All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2)

by Forrest, Lindsey

  O Western wind, when wilt thou blow… She had always loved that verse. That the small rain down can rain? She whispered to Max, “Go hide under the bed, baby.”

  Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again….

  She set her bag on the veranda and closed the door. Outside, sheltered only by the shallow overhang, she felt the fury of the storm, and she wished violently for her coat. The rain, blowing so hard that it slanted sideways, hit her bare legs. She looked out across the circular drive, and her heart dropped. She wasn’t going anywhere. The gates were closed, and they operated electrically.

  But the agent had said something about a manual override. Fine. She’d pull the gates back herself. She started down the steps and stepped right into a puddle, and cold muddy water splashed up over her feet. Her sandals weren’t up to this. She ran back into the house and found her tennis shoes.

  Maybe her raincoat was inconveniently thousands of miles away, but the umbrella was close at hand. She kept several in the car; Meg was always losing hers, and Cam had believed firmly in being prepared. She ran down to the car, thinking that it was just too bad that the owners had splurged on a reflecting pool when a porte cochère would have been so much more practical, unlocked the passenger door, and got herself drenched in the space of only a few seconds.

  She shoved the keys into the shallow upper pocket of her denim skirt and felt around for an umbrella. Nothing in the front seat – was this going to be the one time in history a St. Bride wasn’t prepared for an emergency? Cam had always thought she couldn’t be trusted to come in out of the rain. She hung over the seat and moved her hands around in the back – the headrest crushing into her breast, horribly uncomfortable – and felt, in triumph, her hands close around an umbrella left on the floor.

  The umbrella kept the worst of the cold from her head, but she was already wet through and through. She had forgotten the cold soaking rains that swept in from the Atlantic with so little warning. The wind was picking up speed; she had to fight to hang onto the umbrella, turning it into the wind so that it did not act as a sail and blow her off her feet.

  Above her head, lightning streaked through the sky, and she saw a shower of sparks off in the distance.

  She reached the gates and searched for the handle that operated the manual override. And, of course, naturally, she found it half-hidden behind the overgrown bushes on the side of the drive. She grasped it as firmly as she could with one wet hand and shoved it into the unlocking position.

  And nothing happened.

  She couldn’t be trapped here. She couldn’t be. She had to get out of here. If she had to, she’d walk all night through this monsoon. She was going to do what she had so ungenerously refused to do ten months before.

  And one stupid electronic gate was not going to stop her.

  She walked across the drive to the business end of the gate, transferred the umbrella handle to her left hand, and began to pull back on the iron bars. Nothing. She threw her weight into it and pulled again. Nothing. Damn, damn, damn.

  She tucked the umbrella handle awkwardly between her breast and arm, grasped the bar with both hands, and yanked.

  And was knocked decisively off her feet and onto her rear end when a sudden gust of wind turned the umbrella inside out and sent it flying over the gates.

  “Oh, God!” No point in either swearing or praying. She dragged herself up, shivering, the back of her legs smarting. Her hair fell wetly across her face; she pushed it back, took a deep breath, and put her hands on the iron bar again.

  She froze then, fixed to the spot by the headlights that swept into view, pinpointing the bedraggled mess trying futilely to open gates that simply would not budge.

  She stood still, letting the rain do its worst, while he stopped the car and got out. Of course, he had an umbrella; of course, he handled it competently so that it didn’t turn into a sail and get him soaked to the skin.

  She didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to. Somehow, managing to hold onto his umbrella, he put his hands above hers on the bars, and, beneath the sound of the thunder, she heard, “Pull. Now.”

  They pulled together – even in her sodden misery, she saw the irony – and the addition of his strength and weight did the trick. The gate began, reluctantly, to slide back – not all the way, but enough room for his Lexus to crawl through.

  They stood a foot apart, the gates no longer a barrier between them, and they said nothing. She felt him pushing the umbrella handle into her hand, but she shook her head and stepped back. She was wet through already – no point in both of them getting soaked. He simply looked at her, with eyes that she could not read, and his face was completely blank of emotion. He had gone away again.

  She felt her hand start to lift to him, to touch his face gently, and then his eyes lifted and he looked beyond her towards the Jaguar, towards the veranda where she had dropped her overnight case. In the light of the storm, she saw his mouth twist, and her hand fell.

  She thought he said, “Just what I thought.”

  An attack of shivering hit her. She wrapped her arms across her chest.

  “Get in the car. You’re freezing.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll get your seats wet.”

  She turned from him then, quickly, ignoring the hand that he extended to her. She didn’t look behind her as she walked back across the circular drive to the veranda – that small, merciful strip of roof that provided a respite from the driving rain that was, incredibly, picking up in speed and rage. She was cold, through and through. She did not think, in the few seconds it took her to reach shelter, that she would ever be warm again.

  Through the storm, she heard his car door close, heard the Lexus pull up behind the Jaguar.

  At least, on the veranda, the rain wasn’t beating down on her head. She pushed her hair out of her face and watched him get out of the car and walk around the Jaguar to her, his eyes again on her bag.

  He said again, “I expected as much.”

  Her teeth were chattering; she couldn’t stop them. Her arms around her chest brought no warmth to her body.

