The solarium, though – she wondered if Richard had built the room and then not known what to do with it. It was too large to be so bland; it ought to be a haven of peace and quiet, filled with plants and music and comfortable, overstuffed furniture, instead of this rather unengaging room. A pity, because it looked out into the green fields of Ashmore Park, a view of utter privacy and security, and a terrace leading down to the pool. If this was her house, she would make this her sanctuary. She would relax with her books and listen to music and dream the hours away.
She wandered out into the great room and started up the flying staircase. From the landing, she looked down over the railing. Below, the enormous room lay spread out before her, a map of the inner landscape of the man who’d designed it. He worked at his desk, oblivious to the woman overhead, to her eyes sweeping the room in a search for a key to the map.
A cocoon, she thought, a retreat. She wondered why he had not chosen a private study for himself, but she could see that, from his desk, tucked into an alcove set off by columns that rose to the ceiling, Richard ensured both privacy and access to his domain. The supporting columns that held up the massive high ceiling (now, thankfully, devoid of the hideous baroque gods and goddesses of the old Gilded Age ceiling) divided the room into sections – a living area centered in a half-moon in front of an enormous stone fireplace, a second library area papered with bookcases, volumes stacked lovingly, their bindings indiscriminate dashes of color. The immense western window with its myriad lights shone on Julie’s music room and his work area. In the living area, a recliner sat slightly apart. She had a sudden, strong vision of Richard sitting in the dark, listening to music.
This house had been built for more than a man and his daughter. He should not have time to sit in that recliner very often.
He lifted his head unexpectedly, and their eyes met.
“Well?”
Laura drew in a breath and swept her hand out over the expanse of space below. “Wonderful! I’m moving in. I am in lust with your kitchen.”
He laughed, and did she imagine it or did a shadow leave his face? “So is Lucy. She wants me to move out so she can have it.”
“I have to get a house. Will you design one for me?”
“Gladly. And since you’re rich as Croesus, I’ll raise my fee accordingly. You don’t have a house?”
“Not like this, that’s for sure.” She leaned forward on the railing. “I never bought one after – after I left Cam’s. The brownstone in New York is a prewar double – it has great ceilings and all this incredible molding, but it needs a lot of work. I have an Edwardian flat in Knightsbridge – actually, it belonged to Cam’s mother, and she left it to me. She had this thing for fireplaces, which is great because the heating is definitely Edwardian. Meg and I spent the winter bundled up in blankets. Our house in Plano was fake French chateau, okay, I guess, but this—”
“Beaux Arts original.” The phone on his desk rang, and his hand hovered over it. “I had a lot of fun with the upstairs. Tell me what you think.”
He answered the call, and she wandered away from the railing. The landing extended around three sides of the house, with a second stairway leading up from the kitchen area, leaving the western wall free for that unbelievable window. She started along the hallway on the south and opened the first door to find a two-bedroom suite, obviously not in use. Another door produced an enormous game room, with a big-screen TV that rivaled the media screen in the St. Bride house.
She peered over the railing. Richard was still on the phone, staring out the great western window, his back to her.
The first door on the eastern end gave her a more fruitful yield. She stepped into a veritable princess’s bower, a gorgeous suite of antique lace and bleached oak and peach moiré-covered walls. A loving father had not forgotten a single detail, from the window seat to the old silver dresser set to the corner sewing nook.
Rows of dolls peeked at her from one wall, and Laura was startled to recognize a few familiar faces. She had not thought to wonder what had happened to the dolls Dominic had brought her from his European forays. Francie had deemed herself too old to share her room with a collection of dolls and had banished them to the attic in their early teens. Someone – Diana? more likely Lucy – must have unearthed them and given them a good home.
