Actually, it had been eighteen years and five days; she knew his anniversary as well as her own. Laura felt a shadow of unease. Reticence she could understand, but he avoided mentioning Diana, she thought, the way someone might avoid touching a still painful wound.
Maybe he cared about Kevin Stone more than he wanted to admit.
Before she could regroup, he turned the tables on her. “How about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
“What?” So much for basking in her fantasy date. “No. No, I’m not. I – I’m not ready.” That seemed inadequate. “I’ve been busy. Working in a production six nights a week doesn’t leave a lot of spare time.”
He said nothing. She hurried on against his gaze, “It was – good to be busy. It helped.”
Richard sat back, and his voice turned musing. “I went for a run that night. I had to take a break from watching – the same pictures, again and again—” She caught her breath, and he looked at her swiftly. “You know. That endless replay, and each time it seemed more and more like one of those high-tech action movies, disaster averted at the last second, but this time,” he shook his head, “no one to the rescue. I stood out there at Ashmore Park, everything quiet and at peace, a world removed from the hell in New York, and I looked up, and it hit me, it had even come to us here. Usually, I see the flight patterns from the west, the lights of the planes on approach into Norfolk, but—” he paused— “not that night. The sky was empty. There were only stars. And I thought, it’s happened, someone has finally stopped the engine of the world.”
He leaned forward and took her hand, and she felt the warmth of his long fingers on hers. “Everything’s changed,” he said. “You know better than most. We won’t go back to September 10. Just – don’t let those bastards stop anything for you, Laurie. Don’t not live because the stairs were blocked.”
He released her hand, and sat back again.
She kept her eyes on him, and the silence lay between them.
He must have felt the heavy intensity, known that he had to break through it. He picked up his wine and smiled at her, and his voice lightened deliberately. He was once again the big brother. “You have to get back in the game sometime. You are still very young—”
Just how young did he think she was? She matched his tone. “I’m thirty-one, O ancient one.”
Her retort – or her age – seemed to take him aback, but he recovered quickly. “Too young for the cloisters. Time to spread your wings, little butterfly. Besides,” and he flashed her a grin that said, as much as anything, that he had shifted into teasing mode, “you need to get your defenses up in quick order before Lucy gets hold of you. Be prepared to be fixed up.”
Laura spared a second of sheer horror at that thought. “I don’t want to be fixed up. That’s not even on my radar.”
“Understandable.” He waved the waiter off. “But that will change. This will – recede in time.”
He sounded just like Roger, but, she saw, he had left her an opening. “Right now – I don’t want to date just to date. It’s not worth it. If it’s not going to be,” she gestured, “the world lost for love – what’s the point?” She hesitated, unsure of her way. “You had that, Richard, you of all people should understand how I wouldn’t want anything less.”
She’d said the wrong thing, she knew that instantly. He fingered the goblet of candle-lit wine, but somewhere behind his eyes, he shut down and went away from her. Tension flooded her limbs; she found herself clutching the linen of her skirt. She had gone too far, probed into a wound too fresh or too deep for healing. She scrambled for a light-hearted remark to gloss over the awkwardness, lift that darkness from his eyes, anything, and then lost her train of thought when he turned back to her and put his wine down. “Let’s see if you still know how to dance.”
She rose uncertainly, her blood still trembling from this brush with his unknown pain. The dance floor shimmered before her, a small square of space before a great open hearth, flanked by large floor candles and an anonymous piano swathed in shadows. He drew her into the shelter of one arm.
His free hand raised hers to heart level, and she found only one thought in the warmth of his fingers closing around hers. I have wanted you across these years, I have waited to step into your arms. Now here you’re holding me, and what do I feel? What do I say?
He had taught her to dance after she had stepped on his toes at his wedding. “You need to know this,” he had lectured, “you and Francie will have all the boys after you in a few years.” So he had mercilessly drilled her that summer until she could acquit herself honorably, and Diana, still a laughing new wife, played the piano patiently for those lessons. And I didn’t mind at all, said Diana. You were moonstruck over him, but so what? He was mine then, all mine.
“Relax.” Richard’s voice ruffled her hair.
She stared hard at his shoulder. “I’m afraid I’ll step on your feet.”
And I don’t want you to feel how hard my heart is beating.
Oh, if only her fantasy had been real, if they’d been just another man and another woman, with no history and no blood between them, no wife and no mistress and no lost afternoon forever staining them. She might then have relaxed against him and enjoyed the heat that began to seep down her back; he might not have held her so carefully, befitting a man with his wife’s sister. She might have whispered her thoughts for the night ahead, and he might have suggested that dinner was an option best left untaken. And when the inevitable happened and she dug her heel into his shoe, they might have tossed it off with a silly lover’s joke.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
Richard’s voice sounded measured in the extreme. “Stop acting as if you’re dancing with a serial killer.”
She laughed at that, and he took advantage of her momentary looseness to draw her closer against him. “Much better,” he said. “Didn’t you ever dance with your husband?”
She shook her head. “Cam was Baptist. He didn’t drink, dance, or play cards.”
He just slept with other women when he got mad at me.