  “Let’s go inside.” He pulled out the key she had given him last Sunday afternoon, when she had lain across her bed and he had made her warmer than she had ever thought possible. She felt heavy and sodden; she had been light as air as his mouth had moved across her. “You’re soaked through. You can leave later.”

  She stared at him.

  “For God’s sake, Laura!” He pushed the door open. “Get inside. I’m not going to stand out here all night.”

  Once inside, his hand felt for the light switch by the side of the door, and he swore as he found no power. The air was still and stuffy, but it was so much warmer in here. The sound of the storm faded into the distance, the house a wall between them and the fury outside. She stood there, trapped in a dream that she couldn’t awake from, dripping rainwater on the hardwood floor, as he disappeared into the powder room off the staircase.

  A moment later, he came back with a towel and handed it to her.

  She sank onto one of the lower stairs and rubbed the towel over her hair. He stood before her, only a few feet away; she could have reached out and touched him, if only he hadn’t felt a universe distant. She felt the cotton cloth become damp with the rainwater soaking her hair; she rubbed it across her face and thought, in surprise, how strange that anything still registered on her skin. She felt not quite real, as if the real Laura floated somewhere high above her body, watching.

  He said, “Are you leaving?”

  She stared at him, her eyes adjusting to the shadows. “I have to – we can’t – Tom said—”

  Then, unbelievably, he cut her off.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  He turned away from her. She looked after him, bewildered.

  “But I thought—”

  He said harshly, never looking back at her, “You don’t get to make those decisions anymore. Not by yourself, you don’t.”

&nbs
p; She inhaled the warm air sharply. “But you told me I could leave.” That one thought was her talisman, that he had tried so many times to release her. “You said – it was my choice, it was up to me. You said I could walk away.”

  He wheeled around, and she saw then, in shock, the full force of his anger against her. “If that’s your decision,” he said. “But that’s if you want to leave me, Laura, not if you’re leaving to protect me. I’m a grown man. I don’t need your protection. I went into this with my eyes wide open.”

  She swallowed. Impossible, without the benefit of light, without the luxury of touch, to know what he was thinking. She only sensed his anger running high, in tune with the fury of the storm. She noticed, almost incidentally, that her feet were freezing inside her soaked shoes. In the warm stuffiness of the house, her shirt clung to her uncomfortably; the denim of her skirt felt clammy against her legs.

  “I’m half of this,” Richard said. “It’s not all about you anymore. It’s you and me.”

  She stared down at the floor. “I have to.” She barely heard her own whisper. “This is hurting Lucy. Tom says—”

  “Yes, I know what Tom says,” he interrupted. “I do not appreciate his interference. We had a short discussion to that point not an hour ago. I can keep Lucy out of this. If it’s going to cause her stress, then I will damn well get other lawyers.” He stopped and came back towards her. His hand lifted her chin to make her look at him. “Now tell me why you’re leaving.”

  Why didn’t she feel anything? All her courage, all the determination that had driven her out into the storm had drained away. “I’m going to cause you problems if I stay.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Richard said. He’d tamped down the anger. He sounded flat, but she saw that he had his mask on again, that damnable mask he had used for so long to keep the world at arm’s length. As much as Julie Ashmore or Cat Courtney, Richard Ashmore armored himself against exposure. “Diana is no longer in my life, Laura. Not in any way that counts. You won’t – you can’t – cause me problems with her. She has no hold over me. Nothing today changed that.”

  “I saw—” But she had no words to tell him what she had seen, how terribly it had disturbed her to see him with Diana. She couldn’t let him see inside her soul – the jealousy, anguishing over those bonds that still stretched between him and his wife, the pettiness, raging because Diana was his day and she was only his night. She mustn’t ever let him see how it had torn at her to see Diana standing beside him, her hand on his arm, the mistress of Ashmore Park.

  “You saw what?” She heard a new note in his voice, the wariness of a man of secrets who had never intended her to see beyond the surface.

  Laura said into the dark, “I saw that she is still your wife.”

  Nothing. He stood still. The towel wouldn’t absorb another drop; she let it drop by her feet and bent to take off her wet shoes.

  He said only, “She was the wife of a young man who no longer exists.”

  She nodded. She didn’t look up.

  “Diana has nothing to do with you. You ran away, Laura. I watched you – you just picked up and left. You didn’t bother to say goodbye to anyone. You didn’t bother to find me to see what I thought or felt. You just ran.”

  Oh, please don’t say you saw me throwing up all over your roses.

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it? When things get tough, you run. You ran from Dominic, you ran from St. Bride, and you’re running from me.”

  As if those roses meant anything. So what if she’d ruined them? She tugged her shoes off and wondered why she was worrying about some flowers she had never seen before and would probably never see again as long as she lived.

  “Why?” He stood over her, so close that she felt the warmth from his legs only inches from her face. “Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you let Diana get to you? You are Cat Courtney, for God’s sake. You’re young, you’re healthy, you’re talented – you have it all, Laura, you have everything she doesn’t. Why do you always assume you’re going to lose?”

  She lifted her hands in answer and then let them fall. She crossed her arms on her lap and bowed her head over them.

