Page 26 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

“Yes,” Laurell said. “Yes.”

He came into her slowly, and there was no pain in it at all, only a full sweet stretching ache and the extraordinary intimacy of his face six inches above hers. He held still, trembling, until she moved beneath him—and then he began to move, and she rose to meet him, and it built between them until she was clinging to his shoulders and he was saying I love you into her hair on every stroke, and when she broke apart the second time she took him with her.

Afterward he pulled her against his chest and drew the counterpane over them both, and Laurell lay in the dark listening to her husband’s heart.

“I’m going to keep waking up,” she murmured, half gone already. “To make sure.”

Remy’s arm tightened. “I’ll still be here.”

EPILOGUE

The Following Christmas

The tree stood in the front window of the Vincent house, and it was, in Remy’s considered opinion as chief magistrate of the city, entirely too large.

“It’s eleven feet,” he said.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s eleven feet, and Winston has had to take the top off it, and there is a pine needle in my coffee.”

“Then don’t drink the coffee,” said his wife, who was standing on a chair.

Remy put down the cup and crossed the room in four strides and lifted her off it bodily, ignoring the indignant noise she made and the ribbon she dropped.

“We have discussed chairs.”

“I am six weeks pregnant, Remy, not made of glass.”

“Six weeks and four days,” he said, setting her on her feet, “and you may have the entire tree, and Winston’s ladder, and my complete cooperation, in about eight months.”

Laurell burst out laughing. She had done a great deal of that this year. It had been the first thing he noticed, and it still stopped him where he stood.

She had told him on Tuesday, over the breakfast table, in the flattest possible voice, watching him over the rim of her cup like a woman waiting for a firework to go off—and he had knocked over the milk jug, sent for Dr. Lasalle, forbidden the stairs, and been laughed at without mercy for four days running. Mrs. Curry had taken his side, which had only made it worse.

From upstairs, thin and outraged, came the sound of a baby waking.

“That’s his I-have-been-abandoned-forever cry,” Laurell said.

“That is his where-is-my-father cry,” said Remy, already at the door.

Julien Michel Vincent had been born on the eighteenth of August at four in the morning after eleven hours that Remy had spent in the corridor outside his own bedroom being useless, and had come into the world furious and squalling and weighing eight pounds and one ounce.

Remy had held him at ten past four. He had been prepared, in some cowardly corner of himself, to feel something complicated.

What he had felt was: there you are.

The name was written in the parish register in his own hand—Julien Michel Vincent, son of Remy Vincent and Laurell Vincent, née Beaumont—and Father Reynaud had baptized him in September with the Kilnworthys standing as godparents and Ann permitted to hold the candle, and that had been the end of it as far as Remy was concerned, and he had made it clear to a number of people that it had better be the end of it as far as they were concerned as well.

Most of them had taken the hint.

Mrs. Aucoin had not.

She came to the Christmas open house, as everybody in New Orleans came to the mayor’s Christmas open house—there had been three hundred and some people through the front rooms since two o’clock—and she made her way to the corner where Laurell was sitting with the baby, and she looked into the blankets for rather a long time.

“Well!” she said, brightly. “Isn’t he a fair little thing. Not one bit like his father, is he. Not one bit.”

The conversations nearest them stopped.