“If you think that’s best.”
“I do. I don’t want anything to happen to them. How about I bring my truck around here, we load up the portraits and the drawings, and move them right this minute?”
“They’ll fit in the back of my car.”
“Yeah, but Dante won’t.” She touched his arm. “Be right back. Come on, Dante, you can run better than that, you old fat thing.”
He considered going back in and staring at the portraits, but decided he’d had enough revelations for one day. Nothing seemed to add up about his father. If he’d loved his mother once, when had he stopped? He’d married her, for God’s sake. Tante Helaine said he married her because he couldn’t entice her into his bed any other way. That might be partly true. Still, his mother had told him his father had planned to live in Paris the rest of his life.
Lieutenant Pinkerton had married Madame Butterfly and abandoned her. Had his father wanted to marry an American girl? Had he felt that marriage to a French girl in France did not bind him?
Paul had news for him. If there was one thing the French were good at, it was legalities. David Delaney had used his address in Paris on the marriage license, and the marriage banns had been posted in his arondissement rather than in Michelle’s neighborhood where her parents might spot the announcement. That made no difference. The marriage was legal in France, and by extension, the whole world.
It was sheer luck that they had managed to pull it off. Banns stayed posted for three weeks. Any time during that period a friend or neighbor of the Bouvets might have happened upon the names of Michelle Bouvet and Paul David Delaney on the banns and queried the Bouvets.
Maybe David Delaney had counted on just that. If he’d offered to marry Michelle and been thwarted, she might have turned to him in disappointment and come to his bed, anyway.
But in the end the marriage had taken place. Paul hadn’t inherited much from his mother, but he did have her livret de famille—the little red book that constituted a decree of marriage in France. His name was entered on the first page devoted to children of the union. There he was listed as Paul Antoine Bouvet Delaney. When they came to the States to live with Tante Helaine and Uncle Charlie, his mother had decided he should use her parents’ name, Bouvet. Tante Helaine said she’d rather not have to explain the circumstances of being Delaney.
Paul thought Michelle must have been embarrassed, as well as angry and sad at her husband’s duplicity. Tante Helaine had berated her again and again about allowing her husband to spin falsehood after falsehood about who he was and where he came from.
After his mother disappeared to look for his father, when Tante Helaine was filling his ears for the umpteenth time with the story, she’d always tell him, “I could not believe she had married the man without once looking at his passport. She didn’t copy down the number or the information.” Helaine would throw up her hands. “If I had still been in France, I would not have allowed her to be so naive.”
He knew from Helaine that Michelle’s parents had been furious when her pregnancy had forced her to tell them about her marriage. They’d threatened to throw their younger daughter out on the streets until Helaine called them from Queens and convinced them to forgive her.
It had been bad enough when Helaine had married her GI, Charlie, and moved to the States. In New York their elder daughter was as good as lost to them. They never saw their grandchildren. They didn’t particularly like Americans. Everyone knew they were crude and loud and had no idea how to hold their cutlery.
Michelle was supposed to marry a hardworking provider who could take over the business when her parents retired, give them grandchildren to spoil and help support them in their old age.
Suddenly she’d betrayed them by marrying in secret—and another American at that. Then she allowed him to desert her and leave her enceinte—with a baby on the way. Another mouth to feed. Not a child they would enjoy spoiling, but a burden.
And Michelle was no longer a marketable commodity. She refused even to consider requesting an annulment, though they argued and threatened and begged her to try for their sakes, as well as her own.
Michelle swore that her David had not deserted her, that he would be back to claim her and live with her in Paris as a good French father should. Even after the letters she sent to him were returned “address unknown,” even after she faced a blank wall when neither the American military nor the American embassy would help her find him, she still swore that he loved her and would come back for her.
But he never knew about the baby she was expecting. They’d agreed not to have children until his career as an artist was well under way.
Tante Helaine had told him that David’s mother had continued to send him money in Paris secretly until he’d returned to the States. His father cut him off after he chose to leave the army in Europe, rather than return to the States. Conrad must have felt that if he deprived David of money, sooner or later he’d get sick of poverty and come home.
Even with the money his mother sent, David was still poor. Michelle lived at home after their marriage. Their only moments as husband and wife had been stolen on afternoons when she told her parents she was studying or nights when she swore she was staying over with a girlfriend.
Years after his mother disappeared and Tante Helaine knew she, too, was dying, she’d finally told him how his mother came to get pregnant so soon after the marriage. Helaine had met and fallen for Corporal Charles Parker in France and had married him five years before Michelle met David Delaney. Despite her parents’ disapproval of the union to an American, she’d had a decent wedding in a church before she moved to the States.
She’d had sense enough to start a baby right away, Helaine said, whatever she and Charlie had agreed on. As a good Catholic, she wasn’t supposed to use birth control, anyway, but Charlie insisted.
“But one has ways,” Helaine said. By the time Paul’s conversation with his aunt took place, Uncle Charlie was dead of lung cancer and Tante Helaine was failing. “I wrote your mother and told her how to do it,” she said with satisfaction. “The American GIs all bought their ca-pots—their condoms—in the PX, and her David still had a large supply after he left the army to move to Paris. They come in these small square foil packets.”
