“Oh, not a problem.” Her heart picked up the pace. She wondered what role she was to play, sister-in-law, childhood friend, or significant other. Lucy would probably place her firmly in the little sister/sister-in-law slot. “I have to call Lucy today anyway. I’ll get the details from her.”
“I appreciate it.” On the surface, Richard sounded brisk, professional. The traffic noises in the background were dying down; he must be north of Richmond by now. “Listen, I’m at the site – I’ll try to email you this afternoon, and I’ll see you tonight.”
Max reasserted his dominance as she hung up, throwing himself against her in a bid for attention and food. He let her pet him for a few minutes before he made it clear that she had tried his patience long enough. He wanted food, and he wanted it now. She threw on her robe and followed him downstairs.
Once he buried his face in his bowl, she brewed a cup of tea and took it out to the terrace where she and Richard had talked a mere two days before.
Between that morning and this lay Monticello, and nothing would ever be the same again. She’d thought on this terrace, then, that everything had changed, but she’d not even known what that meant. She hadn’t known of the titanic shift still to come, when he had finally told her about Francie and she had finally accepted the past. When she had told him she wasn’t letting him go. When she had claimed him.
She held the cup to her lips and let the tendrils of steam from the tea steal across her face.
The world had changed. They had changed. We stand together. This was real, this was serious. This was exactly the disaster Lucy had feared.
She wondered how they were going to deal with the real world – the world of Julie and Lucy and Diana and Meg, the world where they did not exist only unto themselves. Their weekend out of time had run out of time; they were back in their everyday lives. They had to make room for each other; the people they loved had to make room for them together.
She had no idea how they were going to pull it off.
She heard her cell ringing in the kitchen.
~•~
“Morning, love,” said Terry. “Are you up yet?”
Laura carried the phone back out to the terrace. Even with no one around to see, she couldn’t help but smile. “Halfway. You?”
“Rushed.” It must be noon in London; the restaurant would be filling up. His chef’s table was always booked for luncheon. “Listen, darling, you didn’t answer emails – wild weekend, eh? – so I thought I’d call and let you know I got your – um, package on a BA flight to Dulles. The airline is supposed to get it to you late today through a courier service. I gave them your number so you’d be home for delivery. I hope this man of yours is worth it – you will pass out at the price.”
“Oh, Terry, you are wonderful!” She didn’t care how much it cost. “How much do I owe you?”
“Three hundred pounds. I put it on my Visa.”
“I’ll FedEx you a check today on my London account. Terry, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Well, we can’t have you getting yourself in the club. Now,” said Terry, “suppose you tell all in thirty seconds or less, because I cannot neglect the coq au brochette much longer? Roger and I are heartbroken, of course. Who is this bloke?”
Laura took a sip of her cooling tea and said, “It’s complicated. I’ve known him most of my life.”
“Not the love of your life, is it? The heartless cad? The cold-hearted scoundrel?”
She heard the genuine concern in his voice, and it touched her. In all the years of her exile, she hadn’t made friends as dear and caring as these two men in London. “Well – I won’t lie to you, it’s him, but – oh, Terry, he’s not heartless or cold-hearted. He’s a fine person – a good man.”
“Does he know about Meg?”
A frisson of unease went down her spine. “No, not yet.”
“Going to tell him?” Terry knew her too well, knew what a coward she was.
She said slowly, “I don’t know. Not yet. Things are – early. Fragile.”
“Be careful,” Terry warned her, and then she heard him shout, “Be careful! Braise, not massacre!” His voice became normal again. “You need to think this through, hon. Men can be weird – their first instinct may be to run a mile, but, by God, don’t deprive them of their rights. And this is now – what? Fourteen years after the fact? Have a real good reason why you didn’t tell him before this.”
It wasn’t my secret to tell. “I know. As I said – it’s complicated.”
“If you need to rehearse, call. You can practice your explanation on us.” She heard the smile in his voice. “I hope he’s worthy of you. At least, I hope like hell he is hounding you for sex.”