The room was neat, Julie’s clothes all hung away, but still the girl’s spirit lingered in the room. Not only the dolls – and the fancy, high-end Cat Courtney bear sold at all the concerts – but pictures, framed in silver and wood, scattered around the room, all gave testament to the world of Julia Ashmore. Laura wandered from one to the next: Lucy and a much younger Julie in front of a Christmas tree, Peggy and Philip (her breath caught in remembered love), Richard astride a magnificent horse with a little Julie in front of him, Richard and a grade-school Julie in front of the castle at the Magic Kingdom, Richard and a teenage Julie in a sailboat. Even Cat Courtney, a magazine picture carefully cut out and framed.
No picture of Diana.
She backed out, aware of a sudden sense of intrusion into a world she had no invitation to enter.
The next door reverted to type, another two-bedroom suite for visitors. Laura closed the door, just in time to hear Richard embark on a sneezing fit. His voice drifted up, “Didn’t my mother give you a sure fix for a cold? I’m giving a three-hour presentation tomorrow.”
He sounded just as pitiful as Cam when he felt sick, and Laura felt just as sorry for him. “Eat some jalapeños,” she said heartlessly, and opened the first door on the northern wall.
She stopped, stunned.
Who could mistake the purpose of this room? In the corner, the old wooden cradle where generations of Ashmores had rocked gave it straight away. This room had been designed as a nursery, although – Laura drew a test finger across the wooden saddle of an antique rocking horse – no one had entered this room in a long, long time.
Along the wall, a connecting door.
She, who had never entered this house before, knew where it led. She stepped through it into the master bedroom, and stepped further into Richard Ashmore’s universe.
His suite was even larger than Julie’s. The opposite wall held doorways into other rooms: a bathroom, a dressing room, a small study and workroom, a staircase spiraling down to the library below. She recognized the antique furniture from Ashmore Magna, and a couple of paintings seemed familiar. The king-size bed went on forever, a vast field covered by the quilt she and Peggy Ashmore had sewn for a wedding present. She wandered over to the bed, her hand outstretched; she could not resist touching the square she had worked the spring before Richard married Diana.
She’d designed it herself, and Diana had obligingly posed for her one afternoon so that Laura could cut an exact silhouette. She traced her finger along the black line of the carefree hair, the lovely profile of Richard’s intended bride sewn into posterity with love and despair.
Tiny stitches, Peggy said lovingly across the years. Take your time, Laurie. You’re doing such a pretty job. Richard will be so pleased that you made this specially for him.
Her hand dropped.
She turned around, and then she saw the painting. It hung opposite the bed, and she knew that this painting had never hung on the walls of Ashmore Magna. Peggy would never have allowed it. A woman stood in a room at dusk, turned away from the artist just enough so that the painting gave a hint of her dreaming profile and the curve of her breast. Her arms rose to unpin her hair so that it tumbled onto her bare shoulders. She wore a backless white gown that scooped down low, and what held it up, Laura couldn’t tell. The artist hadn’t worried with that small detail. He was more interested in the exquisite lines of her back.
It was, without a doubt, the most sensuous painting she had ever seen in her life. Every line in the woman’s body spoke of love and longing, of anticipation of the hour ahead, and Richard saw this first thing every morning and last thing every night. It could have been Diana if she had ever worn her
hair that long. It could have been Francie if she had parted her hair on the side instead of in the middle.
It could have been her if she had ever figured in this man’s life.
She wrenched her attention away from the painting, her heart accelerating.
This was definitely a man’s room. For all the colors of the quilt and the paintings, the room seemed somber in the northern light. No woman had ever shared this room. A woman would have added hairbrushes, plants, lace pillows. A woman would have moved that painting so that she didn’t have to compete with it.
But he had built this room, this house, with all its abundant space, for a reason.
I’ll never marry again, he’d said. I don’t want a divorce. But Lucy, who knew Richard so well, who had seen this house many times in the past, Lucy thought he was only biding his time.
All those rooms, and that nursery…. She sat down on the quilt and spread her fingers along Diana’s silhouette again.
It served her right. She’d sought a blueprint to his thinking, and she’d found it. Maybe Richard had lied to her, maybe he didn’t realize himself the future he’d designed, or maybe he considered his plans none of her business. She trusted the signs. He had every intention of divorcing Diana. He fully meant to marry again and start another family, once his first marriage was dissolved and his first family raised.
