All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (15 page)

No longer merely handsome, he was devastating now, all Black Irish and Virginia class.

His face so wondrous fair
….
The purest eyes and the strongest hands….

And she was not immune. Her eyes welcomed the maturity of his older face, the cool assessment of his slate blue eyes, the repose of his once-laughing mouth. Her pulse remembered how he had held her against that body that had finally adapted to its great height.

Deep inside, she felt a small blade of desire, trying to break through the snows of grief into life.

Black is the color of my true love’s hair
….

Oh, but for all the changes, for the shadows that shielded his heart from his eyes, he was still Richard. Still her knight protector, her best friend, the all-knowing hero she had worshiped with all her heart. She had stopped confiding in him only when Francie confessed one winter night that she and Richard had become lovers….

I love the ground on where he stands
….

He was still Richard, and she had loved him.

He put down his glass, took hers from her, and for a moment, they were back on that long-ago Christmas.
Laurie, I need a really big favor
….
But his eyes were gentle on her, and she knew what was coming.

“Laurie, your husband—”

“I got your fax,” she interrupted in a rush. “They – they forwarded it to me that night. I saw it – I don’t know, maybe an hour or so after you sent it, I couldn’t sleep and there it was. Richard, I’m so sorry I didn’t get in touch, I just had so much to do—”

“No!” He forestalled her with a quick lift of his hand. “I said not to feel that you had to respond, and I meant it. It’s just – when I saw his picture, I recognized him right away. Julie and I saw him backstage in London last year, and I heard the name. All I could think was that you had to be going through hell. I didn’t know what support you had, if you had any at all. I wanted you to know that you didn’t have to be alone.” He gathered her hands between his. “Have they found—”

“No.” She shook her head. “We submitted the – DNA, but nothing so far. They – they did find his wedding ring a couple of months ago, so we got that back.”

“The things that survive us.” He fell silent for a moment. “Does it bother you, talking about it?”

She shook her head again. “No. You get used to a lot in nine months.”

“That’s true,” Richard said, and she saw a brief shadow in his eyes. She opened her mouth to ask him about his parents, but he anticipated her with a quick movement that told her to wait. “Do you know how he got caught there? Don’t answer if you don’t want to, but Lucy’s going to ask, you know that.”

“She knows?” But of course Lucy knew. Lucy would make it her mission to know everything.

“I told her a few months later when she recovered – what I knew about him, what your name was – and we agreed we’d wait for you to contact us, although,” he showed a glint of humor, “you know Lucy, she wanted to get on the next plane. I have to tell you that your timing is perfect, because she has run out of patience. She set up news alerts on you – she found out that you left your show, and she was hot to go track you down. So brace yourself. I understand if you don’t want to talk to me about it, but you’re going to have to tell your sister.”

His sensitivity touched her. A memory touched her briefly, Richard finding her weeping near the bodies of her kittens, comforting her with a boy’s awkwardness.
Tell me, Laurie, I’ll do whatever I can.
In all these months, she had talked only to the counselor in London, and he had not been interested in what had happened so much as how she was dealing with it.

She met his eyes. “He had a meeting in the restaurant at the top of the north tower.”

“Oh, dear God.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds as he absorbed the significance of that. She heard him keep his voice deliberate and flat. “Then you know he never had a chance.”

“No.” She looked down at their joined hands and thought how beautifully shaped his fingers were. “There was no way out – it was hit first – they say all the stairs were blocked. His group had left, but Mark – his brother – called him, and he missed the last elevator.”

“So you must have known pretty quickly.” Quiet, matter-of-fact.

“Yes. He’d been with us the night before – I was rehearsing in London, and he flew over for the weekend because—”

He finished for her, “Because your birthday is September 9.”

She nodded, surprised that he remembered. “We knew he was supposed to be there, in the restaurant. And then,” she swallowed hard, “I saw CNN, right before the second plane, and I knew – I was afraid he was in danger.”

