Sinning with My Fiancé's Twin Brother novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: Moonlight

A chair scraped in the study.

I opened the front door and walked out of it before anyone came into the hall.

The gallery was empty.

I went down the steps holding forty unpinned inches of satin off the gravel, and I didn't stop until I reached the barns.

Laurent was in the aisle with a colt on a lead.

He saw me and the colt saw me, and they both stopped dead.

"Mais," he said slowly. "That's a lot of dress."

"It was your aunt's. She never needed it."

He handed the colt to a groom without looking at him.

"What happened?"

I pulled him into the empty tack room and shut the door.

Then I told him.

Canal Street. Eleven thousand. New Year's Day. The income on his wedding day. The girl comes with a river landing.

He listened with his arms folded and his back against the saddle racks.

His face didn't move until I said eleven.

Then his jaw went tight under the new beard.

"Last spring it was three," he said.

"You knew?"

"I knew there was a man. I paid four hundred of it in May out of the barn money and Odile took it out of my wages." He looked at the floor. "I didn't know it was eleven."

"He's marrying me to pay a gambler."

"He's marrying you to pay a gambler," Laurent said, "and Odile's marrying you to get a landing for her cotton barges. And you were going to marry him to pay your father's note."

"I know."

"So nobody in this was ever marrying anybody."

I laughed.

It came out wrong and wet, and I put my hand over my mouth.

"Ride tonight," he said.

"Tonight?"

"It was eighty degrees this afternoon. The race is New Year's Day. I want to know what she does in cold air." He pushed off the saddle racks. "Moonrise is at nine. Wear the trousers, not that."

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