Page 12 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

There was a distinct scuffling in the hall.

Laurell’s mouth twitched, and then curved in spite of her, and she put her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet.

Later, alone in the pink room, Laurell sat on the edge of the bed with his handkerchief still balled in her fist and understood, with the cold clarity of someone watching a carriage come on and knowing she cannot get out of the road, exactly what had happened to her.

She had lost her family at three o’clock in the afternoon and stopped caring by half past four, because a man had knelt on the floor beside her and said as long as you want.

This was going to be so much worse than Philip.

Philip she had loved greedily and in a hurry, mostly for what he made her feel about herself. This was different. This was a man who had bought her, who had signed a paper for her as though she were a horse at auction, and who had then spent every day since being scrupulously, maddeningly decent about it, and who had gone white about the mouth when she said Marchand’s name.

He was forty. He was the mayor of New Orleans. He had a dead wife he still kept a room for, and Laurell was carrying a child that belonged to a man who had laughed at her.

“Don’t,” she said aloud to the empty room. “Don’t you dare.”

Through the connecting door, she heard him moving about in the next room, and she lay awake for a long time listening.

CHAPTER FIVE

January turned, and the house changed.

It began with the linen. Laurell came upon Mrs. Curry in the hall with an armful of tablecloths and a face like thunder over a laundry maid’s scorching, and by some instinct older than manners she found herself sorting the ruined from the salvageable on the dining room table, and then reorganizing the press, and then, three days later, going over the household accounts because Mrs. Curry had mentioned in passing that the fish man was cheating them and she couldn’t prove it.

She could prove it. It took her one afternoon and a column of figures, and when she laid the page in front of Mrs. Curry, the housekeeper looked at her with an expression bordering on love.

“Eleven dollars since November,” Mrs. Curry breathed. “I’ll have his ears.”

“You might simply pay him what he’s owed and tell him you know.”

“I’d rather have his ears.”

After that it was everything. The menus. The candles, which were being bought at a shameful price. The upstairs maid who was being worked half to death because no one had ever assigned the third floor to anybody. Laurell had run her mother’s house since she was seventeen—it was the only thing she had ever been praised for—and she fell on Remy Vincent’s neglected household like a woman coming home.

She told herself it was to earn her keep. It was very nearly true.

There were bad mornings. She was ill three days out of five now, wretchedly and reliably, and Mrs. Curry brought dry toast and weak tea to the pink room before dawn without ever once being asked, and never said a word about it in front of the master. Laurell was grateful beyond expressing. It was the one part of her condition she could still pretend belonged to her alone.

She was wrong about that, as it turned out.

“I’ve asked Dr. Lasalle to call on Thursday,” Remy said at dinner, in the tone of a man mentioning the weather.

Her fork clattered. “You’ve what?”

“He’s discreet, he’s expensive, and he attended my sister-in-law through four confinements in Baton Rouge. He is also seventy-one and entirely deaf on the left side, which I’m told improves his discretion further.”

“Remy—”

“You have been sick every morning for a fortnight,” he said, “and you have lost weight rather than gained it, and I have no earthly idea whether that is ordinary or alarming, and neither do you, and neither does Mrs. Curry, though she has opinions.” He returned to his soup. “So a doctor will come and tell us, and then we may all stop pretending we haven’t noticed.”

Laurell sat with her face burning and something enormous swelling behind her ribs.

“He’ll want to know who I am.”

“He’ll be told you are my ward’s cousin, recently widowed, staying with me while your affairs are settled.” Remy glanced up. “You’re a Mrs. Devereaux. Try to remember it; I invented you in a hurry.”

“And when the child comes and there’s no Mr. Devereaux in the churchyard?”

“Then we shall have been found out by a deaf man of seventy-one,” Remy said, “and I shall bear it.”