She looked around the room again, her eyes alighting on items she hadn’t noticed before: a couple of books lying on the night stand, a ship model on a chest of drawers, the telescope standing ready near the northern window. Through one of the doors on the opposite wall, she saw into the workroom: model planes suspended from the ceiling, a couple of models in various stages of construction, a computer on a desktop.
A man with too much time on his hands, a man on whom the late hours of night weighed heavily.
“Damn you, Richard.” She didn’t fear that he heard her whisper; she didn’t fear that he might appear in the doorway to interpret the tears spilling down her cheeks.
Damn you! You should have divorced her, if there was no hope. You should have married again, so that when I came here, you’d be happily ensconced with a loving wife, maybe sons and daughters you could love as much as you love Julie. It wouldn’t hurt so much then. I could have buried Francie forever, and I would have forgiven you for taking the second chance life offered you.
Oh, Richard, if only you had…. You could have invited me to meet your wife and children, and I’d have been everything you’d want in a sister-in-law. I’d have stopped loving you then, because you would have been happy and I wouldn’t hear my heart saying, if only, if only….
Damn you, Richard! You should have been happy.
Two years. In two years he would divorce Diana.
In two years she’d be close to having Meg raised. In two years she would still not even be thirty-five. She might want to marry again, try again to have a family….
Dear God! What was she thinking?
Lucy had been right to worry. She’d detected the dark loneliness in Richard, the answering shadows in Laura that knew only desire and forgot all conscience. He doesn’t need you.
She looked around the room once more, imagining her Tiffany lamp brightening that table, her antique dressing table in that corner, her prettiest silk nightgown lying tossed on the end of the bed, a child sleeping in the cradle they’d brought in from the next room….
Imagining getting ready for bed, her back to him as he waited, letting her hair tumble down.
Not for you, Laurie. Not ever for you.
Into her misery intruded a young, fresh voice, high-pitched in excitement. “She’s here! Where is she? Why didn’t you call me?” And she heard the eager sound of feet running up the stairs and around the landing.
Laura brushed her tears from her eyes, left her dreams crumbling at the foot of Richard’s bed, and went out into the hall to meet her niece.
~•~
She had the eerie feeling of looking into a long-gone mirror. The same long-legged, coltish walk, the mark of a girl not yet used to her height; the same green eyes squinting to bring her into focus; the same long, wild autumn hair that she’d never managed to tame. But Laura Abbott had never possessed the sheer, stunning, drop-dead-in-your-tracks beauty of Julia Ashmore.
No, only Diana had been that beautiful. But cool, sophisticated Diana had surely never shrieked with joy and flung herself into a mere aunt’s arms.
“Aunt Laura! I can’t believe I’m finally meeting you!” Julie gave her a second, impetuous hug that knocked the breath out of her. “I’m so glad you’re here! Can you stay? I’ll start breakfast, if you can just wait a minute while I clean up – I was out riding, I’d never have gone if I’d known—”
“Julie.” Laura succumbed to laughter herself. Impossible not to catch the delight shining on the girl’s face and bubbling in her voice. “Give me a second to catch my breath! One question at a time! And none of this Aunt Laura stuff, either, you’re making me feel ancient!”
Ah, she’s Diana all over again. The way she tilts her head, that smile – my God, that smile, it must have broken his heart the first time she turned it on him.
“If Dad says it’s okay,” said Julie. “I’m not supposed to call grown-ups by their first names.”
That artless statement had the salutary effect of making Laura feel every one of her years. “Well, I’m different. I wasn’t even your age now when you were born. We could have been sisters.”
Julie giggled. “Sisters! I’ve always wanted a sister. I used to pester Dad to get married again so I could have a younger sister.” Laura heard Richard choke, and not from his cold. Served him right for eavesdropping. “I hear I have a cousin who’s practically my age.”
