“How kind of him,” Andre sneered and pushed away from the wall.
She caught his arm. “I want to take a house in the south of France where it’s warm and sunny. I want—”
He glowered at her. “You want to be a naturalist?”
“Perhaps I do!”
“What?” He gazed at her as if he’d never seen her before.
“I want to stroll naked in the sun. And I want you to come with me.”
He stared at her. Temptation rose in his eyes. His lips parted. But then he waved a dismissive hand and walked on.
She scampered after him. “Will you please stand still?”
“No!” He whirled on her. “You talk of my faults, your dowries and renting and the south. I thought you said you came to apologize. None of this is that.”
“I’m trying to do it and you’re acting like a spoiled child!”
“There you go again! Yes, I was a spoiled child. I am a spoiled child! Did not my mother tell you? I was everything to her, to my father, too. I was obedient and studious, reverent and got my proper education in the ways of the world when I went to boarding school and learned how to cheat and claw my way up.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You are no cheat.”
“No. But I know how to be. How to get what I want the best way I can.”
“That’s not what you did with me. You were the perfect gentleman. Perfect for me.”
He watched her, a lion injured, hurting.
She could not relent. “So don’t give me your regrets about your wayward ways, my prince. I know you as better than most. And best of all.”
He grabbed her by both arms. “You know nothing of who I am or what I want.”
“Oh, but you‘re wrong. I know you are the great Remy. The sculptor who will shake cities and continents with your perceptions of men. Carved in stone, fired in bronze, molded in clay, your works will stand for centuries for men and women to admire and imitate.”
“What good is all that?” he mocked. “I’ll be dead and gone.”
“But what you have in life is what you’ll leave the world too.”
“You talk nonsense.” He whirled away.
She hurried to scamper in front of him. There was a bit of humility in him and she grinned at its appearance. “They’ll say this is the man we should admire. The one we should imitate. Not in his works but in his manner and his ethics. His dedication to his art and his students and his colleagues and those he loved.”
He stared at her.
“Listen to me!” She stepped against him, her arms around his waist, her eyes adoring him. “They’ll say he loved one American woman. She was no one. A Virginia planter’s daughter. A widow of an unprincipled man, a coward and a bully. Niece to a robber baron and cousin to those she adored. But none of them meant as much to her as Remy. Her Andre.”
He focused on her lips, but then raised his face. “I’m getting the gig.”
“They’ll say he loved this woman so much that she learned how to live herself. He taught her how to tame her own art and to live with courage and joy.”
“They’ll say she refused him.”
She nodded. “At first, she did. Yes. She was still so young to the charms of the freedom he taught her. She raced to keep up to him. She cast off her need to remain alone. That was to protect from the unknown, you see. She cast off her habit to reject her own desires. That was to remain safe. She cast off her fear of being a second rate artist to learn how to be a very good one.”
She stood before him and hugged him to her. “She wanted to live with him. Love him. Share with him the rewards of what he had taught her to grasp.”
His anger melted from his gaze. “And what did she do with all that desire?”
“She asked him to love her. To take her back. To live with her.”
He considered her eyes, her mouth.
“She told him she loved him. Loved him and would until the day she died. And maybe longer.”
“And if he refused her?” he asked on a whisper. “What would she do?”
She dropped her arms. “She’d say, I love you one more time. And then she’d leave.”
He stared at her, the sadness in his gaze palpable.
She stepped away. She’d failed. Failed. She could not change him. Could not make him see her as she had become and as they were meant to be together.
She spun around, once more headed for the door.
“And if he told her he loved her?”
She halted.
His footfalls on the earthen floor were soft, almost imperceptible. “If he said he had loved her from the first moment he’d seen her in the Rue des Abbesses?”
She wanted to sob.
“What would she do with that?”
A great well of agony rose in her throat. “She’d say she loved his graciousness. His generosity. His great good heart.”
“And if she could change the ending? What would she do?”
“She’d ask him to come south with her for the winter perhaps? A few months for a new beginning. She’d ask him to stay with her, all their lives, in fact, so that she might prove to him every day that he was the finest man she’d ever known.”
She could not hear a sound in the old carriage house. Had he left her standing there?
Dear god. She’d lost. Lost. She squeezed her eyes shut, but picked up her skirts and—
He caught her around the waist and carried her, pressing her to the wooden wall. His lips to her nape, his arms gathering her back against his chest, he said, “I won’t live with you. I won’t be your lover.”
She let out a groan.
“You won’t be my mistress.”
She shook her head, her heart cracking. “No.”
He spun her in his arms and lifted her face with two hands cupping her cheeks. “You’ll be my wife.”
She laughed or cried, she couldn’t tell which. This was the man who would not ask for her hand, but tell her she would wed him. “Yes. Of course. Why not? We are so conventional, you and I. Why shouldn’t I marry my superb lover the illustrious, demanding, darling Remy?” She reached up and kissed his lips. “I love you.”
He picked her up much as he had that first night she’d come to him in Montmartre and swung her up and around, giddy with laughter and success. Tears in his eyes, he kissed her with all the passion she recalled. “You will marry me.”
“I will.”
“And never leave me?”
“And never leave you.”
“Because you love me,” he said.
“Because you love me.”
THE END
Author’s Notes
My joy in writing historical fiction is attempting to paint a picture of the past that is as accurate as possible, but also as entertaining to you, my readers.
Writing DARING WIDOW has been a delight for me, but it’s also been a thrill to research! Days and nights in Paris and the countryside, I hope, live in these pages for you.
