Page 24 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

“I loved her,” Remy said. “I want you to understand that I’m not going to stand here and tell you I didn’t. But I have been thinking, since about ten o’clock, that Mary was the love of the boy I was. He was nineteen and he thought that was the whole of the world, and it was, for him.” He looked at the photograph. “And that boy has been keeping her room aired for twenty-one years, and he has been keeping me in it with her. I stopped wanting anything. I told myself I was faithful. I wasn’t faithful, Laurell, I was hiding, and everybody in this city thought I was a bachelor of confirmed habits, and what I actually was, was a man who had decided at nineteen that his life was over and had been very busy ever since.”

“And then you bought a girl out of a brothel,” Laurell said.

“And then a woman walked into my house,” he said, “and put camellias on the hall table in January.”

Her breath caught.

“You asked me why, that day in the parlor. When you cried, and I told you the house was too large.” Remy turned to face her. “That was a lie. It was the only one I have ever told you and I have been ashamed of it ever since, so here is the true answer, and I am going to say it very badly.

“I don’t want to rescue you. I did, at the beginning—it made me feel a fine fellow, and God knows the city was owed it. But somewhere in January it stopped being that, and what I want now is to marry you. Not to give you my name because Gauthier is at the door, or because there’s a child, or because it solves anything for anybody. I want to marry you because I have not eaten a meal alone since Twelfth Night and the thought of doing it again makes me feel ill.”

Laurell had both hands pressed to her mouth.

“I want to come home at six and find you cross about the fish man,” Remy said. “I want you telling me which contracts to look at. I want thirty years of arguments about candles. I want your things in every room in this house—your comb on my washstand and your book face-down on my chair and your hairpins in places I will never in my life understand.” His voice began to go. “And I want that baby. Not as a condition or a complication—I want him, Laurell. I opened the nursery in January and lied to Winston about it being damp, and I have been standing in that doorway ever since like a fool. He is going to be born in August and I intend to be there, and I intend to give him my name that morning without one moment’s hesitation, and I will horsewhip any man who ever suggests within his hearing that he is anything other than my son.”

“Remy—”

“And if there’s never another,” he said. “If it’s only ever him. It doesn’t signify. I have spent twenty-one years grieving a child I never met and I am not going to spend one hour of the rest of my life measuring the one that’s coming against it. He’ll be mine in every way that counts, and every way that doesn’t is only paper.”

The room was very quiet.

“I love you,” Remy said. “That is what I should have said in the parlor, and instead I stood there and offered you settlements, because I was too much of a coward to put myself where you could refuse me. So I’m doing it now, with nothing in my hands, on the worst night of your life, in my shirtsleeves.” He got down, with some difficulty, on one knee, and looked up at her. “You may go to the Kilnworthys tomorrow if you wish and I will drive you there myself. You may take the house in Baton Rouge and live in it and never see me again and I would still count this winter the best thing that ever happened to me. But I am asking. Laurell, will you marry me?”

Laurell Beaumont looked down at him for a long moment.

“I had a speech,” she said unsteadily. “I had a whole speech. I came in here to tell you that I still meant to go.”

“Ah.”

“It was a very good speech.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“I’ve forgotten every word of it.” She sank to her knees in front of him, careless of her shoulder, and took his face between her hands. “Yes.”

Remy shut his eyes.

“Yes,” Laurell said again, fiercely. “Yes, and yes, and I have wanted to say it since the day you knelt on the parlor floor with my tears all over your coat—and I never once believed it was possible, not once, and if you say a single sensible thing about waiting until I’m calmer I shall hit you with a chair as well.”

He laughed and pulled her in and kissed her, and it was nothing at all like the kiss in the library. There was no bookcase at her back and no eight hundred dollars between them; there was only a man on the floor of his own bedroom with his hands shaking in a woman’s hair.

When at last he drew back, she was crying and so, to his considerable surprise, was he.

“Friday,” he said. “Father Reynaud will do it in the front parlor.”

“Friday.”

“You may have any wedding you like afterward—cathedral, four hundred people, the whole miserable business. I’ll give you Easter if you want it. But Friday you are going to be Mrs. Remy Vincent, and let this city say whatever it pleases.”

“It’s going to say a great deal.”

“Let it.” He got to his feet and drew her up with him, and then, because she swayed, simply lifted her and carried her back through the connecting door and put her into the bed that had been waiting twenty-one years for somebody to sleep in it. “Now go to sleep. You have been kidnapped and I have been proposing, and we are neither of us fit for anything.”

“Stay,” Laurell said.

He hesitated exactly one second. Then he lay down on top of the counterpane in his shirtsleeves, and she curled against his good side with her head on his shoulder, and neither of them said anything else.

She was asleep in four minutes. Remy lay awake a good while longer, watching the ceiling of his dead wife’s room, listening to the living woman breathe, and thought that he was going to be somebody’s father in August.