“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.”