The Orchid Affair Read Free Page A

our way out, the strap of my bag snagging on Colin’s coat.
    “Marzipan pigs, eh?” said Colin, skeptical, but game, and I liked him even more for it, liked him so much that it made my chest hurt.
    “You’ll see.” I threaded my arm through his. “The big question is, tail first or head first?”
    “What do you usually do?” he asked.
    “I generally start with the tail and work my way up.”
    “Prolonging the agony? Bloodthirsty woman.” Colin sounded like he rather approved. He nodded towards the desk. “Shall we see if Serena’s in yet?”
    “We can get her a pig too,” I said cheerfully. Serena needed fattening up. They say a camel can’t fit through the eye of a needle, but Serena probably could. She was at the point of thin that crosses over from elegant to gaunt. And, no, that wasn’t just sour grapes speaking.
    I smiled ingratiatingly at the receptionist, who couldn’t have cared less.
    “Est-ce que une Serena Selwick est ici?” I asked in my very ungrammatical sixth-grade French. I can read the stuff; just don’t ask me to speak it.
    The receptionist was not impressed. She checked the book. “Selwick … 403?”
    “Um, no,” I said. “I mean, non . Nous sommes dans 403 . Me and him. Nous cherchons l’autre Selwick. Serena?”
    “Oui.” The woman seemed unfazed. She poked a manicured nail at the book. “Selwick. 403.”
    This was getting a little frustrating. “ Mais où est l’autre Selwick? Une autre Selwick? There should be another reservation.”
    Now it was her turn to look confused. From the look on her face, she was thinking, Americans . Why do I always get the Americans?
    Colin stepped in. “My sister is also staying here,” he said in accented but perfectly grammatical French. “Which room is she in?”
    “Room 403,” repeated the woman in the same language, frowning at him, although not as she had frowned at me. This was confusion, not annoyance. “The entire party is in 403. It is a room for three.”
    “What?” I yelped. Like I said, I can’t speak it, but I can understand it. Room for three came across loud and clear.
    Turning to me, she switched to English. “How you say? A … three-person,” she said helpfully.
    Not if I had anything to do with it, it wasn’t. “There’s been a mistake,” I said.
    “No mistake,” she said peacefully. “Selwick, 403.” She tapped the ledger for emphasis.
    I was getting pretty damn sick of that ledger.
    “That may be so,” I said, “but we reserved two rooms, one for two people, one for one.” I looked to Colin for support. “Didn’t we?”
    “Um …” Colin didn’t quite meet my eyes. Never a good sign.
    I shifted so that we were facing away from the reception desk, our bodies angled away from the receptionist, who was watching us with a certain amount of I-told-you-so, or whatever that might be translated into French. “What did you do?” I whispered.
    “I didn’t do anything,” said Colin with patent untruth.
    “All right,” I said, with the same tone of exaggerated patience he had used on me. I wasn’t going to quibble over syntax. There were more important things to quibble over. Like who was going to be sleeping on the couch. “What did you not do?”
    “I rang and asked them to add an extra.”
    “An extra room or an extra person?”
    Colin jammed his fists in the pockets of his Barbour jacket, pulling it down taut around his shoulders. “I don’t remember.”
    There went my moral high ground with the desk woman.
    I bared my teeth in a fake smile, just for her benefit. “Try.”
    “Does it matter?” Colin raked a hand through his already disordered hair. “Look, we’ll get it sorted, all right? It’s not that big a deal.”
    Not that big a deal? If he wanted to share a bed with Serena, that was just fine with me. My lingerie and I would be elsewhere. Like back in London.
    If I stayed any longer I was going to say something I would regret later, and that wouldn’t be good. For either of