Page 11 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Rachel blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You may tell your father that his daughter is under my roof and under my protection, and that if any member of your family sets foot on my step again I will have the police chief explain to them personally what the law has to say about selling a woman to Madam Giselle for the settlement of a gambling debt.” He held the door wide. “He might find it educational. So might the newspapers.”

The pretty face curdled. “You’ve no right—”

“I have eight hundred dollars’ worth of right, Miss Beaumont, which I understand is roughly what your family thought your sister was worth. Good afternoon.”

She went. She said several things on the way out, none of them worth remembering, and the front door shut behind her hard enough to rattle the fanlight.

The parlor was very quiet.

Laurell was still standing by the mantel with one hand curled around the edge of it. She hadn’t moved at all.

“You heard,” she said.

“Most of it.”

“Then you know she’s right.” Her voice was perfectly steady, which frightened him more than tears would have. “Not about the rest. About there being nowhere. My father is the only person in the world with any obligation to me, and his terms are that I get rid of it, and I won’t, and so I have—” She stopped. Her chin came up, wobbled, and held. “I have no family. I’ve been telling myself for months that when it was born they’d soften. That Mama would want to see it. And she smiled, Remy. My sister stood in our own front room and watched him sign, and smiled, and I have been making excuses for her since we were children.”

“Laurell.”

“I’m quite all right.”

“You’re not remotely all right.”

And then it came—not the storm he’d braced for, but something far worse: a small, wrenching sound she tried to catch behind her hand, and then her whole frame folding, and she sat down hard on the hearthrug because her legs had simply stopped.

Remy crossed the room and went down on one knee beside her, and after a moment’s hesitation that cost him something, he put his arm around her shoulders. She turned her face into his coat and wept as though she meant to be finished with it forever, and he sat on the floor of his own front parlor with a young woman’s tears soaking through to his shirt and thought that he would have gone to Esplanade Avenue that night and beaten Philip Marchand into paste, and that he would have gone to her father’s house afterward, and that both of these things would have been enormously satisfying and of no use to her at all.

So he stayed where he was, and let her cry, and said nothing until she was done.

At last she drew back, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand, mortified. “Your coat.”

“It has survived worse.” He passed her his handkerchief. “Blow your nose.”

She did, and hiccupped. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing.” He waited until she looked at him. “Now listen to me, because I intend to say this once and then never again, and I want you to have it.”

Her eyes searched his face.

“You have a home,” Remy said. “Here. For as long as you want one.”

Laurell went very still.

“Not until I find somewhere to put you,” he said. “Not until the child comes and other arrangements can be made. Not until it becomes inconvenient, or the aldermen grow restless, or Giselle sends her man round with a letter.” He held her gaze. “As long as you want. If that is thirty years, then it is thirty years, and my staff will simply have to become accustomed to you.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I have been called a great many things in my life,” Remy said. “Sentimental has never once been among them. I don’t say things I don’t mean; I haven’t the temperament for it.”

She stared at him, and he watched something move behind her eyes that he did not, at that moment, have the sense to identify.

“Why?” she whispered.

Remy opened his mouth, and found that the true answer was standing there in plain view, and that he was nowhere near ready to look at it.

“Because the room was empty,” he said, “and the house is too large, and I have grown accustomed to somebody at the other end of the table.” He rose and offered her his hand. “Come. Mrs. Curry has been listening at the door for a quarter of an hour and her knees won’t take much more of it.”