Page 8 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

THE library was the smallest room in the house and the only one Laurell had come to love. Remy put her in the leather chair nearest the fire, poured himself a brandy he didn’t drink, and sat down across from her without saying anything at all, which was somehow harder to bear than questions.

“His name is Philip Marchand,” she said at last.

The glass stopped halfway to his mouth. “Marchand. Of Esplanade Avenue?”

“You know him.”

“I know his father. I’ve dined at their table.” He set the glass down. “Go on.”

So she told him. It came out badly and in the wrong order, months of it at once.

She’d met Philip at the Bergerons’ in September. He was three years older than she was, handsome enough that other men laughed at his jokes, and for two months he had been the whole of her world. He’d sought her out at every event. He’d sent notes by way of her sister, which had made Rachel important and therefore willing. He had told her, in a garden on Prytania Street in November, that his father would object to her portion but that he intended to have her anyway, and that he could not be expected to wait for a woman he already considered his wife.

“I believed him,” Laurell said. “That’s the whole of it. I wasn’t forced and I wasn’t drunk and no one deceived me except as people will when you want very badly to be told a certain thing. I believed him, and I went into the garden, and a month later I understood what I’d done.”

“And when you told him?”

“He’d already asked for Céline Bouchard.” The name still tasted of ash. “The banns were read at Christmas. Everyone says it’s a splendid match.”

Remy said nothing for a long moment. When she looked up, his face was perfectly composed, and yet the room felt several degrees colder.

“And your father?”

“My father called me a whore.” She said it flatly; she’d had time enough to get used to the word. “My mother stopped speaking to me altogether—she still hasn’t, not one word since the first week of December. They told the household I was ill. I wasn’t allowed downstairs when there were callers. And then Madam Giselle came to collect what my father owed her, and asked for Rachel, and my father”—her voice cracked, and she pressed on through it—“my father said he had a daughter of no use to anybody, and would she take that one instead.”

The fire popped. Remy rose, and for one terrible moment Laurell thought he meant to leave the room, that she had finally said the thing that would make him look at her like all the rest of them. Instead he went to the window and stood with his back to her, one hand braced against the frame.

“Marchand has a house on Esplanade,” he said, “and a father with three municipal contracts.”

“Remy.”

“He has a wedding in April and a great deal to lose.” He turned. “Give me a week. I’ll have him at your feet.”

“No.”

“Laurell—”

“No.” She stood, and was surprised to find her legs held her. “Do you imagine I haven’t thought of it? Do you think I haven’t lain awake making him say the words? I could have you go to him. You’re the mayor of this city, and his father needs you, and I daresay you could frighten him into a church by Sunday.” Her hands were shaking. She flattened them against her skirts. “And then I would be married to a man who was made to have me. Every day for the rest of my life I’d look across a table at someone who wished I’d had the decency to disappear, and my child would grow up in that house, and know it. I lived in a house like that from October until Tuesday. I won’t go back into one, not for the sake of a name.”

Remy was staring at her.

“I don’t want him,” she said, more quietly. “That’s what no one seems able to understand. Everyone has been so busy deciding what’s to be done about my ruin that not one person has thought to ask me what I want.”

“Then I’m asking.”

The simplicity of it undid her more thoroughly than any of the rest.

“I want to raise my baby,” she said. “That’s all. Somewhere no one knows me. I’d take in sewing, or keep house for someone, or teach letters to children in a place too small for anyone to have heard of the Marchands. I know how ridiculous that sounds coming from a woman who can’t so much as dress herself without help. But it’s what I want. I’ve wanted it since the night I understood what was happening to me, and I never once said it out loud, because there was no one to say it to.”

She stopped, mortified, and waited to be told how impossible it all was.

Remy crossed the room. He stood in front of her, close enough that she had to tip her head back, and for a wild instant she thought he might touch her.

“It isn’t ridiculous,” he said.

Remy did not sleep that night.

He lay in the dark listening to the house settle and heard, through the connecting door, the small sounds of a woman turning over in a bed that had waited twenty-one years for someone to use it.