There wasn’t going to be any sweet goodbye tonight.
Through her lashes, she stared at him, silhouetted against the rain-washed window. She looked at his hands – those long, elegant fingers, his hands tapering into the wrists that disappeared into the cuffs of his shirt. Beautiful hands, with their controlled male power – hands to stroke a woman’s back, trace through her hair, bring her to the brink of oblivion.
The car shot through the waters, an extension of the masculine force she sensed rising in him. He felt it too, she saw, this unexpected bonding with the forces of the night storm. The tide was beginning to intensify in him, a longing to plunge together into the rising waters of desire. He knew now, if he hadn’t before, how precariously they stood on the fragile sandbar together, a great river flowing around them, threatening to crest and tear them apart. The currents of their pasts, his and hers, had proven stronger than they had imagined; he knew, and she knew, how powerful were the forces raging against them.
He had felt it that night, and it had mattered. For the first time, he had faced the possibility of losing her, and it had scared the hell out of him.
He felt, as she did, the flow of the powerful car along the dark road with only the sound of the heavens hurling themselves at the earth to keep them company. No other cars here on this country road; they might have been alone in the world, all nature’s ferocity breaking around them, safe in their silent shelter from the storm. Their speed through the darkness echoed in the dark primeval depths of them both, depths that could never stand up to the light of civilized day.
But no light of day intruded into this night.
“We lucked out,” Richard said into the silence, “the water’s rising fast. Another few minutes, and we would have been stuck for the night.”
Laura said, “What about your gates?” and she heard the sudden huskiness of her voice.
“I left them open,” he said, and she knew that he heard it also.
He felt the violence of the night too; he felt the welling up of the life force of the earth, opening up to the torrents from the great void of the sky. The air between them tensed, still and taut in anticipation of that storm yet to break. Slowly, she laid her hand high on his denim-covered leg; she felt the hard masculine skin and bone beneath; she felt rather than heard the swift intake of his breath.
She thought he might say something about her hand, what it meant, but he said only, “You were magnificent today.”
She jerked her hand away and stared at him. “I thought you were angry,” she said finally.
“No.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Why would I be?”
“Because—” Laura bit her lip hard and tasted blood. “Because I didn’t play fair. Because I used Cat Courtney to flatten her.”
“Diana deserved everything she got.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “And, yes, you did use Cat. Very effectively too.”
She turned her eyes from him and stared straight ahead. “You aren’t angry because,” she took a deep breath, “I brought up Francie?”
The name fell into the well of silence between them, and rippled out.
He said at last, “You have a right to sing the songs you’ve written.” She couldn’t interpret his tone. “I don’t know that dedicating that song to her was the wisest thing you could have done – you knew that was going to provoke Diana.” He paused. “She still asked for it. That was rotten of her to out you and then demand a free performance.”
She swallowed hard and felt the tension stretch between them like a taut stringed instrument. Pull it much tighter, and it might snap. She looked out at the passing trees, and she saw only the bleakness of the night.
She had never felt so uncomfortable with him. Roger could talk about a jumble of emotions and how she had to work it all out – she felt those emotions all agitating in her now, exhaustion, fear, and the fiercest physical tension she had ever felt in her life. She flexed her fingers on her lap and saw them, in her mind’s eye, curling around the Standing Stone of Ireland, and she jerked herself back to reality. How in the name of heaven could she be thinking of that now? What was wrong with her?
She wondered what he planned to happen when they reached Ashmore Park. And then an unwelcome thought hit her.
“Is Julie there?”
“No. I drove her to the lock-in. I watched,” she heard him trying to lighten his tone, “to make sure she made it inside before I left. Not that the church has power right now – I hope there are plenty of flashlights so the kids don’t go sneaking off into corners. This isn’t supposed to be a make-out party.”
Not like the adults. She remembered that they had planned to drink wine and watch a movie before they had their own make-out party – well, he had probably ditched that idea.
The trip between Ashmore Park and Edwards Lake normally took only a few minutes, but he had to slow down as he drove through the rising waters. They hadn’t even reached the rural turn-off to Ashmore Park yet. It seemed like ages since they had left Edwards Lake – she glanced at the clock on the dashboard and saw that only a few minutes had passed.
Time had slowed on them.
“When did Diana hear you singing opera?”
He sounded normal. Maybe she was imagining everything – the taut atmosphere, the tide of desire rising with the waters. Maybe she was reading more into the night than actually was there.
“I went inside to play the piano, and she heard me.” She hesitated. “She told me about the divorce.”
“Oh, did she?” Richard’s voice was dry. “I’m sure you heard nothing good about me.”
“No, not too much.” How could he sound so normal? She watched lightning split the sky again, and then, from the recesses of her memory, Diana’s words echoed in her head. She heard herself ask, “Did you ever hurt her?”
A shocked second, and then he slammed on the brakes. The deceleration threw her hard against the shoulder belt.
