I Married the Don for the Debt, and My Husband Walked In Alive novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Marker

Rafe's POV

I met Camille Beaumont in a church-hall kitchen, with a coffee pot in her hand.

She told me to take off my hat.

That was a Sunday in September, the repast after her husband's six-month Mass.

I had walked in the side door of the Bayou Rose with a marker in my breast pocket and a plan.

Julien Beaumont owed me one million, one hundred thousand dollars, and the Society's rule on a dead man's debt was older than I was.

She stood at the stove in a black dress, with flour still under her nails, pouring coffee into forty paper cups.

She did not turn around.

"You don't wear a hat in the house of the dead, Mr. Castellane," she said. "Not in this one."

I took it off.

I said what I had come to say, in four sentences, and I watched her hands.

They did not shake.

"Yes," she said, and went on pouring.

I had stood there with my hat in my hand and understood that I had been lied to about the kind of woman she was.

She had said yes in the time it took to fill a cup.

I thought about that more than I should have.

She had not asked one question about me, and I told myself that she would have said yes to anyone with a ledger.

Now it was Wednesday, and I stood in the alley behind the Bayou Rose in a thin rain, looking at her husband.

Julien had the face of a man who has never been refused anything that mattered.

"I'll be quick," he said. "You've got a wife who isn't yours."

"Go on."

"The marriage is a business deal. Fine. I understand business." He spread his hands. "I'll make it simple. Keep the paper. Keep your quiet little year. But the bakery deed comes to me, in my name, and the house on Ursulines too, and I disappear again. No scene at the Society. No lawyers."

"And Camille?"

"She'll get over it." He grinned. "She always does. She's had practice."

I looked at him for about as long as it takes to count to five.

The old me would have had Sal bring the car around.

There is a lake at the end of every street in this city, and I know how deep each of them is.

"Camille decides," I said.

"She's a woman. She's grateful."

"She is a woman who put your ring in your glass in front of two hundred people. If she wants to hand you the deed, she can write you a letter." I put my hands in my pockets. "Not me. Not you. Her."

Julien's grin slipped.

"You're making a mistake, Castellane."

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