She couldn’t stop the soft sigh in the back of her throat.
“Do you like that?” His voice had dropped even lower, lazy and knowing.
She liked it, of course she did, and he knew it. But maybe he wanted to hear it, and so she whispered, “Yes.”
“You are so lovely – so soft and warm—” His fingers were gently shaping and massaging her flesh. He gave her a grin. “You’ve grown up nicely, Laura Rose.”
Impossible to hang on to shyness in the face of his frank delight in her. “You told me once they were smaller than mosquito bites.”
“Did I?” He tweaked her nipple lightly and studied its reaction. “When did I see—”
“I was eleven. We were fishing and I fell in the lake and lost my top. You said not to worry, no one would notice.”
He laughed. “How ungallant of me. But – in my defense – you probably scared the fish off.”
“Yes, you said that. But you let me wear your shirt till we got home.”
“Oh, Lord. My careless youth comes back to haunt me.” His lips traveled to the soft flesh on the undercurve. “Well, you can wear my shirts any time. Now – about your breasts – from a structural point of view—”
She was laughing now. “Structural? Are you planning to build yourself a woman?”
He shook his head. “Can’t. Ask any architect. You can’t improve on the female breast. It’s nature’s perfect structure.”
Oh, she loved this silly, sexy pillow talk, and she loved the way he traced lazy circles on her sensitive skin. Who knew that Prince Charming could flirt so outrageously in bed? She stretched out luxuriously and rubbed her foot along his denim-clad leg. “I thought you guys worshiped skyscrapers. Bigger is better, or – um, something like that.” Her hand traveled down his chest to the waistband of his unbuttoned jeans. “Speaking of which—”
She received a look of mock sternness, but he leaned into her hand. “Skyscrapers do not occur in nature.”
“Oh, my mistake. I thought they did. Like this one.”
“Besides,” his voice caught for a second, as her fingers came trailing down his zipper, “do you have any idea how much trouble a skyscraper is to erect? You can only build on certain types of land – yes, like that – the permits are hell to obtain, half the time you have to resort to bribery—”
She whispered, “I’m easy to bribe.”
Another indrawn breath. “I thought you might be – Laura, take it a little slower there—” He shifted against her hand. “And a skyscraper, once built, still has to make a respectable return on investment.” She giggled. “Now the breast, on the other hand, has none of those disadvantages.”
She kissed his chest. “Oh, you think so, Master Architect?”
He leaned over her again. “Well, let’s examine the evidence objectively.” His fingers molded and lifted her left breast. “Focal point equidistant from all points on the perimeter, so we have precise concentricity – perfect load-bearing weight distribution—”
“Not anymore. Gravity is already doing its evil work, I’m afraid.”
He quieted her with a kiss. “Aesthetically pleasing from all angles. That’s of paramount importance. Then, of course, it fulfills architecture’s driving principle—”
“What’s that?”
“Form follows function.” And Richard lowered his mouth to her.
~•~
The rhythm was different tonight, they were different, relaxed from their day together. No frantic reaching out to claim each other before it was too late, no jumping off an emotional point of no return. Last night’s storm had played itself out. Tonight was gentle, leisurely, fun. She could wriggle out of the silk gown, putting on a show like the most exotic of fan dancers, with an audience whose eyes glowed at the sight of her. She could insist then on wearing his shirt, which he surrendered to her on the laughing condition that she not button it up. He could lie on his back and let her draw his jeans down with excruciating, teasing slowness. He could reward her by covering her body with his own, kissing her long and deep, so deep that she felt touched by the sun all the way to her core.
And, in all those long moments of his discovery of her, she could explore him. He was an unknown continent to her, a beloved friend, now become a stranger, now become her lover. Her hands could run along his back, feeling those long muscles that gave him that incredible height. Her skin, against his, could feel the different textures between them – where she was soft and delicate, he was hard and masculine, where she was round and pliable, he was straight and unyielding. She learned that he loved her hands against the back of his neck – that he delighted in the flushed skin and shallow breathing of her own arousal – that he had a hidden weakness for the sound of her whisper in his ear, telling him what she felt and what she wanted him to do to her next.