Trust Terry to leave her laughing. “I’m not saying anything. Draw your own conclusions.”
“Oh, darling girl, I am, I am, and I want you to have a very good time.”
~•~
Terry was right. Lying against Richard in bed, drowsily watching a PBS documentary, Laura had realized that she was running out of time. She was part of this man’s life. Her journey home was no longer a drop-in visit; she had set down roots in her family. She couldn’t keep Meg hidden in Texas indefinitely. Sooner or later, she had to introduce her daughter to Richard, to Lucy, even – God forbid – to Diana. She had to run the risk that someone might wonder how an auburn-haired mother and a Viking father had come up with a Black Irish minx.
No one in the St. Bride family had ever questioned Cam’s paternity. His parents had accepted Meg immediately, Kate with a regally raised eyebrow at the date of Meg’s birth, Matthew with a sharp comment to Cam about the usefulness of birth control. Even so, they’d adored their granddaughter. Mark and Emma had welcomed Meg, even as they kept Laura at arms’ length. If the St. Brides, who’d had every right to look askance at a daughter-in-law with a dubious background and a grandchild who looked nothing like their son, had accepted them readily, then why shouldn’t her own family? How could Lucy and Richard know that Meg looked like no one in the St. Bride family?
Laura crossed her arms on the table and buried her face.
Meg’s obvious Irish heritage wasn’t a problem. Dominic and Renée had both been Irish-American, so she could explain away Meg’s looks, if someone – Lucy – decided to ask. But, no matter what, there was no convincing explanation for Meg’s birth date unless she asked Meg to lie about her age, and that she wasn’t going to do.
Eventually, Laura thought morosely, she’d have to tell Richard that, in a “handful” of sexual encounters, he had fathered a child. She’d have to admit that she’d known all along that he was Meg’s father and had colluded to make sure that he would never find out and could never make a claim even if he did. Then he’d know that she had told him she loved him, promised to chase off any woman who dared look at him, made love with him six times in two days – all the while deceiving him about his only blood child and intending to go right on doing so until she got caught.
So much for honesty and openness. So much for standing together.
“Oh, God,” she heard herself say, and it truly did sound like a prayer, “what am I going to do?”
Get up and get going seemed like the best place to start. Richard wasn’t going to find out today; she had some time to come up with a strategy. She picked up her cold tea and started back to the house.
Near the steps, she felt something small and hard beneath her foot. She bent down and picked up a black square. She turned it over in her hand, mystified. It looked like the memory chip from her digital recorder, but hers didn’t use such a large capacity – 512 MB. She tried to remember. Had she brought her recorder out on the terrace?
It probably belonged to Richard. She’d seen him use device after device over the weekend; maybe he had dropped it on Saturday morning. She’d ask him that evening.
Laura stuck the chip in the pocket of her bathrobe and went inside to disentangle herself from the St. Bride web.
~•~
Independence took less time than Laura had expected. A quick call gave her a separate American Express account, and the satellite phone carrier immediately transferred her number and Meg’s into a new account so that they didn’t have to change phone numbers. It took five minutes to set up an Internet account and another five to send a mass email to her address book with her new email address. When she called her bank to set up a new account, her bank manager told her to change her password on her existing account and opt for online bill payment and statement reconciliation if she wanted to preserve her privacy.
“The only problem is,” Laura said, “I spend a lot of time in Europe traveling. I have to figure out a way to get the bills so that I’ll know when to pay them.”
“You can set your bills for Internet delivery,” he told her. “Just go on our web site and follow the directions so we can get your bills for you. Then you can have us pay them automatically before they’re due. People who travel a lot use the service and are very pleased with it.”
He recommended that she buy checkbook software so that she could download her bank statements to her laptop and told her to call him back if she needed more help. He probably thought she was an idiot, Laura thought ruefully as she hung up. How could she have turned thirty-one without balancing her checkbook? How could she not have known how easy it was to pay her bills on the Internet? How could she have ever put herself in the position where Mark – and Cam before him – had so much control over her life?
