All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (34 page)

“Laurie,” no resisting now the gentle timber of Lucy’s voice, with all its rich history of healing ancient hurts and dispensing unwanted wisdom, “you must stay away from Richard.”

“According to you, Richard won’t give me the chance to do anything else.” She heard her voice from far away, brittle, falsely upbeat, denying the truth of every word her sister said.

“Actually,” said Lucy, and stroked her hand, “I’m not worried about Richard, at least not as much as I am about you and Di. I care about this family, Laurie. Someone needs to. I foresee a disaster if you can’t get your feelings for him under control. You’ll hurt yourself and him both, and I shudder to think how it might affect Di.”

She saw the lifeline of her control floating away downstream; she grabbed and just barely caught it. “You exaggerate, Lucy. Just because I used to hero worship him—”

“Then what happened when you came home?”

Of course, she couldn’t answer. That moment of their bodies’ recognition, that language of hand against back, of cheek against shoulder, of lip against hair – oh, she refused to share that. She yanked her hand back and walked over to the window, touching Lucy’s antiques, picking up the fallen quilt. Lucy watched her, letting the silence ride out, probably (Laura thought, stopping before a pretty framed pencil sketch of Diana that gave no hint of her demons) letting her imagine that she might avoid an answer.

Lucy and her damned power struggles. Whoever spoke first lost.

Lucy waited her out.

She was well-schooled in silence. She waited Lucy out.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Lucy said eventually. “If things were different, I’d encourage this. I think you’re lonely. You’ve no man in your life, your marriage was unhappy, it ended horribly – you’re entitled to one hell of a fling, and I hope you have it soon.”

“Thank you,” Laura snapped. “But I’m not in the market.”

Lucy ignored that. “You will be. Give them a signal, guys will be lining up.”

“Oh, my
God
, Lucy!”

She might as well not have protested, as far as Lucy was concerned. “As for Richard, I’d prefer that he see someone who gets him and that whole Ashmore Park mystique instead of some little girl who just sees that face and that house and decides that she wants to play lady of the manor. I worry about him. He’s a good man, and he’s so lonely, rattling around out there in the country with only Julie. He needs someone else to love, he needs a woman who will shake him up and bring him alive again. I watched him once at a fundraiser, talking to a woman he left with later, and he was smiling, laughing, but somehow,” and Lucy paused, “he didn’t seem quite real, like he was playing a part. And I thought, how sad, he’s let Di and Francie bring him to this.”

Laura scarcely had time to picture the scene – Richard standing close to the woman, talking, smiling, admiring her with his eyes (the way he had looked at her) and the woman (young, pretty, soft-voiced) brushing an imaginary speck of dust off his jacket – before Lucy thrust her rapier home.

“So – don’t push your feelings for him into an already bad situation. Leave him alone. He’s not your romantic hero anymore. He’s a man struggling to balance his own needs with the welfare of his wife and daughter. He doesn’t need you. If he wants a woman, he’ll find one. But not you, Laurie. You stay away from him.”

The words neatly found their target, stabbed her, and ran her clean through. In a few words, Lucy had done what no one else ever had. She had explored Laura, filleted her, and laid her most precious thoughts open to view.

I will not let her do this to me.

Please, no tears. She dared not betray any weakness now. She said merely, and marveled at her pleasant boredom, “I’m not interested. Richard is quite safe from me.”

“Then why doesn’t he think so?”

She managed a shrug, a tolerant movement to convey bewilderment. “We don’t see eye to eye about Di, that’s all. I – I didn’t expect their marriage to be in such disarray, and I’m shocked at how far she’s fallen. Naturally, I was concerned that he wasn’t doing all he could to help her.”

Quiet. Then Lucy smiled, a smile of respect. “You’re good, you really are. You may get rattled, but you recover quickly. You’re entitled to your shock. You’re entitled to talk to Di about it; in fact, I encourage you to. God knows we’ve talked until we’re blue in the face! Make her sing for you. It’ll do her good to embarrass herself in front of Cat Courtney. Just don’t talk to her about Richard. Stay out of that marriage, and keep away from him. Please.”

