Page 9 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

He had been prepared, in some part of himself, to hear a story that made her a fool or a schemer. He had heard a great many stories in a great many parlors. What he had not been prepared for was the arithmetic: a girl of two-and-twenty had believed a young man’s promise, and for that she had lost her family, her name, her sister, her freedom, and very nearly her body, and had come within seventy-two hours of Abelard Gauthier. And Philip Marchand had lost nothing. Philip Marchand was going to be married in April with four hundred people in the cathedral, and would dance at his own wedding breakfast, and would live to be eighty.

There was no ledger in the world that balanced.

And under that, running like a second current, was the thing he could not stop turning over.

I want to raise my baby.

He had been thinking of it as a complication. That was the shameful part; he could see it clearly now, laid out in the dark. From the moment she’d said the word expecting in his study, he had filed the child under difficulty—an obstacle to any respectable arrangement, a thing that made her harder to place, like a flaw in a deed of sale. He had been no better than her father, only politer about it.

It was a child. In eight months there would be a person in the world who had done nothing to anyone.

A boy, perhaps, learning to walk on somebody’s floor. Somebody’s hand steadying him.

Remy stared at the ceiling and made himself finish the thought, because he had never in his life been a coward about anything except this one thing.

He had wanted children. He had wanted them so badly at eighteen that he’d married a girl from Baton Rouge four months after meeting her, and he had wanted them still at nineteen, standing in the rain while they put her in the ground with the baby that had killed her, and somewhere in the long gray years afterward he had simply stopped saying so at all.

Twenty-two years. He had built a career, a fortune, and a house with fourteen rooms nobody entered.

Down the hall was a room with a bed nobody had slept in, full of gowns nobody had worn, kept like a shrine to a girl who had been dead longer than she’d been alive—and now a living woman was sleeping in it, and Remy found that when he tried to summon Mary’s face tonight, what he saw instead was a startled laugh in a study doorway and a green dress in candlelight.

He rolled onto his side and swore at the wall.

In the morning he sent for Winston.

“The small room at the end of the third-floor hall,” he said. “The one that looks over the garden. Have it aired and the furniture uncovered.”

Winston’s face did not move by so much as a hair. “Very good, sir. Shall I have anything brought up?”

“No. Nothing.” Remy shook out his newspaper with a snap. “It’s damp, that’s all. Damp is bad for a house.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Winston, who had been with him nineteen years, and who went upstairs and had the nursery opened.

CHAPTER FOUR

The first sign came from Alderman Delahoussaye, who cornered Remy in the corridor outside the council chamber with the air of a man doing a great favor.

“A word, Mr. Mayor. As a friend.” Delahoussaye was sixty and pink and had never in his life been anyone’s friend. “There’s talk.”

“There always is.”

“They’re saying you’ve installed a woman in the house. Your own house, mind, not the Storyville place.” He lowered his voice with obvious relish. “Young. A brunette. Bought out of Giselle’s.”

Remy allowed a beat of silence to stretch, which was a trick he had learned early and used often.

“And?”

“And it’s an election year,” Delahoussaye said. “A gentleman’s arrangements are a gentleman’s business, but there’s a difference between discretion and a young woman coming down your front steps in a new coat where the whole street can count her.” He spread his hands. “Set her up on Basin Street like a Christian.”

“Thank you,” Remy said, “for your interest in my household,” and walked into the chamber, and did not hear a word of the drainage report.

It was worse than he’d let himself expect and precisely what he should have expected. Servants talked. Tradesmen talked. Mrs. Stratmore was discreet, but Mrs. Stratmore had two apprentices and a delivery boy. A driver had brought a woman from Giselle’s door to his own at eleven o’clock at night, and men had been standing on that street corner, and half of them had known his carriage on sight.

He had been mayor for six years. He had known exactly how this worked for all six of them, and he had done it anyway, and the strange thing—the thing he examined all the way home in the cold—was that he could not make himself regret it.

He was still turning it over when he came through his own front door and heard a woman’s voice in the front parlor.

It was not Laurell’s.