.

Her stride shortened and her head came up and she started to blow.

Laurent rode up beside me while she heaved.

"There it is," he said.

"Papa always said she quit in heat."

"It's sixty degrees this morning." He reached over and laid his palm on her steaming neck. "She doesn't quit because she's tired. She quits because she can't get her wind back while you're still pushing."

"So what do I do?"

"At the mile, you sit still. Three strides, nothing. Let her blow out. Then ask her."

"And if she doesn't come back?"

"Then she was never going to win, and you'll know." He looked at me. "But she will."

When we walked back to the barns, the sun was just up.

My left stirrup leather had stretched where I'd fallen on it.

Laurent took my foot out of it and went to work on the buckle himself.

His hand was on my boot.

Then it was on my ankle, holding my leg still.

Then he was standing at my knee, close enough that I could see where his beard was coming in dark along his jaw.

He hadn't shaved in three days.

"You're letting it grow," I said.

"I'm tired of being called by the wrong name in town."

He punched a new hole in the leather with his knife.

His fingers brushed the inside of my calf through the canvas.

Neither of us moved.

I could feel each of his breaths through my trouser leg.

He looked up at me, and his gray-green eyes were nothing like his brother's.

"You're my brother's," he said, very low.

I looked down at him.

"I'm my own."

He held my eyes.

Then he slid the buckle home, set my foot back in the iron, and stepped away.

I rode home with my leg still burning where his hand had been.

There was a carriage waiting at the Lacombe gate.

Black, with the Devereux crest on the door, and two gray horses.

The driver touched his hat to me.

The window came down.

Aunt Odile looked out at my muddy trousers and my loose hair and didn't change her face at all.

"Get in, Varina," she said. "You have a gown fitting at eleven, and you are not going to it like that."

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