She drifted into the later stages of lazy desire, warm and liquid and secure, and when he entered her, she enclosed him like a river. Her body surrounded him, her arms encircled his shoulders, her hands held his head to her. They rested there together, melded as one, in no hurry to accelerate into a great culmination. He seemed content to enjoy the ebbing and flowing thrust of the tide of desire, content to let her mouth trace along his shoulder—
She tasted him, and unexpectedly, her lips found a change in the texture of his skin. No longer the warm smoothness of masculine flesh covering broad shoulders, but something different, out of the ordinary. A strange roughness, a spot where the skin pulled together oddly, as if a wound had never quite healed right—
Her eyes snapped open.
Lost in the pleasure of their union, he didn’t see her dawning horror as she looked at the wound on his right shoulder. A sudden, hideous flashback to a moment of blood and rage, a flash of light, a loud retort – his hand clapping to his shoulder—
She stiffened involuntarily, but he took that as her coming joy, and he surrendered to his own climax. Her mind froze, and then, without a second of hesitation, Cat Courtney stepped in and shut Laura down and took over. It was Cat, blameless that long-ago afternoon, who let herself flow into the swell of fulfillment. It was Cat, unburdened by destructive conscience, who snuggled against him in afterglow. It was Cat who kissed him good night and told him that she loved him.
It was Cat whose face he touched tenderly in response.
Laura found herself watching them both, her mind detached from what was going on inside and outside her body.
Afterwards, they fell asleep, two tall people wrapped together in a small bed. He slept first, exhausted from the day, his arm thrown over her to keep her close. She slept later, much later, and all night long she felt the remnants of his wound against her back.
~•~
“War.”
Diana stopped.
She was out of breath, out of voice, out of memory on the digital recorder, and, she discovered, out of whiskey.
Maybe this made a good place to stop for the night. Obviously, her self-righteous little sister was off enjoying the fleshpots; repeated calls showed that Laura still hadn’t come home. She didn’t know what time it was – past midnight, if she read the time on her cell correctly – and she was getting cold.
She rubbed her arms for warmth.
Kevin had said to take the memory card out of the recorder when the red light started blinking, indicating that it was 90% full. She fumbled in her bag for the case, found the other memory card, and switched the two. Too bad Francie hadn’t used this kind of recorder when she had made that purple prose tape for Richard – she wouldn’t have been known how to destroy a memory card, and then she would have had her evidence.
She picked up her flask, dropped the recorder in her bag, and rose unsteadily to her feet.
She couldn’t go back to her condo; the Gorgon was probably still there, waiting for her errant charge to come dragging home. Lucy’s house was closest – well, not as close as Ashmore Park, but Richard had told her flatly the year before to stop treating Ashmore Minor as her personal f
lophouse. The problem with crashing at Lucy’s at this time of night was that she wouldn’t be able to avoid Tom, and he’d rat her out to Richard.
So she’d have to go to Dominic’s and brave the sight of the smashed mirror and the ruined ball gown in her room. She could always sleep in the twins’ old room.
She started off across the flagstone terrace, heading for the gate at the side of the house, when she saw two eyes watching her from one of the back windows. Two small, glowing, unblinking green eyes with a strange transparency… she felt a frisson of fear across her skin. If someone had broken into the house… maybe something was wrong with Laura, maybe that was why she hadn’t answered, someone had broken in and hurt her… she reached in her bag for her cell when the eyes turned away, and she saw the flick of a tail.
That stupid cat!
She caught her heel on an uneven stone, and she went sprawling across the terrace.
The fall knocked the breath out of her. She lay there, motionless, for a moment, before she began to hurt all over her body. Her knees, her hands, her elbows, her breasts… all had slammed into the unforgiving surface. She gingerly dragged herself to her knees and tried to force air into her lungs, but the deeper she breathed, the more she hurt.