She had to catch her breath, and it took her a few disoriented seconds before she pulled herself together to look at him. He sat still, staring straight ahead, only his shoulders rising and falling with some emotion she couldn’t identify. His fingers were biting into the steering wheel.
He said curtly, “The answer is no. Never. I have never lifted a hand to a woman in my life.” He exhaled audibly. “Now why – the – hell did you ask me that?”
Laura swallowed. “Did she ever hurt you?” Her heart picked up an uncomfortable beat. “Did she ever – smash your face in?”
Dead silence.
She said quietly, “There’s a faint scar on your jaw. I don’t remember it from before.”
He said nothing. After a heavy moment, he put his foot to the accelerator, and the Lexus turned down the road to Ashmore Park.
She let the silence lie between them. She stared ahead at the road, as he did, and let her mind swirl around his unspoken acknowledgment. Violence to violence… there are all kinds of violence… and surely this, between him and Diana, had been more than her slapping him across the face for Francie. The most appalling scene… dear heaven, what had happened? What had he endured?
What terrible strain ran through the Abbotts that violence became their best solution? Dominic throwing the love of his life into the sea, Diana smashing his face in. She’d knocked Francie into a tree that day in the park; Laura had sat beside her twin that evening in their bedroom, holding an ice pack to her face, listening to Francie sob out her dilemma as the bruise on her face swelled and darkened. Francie setting out to kill in hatred and revenge. She herself losing her head and reaching for a gun instead of confessing the truth.
And Dominic’s still unsolved death, a violent blow to the head.
Obsessives could turn violent. Drunks could turn violent. Stupid lovesick girls could turn violent. Something always gets broken.
Through the gates of Ashmore Park, and in less than a minute, he pulled into the porte cochère by the kitchen, and the furious pounding of the rain against the car ceased im
mediately. He cut the engine, but he made no move to open his car door.
She had to accept his silence.
Finally, Richard said, “Every marriage has its private moments. I will never tell you what went down between Diana and me. You have to accept that.” He paused. “Just as you and St. Bride had private moments that I don’t need to know about.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward to brace her hands against the dash. It was dark and quiet here in the car, even with the heavens raging above their heads. Nothing else existed beyond them here, now, in this place.
“Oh, God,” she heard her own anguish, “why did you marry her?”
She felt his eyes on her. “I loved her.” And then, a long moment later, “Why did you marry St. Bride?”
“That’s easy,” she said, and her bitterness shocked her. “For money. Everyone knows that.”
She shoved herself back and leaned back against the headrest and let her eyes close. They couldn’t stay here all night. They should go inside where the air was cool, where chilled wine and a wide bed awaited them and they could do whatever he wanted. She should speak, make the first move….
She heard her words come out of the blue. “I wasn’t coming over for – charity or mercy. It wasn’t like that.”
He leaned back too, and she felt his quiet presence only inches away. “Then why?”
She shut her eyes against another lightning streak. This one must have hit something; she saw, in the second before her eyes closed again, sparks flying not too far away. A pole, a tree, a house… something split in two by the sheer force of nature, crashing hard to the ground as a mountain had once crashed down to the earth. Inside, the dam that had stood guard against her memories cracked, a stronghold no longer, and she felt the pent-up grief and guilt of ten months flooding through, no more to be denied.
~•~
September 10 – Francie’s birthday. Always a day when she felt a little low. Cam knew it, and he had even said something before she left to take Meg to school and then to go on to the theater for rehearsals. He was supposed to leave that morning for New York; he had mentioned a late afternoon meeting. She and Meg had said their goodbyes.
He had taken her by surprise, then, when she received his call mid-morning, asking her to come back to the flat before Meg was due home. He’d reset the meeting to the next morning; he wanted to talk to her alone, without Meg around. He’d decided, as they’d argued over the weekend about her decision to go back to Virginia, that he’d been too pessimistic about their marriage. Her miscarriage and the doctor’s ultimatum had colored his thinking. He didn’t really want the divorce. They needed to talk, really talk, to see if they could resurrect what they had once had.
“I don’t know,” she’d said dubiously. “There’s so much history—”
Cam had put an end to that train of thought. He had taken her in his arms and said, in that voice that always made her toes curl, “It’s 2:30. Meg’s not due back for – what? Another two hours?” Then he’d kissed her, his hand slipping slowly down her back in the familiar signal that he wanted to make love. “Don’t turn me away, Laura. Give me a sign you’re willing to give me another chance.” He’d stopped and then said, “That you’re willing to let me into your heart. Damn it, I’m your husband. I would do anything for you. Don’t I deserve another chance?”
And she had refused. She had not forgotten her birthday the year before.
Cam seldom showed outright agitation, but that reminder had bothered him. His conscience was still not clear. “How long will it take you to forgive me for that? I made a mistake, Laura! I’ve bent over backwards to make it up to you – I offered you your freedom—” And he’d looked away in obvious pain.
And that had melted her heart, a little. She had touched his face tenderly and whispered that she had forgiven him long ago. “Please – I can’t right now. That fax – I feel thrown for a loop. I need time to think.”