But she didn’t want to think about Cam, not now, not ever while she was dancing with Richard. This was how it felt to dance with him now, not a child seeking comfort, but a grown woman held against him, with his arm around her waist and his hand sheltering hers. This was how his pulse accelerated, just for a moment, when she turned her head. This was the way his hand slipped gently up her back, and his fingers touched her nape…. She thought for a moment that his lips brushed her hair.
She closed her eyes and leaned against his shoulder, and she willed the music on and on, until the mellow voice of the piano intertwined with the steady tide of Richard’s breathing. She moved her cheek against the fine weave of his lapel, closer to the heat of his skin, and she heard the catch of his breath, the tightening of his hand on her back, the echoing song of his heartbeat against hers.
She drifted into a dream: the two of them alone, in a darkened room, moving inexorably towards their doom, like dancers, like lovers, and all the time his hand in her hair, his fingers trembling with passion against her skin.
She moved her hand against his and realized, with a shock, that his fingers did tremble.
He held her away abruptly, and she swayed against his arm. The piano still showered them in lush romance, but for them, one look at his face told her, the dance was over.
“Laura.” His voice was neutral. “It’s warm in here. Let’s get some air before dinner.”
The room wasn’t warm. The heat still clung to their bodies, though, and a flush colored his face. Thank God for the candles, and their gentle, forgiving light; she thought that she might brazen this out in the dusk, just as long as he couldn’t look at her face and know what she had been thinking.
Let me die, right now, before he says anything.
His hand behind her waist, guiding her towards the doors of the veranda, was light and impersonal, and he said nothing as he escorted her out into the night. The evening enveloped th
em and masked her embarrassment. She felt all the disturbed balance of someone ripped rudely awake from a wonderful dream.
If Richard felt awkward, if he tamped down the just-lit flames of arousal, he disguised it well. He pulled out a chair for her at the table closest to the railing, in the deepest shadows, and she sank into it warily, eying the chair across from her. But he did not join her. He strolled to the railing and, without speaking, pulled his cigarette case from his breast pocket. She watched the brief light and followed the burning point through the air as he smoked.
No words, still. The warm silence wrapped around her, and she leaned back against the chair, aware of exhaustion creeping through her blood as desire fled. It had been a long day, a long journey to this silence between two people who had just stepped back from a precipice. Or rather, she thought in shame, remembering how she had cuddled into his body like a small kitten, a man who had just yanked a woman back from the edge before she pulled him over with her.
She couldn’t believe she had behaved so thoughtlessly. She was not an innocent; she had lived twelve years in a marriage that, for all its problems, had worked in the bedroom. But, oh, how wonderful it had felt to be held again by a man who cared about her, not Cat Courtney, not Laura St. Bride. Any man might have done.
Not that any man had ever cared about Laura Abbott. Not Cam, who had wanted to stamp Laura Abbott out. Not Mark, who didn’t even want to acknowledge that Laura Abbott existed. Not Richard, who hadn’t seen Laura Abbott when she was right under his nose.
And might any woman have done for him? Had he closed his eyes and imagined Francie in his arms again, warm and giving? Had he even known who had danced against his heart?
He had not known once.
She could not bear the silence any longer. “Richard,” she said into the night, “sit down.”
He glanced around at her, amusement cracking the darkness of his expression, and she realized how she must sound, Cat Courtney giving an order to an underling. She swallowed her nerves. “Please,” she added gently, waving her hand at the seat across from her. Now what can I say?
He came back towards her but ignored the seat, choosing instead to lean against the railing and enjoy his cigarette. He made a point of keeping the smoke away from her, and she didn’t doubt for a moment that he used that cigarette as an excuse not to sit close to her. It also gave him a splendid reason to stand over her and use his height to put her at a disadvantage.
She wasn’t embarrassed now; she was irritated. She was coming close to grabbing his cigarette and demanding his attention when he broke the silence, and then she wished that he had never spoken.
“How long are you in town?”
Whatever she had expected – an apology, a lecture, a proposition – this wasn’t it. She drew a breath for courage. “A couple of months.”
Richard’s hand paused in mid-air. “Months?” he echoed, and she thought that he looked dismayed. “Where?”
“I’ve leased a house.” She didn’t look at him, but concentrated hard on adjusting her ring. “Outside Williamsburg.”
He said nothing.
She said in a rush, “Edwards Lake.”
He stubbed out his cigarette carefully. “You remember that it borders Ashmore Park.”
Apprehension curled up in her stomach. “Of course I do.” What a stupid idea. He doesn’t want me there. “I have a lot of work to do – I’m under contract for a new album, and I have to get ready for a tour this fall, and I thought it would be quiet out in the country—”
He probably thinks I want to be near him—
“Privacy,” she said firmly. “I need the privacy.”
“What Lucy allows you,” said Richard. His eyes, when they met hers, were expressionless, and that worried her, that he deliberately shielded his thoughts from her. “I hadn’t heard that the Careys had a new tenant. Julie will be excited to hear about this.” He smiled, and the sick fear inside her started to subside. “Your niece is one of your biggest fans.”