“Damn cat,” she said aloud. Just like Laura to have a cat to scare the hell out of you so that you didn’t watch where you were going.
She’d spilled the contents of her bag. Through the night, she could see dark objects against the lighter-colored stones, and she crawled around scooping them up. Her brush, her cell phone, her recorder, a lipstick… she threw everything into her bag and rose painfully to her feet.
“Screw you,” she said to the cat in the window, and limped over to the gate.
I’ll get you, my pretty, interfering sister.
And your stupid cat too.
Chapter 21: Diana, Discovering
WAS I, THE WIFE, THE LAST TO KNOW?
Probably. Of everyone who knew or suspected, I was certainly the last.
I have thought and thought about this over the years, and it must have started over Christmas vacation, when Francie volunteered to type Richard’s thesis. I don’t remember that much about that week, truly, and why should I? At the time, I never thought it meant anything. I never dreamed that I would spend years, going back over and over it in memory, searching for clues.
I thought of it as just a week to get through with Francie.
I don’t remember smoldering looks or strange silences or anything at all.
What I do remember is that, for the first time in our lives, Francie was pleasant to me. That, of course, should have tipped me off, because that girl never did anything unless there was something in it for her, but maybe I was so sick of the silences with Richard, I was willing to take her at face value.
No smart-ass remarks. No rotten little digs. No batting her eyes at Richard. When he practically fell all over himself the first night back in Charlottesville, volunteering to take the sofa so that “you girls can stay up all night talking” (and who was he kidding? he knew better), Francie didn’t raise an eyebrow or make one nasty comment when he went right to the closet and dug out the blankets and pillows with long-practiced familiarity. She even talked to me a little before we fell asleep, admitting that she was worried sick about Laurie.
“It’s just flu,” I said sleepily. “She’ll be better in a few days.”
“But she seemed so sick,” said Francie, on the verge of tears. “Laurie’s never sick. She’s always so strong.”
She sounded so concerned that I turned on the light and handed her the telephone. “Here,” I said, “call Peggy. See how she’s doing.”
And, of course, Peggy said that Laurie was on the mend but was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. Still, Francie seemed relieved, and I figured that, if it kept her in a good mood and off my back, it was worth the long distance phone call.
She worked hard too. Philip had bought a new PC for Richard for Christmas, and of course it wasn’t like the computers now. It was bulky and slow, but Francie sat down gamely and went to work. It would have been my idea of hell, reading and typing all those engineering notations in that precise dissertation style, formatting all those footnotes and equations, but she did it, and she didn’t utter a single complaint. I kept Julie in the bedroom, playing and watching videos, so that we wouldn’t disturb them, and the few times I ventured out, I saw nothing suspicious. Richard wasn’t even there half the time; he kept running out to the library or the architectural school to check citations, or going to the firm where he worked to get some drafting done.
I didn’t have time to think about either of them, really. My group had been hired to play at a New Year’s Eve dance in Washington, so I was tied up in rehearsals. Did anything strike me as odd when I came home? Not at all. No guilty looks, no springing apart… nothing at all. The only mental image I have is of Francie, typing away industriously at Richard’s desk, and Richard usually across the room, working at our dining room table, books piled out around him, calculator at his fingertips.
If it started that week, it must have been during one of my rehearsals… or maybe it was on New Year’s Eve. I don’t know. We played at the party that evening, my group and I, and then, since we didn’t intend to drive back until morning, we all got thoroughly bombed. One of the guys even came on to me, but I turned him down flat (that I do remember). I had no birth control with me, and he didn’t either, and I wasn’t about to get caught again – or hand Richard another bullet engraved with my name.