“Not quite.” Laura let her niece draw her along the landing towards her room and threw a bright smile at Richard, who had given into his curiosity and come up the stairs to meet them. Let him wonder what she was going to say! “She’s twelve.”
“What’s her voice? Or does she play?” Words of a true Abbott.
“No, she’s a dancer. She started in ballet when she was four.”
“Ballet!” Julie breathed. “How fantastic! I wanted to take lessons when I was little, but I couldn’t even manage tap. I’m not very graceful. But I love the ballet. I remember once, a long time ago, Dad took me to New York, and we saw Baryshnikov dance.” She threw a look at her father as he approached. “Remember, Dad? I couldn’t sleep that night!”
“Or the night before.” Richard smiled at his daughter, and Laura noticed the gentleness of his voice, the easiness of his manner. “The best night of your life, you said.”
“Oh, no,” said Julie, and bestowed such a dazzling smile on her aunt that Laura was nearly floored. “Second best. The best was when we saw you in London. You looked so beautiful! Didn’t you sketch her on the flight back, Dad, because we couldn’t find our programs? We left them in the cab.”
“I’d be interested to see that,” Laura said. “I’m afraid my concerts all run together in my mind.” She couldn’t remember what she had worn during that concert; she only remembered the jeans and sweater when Cam had taken her to dinner afterwards and told her he wanted a divorce.
“I’ve got it in my portfolio.” He opened Julie’s bedroom door for her. “Go clean up, kitten. We’ll wait downstairs for you.”
“Okay.” Julie hesitated in her doorway, then leaned over and gave Laura an impulsive kiss on the cheek. “Do wait for me, please. Maybe we could go around together for the day, if you’re not busy? I know all kinds of places to hang out. Do you like antiques? I know this market outside town.”
“Sure.” She’d never get to know Julie under Richard’s eye. “Hurry down.”
Julie vanished into her room, and Laura had no choice now but to turn around and face Richard. She was surprised to see that he had not retreated back into his emotional fortress; either he’d decided to tolerate her or she was reaping the benefit of Julie’s presence. She
was even more surprised to hear, “Well? Look familiar?”
She understood at once, and laughed. “I never looked like that! Heavens, Richard, I’m surprised you haven’t gone gray, with a daughter that gorgeous!”
“I’m getting there.” He escorted her companionably down the stairs. “She doesn’t date much yet, thank the Lord, but even so – I remember myself at that age. I know what those boys are thinking.”
“Poetic justice,” said Laura sweetly.
Overhead, the sound of running shower water signaled that Julie was now out of earshot. “I’ll show you the sketch,” he said. “And we need to talk.”
She said warily, “What now?”
“Julie,” he said. “I don’t want you alone with her. Sorry, Laura, I just don’t trust you.”
~•~
In her sixteen years, Julie Ashmore had learned the value of listening.
She’d discovered early on that a quiet child became an invisible child. So quiet, so invisible, that the adults forgot her presence and discussed matters they never meant her to hear.
Her father and grandfather, working to clean up the destruction in the garage. Her grandfather, “This can’t go on, son.” And her father, “I’ve reached the end. She’s not coming back.”
Her grandfather, in the kitchen one afternoon, unaware that Julie was playing on the porch outside, “Of course he’s unhappy. He married the wrong girl.” And her grandmother in reply, “Oh, I wish he’d waited for Laura. She was perfect for him, she adored him, and he never realized how much he depended on that. Now he’s tied to that stupid girl.” Pure dislike in Peggy Ashmore’s usually gentle voice. “Dear heavens, men are such fools for a beautiful face!”
Lucy, when Julie spent the night, confiding on the telephone, “No, I don’t know who he’s with, Di! He just said he’d pick Julie up tomorrow afternoon.”
A sweet voice on the telephone, “Hi, this is Jennifer, may I speak to your father?” And her father swiftly taking the telephone, his voice dropping. In his quiet laughter and intimate tones were distilled all the mysteries of men and women. Julie wasn’t surprised when he took her over to Lucy’s for another weekend sleepover.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 28
