I Married the Don for the Debt, and My Husband Walked In Alive novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Levee

She meets her husband alone at dawn, says the Don's name aloud, and finds the bakery lit and her mother-in-law inside.

I told no one and went anyway, and I did not lie to myself about why.

At half past five I put on jeans and an old sweater from the dresser in the east bedroom and went down the back stairs.

Sal was in the kitchen with a thermos and his coat on.

"Mrs. C.," he said.

"I need a car."

"Mr. Rafe said you'd say that." He took his keys off the hook. "I'll park a block back. You won't see me."

"Did he tell you to stop me?"

"He told me to drive."

Algiers Point was grey and cold, with the river smoking under the levee and a tugboat moaning somewhere upstream.

Julien sat on the grass at the top of the slope with his knees pulled up.

He stood when he saw me, and his hands went out.

I stopped well out of reach.

"You came."

"You wrote that you're alive because of me. Explain that."

He rubbed his face.

Up close he had lost weight in the cheeks, but his arms and neck were brown as leather.

"I owed that man a million dollars, Cam."

"A million one."

"He'd have put me in the lake. You don't understand what those card rooms are." His voice cracked. "I left the boat running, I left my wallet in it, and I swam to the shore and walked. I thought it would be a week. I thought I'd figure a way to pay him off and come home to you."

"For eight months."

"I couldn't call," Julien said. "If he'd traced a call."

"My phone number hasn't changed since I was nineteen."

He looked away.

"You let me bury a box with nothing in it," I said. "You let me wear black at your mother's table. And now you walk into my wedding in a linen shirt."

"I came because I heard you were marrying him." He took a step. "I heard what he made you sign, one year, a million one forgiven, the bakery safe, Mama's house safe. It's a trade, it isn't a marriage. Mama told me."

His mouth stopped.

"I called her yesterday," he said. "She told me yesterday."

I stared at him.

I knew every lie Julien had ever told me, from the first lost paycheck to the second mortgage, and I knew this one had a hole in it.

I let it go by, because the rest of him was so much worse.

"So I came back to save you," he said. "Leave him. Come home with me tonight, we'll go to Mama's, we'll work it out. He can't hold a marriage that was bought."

I laughed, and it hurt.

"You put my bakery on a marker, Julien. You put your mother's house on it. I learned that from the man who held it."

His mouth opened and closed.

"I married him," I said, "because I stood in your mother's kitchen and nobody else was going to pay."

"Camille."

"The marriage is real, Julien. I signed it, I meant it, and I'd sign it again."

The wind came off the river and pulled my hair.

I heard myself say the next words in a voice I had never used with him.

"I'm Rafe's wife."

It was the first time I had said his name out loud like that, as a thing that belonged to me.

Julien's face went still.

"Nobody asked you to come home," I said. "Nobody wants you here. Go back to wherever you've been."

I turned and walked down the levee.

Rafe was standing at the bottom beside the black car, with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his collar up against the wind.

I had not seen the car arrive.

He took off the coat without a word and put it over my shoulders.

It was warm from his body and smelled like cedar.

"Sal called you," I said.

"Sal drove. I followed." He looked at the top of the levee, where Julien still stood. "I stayed in the car."

"You could have come up."

"You didn't ask me to."

I held the front of the coat closed.

"I said your name to him."

"I heard from the bottom."

"Rafe," I said again, because I liked it.

His jaw tightened.

"Get in the car, Camille."

The house on the bayou was quiet when we came in.

Rafe turned the key behind us, took the coat off my shoulders, and I walked straight past the stairs into the music room.

It was a long room with shutters, and one upright piano against the wall, black and old, with the lid closed.

Grey morning light lay in stripes across the floor.

"I told you something last night," I said.

"You told me a lot of things."

"I told you I'd say it in plain words. You said you'd make me say it twice."

He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

"I want you," I said. "I want your mouth on me, and I want it now."

I waited.

Rafe didn't move.

"That's twice," I said. "I said it twice in one breath. Come here."

"Once was plenty." He crossed the floor. "I lied about twice."

He lifted me onto the closed lid of the piano, and the old wood creaked, and a low chord rang through the room.

I pulled my sweater over my head.

He looked at me in my lace bra and his jaw moved.

"Take it off," he said softly. "All of it. I want to look."

I took it off.

I was sitting naked on a piano lid in a shuttered room, and he stood there in a suit and looked at me for a long moment.

"Beautiful," Rafe said. "Lie back."

The wood was cool along my spine.

He pushed my knees apart and knelt on the floor in front of me, and his hands closed on my thighs.

"Rafe," I said.

"Say it again."

"Rafe."

He put his mouth on me.

I cried out, and the piano rang under my hips.

His tongue was slow and patient and sure, long strokes and then small circles around my clit, and he groaned into me, hungry.

I grabbed his hair.

"That's it," he said against me. "Show me what you like. Tell me."

"Don't stop. Right there. Oh God."

"Good girl. You taste like heaven. Let me hear you."

I was loud.

I did not care who in the neighborhood heard me, because for the first time in eight months nobody was watching me be strong.

He slid two fingers into me and curled them, and the pleasure climbed my legs and broke over me, hard.

I shook against his mouth.

He kept going, gentler, drawing out every pulse until I was begging him to stop and begging him not to.

When it finally ended I lay limp across the piano with my arm over my eyes.

Rafe rested his forehead on my stomach.

"You're something," he said.

"Come up here."

He did, and kissed me, and I tasted myself on him.

His hand was shaking a little against my cheek.

Monday I went to work at four in the morning, because bread does not care who came back from the dead.

The back door of Beaumont's King Cake & Pie was unlocked.

Every light in the shop was on.

Julien sat on my flour table in the kitchen with his boots swinging, and his mother stood at the counter in her church hat.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend