All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (54 page)

~•~

He said nothing but “Fran” several times, between deep, hungry kisses. She made no effort to stop him. It made no sense, his showing up like this, murmuring into her hair that he was so glad to see her, she looked so pretty, where had she been, why had she left, why had she come back….

~•~

In the twilight, she saw his eyes close as she drew her mouth down his chest, her tongue following behind her fingers working the buttons of his shirt. She felt his fingers tangle in her hair. “Don’t stop – oh, dear God, that feels so good—”

He was hers to touch, now, finally.

Not Diana’s husband.

Not Francie’s lover.

~•~

Gradually, it seemed to her that Francie must have decided to kill Diana without him. Something had gone wrong with her thinking; she knew that in the midst of her fever, but every logical thought drifted elusively just out of reach. Better if he went on thinking she was Francie, she decided hazily, even as he pushed her gently towards the unmade bed where she had napped. She couldn’t bear the humiliation if he realized that he’d kissed Laura, invisible Laura, with all the passion reserved for her sisters.

She managed a smile when he said, “Sit down, Fran, you look all in,” and she promised to behave and tell all if he’d sit down with her. “All right,” he’d said, once they were settled in against the headboard, “now where have you been? And where’s Laurie?” And she’d cuddled up against his shoulder and conjured up tears in her eyes and said that she couldn’t talk about Laurie, not right now, it was too hard, she was too overcome. This, she thought, this would give him an alibi, and she pressed herself right over him. His hands hovered reluctantly over her back for a second, maybe two or three, and then they closed around her. He kissed her then deeply, thoroughly, a parched man drinking at an oasis.

“My God,” a silk whisper in her hair, “it feels so good to touch a woman again.”

She forgot, as he stretched out beside her and gathered her back into his arms, that she had already seen to it that no alibi would be necessary.

~•~

He wove his fingers into her hair, lifting it, stroking it, making a fine veil over her forehead. Through the night, she saw his face, serious, intent on the study of the intricate strands spread across his palm, and she regretted then that she hadn’t Cat Courtney’s mane. Now she could not weave it into a shimmering mesh to bind him to her heart.

“My God,” he whispered, “it feels so good to touch you.”

~•~

She spared a small, delirious thought that later he would surely find out who she really was, how she’d thwarted their plans, but she’d be back in Texas with her husband and her daughter and her baby, and she wouldn’t ever have to face him again, or Francie either, for that matter….

But did he have to know now? Just once in her life, couldn’t she take what she wanted?

~•~

“Laura,” he breathed, in a voice sinking lower and lower into the warm southern velvet of the night, “wait – I want to see you—” And his hands made short work of her nightgown.

Even though she expected it, even though she wanted it, the shock of being held once again against a man’s warm, willing body sent Laura’s mind spinning.

Heat and power and magic, and her own eager journey down his body. Oh, she had forgotten this, the superb pleasure of being a woman in a man’s arms.

And not just any man. Not Cam, receding into dim memory.

Richard.

Diana’s husband.

Francie’s lover.

~•~

She called on every memory of her twin’s whispered confidences. She used everything she knew about him to convince him that she was Francie come back to him, and she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She flirted with him, she played silly lovers’ games, she told him in teasing detail what she wanted to do to him and what she wanted him to do in return.

Her performance would have astonished her husband.

Especially when she stopped performing.

~•~

“Take me,” she whispered against his temple. “I’m dying for you.”

“Not so fast,” he whispered back, rocking her against him, a man partnering a dancer, a lover savoring a woman. “We’ll take our time. There’s no rush. I want to enjoy you—”

And he suited action to word, his mouth moving across her, his hands molding and shaping her into his own landscape of desire. And when he eased her down onto the lush quilt, she melted beneath him, warm and liquid and open. In the languor of lazy arousal, she ignored the first frisson of desperation that crossed her heart.

Almost.

