Page 18 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

“No,” she said.

Remy blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“No. Thank you.” Her voice was perfectly composed and about half a degree above freezing. “It is a very generous arrangement and I am sensible of the honor. My answer is no.”

“Laurell, be sensible—”

“I have never in my life been anything but sensible; look where it has got me.” She came around the desk. “Do you know what you have just described? A settlement. A schedule of terms, benefits, and protections, offered by a man to a woman who has no other choice, in order to solve a problem she has created for him.”

“That is not—”

“My father sold me to Madam Giselle to settle a debt.” She was counting on her fingers, and her hand was shaking. “Madam Giselle sold me to you for eight hundred dollars. Gauthier has bought whatever was left over, and now you propose to convert your purchase into a marriage contract to keep it out of his hands, and you have stood in this room for five full minutes telling me every single reason it is a good bargain.” Her voice broke, and she dragged it back. “And not once—not once, Remy—did you say anything about wanting me.”

Remy stood as though someone had struck him across the face with a plank.

“I won’t be bought again,” Laurell said. “Not even by a kind man. Especially not by a kind man, because I could learn to live with it, and that would be the end of me.”

“You think I don’t—” He stopped. Started over, and made it worse. “Ten days ago I stopped in that library because I would not have you say yes to me when I hold everything you have. How can I possibly say it now? With Gauthier at the door and nowhere for you to go? You’d never know whether you meant it. Neither would I.”

“So you thought you would leave the wanting out entirely,” she said, “and offer me the terms instead. As if that were kinder.”

“I thought it was honest.”

“It was safe.” She wiped her face angrily with the back of her wrist. “You are the bravest man I know and you are a coward about exactly one thing.”

The clock ticked in the hall.

“I’ll go to the Kilnworthys,” Laurell said, quieter now. “Lilian would have me, and James would help me find somewhere, and Gauthier has nothing at all to gain from a woman nobody can find. If I’m not in this house there is no story. The mayor’s election is in the autumn.”

“Damn the election.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I have never meant anything more in my life.”

“Then you should have led with it,” Laurell said.

She walked out. At the door she stopped, without turning round, and Remy saw her hand go flat against the doorframe as though the room had tilted.

“You have been the greatest kindness that ever happened to me,” she said. “That is why I can’t take this. You’d never be able to tell the difference, afterward, between a wife and a woman you rescued. And I would spend thirty years watching you look at me and wondering.”

Then she was gone, and Remy Vincent stood alone in the winter parlor of his enormous house.

He had gone in to solve the problem of Abelard Gauthier.

It occurred to him now, far too late, standing in a room that smelled faintly of the camellias she’d cut, that he had walked in there and offered her a fortune, a name, a settlement, a house, and the protection of his office, and had not managed, in the whole of it, three syllables.

“I love you,” he said, to nobody at all.

The house did not answer.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Laurell waited two days, because she was not brave enough to do it the first morning.

She packed the smallest of the bags Mrs. Curry had found for her, and she packed badly on purpose: two day dresses, the wrapper, her comb, the handkerchief she had never given back. She left the evening gowns hanging. She left the fur-collared coat and wore her own old cloak, which smelled of a house on Royal Street and did not keep out the wind.

The letter took her four attempts.