Page 17 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

“Neither had I. It’s been a remarkable winter.”

“I’ll ruin you both.”

“Get out of my office.”

At the door, Gauthier paused. “You know, I don’t particularly want the girl. I never did. I want what I paid for, and I want the man who took it from me to understand what that costs.” He settled his hat. “It’s a small distinction. I find it makes me a great deal harder to bargain with.”

He put his hat on and left.

Remy sat alone in the office for a long while, staring at the door. Something Willauby had said the previous winter came back to him—that Abelard Gauthier had a grown son who was nothing whatever like his father, who had taken rooms of his own and hadn’t sat at the man’s table in above a year, and that it was a pity the promise of the one couldn’t be traded against the other.

Then his heart settled into something hard and steady, and an idea began to form that would, in the space of six hours, be the worst thing he ever did.

BECAUSE there was, of course, an answer. There had been an answer since the first week, and he had been circling it for a month like a man walking around a fire he didn’t dare warm his hands at.

If she were his wife, there was nothing Gauthier could do.

Gauthier had no claim on her now and would have none then—that had never been the danger. But a wife had a name that wasn’t Beaumont, and a home nobody could turn her out of at a whim, and a husband whose position, whatever else it did, made her socially unassailable to a man like Abelard Gauthier. There would be talk—there would be a great deal of talk—but talk about the mayor’s wife was an entirely different animal from talk about the mayor’s purchase. Society would count on its fingers and reach a scandalous conclusion, and society would then, within two years, decide it had always known the marriage was a love match and that the child had simply come early.

It solved everything. Every last piece of it.

Remy went home at four o’clock, an hour before he was expected, and asked Winston where Miss Beaumont was, and was told the winter parlor, and stood outside the door of it for a moment putting his argument in order. He had done the same before every close vote of his career.

That was the whole of the trouble, though he did not know it yet.

He had spent the entire carriage ride marshaling reasons, and not one second asking himself what he wanted.

“Laurell.”

She was at the small writing desk with the household books, and she rose when he came in. She had taken to wearing the dove gray, and it no longer sat quite flat at the waist.

“You’re home early. Is something wrong?”

“Sit down. There’s something we must discuss.”

She sat. He did not.

“Gauthier came to my office this morning.” He watched the blood leave her face and pressed on. “He knows everything. The switch, the name, the money, this house. He’s bought Giselle’s interest in the whole affair, and while he has no legal claim on you worth a damn—I want you to hear that plainly, he has nothing—he can do a great deal of harm with a story. He intends to.”

“What sort of story?”

“The obvious sort. That I bought a girl out of Storyville and got her with child in my own house.” He made himself say it. “By July there’ll be no hiding your condition, and nobody in New Orleans will believe the child isn’t mine.”

Laurell’s hands folded very tightly in her lap. “Then I must go. I’ve thought so for weeks; I only didn’t know how to say it—”

“You’re not going anywhere. That’s what I’ve come to say.” Remy took a breath. “We should be married.”

There was a silence of a particular quality.

“It answers everything,” he said, and it was going wrong already but he had built the argument and he could not stop delivering it. “Gauthier cannot touch a mayor’s wife. He has no claim on you and never had one; what he has is a story, and the story dies the day the announcement runs, because a man who marries a woman is not a man who bought one. The talk will run six months and then run out; it always does. Your father can make no application for you. Giselle’s paper becomes so much waste.”

She said nothing.

“The child gets a name,” Remy went on. “Not a name in a parish register with a blank beside it—a name people know, one that will get him into any school in this state. You would have the house, and an allowance in your own right, and settlements written so that nothing I have could ever be taken from you or the child, whatever became of me.” He spread his hands. “You would be entirely secure, Laurell. For the rest of your life. It is the only arrangement I can think of that leaves you at nobody’s mercy—not mine, not Gauthier’s, not anyone’s.”

He stopped, rather pleased, God forgive him, with how thoroughly he had covered the ground.

Laurell rose.