~•~

She experienced not a twinge of uneasiness when he took off his shirt, and she halted his hand at his belt by unbuckling it herself. Thank God Cam had taught her about sex, she thought as she turned her back on him to wriggle out of her jeans, which were getting tighter and tighter. And thank God she didn’t show much yet. Not even Cam knew. Of course, given the state of their life together, she had made no effort to tell him either.

~•~

“Am I okay?” she asked him, lying anxiously under the slow inspection of his hands, warm and sensitive against her screaming skin. “I mean, is there anything you want me to do?”

His lips lingered against her abdomen, while his clever fingers drew circles on the tender skin of her inner thigh. “I want you to relax.”

“But—” She couldn’t keep all the fear out of her voice. Too much history, too much remembrance of never measuring up. She swallowed hard and whispered, “I guess I’m just nervous.”

She felt his breath on her skin. “It’s just me, Laurie, you’re not bidding a project.” He paused. “Or, in your world, auditioning for a part.”

That made her laugh, and that small insistent whisper of dread fell silent for the moment. “Oh, is this a casting couch? Do I have a shot at the lead?”

She felt the exploration of his tongue on her left breast in response, and heard him laugh briefly under his breath. “Depends on the script,” he said in that voice that turned her liquid against his hand, and then, “Laurie – oh, God, I can’t believe it’s really you—”

~•~

She watched him, memorizing him, all the time he made love to her, and never once remembered her husband. How could she, when she had wanted Richard Ashmore back beyond her early memories? This was how he kissed her, his lips moving slowly across her throat, laying down a lovely necklace of desire; this now was the tip of his ring finger, outlining her, caressing her, summoning a response she had never surrendered to Cam. This was how his eyes darkened and hardened and his breath caught when she leaned over him, her hair brushing his chest, and claimed the same freedom to learn him.

The feverish darkness descended upon her. She watched her young phantom in his arms, lingered on that moment of enclosure and possession, raced through driving thrusts of passion and whispered words of lust and longing, went into reverse at the culmination that touched her memory as, eleven years later, Richard drew her over him.

~•~

She knew a moment of the darkest panic, the worst stage fright in her history. She stared down at him in the night, at those lashes covering his wonderful eyes, at his firm mouth, and it came to her then, in horror, that the curtain was opening on the part she had wanted and fought for all her life, and she had forgotten her lines.

I can’t, I’m not ready,
and she opened her mouth frantically to say so, because if she said it, then everything would be all right, Richard would understand, they could take things slower….

And then Cat Courtney, bless her, whispered in her soul,
Step aside. I’ll take it from here.

Then it was all right, for Cat knew how to woo and win an audience.

~•~

Later, they lay there drowsily, her long legs wrapped with his, and she heard him sigh in a mixture of release and regret. Perhaps he felt guilty for betraying Diana once more, for falling into bed with Francie all over again. She felt nothing but a hard-won peace. Let me have this, I’ll live on it for the rest of my life…. She was too young to realize that she had just destroyed the mental fabric of her marriage. Ahead lay years of comparing her husband to the man who rested against her breast, stroking her hair – a contest that Cameron St. Bride, only a flesh-and-blood man, was destined to lose against the legend Richard Ashmore became in her mind.

Cat took over then, Cat who’d occasionally made a guest appearance in the St. Bride bedroom and delighted and perplexed Cameron St. Bride with a glimpse of what might have been. Cat didn’t worry about the size of her breasts or the skill of her hands or the bite of her teeth against his shoulder. Cat wanted only to please and serve. So when he reached back for her, long lean fingers stroking against her, his mouth traveling the curving equator of her thigh, and when he whispered, “How does this feel? Do you like that?” Cat lied in the face of Laura’s rising dread.

“Then relax,” and his breath blew against her, “you’re shaking.”

“I’m excited,” Cat whispered back, and banished Laura to the sidelines.

~•~

Later, later – how many times had he returned to her arms? Surely memory erred. She had sat on the edge of the bed, her back turned to him, pulling her jeans on as he buttoned his shirt behind her. He knelt on the bed to put aside the heavy curtain of hair from the nape of her neck, and then his hand slipped down to caress her breasts.