“Time,” Cam had said, “it’s always time with you, isn’t it?”
“Please,” she’d said again, “please give me time.”
~•~
“And he did. He flew to New York that evening.” Laura’s voice grew hoarse. “He sent me an email from the plane. He – Cam was not into poetry, but he went to the trouble of looking up that Andrew Marvell poem on the Internet, and he put it in his email. Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” She turned her head and looked at him. “Do you know what comes later in that poem?”
“No.” He made his voice quiet. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”
She quoted, “But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” She heard him exhale. “2:30 – that’s 9:30 on the East Coast. He had twenty-four hours to live, and I was so ungenerous, I didn’t give him that. I could have, there was no reason for me not to, but I didn’t. I let him go to his death – I thought we had world enough and time, and we had no time left.”
She bowed her head.
Richard said, “Carpe diem. Not charity after all.”
She shifted in her seat so that she faced him completely. “I don’t want to regret – a time, an hour, I could have been with you – and I wasn’t.” She didn’t care how needy she sounded. “The charity isn’t for you, Richard. It’s for me.”
He did not reply; he merely looked down at his hands, still on the steering wheel. She sensed a change in him, a diminishing of his anger against her. Perhaps he understood now, just a little, why she’d had to come to him that night.
He said at last, “Let’s go in.”
What a relief to move, to translate into physical action the uncertain tension between them, to hear in the closing of car doors and the unlocking of the side door a moving forward. Her bathrobe brushed against the step, and she pulled it up around her before she stumbled on the hem in the dark. He went on ahead of her through the utility and mud room, her overnight bag in his hand, and she followed him wordlessly into the kitchen.
The cool air of the house was a welcome relief from the stuffiness at Edwards Lake. The power was indeed still running at Ashmore Park; she heard the hum of the Sub-zero and the swish of the ceiling fan above their heads. Richard switched on a light and put her case on the table.
“Do you want to dry your clothes? We can find something of Julie’s for you to wear.”
He must be blind; there was no way she could fit into Julie’s clothes. Laura shook her head. “I’m okay, thanks.” She felt silly wearing the bathrobe; she took it off and laid it down carefully.
“I’ve got that wine for us,” he said, and crossed to the wine cellar. “Chardonnay, as you ordered.”
She felt at a complete loss. Were they going ahead with their evening as if nothing had happened? Pretending that the day, and the night, had happened to another man and another woman? She didn’t think she could do it. She couldn’t go back to that earlier Laura; she’d laid aside that woman as certainly as she had laid aside the robe that had kept her warm.
She watched him pull the bottle from the wine cellar, reach for two goblets. She was an actress on a stage, watching from the wings; that wasn’t really her, she was merely playing the part of Richard Ashmore’s lover, going through the motions, saying the lines. Deep inside, Laura Abbott had gone into hiding.
Then he stopped, and he put the goblets back in the cabinet.
Richard Ashmore turned around and looked at her.
She met his eyes, and abruptly Laura Abbott came out of hiding. He stood there, casually leaning against his granite counter in his beautiful kitchen, and she saw, in a flash, the enormity of the moment.
For the first time in a generation, the master of Ashmore Park had brought his woman home.
“I’m no different from St. Bride,” he said. He kept his hands relaxed, spread out to his sides along the countertop. He watched her with cool, reasonable eyes; his voice fit into any boardroom, a man making a business proposition. “I want to take you upstairs. I want you in my
bed tonight, naked and open to me. I want to bury myself inside you. I want to know that you want me there, and no, I’m not above wanting you to love me if that’s what it takes.”
Laura stared at him in shock.
“If I have to, I’ll use sex to bind you to me – just as he did. I understand him, I know exactly why he broke the rules on your birthday. I know why he wanted to take you to bed that last day. He felt you slipping away, and he tried to hold on to you the best way he knew. Well, guess what, Laura. I am no different. I am going to hold you the best way I know how.”
She held her breath. She didn’t dare breathe, didn’t dare miss a syllable.
“The difference between him and me is that you are going to make the choice. I am not going to ply you with wine. I am not going to play Rod Stewart for you. I am not going to get you pregnant. I am only going to ask that you—”
And he stopped.
She couldn’t move towards him. She wasn’t sure he wanted her to. “Ask that I what?”
Did she want to know? She had no defenses left. She had been stripped bare.
He said quietly, “That you trust me. That you stand with me. That you keep on standing with me even though I can’t offer you any kind of future.”
They looked at each other across half the length of the kitchen, across a lifetime.
She didn’t even know where the words came from. “No. I can’t.”
Something flashed through his eyes then – pain, shock, loss. He hadn’t expected her to refuse.
“I’m just like Jennifer, Richard. I won’t be your Sally Hemings. I won’t be the woman you can’t admit to. I want to be at your side – the way she was today – I want to be part of your life in the daylight. I will not settle for less.”
He said nothing for a moment, and then he said, his voice still calm and flat, belying the anguish in his eyes, “Jennifer never set foot in this house.”
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 26
