Sinning with My Fiancé's Twin Brother novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Astride

Laurent sets his terms for training her, she pawns her mother's pearls to enter the Cup, and Armand shows up drunk at her gate threatening the mare.

"You?"

The word came out of me louder than I meant.

Laurent picked the brush back up and went on working the gelding's flank.

"Me."

"With what? You don't have three hundred dollars."

"I had three hundred and eleven." He didn't look up. "Now I have eleven."

I stared at him across the stall door.

All my life, people had called him the spare.

He ran the Belle Rive barns, broke the colts, and ate at the far end of the table.

Armand went to New Orleans and came home with debts.

Laurent went to the barns and came home with straw on his boots.

"Why would you buy my mare?"

"Because the man waiting with Armand's marker was going to put her in a cart." He set the brush down. "And because you just bet your house on her in front of twenty people."

"Then sell her back to me."

"For what? Armand's two hundred?"

I looked down at the crumpled bills in my fist.

"I'll find the rest."

"Before New Year's?"

I didn't answer.

He came out of the stall and leaned on the door across from mine.

Up close, he wasn't Armand at all.

Armand's eyes always moved past you to see who else was in the room.

Laurent's stayed put.

"Here are my terms," he said. "Sable stays at Belle Rive, under my roof, where nobody touches her but me."

"Go on."

"You train her every morning at dawn on the back track. Nobody else is up at dawn."

"Fine."

"And you ride her astride."

I opened my mouth.

He held up one hand.

"You came off Brimstone because a sidesaddle puts all your weight on one hip and none of your legs on the horse. No sidesaddle has ever won the Cup, Varina. No sidesaddle ever will."

"Women don't ride astride."

"Women don't ride the Cup either." His mouth twitched. "You've already started breaking rules today. Might as well break a useful one."

I wanted to slap him.

I also knew he was right.

"And on the entry," I said, "who's the owner?"

"I am. The rule says any horse in the parish, any rider the owner names." He looked at me steadily. "I name you."

The barn smelled of hay and leather and his gelding's sweat.

"Dawn," I said.

"Dawn."

I walked home the mile down the bayou road in my torn habit, with no hat.

Aurore was on our gallery shelling peas into a bowl.

She took one look at me and set the bowl down.

"Who do I shoot?"

"Nobody yet."

I told her everything.

The stallion, the bet, the money, the wager, the empty stall.

When I got to the part where I took the two hundred dollars out of Armand's vest, she whooped so loud the hens scattered.

When I got to the part about the house, she stopped smiling.

"You bet our house?"

"I bet our house on Sable."

She thought about that for a long moment.

"Well," she said. "That's not so bad, then."

The next morning I took Armand's two hundred dollars into town.

I paid Papa's account at the feed store and the last of the doctor's bill from February.

The clerk counted it twice.

Then I went to the jeweler on Main Street with Mama's pearls in my reticule.

They were the only thing of hers I had left.

I watched him weigh them.

"A hundred and ten," he said.

"A hundred and twenty."

"A hundred and fifteen, mademoiselle, and I'm being kind."

I took it.

I didn't let myself look back at the case where he laid them.

The courthouse clerk took Cup entries at a desk under the stairs.

Four men were standing around it smoking.

I put the hundred dollars on the desk.

"Sable. A black mare, five years old. Owner, Laurent Devereux. Rider, Varina Lacombe."

The clerk's pen stopped.

One of the men laughed through his nose.

"Rider? Mais, chère, the Cup's a mile and a half, not a ride to church."

"Then I'll be early to church."

Another one leaned on the desk. "Armand know about this?"

"Armand bet two hundred dollars I'd fall off his horse. I'm holding the two hundred." I tapped the paper. "Write it down."

The clerk looked at the rule book, and then at the money.

Then he wrote it down.

The laughing followed me all the way out to the street.

That night, Aurore cut Papa's old canvas trousers down to my size by lamplight.

She held them up against me and nearly fell off her chair.

"You look like a stable boy with a bosom."

"Pin the waist."

"I'm pinning it. Hold still, Monsieur Lacombe."

I threw a spool at her.

She ducked it and kept laughing.

It was the first time either of us had laughed in that house since February.

Near midnight, the dog started barking.

Then I heard a horse on the bayou road, coming slow and uneven.

Somebody was singing.

I went to the window.

Armand sat his chestnut at our gate, swaying in the saddle, his good gray coat open.

He saw the lamp and stopped singing.

"Varina!" he called. "Come out here."

I didn't move.

"I heard you went to the courthouse." He laughed, and the laugh went wrong halfway through. "You made me look like a fool in front of the whole parish."

"You did that yourself," I called back.

He leaned down and wrapped his fist around the top rail of our gate.

His voice went quiet and flat.

"Ride in that race and that mare won't finish it."

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