His stillness told her, as clearly as if he had said the words aloud, that he would wait for her to tell her story. The tension in her shoulders seeped away. Even now, after all these years, this was vintage Richard, kind, considerate, taking the time to listen to a small girl’s problems.

Except that now it was one of the biggest cataclysms of a woman’s life, and in all these months no one had asked her to tell her story. No one had asked,
What did you know? What did you see?
So many people had told her how
they
had felt watching the tragedy unfold, but no one had asked – had wanted to know – how she had felt watching the man she had married burn to death.

Not even Mark, who avoided talking about that morning. She suspected he was still carrying guilt for the call that had kept Cam off that elevator.

“He left a call for me.” She hadn’t planned to tell him that.

“You spoke to him?”

“No. I found it on the voice mail that night.” She saw the compassion in his eyes, and now she felt like a fraud. She bowed her head so that she didn’t have to look at him. “We were talking about divorce,” she said, and didn’t know why she had admitted it. “We’d been separated for over a year. It – it was a lot worse for other people.”

Other survivors had actually loved those they had lost. She had steadily deflected all suggestions that she join a survivors’ support group for that very reason.

Richard spoke over her head. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “It must have made things even more difficult for you. Did you and he – do you have children?”

Her heartbeat picked up. She looked up; she couldn’t keep staring at the floor. “A daughter.”

“How is she doing?”

Of course, he’d consider the impact on a child; Julie was not much older than Meg. “Okay. Better than last fall,” Laura said. “She had some rough moments. It’s gotten easier, but she misses him terribly. We’ve included her in all the decisions, like the memorial service and the marker, and that helped her, I think.”

Richard glanced around the suite. “Where is she?”

“She’s spending the summer with Cam’s brother and sister. I thought—” she hesitated and then said truthfully, “I thought it would be better if she stayed in Texas. I knew this would be stressful – I didn’t want her to have to deal with it on top of everything else.”

And you can’t meet her, not ever.

He lowered their joined hands, and it startled her. It had seemed natural for her hands to nestle in his, and Laura missed the touch with a physical intensity as he walked over to pour himself a fresh iced tea. She couldn’t help her eyes following him. “Last year,” he said, and his tone had changed, stepping back from the morass of grief to a place of objectivity, “was a terrible year for this family. Do you know about Dominic?”

Thank God, this she felt honest about. “Oh, yes,” she said, and matched his tone. “Cam showed me the news clippings that last weekend. He had just found out himself.”

“Is that—” he gestured loosely— “is that why you’ve come home?”

She nodded. She could not lie to him. Too often, he had rescued her from Dominic with a well-timed
Come riding, Laurie
or
Mom wants you to come over and help her
. Once, he had stopped Dominic in the middle of a punishing tirade.
You hit her again, I hit you. Then I call the police.
“It helped. It wasn’t all of it, but – it helped. It would be much harder to have to see him.”

He came back towards her and stood against the wall by the French doors. “Laura,” he said, “Dominic should never have mattered. This was your home, and God knows you showed him up. If it’s any consolation, he never got over the shock of Cat Courtney. Lucy is going to wring your neck and then forget you were ever gone. She’s missed you terribly. Diana—” He stopped then, seemed to keep his own counsel. “I don’t know how Diana will react.”

She felt herself relaxing. “I thought she liked me when we were growing up.”

“She liked you just fine.”
You weren’t Francie
hung between them. His manner, abruptly cool and remote, shut down that line of discussion. A moment of silence, and then, unexpectedly, “Did you send a note after my parents died?”

“Yes.” The shadow had returned to his eyes, and she saw that this man still grieved. The Ashmores had died in an auto accident four months after the Christmas miscarriage. It had indeed been a terrible year. “Cam told me. I made him promise to tell me if anything happened to any of you. He probably had news alerts too – he didn’t tell me much, he tried to keep all that away from me. Richard—”

“I know,” and she heard the quiet sorrow in his voice. “It’s been over a year, and I still find myself thinking I’ll see Mom out in her garden or pick up the phone and hear Dad’s voice.” He gave her a small smile. “I didn’t put two and two together until later. It meant something that you wrote, Laura, indeed it did. Thank you.”