Her breasts were sensitive, and so she winced. He drew back in surprise, and then his eyes opened and he really looked at her, he looked at those tell-tale blue veins and that bulky waistline, and then, worst of all, his eye fell on the wedding ring she had forgotten to draw from her left hand. Passion no longer blinded him. “What the devil is going on?” he demanded, and she could only hold onto the notion that he still didn’t know who she was, and he mustn’t find out until she could get away. Let Francie explain, let Francie dig herself out of this, let Francie hate her, if she wanted, but, dear God, let her get away first.

~•~

“Not the best time to ask,” his voice, edged with rue, brushed her in the darkness, “but do I need to use anything?”

Cat shook her head, Cat who understood Laura’s internal calendar, and Laura knew a moment of dismay at her cowardice, that she’d let slide such a perfect opportunity to pull them both back from looming disaster.

“Then,” he whispered, “invite me in.”

~•~

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” His voice reverberated in the dream, and she nodded and bent her head. How far along? Was she married? his voice continued to demand, and she replied, trembling, afraid now, because his eyes were burning with fury and contempt and pain. The words he threw at her, the names he called her, made her sick, and she covered her ears defensively, and he leaned over to jerk her hands down so that she had to listen.

~•~

He must have known right away that it had been a long time for her, because her body tensed and she resisted him, for just a second, when he sought entrance. It might even have been Cam who whispered, “Put your arms around me.” And Cat, ever obedient, ever responsive to the mood of her audience, clasped her hands around his neck.

And Laura looked into his eyes and saw, in shock, that he stared down at her. The thought hit her, sickeningly, that he was staring straight through time.

~•~

Well, maybe she was a whore, she admitted painfully to herself, but then what was he? He wore a wedding ring too! How dare he treat her this way, when she was a perfectly respectable married woman carrying a child conceived within the confines of her marriage bed? No matter that she had just disregarded those marriage vows as if they were as flimsy as tissue, how dare he force her back onto the bed and say contemptuously that she hadn’t changed, that he supposed he ought to consider himself lucky that he had found out just how despicable she really was, she always had been a world-class liar, did her husband know what sort of deceitful bitch he had married, or was that baby even her husband’s? How dare he taunt her with the threat that her husband ought to know how lightly she took her marriage vows? How dare he tangle his fingers painfully in her long hair, trembling as if he still wanted her, and accuse her of being unworthy to be a mother, that perhaps she might find herself fighting to keep her child when her husband learned what had happened? How dare he hold her shoulders so tightly, accusing her of coming back to ruin his life, and he wouldn’t stand for it, he’d see her in hell first before she destroyed anything else? How dare he tell her that he had enjoyed the show, she had become quite the actress, and thank God he saw right through her, not like that poor bastard she was married to?

A long time later to him, even longer to her, Laura knew in despair that all her fine desire had fled in the face of memory. Francie, Diana, Cam…. He worked hard over her, his mouth and hands moving lyrically across her, and nothing helped. He tried, oh, God, how he tried, but her mind had left her body. She found herself watching dispassionately as he tried to bring her back to him, wishing he would just hurry up and get it the hell over with.

When she heard the strain in his voice and touched the sweat on his face as he whispered he couldn’t hold out much longer, she took the only humane course open.

She resorted to fraud. She did what she had seldom had to do even with Cam, even in the last days of their dying marriage; she called on all her skills as an actress, and she faked it.

He, of course, did not.

~•~

Later, of course, she saw those words for just what they were, the expression of a pain and betrayal rocking him to his very core, but maddened with the ferocity of his attack, she was filled with a furious terror that he might make good on his threat to tell Cam… she might lose… everything. She might lose
…
Meg. She couldn’t focus clearly for the toxins pouring into her blood. He paused in the open door to demand one last answer, fling one last insult, what it was she didn’t hear, and her hand trailed along the floor, and her fingers closed around the cold metal of the gun she had hidden from Francie earlier. She didn’t stop to think or even feel. She pulled the gun up in one fluid motion, and she shot him.