Page 25 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

They were married on Friday afternoon in the front parlor, with rain on the windows and every candle in the house lit against the gloom.

Laurell wore the rose silk. Mrs. Stratmore had come herself at seven in the morning with two apprentices and taken it in at the shoulders, and had cried, and had denied crying, and had charged him double.

There were eleven people present. Father Reynaud, who had baptized half the Sixth Ward and asked no questions whatever. James and Lilian Kilnworthy. Chief Willauby, who arrived in a shocking green waistcoat and gave the bride away, and who had also, that morning, seen Abelard Gauthier committed for trial on charges of abduction and false imprisonment on the sworn statements of one police chief, one nine-year-old kitchen maid, one hired man named Cobb who had discovered a great enthusiasm for testifying, and one son. Mrs. Curry wept from the opening words. Winston did not, and was very nearly convincing. Josie and the cook and the two housemaids stood along the back wall, and Ann stood in front of them all in a new blue dress with her chin up like a small soldier.

“Do you know what they’re saying?” Lilian whispered, pinning the last camellia into Laurell’s hair.

“I have some idea.”

“The Picayune printed every word he said in that street. Every word, Laurell, on the second page.” Lilian’s eyes were shining. “Mrs. Delahoussaye told my husband at the Charity Hospital board on Wednesday that she had always known the mayor was a romantic. Three ladies have called at our house asking whether it’s true that he carried you out of a burning building.”

“It wasn’t burning.”

“I know. I didn’t say so.”

The ceremony took eleven minutes. Laurell heard perhaps half of it. She said the words when she was prompted, and Remy said his in a low, steady voice without once taking his eyes off her face, and when Father Reynaud pronounced them man and wife the entire back wall of the parlor burst into applause, which Winston afterward maintained had been started by Mrs. Curry.

Remy kissed his wife. Then he kissed her again, rather longer, until Willauby coughed.

They dined, all of them, and it went on until nearly nine. Ann fell asleep in a chair by the fire and had to be carried out by James, who did it as though he had been carrying children about for years.

And at last the house was empty, and quiet, and Laurell stood in the doorway of the pink room with her heart going far too fast.

“I have something to say about this room,” Remy said behind her.

“Oh?”

“It’s a perfectly good guest room, and I’ve been thinking that you might want to make a sitting room of it, or a nursery, or turn the whole of it out into the street.” He took her hand. “But you are not sleeping in it tonight, or any night hereafter, because my wife sleeps in my bed.”

Laurell let him lead her through the connecting door, and heard it close behind them, and thought that she had been afraid of that door once, two months and a lifetime ago.

“Remy.” She turned in his arms, and her hands were unsteady on his shirt studs. “I should tell you—I don’t know anything. I’ve done this once, in a garden, badly, in the dark, and it was over in a few minutes and it hurt, and I have been dreading you finding out that I—”

He stopped her mouth with his own.

“Then you have never done this at all,” he said against her lips. “Not once.”

“Your library,” Laurell said, and felt herself go scarlet. “I have thought about your library every single night since.”

Remy’s eyes closed. “So have I. It was the finest and stupidest hour of my life, and I have twenty-one years of wanting to make up for, and tonight I have no intention whatever of hurrying.”

He undressed her by lamplight, slowly, and she discovered that being looked at was not what she had braced for—that his hands stopped, when they came to the new soft roundness low on her belly, and stayed there, warm and open, for a long moment before he bent and put his mouth against it.

“Remy—”

“Hush.”

He laid her back on the bed, and he was careful of her shoulder, and he was not careful of anything else. He kissed her throat and her collarbone and the swell of her breasts, and when he closed his lips over one aching nipple Laurell’s back came off the mattress with a cry she couldn’t have swallowed if she’d tried. Nothing in that garden had prepared her for this. Nothing had prepared her for a man who took his time, who watched her face, who murmured filthy and tender things into her skin while his hand slid down over her belly and lower still.

“Open for me, sweetheart.”

She did, shaking. His fingers stroked through the slick heat of her, unhurried, learning her, and when they found the spot that made her whole body jolt he made a low, satisfied sound and did it again, and again, until she was clutching at the sheets and saying his name in a voice she didn’t recognize.

“That’s it. Let me have it.”

The wave took her so hard she sobbed. He worked her through it, gentling her, and by the time she came back to herself he had moved over her, braced on his forearms, his eyes dark in the lamplight.

“Say yes,” Remy said. “In this bed you say yes to me or nothing happens at all, for the next fifty years. Do you understand?”