All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (16 page)

“Twelve years.”

What was he thinking behind those unfathomable eyes? “You must have met him soon after you left, then.”

Perilous territory, this. That active mind of his might start fitting the timeline together. As much as Cam, Richard had always excelled at puzzles and patterns. “A year or so.”

Did she imagine the fine sharp edge to his gaze?

“You were still very young then. You must have married him very quickly.” She stared at him in horror, unsure how to deflect this dangerous train of thought. “No wonder he wanted to protect you.”

As he had, many times in the past. She had the unnerving feeling that he had forgotten Cam, that his mind had flown straight back to his wife. Had he failed to protect Diana? Against himself? Had they inflicted wounds on each other too deep for healing?

Of course they had. Had the fissures of that marriage ever sealed?

He had accused Diana of spying on him – not the reaction of a loving husband to a wife, nor even of a man to a woman he lived with, no matter what the state of their marriage.

And he had accused Diana of scaring her own daughter.

She said softly, “I’m sorry about this morning, Richard. I never meant to alarm Julie. Did the fall hurt her?”

He looked at her sharply at the change in subject. “No, it just knocked the breath out of her. You weren’t at fault, Julie was, and she knows it. That mare is skittish, and Julie spooked her.” None of the clipped anger of his call to Diana. “Of course, it never occurred to me it was you, not until Tom’s call.”

So Julie was safe. A small burden wafted off her shoulders. “You keep mentioning Tom. Should I know him?”

A startled pause, and then he smiled. “That answers one question. Your husband really didn’t tell you much, did he? Tom Maitland. You’ll like him. He’s my lawyer, my tennis partner, my closest friend, and, not least of all, Lucy’s husband.”

“Lucy’s married.” That small puzzle piece set her at ease. No wonder Kevin Stone had looked so disconcerted. “Are they happy?”

If he thought that a strange question, he still answered gently. “Yes. Mom and Dad thought him perfect for her. It’s one of the best marriages I’ve seen. She’s still as bossy as ever, but Tom just ignores her.” His grin invited her to join in. They both knew that the only defense against Lucy was passive resistance. “She’s mellowed a lot. He’s very good for her.”

“So she doesn’t try to run everyone’s life anymore?”

“Of course she does! I’m a continual source of frustration to her.” Richard took the glass from her hand. “I know today’s been tough on you,” he said, “but we need to talk. Let me take you to dinner.”

And not a word about his wife. She tried again, half-heartedly, “What about Di?”

He smiled, and now he looked more like the old Richard. “I’m not accountable to Diana. And I want to take Cat Courtney, or Laura St. Bride, or Laura Abbott, or even all three of you to dinner.”

~•~

Laura flew around the bedroom, getting ready, while he waited in the living area. Nothing too fancy, he had said, an intimate piano bar with seafood, and she shucked her jeans and shirt and dove into her suitcase. Some of her prettiest clothes were stored back in London, and she wasted a small regret before she reminded herself sternly that this was not a date.

But the admiration in his eyes fed her imagination.

“Look at you,” he said, and touched the hair that she had managed to tame. “Is this the girl whose ponytail was always falling down and who was always losing a lens out of her glasses?”

“No glasses,” Laura said lightly. “Contacts. I’ve grown up.”

Richard summoned the elevator and turned back to her. “Oh, that you have,” he said, “you certainly have.”

But if his eyes were admiring, his words became casual, matter-of-fact, a brother talking to a much younger sister. The trip to the restaurant blurred before the panoply of family events that he described: Lucy’s wedding, Julie’s first day at school, the opening of his practice, the rebuilding of the Folly…. So much she had missed. She soaked it up like a parched flower. Julie, he admitted readily, was the center of his life, and he handed over his wallet to show her snapshots of her niece. “Trusting soul,” she teased, and was stunned to see that Julie, sans obscuring sunglasses, was Diana reborn, lovely and luminous at sixteen.

No pictures of Diana. He never mentioned her, as though she had no place in his life. Anyone listening to him could be forgiven for assuming that she was dead, that he was well past the shock of loss, content to be a widower.

And no mention of Francie, as though no other sister-in-law had ever existed.