“I can’t wait to meet her.” She watched him. Julie, at least, seemed a safe topic. “Do you mind, Richard? Is it all right if I meet her?”
“Of course it is. She’s very proud of you.”
She groped for something to say. Julie, how much she wanted to get to know her niece – and then he spoke again, and she discovered that Julie was not safe after all.
“Before you meet Julie, we need to get a few things straight.” His voice had lost his neutrality; she sensed a wall thrown up against her. “She doesn’t know much about what happened when you left – no one does. She doesn’t know why you ran off or why you never got in touch with anyone. No one’s ever had an answer to give her. I don’t know if she’ll ask you. She’s a polite girl, and I want to think she won’t come right out and ask, but she’ll want to know.”
She reached for breath, and found herself too tense to breathe.
“Julie lives with me.” Richard straightened from the railing. “I’ve had custody of her since she was five. For reasons I won’t go into right now, she doesn’t see her mother very often—” He must have seen the shock on her face; his voice gentled, just for a moment. “Sorry. I’ve no way of knowing what you know and what you don’t. Lucy will tell you soon enough anyway. Diana and I haven’t lived together in over ten years.”
Francie? Or the unknown devastation that had opened the door to Francie?
“I’m sorry,” she said into the appalled silence.
Liar. You’re not sorry. You’re not sorry at all.
“Don’t be,” Richard said briefly. “We aren’t. You’ve been through it. You know what it’s like when a marriage is dead.”
So the damage had run so deeply that there had been no salvaging the wreck. “Why?” she asked helplessly, a stupid question, but all that she could muster.
But her grief was lost on him. He leaned forward, across the table towards her, his hands on the glass top on either side of hers. “You know why.” His voice was calm, flat. “You know better than the rest of them. What I don’t know is what it had to do with you.”
He was closer than she’d thought. She had to school her eyes to keep from sidling away from the chill of his look; she had to still herself to keep from jumping when he brought one hand up and lifted her chin with one long finger.
“Why did you run away?”
She couldn’t think. She stared at him, and panic started down in her stomach and fought its way up. He watched her now with eyes that betrayed no trace of affection, and she heard the questions shouting in his mind: Why did she die? Why did Diana live?
“You were very clever,” he said, and when she tried to avert her head, his fingers kept her chin rigid. She closed her eyes against the hardness of his face. “You must have planned it for some time. Telling your father that you wanted to visit us, and Francie planning to see her friends in Baltimore. It took him a week to realize that you were missing.”
“That was the plan,” she whispered. “We had a better chance of getting away if we split up.”
“Do you know you devastated my parents? My mother wept for you, as if she’d lost her own child. Dad blamed himself till the day he died. He felt he should have known you were planning to run. Two girls out there somewhere – dear God, we thought you must have been kidnapped or killed!” She flinched at the coldness of his voice, no longer a grown-up, but a scared girl shying away from an adult’s fury. “We couldn’t even be sure you were alive until the police found that you’d withdrawn all your savings. Where the hell did you go, anyway?”
He let her go then, as if afraid of the remembered anger sweeping through him. She swayed away from him.
“San Francisco,” she said, grasping at the least painful of his questions. “I thought I could find a job and a place to stay out there. I worked and sang in clubs, until I met Cam.”
“Is that why you married him?” A cool note to his words. “You needed money?”
“Yes.” She looked straight ahead beyon
d his shoulder. “Don’t worry, I didn’t cheat Cam. He got his money’s worth. I tried to be a good wife.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, calmer now. “You still haven’t told me why you left,” he reminded her. “And where is Francie?”
~•~
Earlier that spring, she had tried to write down what she remembered of the great break in her life. She had consciously tried not to remember for the first few years; she had kept memory at arm’s length through her child and her music. So successfully had she blocked out that time that several painful afternoons had produced only a couple of pages, filled mostly with bits and pieces of conversations.
Dominic Abbott, the summer before her senior year: You are not to see that boy again, do you understand?
Dominic, later: I have decided that you will not go away to school.
Francie, hysterical after Diana’s attack: I can’t tell Daddy, Laurie, I swear I can’t. What am I going to do? I’m past three months already.
Laura, staring in despair down at her desk: Does he know?
Francie’s unexpected reaction, as she grabbed her twin’s arm: No! And don’t you tell him either! He’ll never leave her. He’ll never risk losing Julie.
It’s okay, Francie. Laura, assessing the panic in her twin’s eyes and making the decision to alter her life, opening her desk drawer to pull out the notebook where she had outlined her escape. I’m leaving, I’m going away from here forever. Do you want to come?
Her savings had not gone far in those last few months before Meg’s birth. Francie, usually the picture of health, had endured a difficult pregnancy, culminating in enforced bed rest, and Laura kept them afloat through a succession of transient jobs that she obtained by lying through her teeth about her age and being willing to take less than minimum wage. Her carefully planned budget had disintegrated under the weight of care that Francie needed; she had been forced to learn early the reality of public clinics and charity hospitals. Faced with the true cost of Francie’s spring idyll, she had found herself unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to shed the terror of adult responsibility.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 13