  He said he doesn’t want you to leave. He said it’s the two of you.

  She didn’t know what to say to him. She’d run out of words.

  She’d run out of energy. She’d given a performance that evening, all the more draining for being unforeseen. She was always exhausted after a concert. Her manager knew not to schedule anything the morning after; she usually spent the time alone, reading or writing, pulling herself together to face the world once again. Richard didn’t know that about her; he didn’t know that she had reached the end of her tether, or surely he wouldn’t hammer at her like this, demanding that she overlook the way Diana had managed to reassert her claim on him, destroy her dreams, and expose her to the world, all in the space of one hour. The way she, in turn, had struck back.

  He broke the silence. “At least – if you’re going back to Texas tonight, let me take you to the airport. Although I doubt you’ll get a flight in this weather—”

  Laura lifted her head. “I wasn’t going back to Texas.”

  He absorbed that, and waited. She added, “I was coming over to see you.”

  That seemed to surprise him, but only for a moment. She saw his face grow taut. “With an overnight bag?”

  She nodded.

  “So – you were planning one last night together, and then you were going to leave?”

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” No mistaking the anger that licked along the edge of his voice. “I don’t require charity. If you want to leave because you’ve had enough of me and my complications, that’s your right. But you don’t leave to protect me, and you don’t come over to make love to soften the blow.”

  She shut her eyes against his anger. She wondered where the tears had gone, why they wouldn’t flow. She needed the release of tears; she needed the release of the tension in her body. She said softly into the dark, “I wasn’t trying to soften the blow.”

  Nothing passed between them, it seemed for ages. She knew vaguely that he tried the lights again; she saw, from the corner of her eye, that he picked up the towel she had dropped and draped it over the stair rail to dry. Max, emboldened by the presence of his hero, came creeping out from wherever he had been cowering long enough to rub against Richard’s legs and utter a pitiful complaint about the storm.

  The area behind her eyes felt heavy with pain masked by the aspirin she had taken earlier. She watched him at the window of the drawing room, gazing out into the storm, his face in silhouette still and hard.

  How long he stood there watching the storm, how long she sat there watching him, she didn’t know. She knew only when he came back to her. “Let’s go.”

  “Go?” Where? Was he actually taking her to the airport? Had he decided that he’d had enough of her? She felt herself starting to shake, from her wet clothes or from her shot nerves, she couldn’t tell. “Go where?”

  “Home.” She couldn’t read his voice. “If your electricity is out, then the alarm system is out. I’m not leaving you here by yourself without power. We can continue this at my house.” He put out a hand to her. “It’s uncomfortable in here.”

  “Won’t – won’t your power be out?”

  Richard shook his head. “Ashmore Park is on a different grid, plus I’ve got a generator. I know these storms – you won’t get the power back until morning. Come on.” His voice altered. “Get some dry clothes on, and we’ll go.”

  It seemed pointless to offer any resistance. She let him raise her to her feet and guide her up the stairs to her room. He came up behind her; maybe he didn’t trust her not to fall into a trance in the middle of her room, staring out into nothingness. Maybe he didn’t trust her – oh, she didn’t even know anymore. Maybe he didn’t trust her out of his sight. She had shaken him tonight, more than she had known she could.

/>   Maybe he hadn’t known until now how much he wanted her in his life.

  She felt her way to the armoire where she had stored her clothes and then remembered. “Oh, no,” and her heart sank.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was washing clothes tonight.” Everything was still in the washing machine. She didn’t have that much with her; most of her wardrobe was hanging in her closet in London. She shrugged. She would just have to make do. “This will dry on me.”

  “We’ll throw everything in the dryer when we get home.” Home. His home, not hers, but she felt better – even if they were talking about drying clothes – that for the moment he still thought of them together. He picked up the bathrobe she had thrown across the bed and put it around her shoulders, his fingers brushing against her. “Here, that ought to help. Do you need anything?”

  She shook her head. He went downstairs to put her bag in his car, and she made her way to the kitchen to dish more kitty treats out for Max. Another minute, a pause to find her sandals, and she stepped back out into the fury of the night. The rush of cold air felt welcome after the stale air of the house; she touched her face and found her skin cool and soft from the rain.

  Lightning streaked across the sky, for a few seconds making the circular drive light as morning. She saw him more clearly now, and she saw what she had not seen before – he was as weary as she, tension running through his body as it ran through hers. He locked the door behind her and held the umbrella over her as she got into the car.

  They spoke little as he drove. He concentrated on the road ahead, barely visible through the windshield. The rain beat on the moon roof; the only light came to them from lightning flashes. Laura leaned back against the headrest and tried to let the tension of the day melt into the night storm.

  And slowly, through her exhaustion – mental, emotional, physical – urgency she hadn’t known in a long time began to build. It started as a small pulse in her blood and built up, a hard rhythm keeping time with the pulse of the storm, stripping away her outer self. The compliant sister, the brave widow, the seductive singer – all came peeling away in large strips, leaving her bare. Her heart began to accelerate; her breathing became shallow and faster, and deep within, in some profound female river, she felt dark, unexpected longing surging into life.