She had an image of Richard and Cam facing each other with death in their hearts – pistols at dawn, perhaps. Two rational strategists, each studying the other’s weaknesses, playing a mental chess game to determine which move might yield a definitive victory. Two elegant, civilized men, retaining in their genes the uncivilized vestiges of their Celtic and Viking heritages. She couldn’t say for sure who would have stood over the other at the end.
Full-blown, water rushing through a faucet, lyrics assembled in her mind, whole phrases dropping into stanzas. Now how to score them? D minor?
“And now you come back to your family, where at least you ought to be safe and no one will use you like that, and Diana and I screw up your homecoming.” She made herself pay attention. Something bad was coming. “We – this – may not be the best choice for you, Laura. I really want you to think this through. You deserve someone who can give you what you want, and it’s obvious to me now what that is.”
Laura’s heart leapt into her throat. She didn’t dare show any hesitation, or he’d send her packing for her own good. She matched his forceful tone. “I thought I made myself clear yesterday.” She lifted her chin. “Stop trying to get rid of me.”
She retained the Celtic, too, from her parents. Irish women had ridden to war back in the mists of time. She might have to go to battle, fight Diana and the world for him. Fight him for him.
“This is going to take a long time,” he warned her. “Probably longer than either of us will like.”
“I can wait.” She was not going to compromise. “I’ve waited all my life for you, Richard.”
The pledge again, and she knew he wouldn’t return it. But, in unspoken acknowledgment, he held her hard against him. Damn her calendar – he might be exhausted, but part of him wasn’t getting the message. “We will not discuss the future until this is all over, do you understand, Laura? No plans, no what-ifs, nothing like that. Can you live with that?”
“I have to,” she said simply. “You’re worth it to me.”
He looked down at her and then away, frowning. “God, Laura, what I’ve done to deserve you, I don’t know. I wish I could take you upstairs and give you your heart’s desire – and don’t deny it, it’s as plain as day. But I can’t.” He caught her gaze and held it. “There will be no slip-ups,” he said bluntly. “No just-this-once. I do not want any accidents, do you understand?”
Did he know – oh, but he was thinking of Julie. The horror of those unfiled pleadings flashed through her mind. She nodded. “I understand.”
He lifted her hand, palm up, to his lips. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I should have gotten this over and done with years ago.”
She nodded again, and for a few minutes they stood there, each enjoying the other’s warmth. She slid her hands up his arms as they tightened around her, and nothing in life had ever felt so right, so wonderful, as hearing him breathe into her hair and feeling his heartbeat against her and knowing that, after so many years of anguish and loneliness, they’d come to the same point in their lives. She knew in her heart of hearts that never would Richard use her and manipulate her as Cam had. With this man, she would never have to protect her heart.
“Richard?” Laura murmured against his shirt.
He caressed her hair. “Hmmm?”
“Friday night – if I’d said you needed to use something – did you bring anything with you?”
He laughed down at her. “No, my lady, I did not. Do you think I carry condoms with me all the time, just in case?”
“Some men do.”
He said, exasperated, “News flash. I am not Cam.”
“Then what would you have done?”
“Improvised.” He arched an eyebrow at her, and she tried not to blush. “We could have salvaged the evening.”
“Oh.” She absorbed that. “Maybe you should store more than coffee over here.”
“Good idea.” He paused. “What an evening. I’ve never had a conversation like this with a woman. This is one for the ages.”
“It’s the stuff of life.” She gave him a small smile. “It’s birth and death, beginning and endings—” And it was their pasts, and their future. In telling her that they could not discuss the future until his marriage was dissolved, he had told her that he saw a future for them. She could live on that for a long time. “It’s the stuff that dreams are made on. It’s our lives.”
He kissed her, a gentle, loving kiss, and then held her against him. From his stillness, she sensed that he was pondering something; this wasn’t done between them. But she could wait until he was ready. So she nestled against the wall of his body and thought again how unfortunate it was that this Monday had to be this Monday.
“Laura,” he said finally.
She looked up at him.
“I want to say something,” he said, “and I want to do it right, and I want you to hear me.”
Oh, no, not again. It was her turn to be exasperated. She said into his shirt, “This had better not be for me to rethink us again.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotten the message. And I can’t say I’m sorry. But—”
She waited.
“I don’t like what St. Bride did to you. I understand he wanted you back, but I don’t like the way he went about it.” They were back to that. She wanted to forget, but obviously her story had disturbed him. “But what I think doesn’t matter. What matters is that you forgave him, and no—” He overrode her instinctive reaction. “You did, Laura, it’s clear you did. But I don’t think you are completely honest about why you did.”
She moved her head in protest. “I’ve been honest with you.” About that, at least.
“Laura,” Richard said gently, “you loved your husband.”
His words came so unexpectedly that she tried to pull back from him. All her instincts rose up in protest. She felt the door in her heart where she had thrust all her feelings for Cam straining against the weight of all her memories of him. “I was fond of him.” She winced. Fond was a pale word for all the gratitude and resentment and respect and – oh, even the passion she still remembered. “I was never in love with him.”