By his silence, Francie and Diana joined them; Laura could not shake the feeling that they watched her and, worse, read her fantasies. She basked in his attention, letting him order her wine, indulging her daydream that they were just another couple on a first date, enjoying the stirring of attraction, feeling out each other’s terrain – and Diana sat there between them, watching with cool contempt. She answered his questions about her career – her stage work, her songwriting – and Francie, frozen at eighteen, hung all over him and tried to distract his attention.

Even Cam intruded.

“Was it your career?” Richard asked.

Laura had heard that assumption plenty from her in-laws. Success gone to her head, they’d said. Ingratitude. Ambition. Another man (and Cam had verbally shredded Emma when she suggested that). “Part of it, I guess. I wasn’t the wife he wanted anymore. He – oh, I don’t know, he wanted to keep me all to himself, and I grew up, I outgrew that. I worked, I worked a lot, and I’ve been successful in Europe – more so than here – and I started spending more time over there.” She hesitated. “Neither of us was happy. We’d had problems for a long time.”

Then that final Christmas, when they lost their last best hope….

“Some marriages don’t work,” he observed flatly. “For what it’s worth, when we saw him in London, he seemed very married – he made it clear that he didn’t want anyone trying to hurt you.”

Laura came to attention. “You
talked
to him?”

“Well,” and she heard a wry note in his voice, “it wasn’t exactly a conversation. But he knew who Julie and I were, no doubt about that.”

In all these months, she hadn’t thought to wonder about that cryptic statement in Julie’s note:
My father doesn’t know I’m doing this. If you are the man I saw, I think that is important to you.
Richard and Cam had come face to face. She tucked away the thought to mull over later.

“It worked as a business. Cat Courtney makes plenty of money for St. Bride.” She wondered at his look, that a dysfunctional but civilized marriage seemed so foreign to him. Had he divorced Diana, or she him? What had happened after Francie? “But – over time –
we
stopped working. I knew for a long time that we weren’t going to make it. I knew that I could live to be ninety and be happy if I never won a Grammy, or I never had a – another child, but I just couldn’t see being ninety and still being married to Cam.”

Serves you right
, said Francie.
I told you not to marry him.

She thought she heard, “Oh, dear God,” but his face told her nothing.

“It was actually a relief once we admitted everything was over.” She drew a breath. “I think we dealt better with each other those last few months – especially after Meg and I moved to London – than we had in years.”

Richard said slowly, “I hoped you were happy, wherever you were.”

She smiled. “Oh, but I was. I had Meg.” She saw an opening. “We weren’t fated to go the distance, I guess, not like you and Di. What has it been now, twenty years?”

He took his time answering, his body extraordinarily still, his eyes not betraying his thoughts by a flicker. “Something like that.”

Actually, it had been eighteen years and five days; she knew his anniversary as well as her own. Laura felt a shadow of unease. Reticence she could understand, but he avoided mentioning Diana, she thought, the way someone might avoid touching a still painful wound.

Maybe he cared about Kevin Stone more than he wanted to admit.

Before she could regroup, he turned the tables on her. “How about you? Are you seeing anyone?”

“What?” So much for basking in her fantasy date. “No. No, I’m not. I – I’m not ready.” That seemed inadequate. “I’ve been busy. Working in a production six nights a week doesn’t leave a lot of spare time.”

He said nothing. She hurried on against his gaze, “It was – good to be busy. It helped.”

Richard sat back, and his voice turned musing. “I went for a run that night. I had to take a break from watching – the same pictures, again and again—” She caught her breath, and he looked at her swiftly. “
You
know. That endless replay, and each time it seemed more and more like one of those high-tech action movies, disaster averted at the last second, but this time,” he shook his head, “no one to the rescue. I stood out there at Ashmore Park, everything quiet and at peace, a world removed from the hell in New York, and I looked up, and it hit me, it had even come to us here. Usually, I see the flight patterns from the west, the lights of the planes on approach into Norfolk, but—” he paused— “not that night. The sky was empty. There were only stars. And I thought, it’s happened, someone has finally stopped the engine of the world.”

