Page 22 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Gauthier moved with extraordinary speed for a man of fifty. He had her wrist before she could get back through the door, and he dragged her out onto the landing at the top of the stairs, and she went down on one knee and heard her sleeve tear at the shoulder.

“Laurell!”

She would remember, ever afterward, that she knew his voice before she saw him.

Remy was halfway up the stairs with a lamp somebody had thrust at him, and behind him were Chief Willauby and two constables, and behind them was James Kilnworthy with a pistol he plainly had no intention of using and every intention of showing. Remy’s coat was open and his hair was wild and he looked nothing whatever like the mayor of New Orleans.

He looked, Laurell thought dizzily, like a man who had driven a gig through Storyville himself.

“Stay where you are,” Gauthier said.

Everyone stopped.

He had Laurell’s arm twisted up behind her, and he had backed them both against the landing rail, and she could feel it shift against her hip. Below, the hall was full of men and lamplight.

“You’ve nothing,” Gauthier said. “You understand that. A girl in a house. Whose house? A house on a lease in my son’s name, in a district where nobody sees anything. She walked out of the mayor’s home this morning of her own free will—I daresay there’s a letter to prove it—and if she says otherwise, she is a whore out of Giselle’s who was bought and paid for, and I will say so, from a witness box, in the newspapers, with names and dates and the sum on the bank draft.” He was breathing hard. “You know what that story does to you, Vincent. You have known it since Tuesday. Now put down the lamp and let me pass, and you can have her, and the whole thing goes quiet forever.”

There was a silence.

Laurell looked at Remy through the tangle of her own hair and thought, with perfect calm: he has an election in the autumn, and the newspapers love him, and he built all of it out of nothing, and I will not blame him for what he does next.

“No,” Remy said.

“Think, man.”

“I have thought about nothing else since eleven o’clock this morning.” Remy set the lamp down on the stair, very deliberately, and straightened. “Print it. Every word. Tell them the mayor of New Orleans went into Madam Giselle’s house in December and paid eight hundred dollars for a woman, because it is true, and because I would do it again tomorrow for eight thousand.” His voice carried, and every man in the hall below went still. “Tell them I put her in my own home, in the family wing, where I could see that no one touched her. Tell them she is expecting a child that is not mine, and that I do not care, and that I intend to give that child my name if its mother will have me. Tell them the whole of it, Gauthier, and add whatever you like, because there is not one thing you can say about me in a newspaper that I would trade for one hair on her head.”

Nobody moved.

“You’ll lose the city,” Gauthier said.

“Then I lose the city.” Remy took one step up. “I am forty years old and I have been mayor for six of them, and I have spent twenty-one of those years guarding everything I built because I was too damned afraid to want anything else. She is worth every last bit of it. And you—” another step “—are a man holding a pregnant woman over a stair rail in front of the chief of police, and if you do not let go of her arm in the next two seconds I will throw you down these stairs myself and let the newspapers print that.”

“There’s also,” Chief Willauby said mildly, “the matter of the lease.”

Gauthier’s head turned.

“Marais Street. Third from the corner.” Willauby came up two steps, unfolding a paper with the leisurely satisfaction of a man who had waited eleven years for exactly this evening. “Which is in the name of your son, Mr. Etienne Gauthier, who came to my office at five o’clock this afternoon entirely of his own accord, and gave a statement, and then gave me the key.” He looked up. “He asked me to tell you he’s sorry. I promised I would. Personally I thought it was more than you deserved.”

Something went out of Abelard Gauthier then—Laurell felt it in the hand around her wrist, a slackening, like a rope losing tension—and in that half second she wrenched free and stumbled forward, and Remy came up the last three stairs and caught her against his chest.

She heard the constables go past them. She heard Gauthier begin to say something about his solicitor, and Willauby say something dry in return, and she did not attend to any of it, because Remy Vincent had both arms around her and his face in her hair and was saying her name over and over like a man who had forgotten every other word in the language.

“You’re hurt.”

“My shoulder. It’s nothing—Remy, it’s nothing.”

“Your sleeve is torn.” He was running his hands over her arms, her face, as though checking a child after a fall. “Did he—”

“No. No, nobody touched me.” She was shaking so badly now that her teeth chattered. “I hit him with a chair.”

Remy stopped.

“You hit Abelard Gauthier,” he said, “with a chair.”

“I had eleven paces and one chair and I made a plan,” Laurell said, and burst into tears.

He picked her up. She was not a small woman, and he carried her down the stairs of that house and out into the wet street as though she weighed nothing at all, past a knot of constables, past the fair-haired man Cobb sitting on the step in handcuffs looking sullen and rather relieved, past a young reporter from the Picayune who had followed the police wagon and was writing so fast his pencil tore the paper.