Page 14 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Remy set the report aside.

“It isn’t on your account,” he said. “Not in the sense you mean.”

“Then in what way?”

He should have lied. He had spent twenty years in public life and could lie beautifully, and sitting there in his own library he found he couldn’t do it.

“I stopped,” he said, “because I don’t want another woman.”

The needle stopped.

The room was suddenly so quiet that Remy could hear the settling of the coals, and he watched her set the sewing down on the arm of the chair with enormous care. She had put down her fork with that same care the night he asked for Marchand’s name.

“Say it again,” Laurell said.

“Laurell—”

“Please.”

He stood, because sitting had become impossible. “I don’t want another woman. There. You may do as you like with it.”

She rose too. She came across the hearthrug and stopped in front of him, close enough that he could see the pulse going in her throat, and Remy put his hands behind his back like a schoolboy because he did not trust them.

“I have been so frightened of you,” she said.

That went into him like a knife. “Laurell—”

“Not of you. Of the arrangement.” Her fingers twisted in her skirt. “That first night, I lay in that bed and looked at the door between our rooms and thought, he has bought me, and if he comes through that door there is nothing on earth I can do about it. And you never came. Not once. And every day since then you have found new ways of handing me back to myself—the dresses, and the doctor, and the accounts, and as long as you want.” Her voice shook. “Do you know what that has done to me? I would rather you had been a monster. A monster I could have survived.”

“I want you to be safe,” Remy said. “That is the whole of what I want.”

“It isn’t.” She lifted her chin. “Is it?”

“No,” he said. “God help me. It isn’t.”

And Laurell Beaumont, who had been sold twice and told once, in a garden on Prytania Street, exactly what her body was worth to a man in a hurry, put both hands flat against his chest, went up on her toes, and kissed him.

It was clumsy. She was trembling and she missed his mouth by a fraction and had to try again, and Remy stood absolutely rigid for the space of two heartbeats. Then he gave in.

His arm came around her waist and drew her in, and he took her mouth properly, and the sound she made against him nearly finished him where he stood. She tasted of the tea she drank instead of wine. Her hands slid up over his shoulders and into his hair, and she pressed herself against him with an eagerness that had nothing careful in it at all, and Remy backed her two steps until her spine came up against the bookcase and kissed her until neither of them could breathe.

“Remy.” She said it against his mouth, open and unguarded, and it was very nearly the end of him. “Please.”

“Tell me what you’re asking for.”

“I don’t know.” Her fingers curled in his shirt. “I only know that I’ve been thinking about it for weeks and I can’t sleep for it, and if you send me upstairs tonight I shall lie there listening to you through that door again and I can’t—”

He kissed her before she could finish.

Whatever had been holding him together came apart. He had spent seven weeks being more careful of her than he had been of anything since he was nineteen years old, and seven weeks came undone in the space of a breath. His hand found the row of small buttons at her throat and worked half of them free before he had decided to, and when he put his mouth to the hollow beneath her jaw and then lower, to the warm skin over her collarbone, Laurell made a sound he felt travel all the way down his spine.

“Is this—” he began.

“Don’t stop.”

He got her bodice open. Beneath it she was soft and full and already tender, and when he closed his lips over one dark peak she gasped and arched off the bookcase, both hands buried in his hair, holding him there. He was rougher than he meant to be and she liked it. She said his name twice more, ragged. Then his palm slid down over the slight new curve below her waist and stopped, and she covered his hand with her own and pressed it flat.

“That doesn’t frighten you,” she whispered.