Paris in the late 1870s was emerging as the city of light. Baron Haussmann’s civic improvements under the reign of Emperor Napoleon III had transformed the medieval town into a modern metropolis. Europeans from all nations flocked to the city for its gaiety. They came for the marvelous hotels catering to every whim, exquisite cuisine in ornate restaurants and entertaining night life in theaters and cafes. Nearby, up on the butte in Montmartre, raucous dancers performed a new risqué move, the cancan, many went to dance nightly in the Moulin de la Galette. As stone masons cut and positioned huge limestone blocks to build the new church Sacre Coeur, aspiring artists lived in tumble-down wooden shacks. Others who were earning a bit more money managed to live in more substantial abodes.
One of those houses still standing is now a part of the complex on the hill, known as the Musée de Montmartre. Renoir lived there briefly and over the next decades, so did quite a few other artists. The remains of one studio, with its fabulous atelier open to the Paris sky, can take your breath away. This is
the basis for the studio of Andre Claude Marceau, duc de Remy.
Remy, as you may have noted as you read, shows a few similarities to French artist Auguste Rodin. In body and spirit, Remy resembles the great sculptor with his dedication to his art and his capacity for great love affairs. One of those—some say the most tragic—is that of his relationship with sculptress Camille Claudel. Their affair was intense, fraught with Camille’s competitive nature and volatile temper as well as Rodin’s attempt to encourage her in her work. When she left him, Rodin was bereft, unable to work for many months. When he did resume his work, he continued to use her face and form as a model for many works.
Although Rodin never did live or work up on the hill in Montmartre, I chose to place Remy there to attempt to draw the full flavor of the artistic community that still thrives today. Even among the crowds of tourists, you can discern the qualities that attracted so many like DeGas, Manet, Utrillo and later Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso. The fresh air upon the high hill above the rooftops of Paris and the sense of freedom from strict forms of etiquette still make this suburb of Paris a delight to visit.
Among the artists who lived and worked there were a few women. Some attempted the new landscape style of plein air art, but others—as Patricia Farmer tells Marianne—wanted to portray the ordinary people who lived and worked there. Barmaids, laundry women, cancan dancers and waitresses became their subjects. Like American painter Mary Cassatt and French artist Berthe Morisot, Marianne Roland finds her métier is portraying the daily lives of ordinary women and children. It is here, with the help of Remy and the art dealer Edouard Montand (modeled on dealer Paul Durand-Ruel) that she achieves her own individuality and her success.
The ancestral home of the duc de Remy and his mother, the Princesse d’Aumale and Duchesse de Remy, is my fictional representation of a chateau that charms me each time I see it. A few miles outside of Paris, accessible by Metro and local bus, Vaux le Vicomte is a treasure. While I leave you to research it online, I will tell you that the brick and stone gates, the striking entrance, the rotunda, the rooms, the carriage house and the enormous grounds with enchanting partierre are rendered in my text with a humility that can scarcely match its glory.
I hope you’ve enjoyed your journey back to Paris in the dawn of La Belle Époque. And I hope you join me for the next few stories in THOSE NOTORIOUS AMERICANS when Ada, Pierce and Killian Hanniford meet their matches!
Cerise DeLand
About the Author
Cerise DeLand loves to write about dashing heroes and the sassy women they adore. Whether she’s penning historical romances or contemporaries, she’s praised for her poetic elegance and accuracy of detail.
An award-winning author of more than 50 novels, she’s been published since 1991 by Pocket Books, St. Martin’s Press, Kensington and independent presses. Her books have been monthly selections of the Doubleday Book Club and the Mystery Guild. Plus she’s won rave reviews from Romantic Times, Affair de Coeur, Publisher’s Weekly and more.
To research, she’s dived into the oldest texts and dustiest library shelves. She’s also traveled abroad, trusty notebook and pen in hand, to visit the chateaux and country homes she loves to people with her own imaginary characters.
And at home every day? She loves to cook, hates to dust, goes swimming at least once a week and tries (desperately) to grow vegetables in her backyard in south Texas!
For more about Cerise and her works visit:
www.cerisedeland.com
[email protected]
Also by Cerise DeLand
Regencies
Lady Starling’s Stockings
Regency Romp Series:
Lady Varney’s Risque Business, #1
Rendezvous with a Duke, #2
Masquerade with a Marquess, #3
Interlude with a Baron, #4
Regency Romps Box Set, Books #1, #2 and #3
Delightful Doings in Dudley Crescent Series:
Her Beguiling Butler, #1
His Tempting Governess, #2, debuts Winter 2018
His Naughty Maid, #3,
debuts Winter 2018
Erotic Regencies:
His Delectable Cook
Sense and Sensibility
Victorian Romances
Those Notorious Americans Series:
Wild Lily, #1
Daring Widow, #2
Scandalous Countess, debuts 2018
Outrageous Countess, late 2018
Black Irish Rogue, late 2018
Medievals
Swords of Passion Series:
At Her Service, #1
For Her Honor, #2
With Her Kiss, #3
* * *
Military Romances
7 Brides for 7 SEALs Series:
You Were Always Mine, #1
No Getting Over You, #2
Only You, #3, debuting 2018
SEALs Going Hot, box set
Burning for Nero
Conquering Zeus
A Long Time Comin’
Hard Drivin’ Man
Contemporaries
Tall, Hard and Trouble, box set
Tall, Hard and Mine, box set, Coming Soon!
Tall, Hard and Fierce, box set, Coming Soon!
***
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Daring Widow: Those Notorious Americans, Book 2 Page 26