Sinning with My Fiancé's Twin Brother novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Lacombe Barn

Laurent looked at his aunt for a long moment.

Then he took his hat off to her, very politely, in front of the whole parish.

"They're already gone," he said.

He came down the steps to me.

"Our barn has two empty stalls," I said, loud enough for the square. "And a loft, if you don't snore."

"He'll have to prove that," Aurore said.

Somebody laughed.

Odile went down the other side of the steps to her carriage and didn't look back.

By four o'clock, Laurent was walking down the bayou road with Sable on one lead and Gambit on the other.

His father's racing saddle rode on Gambit's back.

A trunk, a box of tools and a sack of oats rode in a borrowed cart behind him.

Two of the Belle Rive grooms drove it.

Nobody had told them to, and Odile hadn't told them not to.

Aurore and I stood at our gate and watched him come.

"He's bringing his own oats," Aurore said. "That's a man with manners."

Papa's barn hadn't had a horse in it since February.

It smelled of dust and old leather and mice.

Laurent stood in the doorway and looked up.

Daylight showed through the roof in three places over the loft.

"Mais," he said.

"It only leaks when it rains."

"That's what leaking is, Varina."

Sable walked straight into Papa's old box stall at the end and put her nose in the corner, where his feed bin used to be.

She stood there with her eyes half closed.

None of us said anything for a minute.

Then Aurore went in to start supper.

Supper was red beans and rice at our kitchen table, which was square.

Laurent stood beside it with his plate, as if he didn't know where to sit.

"Pick a side," Aurore said. "There's no far end."

He sat down across from me.

"At Belle Rive I sat by the salt cellar," he said. "Next to the priest when he came, and the cousins from Opelousas when they didn't."

"Here you sit by the bread," Aurore said. "Which means you pass it."

He passed it.

She watched him butter his.

"Do you snore?"

"No."

"Do you sing?"

"Only to horses."

"Do you leave the barn door open?"

"Never in my life."

She pointed her fork at him.

"Do you mean it about my sister?"

Laurent set down his knife.

"Yes," he said.

Aurore studied him with her chin on her hand.

"Then you can have the second helping," she said, and pushed the pot across.

He stayed up on our roof from dawn to dark the next day.

I trained Sable at first light on a mile-and-a-half loop he'd paced out the night before.

It ran along our fence line, around Papa's forty acres and up the headland of old Madame's cane fields.

Old Madame's eldest son rode over at breakfast to say we could use it.

"Maman says ride where you like," he said. "She says if you need a turn, she'll cut you one."

When I came back, Laurent was straddling the ridge of the barn with nails in his mouth.

Aurore was on the ladder, handing up shingles.

"Not that one," he said around the nails. "It's split."

"It's a shingle. They're all split."

"That's why they leak."

She threw it at him.

He caught it one-handed and nailed it on.

That week he broke two of old Madame's colts for two dollars a head.

He mended our gate, which had hung crooked since Papa got sick.

He oiled Papa's door so it stopped creaking.

On Thursday night it rained hard, from the Gulf, a cold rain that rattled the windows.

I lay awake listening to it on the new roof.

At midnight I got up.

I put Papa's old wool coat on over my nightgown, pushed my bare feet into my boots and went out across the yard with a lantern.

The barn was dark and warm with horse.

Sable put her head over her door and whickered at me.

I climbed the ladder to the loft.

He was sitting up in the hay with his back to the wall, awake.

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