She made her voice light, and, dear Lord, what it took out of her to say the words. She felt all the exhaustion of a swimmer, drowning, finding the last vital energy to swim for shore. “Because I remind him of Francie?”

She managed to throw Lucy there. “No! Why do you think that?”

One afternoon, when I was young, and blood and tide ran high….

“Don’t I remind him of his great lost love?”

No answer behind her. She couldn’t stand it; she turned around, away from Diana’s picture, and she saw that Lucy had risen, come to stand behind her so that, when she turned, she looked straight into her sister’s eyes.

“Oh, yes,” said Lucy softly, “you remind him. Remember I had one more theory? Richard won’t divorce Diana because he can’t let her go. After all this, Francie, lovers, other women – he still loves her. Oh, you remind him, Laurie – of Diana.”

~•~

Through a night of precious little sleep, as she sat on the window seat overlooking the pool, her face buried in a compliant Max’s fur, Laura St. Bride looked deep into herself.

She wanted to hate Lucy. Damn Lucy anyway, for that X-ray vision, for those soft words with their knife-sharp edges, for the glistening tears that had nearly called Laura back before she had walked out. Damn Lucy for calling later, on a pretext, reaching out in reconciliation; damn her own inability to slam down the phone.

Damn Lucy for reminding her that forever and ever Richard belonged to Diana.

Damn Lucy for being right.

She faced facts. All right, she was infatuated with Richard Ashmore. Childish, mortifying – she passed over all that with scarcely a thought. Not too surprising, actually, that she’d fallen straight back into the old emotional patterns with him; she’d never had a chance to grow out of them. Look how quickly she’d reverted to being Lucy’s little sister.

But Lucy had forgotten, Laura thought, enjoying the steady throbbing of Max’s purring against her breast, that Richard had been her friend. She’d gone fishing with him those early Saturday mornings, helped him cart his RC models to meets, baked endless batches of cookies for him, because she liked him. Oh, yes, she’d dreamed of him, hung on his every word, even written a secret poem to him. (Had she destroyed it? She hoped so.) He’d been her hero, but he had also been her best friend.

And their friendship lay broken now, casualty of his pride and her loss.

She pondered leaving it that way.

If she did, refusing to mend matters between them, she’d please no one. She and Richard would meet rarely, and when they did, they’d speak briefly and coolly, separating as soon as courtesy permitted. She’d never get to know Julie; Richard would see to that. The coolness would spread. Everyone would soon know not to invite her to any function that Richard wanted to attend. She didn’t doubt that Richard would hold everyone’s loyalty; he’d been here, part of the family, during all the years of her exile.

She’d crack the family in two and force Lucy and Tom to take sides. And she didn’t want that. She liked Tom, she wanted his good opinion, and she was sure to lose that if Tom’s best friend refused to break bread with her.

And, sooner or later, Diana would find out.

She began to understand, dimly, the core of Lucy’s concern.

Richard held all the winning cards. She’d leave in a matter of weeks; she had only this short time to rebuild her relationships with her family. One thing she’d learned with Cam was that an estrangement, once begun, had a life of its own. She couldn’t rely on Richard to cauterize the wounds their words had inflicted on each other, because he had too much to gain. He needed protection against the attraction shimmering between them, far more than she, and time was on his side. All he had to do was wait her out, and he could go back to the life he’d built, safe from her, from the dangers she’d brought with her.

She reminded him. Of Diana. Of Francie.

And like them, she wanted him.

She closed her eyes.

It lay there, a darkness in her heart. No longer the shining, romantic infatuation of young Laura, dazzled by the laughing young man who’d taught her to dance one long-ago summer. Ah, Richard of the charming smile, the easy word, the kind gesture to heal a hurt young girl’s heart!

And now Richard, quiet, cold, devastated by the mysterious rift in his marriage.

And Laura St. Bride, not a shy teenager any longer, but a woman responding to the man he had become, dancing in his arms and dreaming of the touch of his hands.

A sudden thought slammed into her, and Max yowled in protest as she straightened.

The night she’d come back, Richard had seemed genuinely happy to see her. He had comforted her, teased her, brought her up to date – and all the while, he’d scarcely mentioned Diana. She remembered her impression that he was a widower at heart, that Diana no longer claimed him.