She had thought about going to the funeral incognito, but she had still felt shaky from the miscarriage and hadn’t been sure if she could pull it off. “I couldn’t
not
do something. Your mother was the closest I ever came to a mother, and – I always envied you your father.”

He nodded. The silence lay there between them. The room, she thought, had shrunk on them. She felt wound up, almost ready to fly apart, with the emotional probing of wounds not yet healed. Did he feel the tension? She thought that he did, as he wandered around the room, looking at the framed prints on the wall, rifling through the stacks of books on the desk. She hoped she didn’t have anything too lightweight in the stack; he used to read books like
Atlas Shrugged
while she read
The Thorn Birds
.

“Richard?” The question in her voice brought his quick glance at her. “You said that you told Lucy about – about Cam after she recovered. What was she recovering from?”

Her question visibly caught him off guard. For the first time, he seemed at a loss for words.

Laura pressed on, “In your fax, you said she was ill.”

He put the fourth Harry Potter down and picked up
The Lovely Bones
, buying time, she thought. “Let her tell you about it. Do you know what this book is about? The subject matter’s pretty gruesome. It might upset you to read it.”

Of all the paternalistic deflections. “I’ve already read it, and I’m not that fragile. Is Lucy all right?”

“She’s fine now.” He put the book down and walked towards the open door into the bedroom of the suite, and she had a sudden, unasked-for appreciation of the lines of his long body. “I’d wait for her to tell you – is that your daughter?”

Her heart leaped. “What?” She followed his line of sight, and she saw it then, on the nightstand, Meg’s picture, the picture she had taken out that morning, to remind herself what was truly important. She held her breath as he picked it up and looked hard at it, and surely he heard the pounding of her heart, the knell of guilt and fear.

Why,
why
hadn’t she put that picture away?

But she had never expected that Richard Ashmore would stand in her hotel suite to see it.

“What a beautiful girl.” He sounded merely like an interested uncle. “She has your eyes.”

“Margaret.” She forced herself to speak. “We call her Meg.”

“Margaret.” His voice dropped, and her heart stopped.
Oh, no, no, no
…. But his tone was pure pleasure. “For Mom. She’d have loved that, Laura. Thank you.”

He turned around, and through the shadows of the room, she saw no latent recognition in his eyes. Blood had not called to blood…. He came back out into the living area with the picture still in his hand, looking at it –
why?
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a cigarette case, and Laura, who despised smoking, forgot her alarm long enough to shake her head at him. He promptly put it back. “Sorry, I forgot what a stickler you are.”

“My voice is my trade,” she reminded him. “I take care of it.”

He was instantly penitent. “And you should. It’s an awful habit. I’ll give them up again, if—” and he smiled at her— “if you’ll make me some of your wonderful cookies. I’ve missed them. No one else made them like you.”

Now how could she resist such a charming request? “I’ll have Meg send up a batch. I passed along your mother’s recipe.”

Richard’s manner changed then, ever so slightly; she went back on guard and cursed herself for mentioning Meg again. His eyes traveled over her curiously. “Just the one?”

“Just the one.” She made her voice light, as though four miscarriages and a marriage of desolate infertility had never happened. “And if you knew Meg at her best – or worst, however you want to look at it, you’d think one was enough.”

Damn those eyes of his. He saw right through her. “Going to make it without her?”

“No.”

“Bring her here. Julie would love to meet her cousin. I know you want to protect her, but this – your coming back – isn’t going to be as hard as you think.”

She had foreseen this, and she dealt with it calmly. “No, she’s enjoying being back with her friends in Plano. She’s discovered boys. I couldn’t resist the temptation to run away from that.”

He laughed. “How well I know! I’ve felt like running away a time or two myself, and Julie doesn’t have much of a social life.” He came back around to her. “Strange, you having a daughter old enough to be thinking about boys. How long were you married?”