Page 21 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Laurell stopped in the middle of the floor and pressed both hands over her mouth.

She had been so proud of that letter. She had gone out into the street on her own two feet to keep a story out of the papers, and she had put her hand flat on her stomach a hundred times in two months and thought I will manage this, I will find a way, and here she was, eleven paces by nine, exactly where her father had sent her in the first place.

“No,” she said aloud.

The child would be born in August. She was going to be somebody’s mother in August, and she was standing in a locked room in the last hours of daylight, and there was no one coming who wasn’t already on his way.

She looked at the chair. She looked at the boarded window. She sat down on the edge of the bed with her arms wrapped around herself and began, very deliberately, to think—about the corridor, and the man’s heavy tread on the stairs, and how many minutes there were between the sound of a key and the sound of a door.

Below her, in the front of the house, a door opened and shut, and a man laughed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Madam Giselle received him in the front room at half past seven, in garnet silk, with the air of a woman who had been expecting him for some while.

“Mayor Vincent.” She smiled. “You’ve come a long way for a man forbidden the premises by his own contract.”

“Where is she?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

Remy crossed the room, took hold of the back of the chair on either side of her, and leaned down until his face was a foot from hers.

He had never in his life frightened a woman. He discovered that he did not much care.

“Eleven years,” he said. “Eleven years I have come through that door and paid your prices and told myself I was a decent man because I was polite about it. I have made you rich. I have kept the police off your steps. When Alderman Delahoussaye wanted this district cleaned out in ’93, it was my hand that stopped him.” His voice never rose. “You have four hundred dollars of Abelard Gauthier’s money and a girl of two-and-twenty in a locked room somewhere in this parish, and she is carrying a child, and if she is harmed, I will take everything you have. Not the house. Everything. The lease on the property, the licenses, the man who does your books, the police protection, the aldermen you pay, the mortgage the Hibernia Bank holds on this building—every last one of which I can reach by Friday, and every last one of which I will, and I will do it in public, and I will enjoy it.”

Giselle’s smile had gone. Her eyes, which had always been cold, were now merely careful.

“And if I tell you?”

“Then you get nothing,” Remy said. “No favor, no promise, no protection. I am done buying your goodwill. Whatever happens tonight, I am going to spend the rest of my time in office making it impossible for you to purchase another girl from another drunkard in this city. That is not a threat, madam. That is a program.”

“Then why on earth should I help you?”

“Because Gauthier made a fool of you,” Remy said, “in your own house, over four hundred dollars, and you have never forgiven anything in your life.”

For a moment the woman was absolutely still.

Then Madam Giselle made a low, unpleasant sound that was very nearly admiration, and reached for the bell.

“The Marais Street house,” she said. “Third from the corner, blue shutters, boarded above. It’s leased in his son’s name, which I have always thought said everything about the man—and the boy doesn’t know the half of what it’s used for. He keeps it for the sort of evening he can’t have at home.” She paused. “She was alive at four o’clock. He sent Cobb round for a woman to sit with her, which I did not supply, and I will tell you why—because I sell women to men who use them and I have never once in twenty years sold one to a man who breaks them, and Abelard Gauthier breaks them.”

“That distinction,” Remy said, “is worth precisely nothing.”

“I know it,” said Madam Giselle. “Get out of my house.”

The key turned at half past eight.

Laurell was standing behind the door with the chair held up by two legs and her heart going like a bird in a box. She had rehearsed it forty times. Wait for the door to swing. Swing at the head. Then the stairs, then the street, and scream the whole way.

The door swung. She swung with it, and the chair connected with something and there was a shout, and then a hand caught the chair and wrenched it out of her grip so hard her shoulder tore.

“Little cat,” said Abelard Gauthier, from the corridor, holding his cheek. He looked at the blood on his fingers with an expression of pure astonishment. “Cobb, get the—”

Downstairs, the front door came off its hinges.

It was a sound Laurell felt in her teeth: an enormous splintering crash, then men’s voices, a great many of them, and Cobb’s heavy tread going away down the corridor at a run, and someone below bellowing “Police!”