Page 7 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

They stood a while in silence. Across the room, Lilian said something that made Laurell laugh out loud, and Remy realized he had turned his head to look before he’d decided to.

When he turned back, James was watching him with an expression of the most insufferable neighborly interest.

“You know,” the baron said, “I bought Lilian a great deal more cheaply than eight hundred dollars, and I did it purely to save her. I was quite certain about that at the time. I told myself so at least four times a day.”

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“No. Mine wasn’t expecting another man’s child, and I hadn’t a city to answer to.” James shrugged. “Different in every particular. I only mention it because I remember the exact moment I stopped being able to say the word rescue with a straight face, and I believe I’ve just watched you approach it.”

“I’m forty years old.”

“And I was a widower who’d sworn off the entire institution.”

“I’m not marrying her.” Remy said it more sharply than he intended, and lowered his voice. “Good God, man. She’s been sold twice inside a month, once by the people who raised her. The last thing that woman needs is another man deciding what’s to be done with her.”

James inclined his head, and had the decency not to smile with his mouth. “Naturally.”

“Absolutely not.”

“You’ve said so twice now,” James observed, “and I only asked the once.”

CHAPTER THREE

The dresses arrived on Thursday, and Laurell came down to dinner in the forest green.

Remy had been in the middle of pouring a glass of wine, and afterward he could not have said with any confidence whether he’d finished the motion or simply stood there with the decanter tilted like a man who’d forgotten what wine was for. The color did something extraordinary to her eyes. Mrs. Curry had sent a maid up to dress her hair, and it was pinned in a soft coil at her nape with the weight of it gleaming almost black in the candlelight.

“It fits,” Laurell said, a little defensively, as though he might argue.

“So I see.” He set down the decanter. “Sit down before the soup goes cold.”

They had taken to dining together. It had happened without discussion; the first night she’d had a tray in her room, the second night Mrs. Curry had simply laid two places, and Remy had found he hadn’t the will to countermand her. The dining room seated eighteen. For twelve years he had eaten at one end of it with a newspaper.

Tonight he watched her eat—properly, with appetite, a second helping of the veal without being coaxed—and thought about how thin her wrists had been on the night he brought her home.

“I mean to ask you something,” he said, when the plates were cleared, “and you may tell me to go to the devil.”

Laurell’s fork paused. “That seems unlikely.”

“I want his name.”

The color went out of her face so quickly he half rose to catch her. She set the fork down with great care, as though it were made of glass.

“Why?”

“Because in three days I have to decide what happens to you, and I’m making decisions in the dark.” He kept his voice even. “Because if there’s any chance the man can be made to do his duty—”

“There isn’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I do know it.” Her hands had gone into her lap. “I went to him, Remy. On my own, with my maid waiting at the corner, which was the last brave thing I ever did. I told him and he laughed at me. He said—” Her throat worked. “He said a girl who’d go into a garden once would go into a garden twice, and how was he to know whose it was.”

Something cold and very old moved through Remy’s chest.

“Come into the library,” he said. “The servants have ears, and you’re about to cry, and you’ll hate yourself if you do it over the pudding.”

That startled a damp, unwilling noise out of her, and she let him take her arm.