“You know what I think of being in love,” Richard said, and she felt her heart sink. “Laura, understand, it’s all right if you loved him. You were married, you raised a child together, you lived together for a long time. Frankly,” his words sent a quiver along her spine, “I hope for your sake that you did love him, at least a little.”
Laura stared into the white weave of his shirt. I didn’t, I didn’t, I’ve only ever loved you….
“Cameron St. Bride is going to be a dominant force for the rest of your life,” he said. “Just as Diana will always be part of mine. There’s no escaping that. We haven’t come to this moment – to each other – unscarred or unencumbered. We’ve both been married, we’ve both loved other people, and,” he lifted her chin so that she had to look at him, “that’s all right, Laura. It’s all right that you loved your husband. I do not believe it takes anything away from us if you did.”
She couldn’t speak. I didn’t, I didn’t….
“Any more than it takes away from us that I adored your sister when I was young.” He brushed her hair from her face. “The people we’ve loved before are the stuff of life too. But what I really want you to hear is I’m glad that you forgave St. Bride for what he did.”
She looked at him, startled. “Why?”
“Baggage,” he said. “If you’ve felt Francie around me, I’ve felt him around you. I suspected there was some trauma there, and I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me about it. Frankly, I suspected—”
“Physical violence?” Laura shook her head. “Oh, no, no, no. Cam was not like that at all.”
No, that was me.
“There are all kinds of violence,” Richard said. “I could argue that what happened on your birthday was a subtle form of violence. It certainly inflicted harm on you. Be that as it may, you need time, Laura. Time to deal with your
memories. Time,” he paused, “to mourn.”
She swallowed hard and turned her head away from him. Even standing with his arms around her, she suddenly felt cold. “I’ve dealt with my memories,” she said, but she hadn’t, she hadn’t at all, and she knew it and he knew it.
“It’s just as well this divorce is going to take so long. That’s another reason I don’t want any talk of the future. You need time to get over the past. A bad marriage takes a long time to get over.” He stopped and then said flatly, “I knew seventeen years ago that I was going to divorce Diana. Why do you think it took me so long to do it?”
~•~
Richard left soon after, warning her that he was going to be busy until the 4th. He intended to take Julie riding in the morning to tell her about the divorce; the next evening, he and Julie were going shopping for her camp gear. “She probably thinks she’s an orphan right now,” he said. “I need to spend some time with her.” Wednesday, he had to make a day trip to Charleston. He kissed her one last time, reminding her to call him as soon as she got a lawyer’s name from Lucy.
The song wouldn’t let her go; it was writing itself so fast and insistently that Laura decided to work through the night. She loved the image of the two duelists taking aim at each other, centuries of instinct overriding the veneer of civility and good manners. But pistols? At two in the morning, she lay on the floor to relax her back, stared at the ceiling, and pondered the use of swords instead. Swift, deadly, elegant, and heavy with erotic connotation. Then segue to the final verse, a man and woman facing each other in a bedroom duel….
A duel. Forgiveness. Absolution in each other’s arms.
Oh, this would work. This would definitely work.
At three, she got up from the piano to stretch, switched the digital recorder to play back the latest version of “Sword Play,” and danced around the room while she sang her own karaoke. Max slept through it all on the sofa. Typical cat, once he went into deep-sleep mode, nothing but a can of tuna could roust him. What freedom! No Meg rubbing her eyes, coming in to talk. No husband telling her to come to bed….
At four, she went into the kitchen for a fresh cup of tea. Max, ever hopeful, roused himself to follow her for an early breakfast. She was just dishing out food for him when she saw his ears twitch, right before he leapt up on the trestle table to peer out the window.
She shrugged and poured the boiling water over the tea ball. It certainly wasn’t Richard approaching on horseback; Max had probably heard a squirrel or deer out in the back field. The week before, a couple of deer had watched her from the woods as she read on the terrace. Then she heard her cat hiss loudly, ears folded back, tail swishing frantically, eyes wide.
He hissed again.
“Max!”
A third hiss.
“What’s out there?” She went over to pick him off the table, and then she heard it too. A faint scrabble on the flagstones, and then a rustle tracking into the bushes.
Her heartbeat picked up. She was so isolated here… she could call the police or the security company, she could call Richard, but they couldn’t get here fast enough. She was on her own. She backed up to the island counter and reached into the knife drawer for the biggest, meanest-looking knife she could find – a butcher knife – and switched off the lights.
Then silence. She stood there rigidly, poised to strike if anyone came through that door, but she heard nothing else. Max, at the window, was still watching intently, but his tail had stilled, and his ears had returned to normal. She held the knife in attack position, trembling, for a long time – twenty minutes, she discovered, when she finally turned the lights back on.
Probably just an animal. Any human with ill intent would have made a move by now. Dawn would come soon; Max had taken umbrage at some nocturnal critter skittering for cover.
She laid the knife down on the counter, feeling sick.