As if Paul hadn’t known since he was thirteen what condoms looked like.
“They are very good, very safe. The Americans depended on them. But even the safest birth control can fail.” The old lady had grinned like a child who has discovered a way to steal candy without being caught.
“I wrote Michelle from America and told her that she must become pregnant at once. Otherwise it would be too easy for her David to leave her. It is only a matter of heating a needle very hot and piercing through the foil and into the little condom rolled up beneath. Very simple.”
“But the hole would be tiny. Surely it wouldn’t work.”
Tante Helaine laughed. “Michelle was eighteen and a virgin when she married. Even one small hole would be enough if the time of the month were right. She took all the condoms from David’s bedside table while he was out painting in the gardens of the Louvre, she used her needle, and poof, she was pregnant.”
At that point Tante Helaine had become sad. “If I had known that he would abandon her, I would never have taught her my little trick.”
At that point she’d stroked his cheek. “But you were a blessing, cher Paul. God took my sister, but He gave you to me because I could not give Charlie any sons.”
He’d had to leave her then because she was on the verge of falling asleep in her chair. He tucked her frail hand under the woolen rug that covered her knees and slipped out of the room. His cousin, Giselle, had been waiting at the door. She tugged at his sleeve, drew him into the kitchen and out of earshot, then said, “Well, would you believe that? If I’d ever tried that on Harry and been caught, he’d have killed me. Great way to start a marriage, right? Lie to your parents, lie to your friends and then, by God, lie to each other
.” She shook her head. “Aunt Michelle must have been out of her mind to try something like that.”
“Some part of her subconscious must not have trusted him even then. It was a terrible thing to do, and God knows she paid for it with me, but I can understand why she did it.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Giselle said, leaning her hip against her mother’s kitchen counter. “I’ve read magazine articles about all those trophy wives that say the first thing a woman should do after she marries her aging multimillionaire is to have a baby. That way she’ll be a wife and not just a mistress with a piece of paper in her hand.”
Paul laughed. “Don’t forget the French are the most practical people in the world about marriage. It does not always go hand in hand with love. The French understand that marriage is about property and children, period. Mistresses and lovers are for romance.”
“Huh. Not in my family. If my Harry ever took a mistress, I’d poison his brioche.”
ANN LEANED on the doorjamb of the studio. Paul sat on the bottom step with his head bent forward on his folded arms. If he wasn’t asleep he was pretty close to it.
She wondered how much the pain of his injury took out of him during any given day. His body was muscular—wonderfully muscular, if the way his jeans fit was any indication. She longed to caress that wounded shoulder, to take away whatever pain he felt, to hold him in her arms and let him sleep until he wasn’t tired any longer.
And then what? Do not go there, she told herself. The more exhausted he is, the safer I am from my own libido.
He lifted his head and sighed deeply.
“Hey, every time I leave you for five minutes, you fall asleep,” Ann said.
Paul stood up and stretched. “Not asleep. Thinking deep thoughts.”
“I’ll just bet you were. Okay, help me get this stuff into the truck.”
“You’ll never be able to get those paintings up your stairs alone.”
“I wasn’t planning to.” She smiled at him. “You’re helping. It’s your stuff.”
“I intended to help, but I didn’t want to intrude again without being asked,” Paul said.
They wrapped the paintings in one of the sheets from the studio, taking care to put the clean side toward the paint. They laid them carefully in the bed of Ann’s small truck, then carried the pastels and sketches out.
“Get in,” Ann said. “I’ll lay them in your lap.”
Dante climbed carefully into the rear of the crew cab and lay down behind Paul’s seat.
They made the short trip to the alley in less than two minutes. It took much longer to get the paintings and sketches up without damaging them.
Inside, Ann laid the sketches flat on her worktable. The pastel of Trey Delaney gazed up at them.
Ann pulled sash weights from a drawer under one of her cupboards and began to lay them carefully on sheets of wax paper at the edges of the stack of prints. “While I was over here picking up the truck, I called Aunt Karen,” she said as she set the last of the weights carefully across the upper end of the stack. “She said she’d love to meet you and tomorrow at four will be fine.”
“Should I bring flowers? Wine?”
“Good Lord, no.” Ann pointed to the pastel. “Bring this. That’s enough.”
“If you say so.” He started toward the door. “Are you up for that dinner I promised you yesterday?”
Her breath caught, but she managed to keep her smile bright. She wanted very much to have dinner with him, to find out more about him. Not a good idea. “Thank you, but I think I’ll have an early night. Some other time.”
After she closed the door behind him, she leaned against it and listened to his footsteps descend her stairs. “Close one, eh, Dante?”
“IS DANTE GOING with us?” Paul asked the following afternoon when he arrived to pick her up. The dog sat at the door of the loft with an expectant look on his face.
“Not this time. Sorry, Dante. Stay.”
The dog gave Ann a look of reproach, sighed deeply and dropped to the floor.