He leaned forward and took her hand, and she felt the warmth of his long fingers on hers. “Everything’s changed,” he said. “You know better than most. We won’t go back to September 10. Just – don’t let those bastards stop anything for you, Laurie. Don’t
not
live because the stairs were blocked.”

He released her hand, and sat back again.

She kept her eyes on him, and the silence lay between them.

He must have felt the heavy intensity, known that he had to break through it. He picked up his wine and smiled at her, and his voice lightened deliberately. He was once again the big brother. “You have to get back in the game sometime. You are still very young—”

Just how young did he think she was? She matched his tone. “I’m thirty-one, O ancient one.”

Her retort – or her age – seemed to take him aback, but he recovered quickly. “Too young for the cloisters. Time to spread your wings, little butterfly. Besides,” and he flashed her a grin that said, as much as anything, that he had shifted into teasing mode, “you need to get your defenses up in quick order before Lucy gets hold of you. Be prepared to be fixed up.”

Laura spared a second of sheer horror at that thought. “I don’t want to be fixed up. That’s not even on my radar.”

“Understandable.” He waved the waiter off. “But that will change. This will – recede in time.”

He sounded just like Roger, but, she saw, he had left her an opening. “Right now – I don’t want to date just to date. It’s not worth it. If it’s not going to be,” she gestured, “the world lost for love – what’s the point?” She hesitated, unsure of her way. “You had that, Richard, you of all people should understand how I wouldn’t want anything less.”

She’d said the wrong thing, she knew that instantly. He fingered the goblet of candle-lit wine, but somewhere behind his eyes, he shut down and went away from her. Tension flooded her limbs; she found herself clutching the linen of her skirt. She had gone too far, probed into a wound too fresh or too deep for healing. She scrambled for a light-hearted remark to gloss over the awkwardness, lift that darkness from his eyes, anything, and then lost her train of thought when he turned back to her and put his wine down. “Let’s see if you still know how to dance.”

She rose uncertainly, her blood still trembling from this brush with his unknown pain. The dance floor shimmered before her, a small square of space before a great open hearth, flanked by large floor candles and an anonymous piano swathed in shadows. He drew her into the shelter of one arm.

His free hand raised hers to heart level, and she found only one thought in the warmth of his fingers closing around hers.
I have wanted you across these years, I have waited to step into your arms. Now here you’re holding me, and what do I feel? What do I say?

He had taught her to dance after she had stepped on his toes at his wedding. “You need to know this,” he had lectured, “you and Francie will have all the boys after you in a few years.” So he had mercilessly drilled her that summer until she could acquit herself honorably, and Diana, still a laughing new wife, played the piano patiently for those lessons.
And I didn’t mind at all
, said Diana.
You were moonstruck over him, but so what? He was mine then, all mine.

“Relax.” Richard’s voice ruffled her hair.

She stared hard at his shoulder. “I’m afraid I’ll step on your feet.”

And I don’t want you to feel how hard my heart is beating.

Oh, if only her fantasy had been real, if they’d been just another man and another woman, with no history and no blood between them, no wife and no mistress and no lost afternoon forever staining them. She might then have relaxed against him and enjoyed the heat that began to seep down her back; he might not have held her so carefully, befitting a man with his wife’s sister. She might have whispered her thoughts for the night ahead, and he might have suggested that dinner was an option best left untaken. And when the inevitable happened and she dug her heel into his shoe, they might have tossed it off with a silly lover’s joke.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

Richard’s voice sounded measured in the extreme. “Stop acting as if you’re dancing with a serial killer.”

She laughed at that, and he took advantage of her momentary looseness to draw her closer against him. “Much better,” he said. “Didn’t you ever dance with your husband?”

She shook her head. “Cam was Baptist. He didn’t drink, dance, or play cards.”

He just slept with other women when he got mad at me.

But she didn’t want to think about Cam, not now, not ever while she was dancing with Richard.
This
was how it felt to dance with him now, not a child seeking comfort, but a grown woman held against him, with his arm around her waist and his hand sheltering hers.
This
was how his pulse accelerated, just for a moment, when she turned her head.
This
was the way his hand slipped gently up her back, and his fingers touched her nape…. She thought for a moment that his lips brushed her hair.