She was exhausted. She’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, and she’d run the gamut of emotion from fear to fury to creative energy to fierce reaffirmation of love. She’d been served with legal papers and threatened a lawsuit of her own for the first time in her life. She’d relived Cam’s last manipulation of her. She’d been faced with an analysis of her marriage that she wasn’t ready to deal with. She’d written a song. She needed sleep.
Swallowing hard, she picked up Roger’s package, started the upload of her night’s work to the St. Bride servers, and climbed up to her bedroom, leaving all the downstairs lights blazing.
She was so tired that she got ready for bed in record time. She’d just finished brushing her teeth when she looked down at the package again, and who knew where the little voice came from, telling her to open it up and take a look? Maybe the weight of her promise to Richard. Maybe the guardian angel from childhood. Maybe her own instincts, revived by recounting her thirtieth birthday.
She used her needlework scissors to cut the tape – a good idea, perhaps, to leave them on her nightstand, even if they’d hardly repel Max – and found inside the small pink case that she’d left in the dresser drawer in London. Terry had sent the right case. She opened it to make sure the diaphragm was inside; she hadn’t used it since she’d found the surprise in Cam’s car.
She didn’t know why she lifted the small rubber cap to the light, except that she’d always been meticulous about checking it before. So she immediately saw the small pinpricks of light.
She dropped it in the sink.
“No.” She scarcely recognized her voice, hushed and disbelieving. She looked at her reflection and saw her eyes, wide with shock.
Someone had poked holes in her diaphragm. Cam? Cam ensuring its ineffectiveness even if she retained enough of her Chardonnay-rattled senses to remember to use it?
Or – oh, no, Mark? Mark, haunting her London flat for so many months? Mark, deciding to stack the deck in his favor if he ever talked his way into her bed?
She remembered her unease at the possessiveness of his emails. His assumption that she would go along with his plans. His offer to make reservations for a honeymoon.
His delusions.
Hands shaking, she put the now useless diaphragm back in its case. Now, in addition to tangling with Emma and putting Mark in his place and hiring her first attorney, she was going to have to hunt up a doctor for a new prescription, fast.
The week just got better and better.
~•~
“Do you have any questions?” Richard asked.
Julie shook her head.
“You can ask me,” he added. “Some things will stay between your mother and me, but I’ll tell you as much as I can.”
Julie concentrated on her horse and tried not to yawn. They were riding through the back acres of Ashmore Park, a wild area that hadn’t been under cultivation since before the Civil War, and her mare liked to amble along. Her father had slowed his hunter to a trot, trying the patience of the powerful Herodotus, so that they could talk as they rode through the early morning.
She’d known what was coming, of course. From the moment her father had called her before the board meeting to make a date for riding before breakfast, she’d known he was going to tell her about the divorce. She’d spent the evening and part of the night – since he’d come home late again – trying to decide if she should act tearful and shocked or cheerful and upbeat. She wasn’t sure exactly how a devoted daughter was supposed to act when her father told her he was finally divorcing her mother.
Might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb. And he had invited questions, after all.
Richard Ashmore’s devoted daughter said, “Are you going to get married again?”
“I have no plans to.” He sounded normal, and she gave him a sweet-Julie look to encourage him to expand on that. “I won’t say never, but right now, it’s not in the cards. It’s not respectful to your mother to make plans when she and I are still married.”
Could she believe him? If he was telling the truth, boy, was the new girlfriend in for a shoc
k. Julie tried to sound supportive. “You know, Dad, it wouldn’t be so bad. You might want someone around when I go to college.”
Except that she didn’t want anyone around. Girlfriends were one thing. Girlfriends weren’t part of his real life. They didn’t come to the house, rearrange the furniture, disrupt the routine. They didn’t hang around or get in the way, with their own ideas about how everything should run.
Many of her classmates had stepmothers, and she’d heard all the horror stories. A father’s new wife meant change. A new wife might say that she wanted to be friends, and she wouldn’t interfere with Julie, and she didn’t want to change a thing, but – her friends had all said – that didn’t last beyond the I do. Then the new wife would start rearranging things to suit herself.
She didn’t want anything to change. True, she’d always wanted a sister, but that was before she’d discovered that Richard Ashmore had another daughter nearly her own age.
Richard said dryly, “I’m not drowning in loneliness, Julie. Don’t ring any wedding bells.”
“I won’t,” said Julie obediently. She wanted to ask some other questions – What about Meg St. Bride? Are you going to try to get her away from Laura? The hidden fear: Do you think you might love Meg better than you love me? Much more important than questions about a divorce everyone in the world thought he should have gotten years ago. But she couldn’t ask. She’d heard enough to understand that everyone was supposed to pretend not to know about Meg.
They rode along in silence. Eventually, he said, “I’m going to give Herodotus his head, are you coming in?” She nodded, and they took off back to the stables at a gallop.
Julie waited patiently – sweet, perfect-daughter Julie – until he left for work to pick up the phone.
“Mom,” she said, when Diana mumbled something into the phone. No use wasting a preamble or greeting; she could tell her mother was hung over. “I couldn’t find it.”
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 9