When we got back to Charlottesville the next morning, I found Richard, Francie, and Julie all having breakfast. And this is why I never suspected anything: Richard was hung over. Yes, it’s true, Mr. Perfect had also gotten bombed the night before (on Daddy’s champagne… Francie had bootlegged a bottle and then didn’t like the taste and gave it to Richard to finish off), and since he wasn’t an experienced drinker, he had not held it well.
He looked terrible. All dark circles under his eyes, and his face drawn and tight, his shoulders hunched beneath his sweater, not at all like a man who’d had sex the night before… and Francie was bubbling around, playing with Julie, who was twenty months by then and well into the “no” stage. That’s what I remember of that breakfast, the next to last time that Richard and Francie and I were ever together. Richard sitting in morose silence, Julie saying “no” to everything, and Francie saying teasingly, “No! Gosh, you’re all Abbott, aren’t you, Julie? That’s our favorite word. No-no-no-no-no. Bet you say that all the time.”
And Richard, straightening up, and looking at me with chilled eyes.
So did it start then? It must have… but how could it?
~•~
I didn’t see the other signs.
Richard, who really didn’t know how to conduct a clandestine affair, practically advertised it in neon lights, and I was so used to him being perfect that I didn’t see a thing.
Early that spring, he decided that he wanted his plane up there in Charlottesville with him. I remember my surprise… he’d always said that it cost too much to keep it there at college, but he just shrugged and said he missed his flying, and now that his thesis was in the hands of his advisor and he was doing his last seminars, he had time to fly again. Besides, he said, his internship required that he go to Richmond periodically. Why anyone would fly to Richmond, less than one hundred miles away, was beyond me, but I knew how much he loved his plane, and I figured that he was just grabbing at an excuse to fly it.
He also decided that Julie could go to a playgroup once in a while. I had been pushing for that for a long time, because I thought she was terribly isolated and I wanted her to be around other kids, so I didn’t contest that. I even said, innocently enough, that putting her in the playgroup freed him up from having to rush home and relieve Lucy from babysitting.
How could I have been so stupid! Cell phones were too expensive back then, or I’m sure he’d have had one of those too! (Not that I ever saw
the phone bill. After that time when I forgot to mail it, Richard had never entrusted it to me again.) All the earmarks of a man needing rapid transportation, with a gas gauge I could never check, and ensuring himself some unaccounted-for time. I never saw it.
I didn’t even suspect a thing the day I was driving home from work, and I passed a car that looked a lot like the twins’ car, with a driver who looked a lot like the twins, turning onto I-64. I said something to Richard that evening, and he said (feigning concern, the bastard) that Laurie had taken the day off, and he had taken her up to Monticello, since she had missed it at Christmas. And then he cautioned me not to say anything to Daddy, because Laurie had skipped school to do it.
(And I swallowed that! I was so dumb! As if Laurie would skip school to go traipsing up the mountain with Richard to commune with his architectural god! But, on second thought, she would have. That’s why I believed him.)
So we drifted through that rest of that spring, and I taught school, and Richard went flying every Saturday, and Julie, my sweet, sunny-natured Julie, started having nightmares. (Did she know? Did she sense his distraction? Did she know, in her baby heart, that her father had disengaged mentally, emotionally, physically, from her mother?) We took her to the doctor, who could find nothing wrong with her, and he suggested that she might be suffering separation anxiety because she had a working mother.
Not because she had a cheating father.
Oh, no, of course not. It had to be my damn fault.
I did wonder, from time to time, as I made lesson plans and drilled the worst high school band ever put together, what lay ahead of us, once we left the cocoon of college. Thesis completed, Richard started entertaining offers from several architectural firms, and I had an opportunity for a composition seminar at UVA during the first summer term. He decided to accept a position doing commercial and public buildings, with a base near Williamsburg, and told the firm that he would report the middle of July. I saw that as a huge concession to me, so I could attend the seminar, and it touched me. It had been so long since he had acknowledged me as anything more than an inconvenient roommate that I even thought (in the dark hours of the night, in my lonely bed) that we might make another start once college was behind us.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 49