“We’ll be back before too long,” Ann told him, and preceded Paul down the stairs, carrying the pastel of young Trey. She’d placed it on a sheet of poster board, covered it with plastic, and wrapped the whole thing in brown paper.
He drove out onto the highway and turned toward Memphis. “Tell me about your aunt Karen. You said she’d remarried. What’s her name now?”
“She married Marshall Lowrance a few years after Uncle David died. She has two children by him, a boy and a girl. I think they’re both away at college.”
“You don’t know?”
“I told you, the children don’t usually come to the family picnics and holiday celebrations. Not surprising. They’re city kids and almost a generation separated from Trey. I don’t think they like Trey much, although I’ve never heard anybody actually say that. Truth be told, they’re probably jealous. Trey is still his mama’s fair-haired boy.”
“And your uncle Marshall?”
“I think of him as Aunt Karen’s husband, not as my uncle, though I suppose he is. He’s a partner in a big law firm in town. I don’t imagine they’re hurting for money.”
Thirty minutes later Paul pulled into the circular driveway in front of the Lowrance house.
“You were right about the money,” Paul said. “This place reeks of it.”
They barely got out of the car before the front door opened. “Ann Corrigan, come in this house! I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”
A moment later Karen Bingham Delaney Lowrance turned the full wattage of her smile on Paul. “You, too, Mr. Bouvet. Welcome.” She extended a long, fine and beautifully manicured hand. As Paul moved to take it, Karen blinked hard and seemed to tighten every muscle, but a moment later she relaxed once more into the gracious hostess.
Had Paul imagined that moment of unease? He couldn’t be certain.
Karen led them into a small library with comfortable leather chairs and hunting prints on the walls. “I’ve always loved this rug,” Ann said. “Makes me want to sit on the floor and stroke it.”
“That’s what the Bedouins must have done with it originally,” Karen said.
This library looked the way a real room for books should. No yards of fancy leather-bound editions here. Paul observed that the books all looked as though they had been read. Their covers were modern and bright and seemed to be shoved into the shelves in no particular order.
He waited for Karen to seat herself on the sofa across a heavily laden tea table, then for Ann to sit, and he finally took the wing chair opposite her.
“Now I know I told Ann tea, but if you’d rather have a real drink, I can certainly manage that.”
“Nothing for me, thanks,” Paul said.
“Really? Nothing at all?”
“I’m afraid I’ve overdosed on tea since I got down here.”
“Then how about a soft drink? Or some wine?”
“I’m really fine. I just wanted to meet you and bring you this.”
“Well, all right. Ann?”
“I can’t overdose on tea, thank you, Aunt Karen.”
“Well, I’d much rather have a drink.” Karen stood, and Paul started to rise, but she stopped him. “Stay where you are. Bar’s right over here.” When she came back she held a glass full of ice and what looked like straight bourbon all the way to the brim. “There. It’s too early for gin and tonic. Sure you won’t have one?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“Ann?”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Well, if you’re sure.” She went about the business of filling a crystal glass with ice and tea from the heavy crystal pitcher and handed around fancy square tea cakes which Paul also refused.
“Now. Let me see what you’ve brought.” She wiggled her fingers for the package Paul held. She reached for it and opened it.
For a few moments she said nothing, then laid it on the sofa beside her. “It is Trey.” Her fingers caressed the youn
g face gently. When she looked up at Paul her eyes were swimming with tears that had begun to spill over. She ran her fingers expertly along the skin beneath her eyes and sniffed. “There. Can’t have my mascara running down my face. Where on earth did you find this?”
“It was…put away in Uncle David’s studio,” Ann answered.
“I had no idea he’d ever used Trey as a model. Was there anything else?” She turned quickly to Paul. “Not that I’m laying claim to any of it. If David had a Rembrandt hidden in that studio, it belongs to you. I’m just curious.”
“A few other sketches,” Paul said. “Some landscapes.” He ignored Ann’s raised eyebrows.
“Any of his famous caricatures? He occasionally showed me some that were too scandalous to circulate. I’d hate to have the people he drew see them. They’d be mortified.”
“Nothing like that,” Ann said, obviously picking up that Paul didn’t want Karen to know about the paintings.
“Since seeing his sketches, Mrs. Lowrance, I must admit I’m becoming really interested in your husband as an artist. Why didn’t he ever show? Ever sell anything?”
She brushed away the thought. “Van Gogh never sold anything.”
“He certainly tried.”
“Well, David didn’t.” Her voice had developed an edge. “His family would have disliked the idea of having his work hanging out there for the world to see and critique. They put up with the caricatures because people loved them and they made money for charity. He could hardly have set himself up as a portrait painter. He had enough to do running the farm and the cattle operation. Besides,” she added, “most of the time he was too drunk to pick up a brush.”
Paul was stunned at the baldness of her statement and the depth of anger and pain revealed by the words.
Ann started to respond, but Karen held up a hand. “It’s true. Everybody knows it. If Buddy hadn’t made him promise not to drive drunk, he’d probably have been killed sooner and taken a few other people with him.”
House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 10