But all that ease had vanished as soon as he asked her to dance and she stepped into his arms.

As soon as they stepped from old friends to man and woman.

A shield
, Laura thought in wonder.
He’s using Diana as a shield.

And had Lucy sensed that? Lucy, who knew Richard so well. Now, alone, in the middle of the night, she read Lucy’s mind as she had not earlier: that a one-sided infatuation held no inherent dangers, but this attraction lay on both sides.

But of course he wanted her, Lucy had said. She reminded him of Diana.

Laura stared down at her hands, her left curled around her cat, her right stroking his fur, and concentrated her choices. The left – safety, her sisters’ goodwill, Tom’s approval, a chance to heal the wounds of her disappearance. A return to Laura Abbott. And the right – and she allowed herself to savor the lush fullness of Max’s fur against her fingers – on the right, beckoning, the unknown darkness of Richard Ashmore, and a memory of her body against the heart of a man who wanted her and rejected the wanting.

Either/or. Lucy had made it plain that she could not have both.

She smiled down through the night at her cat, and continued to run her right hand along his spine.

~•~

Laura planned her approach carefully. Twelve years of living with Cameron St. Bride had taught her the value of strategic planning.

Her timing should be well nigh impeccable. Unless Richard’s habits had changed as much as his personality, he was still an early riser, and she remembered enough of country living to know that he’d have chores around the estate before he left for his office. The presence of his Lexus, standing in the circular drive in front of the Folly, proved her right; she backed in smoothly and blocked his way out.

She smoothed her hair down as she approached the door. She’d taken special care with her appearance that morning. Richard had relaxed around her when she appeared the most like Laura Abbott, the least like Cat Courtney, so maybe he’d respond to the jeans and camp shirt and Alice in Wonderland hair band.

Or maybe he’d kick her right off Ashmore Park the moment he realized she’d hacked the code for the security gates.

Laura breathed in deeply, squared her shoulders, and lifted her hand to the door knocker.

He opened the door before she had to knock twice, and for a second she simply stared at him. The doorstep sat below the threshold, so that he loomed over her and knocked all her purpose clean out of her mind. She thought, with the part of her mind that wasn’t scrambling to remember why she’d come, that he looked tired and ill. His eyes were creased with exhaustion, the silver glints at his temples picked up by the blossoming morning sun. He looked remote and not at all happy to see her.

He broke her paralysis with a sneeze.

“Laura.” Even the sound of her name gave him away; his voice held the faint nasal tone of a cold that refused to give up and go away. “What are you doing here?”

Unwelcoming, but she’d expected it. “I came to talk to you,” she said over the punctuation of another sneeze. She felt her confidence rising. She’d cared for Cam when he was ill, and even if Richard matched him in sheer bloody-minded irritability, he couldn’t possibly be a bigger baby. “May I come in?”

“What? Oh, of course. Sorry.” He stood aside as she entered but made no move to shut the door behind her. He continued to stare at her; maybe she’d overdone it with the Alice hair band. “How did you get in? I didn’t hear you buzz from the gate.”

She laughed to put herself at ease. “I hacked your password, that’s how. Your birthday? Piece of cake.”

Reluctant admiration flitted across his face. “It used to be Julie’s,” he admitted. “I suppose this comes from being married to a computer guru? Did he hack his way into the Pentagon?” He heard his words. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“No.” She was careful not to let her relief show. “He was too conservative for that.” She slipped her shoulder bag strap down her arm and let her purse drop on a small Chippendale table beneath a hall mirror. “How is Julie? Did you catch her cold?”

“She’s fine, and yes, I did.” He didn’t shift his eyes from her, even as she placed her keys on the table beside her purse, taking care not to mar the polished surface of the old wood. She used the mirror to adjust the hair band, putting off the confrontation for another minute.

He appeared in the mirror behind her, and their images, hers superimposed over his, carved away at Laura’s resolve. Oh, God, it stretched there again between them, that taut, vibrating string of attraction. She didn’t want to see it, not after a sleepless night of coming to terms with herself. Richard’s eyes met hers in the mirror, and she saw the embers of anger still burning beneath the surface politeness.