My Immortal (Seven Deadly Sins #1)(36)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Marley looked at Anna in horror. For some reason, she had not seen that coming. "Men are disgusting."

"And women are practical. She took the offer, of course, so she could keep her child." Anna closed her eyes briefly. "Have you ever loved a child, Marley? Do you understand why she did what she did? She couldn’t leave that baby at the mercies of anyone else, couldn’t imagine life without her flesh and blood in her arms. She would have done anything to keep her son with her."

Marley swallowed hard. "I know how she feels, even though I don’t have a child. I’d do anything to protect my sister, and even more to keep my nephew happy and healthy. I can’t imagine giving up my baby."

"The man was decent to her. He kept his word, finding her a nice place to live, a shotgun cottage in the French Quarter, getting her a housemaid to help with the baby. And he taught her what her impatient first lover hadn’t—how to draw out pleasure, how to pull your heart right out of the bedroom and let your body be all of you. No love, no emotion, just eye-rolling ecstasy. You can have that, you know, pleasure just for the sake of pleasure, and you can learn each other’s bodies, be comfortable together and still never feel anything for the other."

Marley wanted that too, just once, wanted to have an affair that felt good, that pleased her but meant nothing. That’s what she wanted from Damien, just selfish sex.

"She never loved that man, but she learned to welcome his attentions, learned to look forward to his visits. Learned to take for herself what she wanted, and manipulate him by turning his desire for her against him. Yes, Miss Marley, she learned a lot about how to tease and coax and please a man, and how to please herself along the way. She had two daughters with that man because she loved children and he was decent to her son. He brought all three of them toys and sweets, and he’d play with them, toss them up in the air, and tickle their bellies to make them laugh."

The way a man treated children said a lot about his character. And yet that long-ago man hadn’t married Marissabelle. Had called her a slut. Marley felt the injustice, at the same time her heart longed for the happy ending she knew wasn’t coming. "Did he love her?"

Anna shrugged. "It seems unlikely. I know that’s not what you want to hear. It’s written all over your face, child. You want to hear they were in love and everything worked out just fine. But it didn’t. And I’m sure that in the telling on down from Marissabelle, over all these years, some of the details have gone missing, but I’m telling you as I remember it. The man got married three years into their relationship and Marissabelle knew about it, knew the wife had big money, knew she resented the time he spent with his quadroon mistress. He used to tell Marissabelle his wife ranted and raved and cried over it, but he kept coming anyway, because a man wants to do something, or give a gift freely and of his own will, not because his wife asked or demanded it. Men are stubborn, proud, spoiled."

"Not just men. I know women like that too."

"True. But Marissabelle used that to her advantage. She became his forbidden fruit, and that meant that at a point in their affair when he might have been getting bored with her, his wife’s fussing only made his mistress all that much more appealing to him. She was his independence, his defiance, his control."

Marley adjusted in her plastic chair again. The sweat on her neck, her armpits, her shoulder blades, slid and shifted and made her skin itch. She wondered if Lizzie felt that way—if the men she jumped into bed with were ways to display her independence, her way of proclaiming she could do whatever she wanted and no one could stop her. The thought made her feel hopeless. If that’s how Lizzie felt, Marley would never be able to help her change her life, get grounded. Lizzie didn’t want to be grounded, and Marley had never been willing to accept that.

"So what happened? Did the wife kill him or something?"

Anna gave a soft chuckle. "No. Never would have thought of that. You got yourself a bit of a morbid mind, Marley Turner. No, he didn’t die, and if she had known what he was planning, Marissabelle would have killed him herself. It turned out his wife couldn’t have children. So because she held the purse strings in their marriage, and because he wanted a child to hold on to all that money, they took his two daughters by Marissabelle, moved to Alabama, and told everyone they were his legitimate children with his wife. He didn’t want the boy of course, because he was half black and not his own blood. So it was just Marissabelle and her son left to fend for themselves. Again."

"Oh, no." Marley pulled her knees up to her chest, sick to her stomach. "How could he have done that to her? How could he live with himself?"

"I expect he thought he was doing the right thing for all of them. He knew he couldn’t keep Marissabelle forever, and the girls were only an eighth black, so no one would ever know the difference. He could give them a home, an education, and keep his wife happy. He gave Marissabelle enough money to keep her and her son out of poverty for a fair while, and everybody’s happy, right?"

Marley didn’t think he could have really believed that.

"Well, Marissabelle wasn’t happy, didn’t want to give up her girls, but what was she going to do? No court was ever going to take her side, and she knew he did love his daughters. There just weren’t any choices for a woman like her, and so she took the money, gave him her babies, and wished him a slow, painful death in hell. Then she swallowed her pride, took all her talents of seduction and manipulation, and started attending the quadroon balls in search of a new benefactor."

"What’s a quadroon ball?"

"They were very popular around that time in New Orleans, Rich men came to the balls to find mistresses. The women were all half- and quarter-black women, and the balls were nights of debauchery between French and Irish men who had too much time and money, and women who were taught from birth to lure these men and to look at themselves as better, a class above their slave and freemen counterparts. You can imagine these weren’t bingo nights." Anna gave a laugh and grinned at her. "These were like the parties the current Damien has."

"I am so naive," Marley said, pulling her T-shirt off her br**sts and yanking it down over her knees. "I can’t fathom how men decided to start having actual balls with these women in order to shop the market for a mistress. It’s just so mercenary. And creepy." So had these guys just been sitting around the gentlemen’s club one day lamenting the ability to pick over all the hot mistresses at one time and decided to throw a party to do just that? Did they line them up, rate them according to cle**age, auction them off to the highest bidder? "I can’t imagine standing around with all those men checking me out. It must have been so degrading."