Well, now, at least, she was acting like a full-fledged adult. She wanted to tell Richard – except he was hardly going to be dazzled that she was only now learning to do what he’d been doing for over twenty years.
It took less than an hour to step towards independence. It took another hour of agonizing and rewriting to compose the email to Mark and the St. Bride Family Administration, informing them that she was taking over responsibility for her accounts.
As soon as she clicked Send, she picked up her purse and headed out the door before Mark had a chance to read it and call her back.
~•~
The high of acting like a mature, independent woman came crashing down shortly before noon.
Laura had just stored her groceries in the trunk when her cell rang. She glanced at the caller ID – if it was Mark, she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him for a few hours. They could wait to discuss the checks he’d issued to Dominic. But the call was coming from Meg’s cell phone.
“Meg?”
“Hey, Mom.” Laura heard noise in the background, talking, laughter, even some lockers banging. She glanced at her watch; Meg must still be at the summer math class. “I wanted to call you earlier, but I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“It’s okay. We’re an hour ahead here.” She heard a strange note in Meg’s voice. “Is something wrong?”
“Well, no – I mean – hold on a sec, Mom.” She heard the noise decrease. “Hey, I have to talk fast. So, uh, how’s stuff? Are you okay?”
Laura’s alarm was rising. “I’m fine. Something’s wrong, Meg, I can tell. What is it?”
“Oh, nothing.” Every parent’s frustration, the meaningless nothing that every teenager tossed out to deflect questioning. “So – did you have a fun weekend? Where did you go?”
“I spent some time in the Blue Ridge.” A good cover story, and it had all the advantage of being the truth. “We’ll go there sometime. It’s gorgeous. Look, Meg, I can hear it in your voice. What’s wrong?”
“Well.” She heard Meg turn away to mumble something. “Well – okay, Mom, it’s like this. Do you – well, do you, like, have a boyfriend?”
“What?” Horror flooded through her veins. How could anyone know? Could Mark possibly know what had happened over the weekend? “Who says I have a boyfriend?”
“You know, Mom, it’s okay if you do. I know you’re lonely. I know you miss Dad.”
“Meg.” She marshaled her thoughts and said firmly, “I don’t know where this is coming from. Did someone say something to you?”
“Uh – well—” Meg hemmed and hawed, and Laura drew a breath for patience. “Last night – okay, well, this weekend, you know – okay, I think Emma is upset about stuff, you know?”
“Did Emma say something to you?”
“Uh – well, not me exactly.”
Laura made her voice calm. “Did she say something to someone else?”
“Well – uh, Mark.”
Lord, give me patience. “What did she say?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you, Mom. I don’t want you to get upset.”
“Meg!” Thirteen years of motherhood came to the fore. Laura said forcefully into the phone, “Listen to me, young lady. Whatever you heard, tell me right now.”
“Okay.” Meg’s voice sounded small. “I was going down to the kitchen to get a Coke, because the game room was out of Cokes, you know? So I went by Mark’s study, and they were fighting. Real loud.”
She’d lecture Meg about eavesdropping later. “What about?”
“You.”
She fell silent. Laura prompted, “What about me?”
“I don’t know, Mom, I don’t want to hurt your feelings—”
“What did she say?”
Meg said all in a rush, “Well, she said you weren’t a good mother, leaving me like this. She said you were just being selfish like always, and now you’re abandoning me the way you used to abandon Dad, going off to do what you want and not thinking about anyone else. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, Mom, you and I talked about this, you hadn’t seen your family for so long and you didn’t know how it was going to go, so I should stay here because people might not want you there—”
“No.” She collapsed against her car door and stared out unseeing at the parking lot of the grocery store. “Is that all?”
“Well, then – Mark stuck up for you. He said you gave this a lot of thought, and it wasn’t your fault anyway you used to go away to work, you and Dad agreed you should keep Cat Courtney away from home. Then he said he knew why you went to Virginia, you had to get this thing out of your system, there was this man you knew when you were growing up, and you’d always been in love with him—”
Laura held her breath.
“—Then he said he knows about it and he doesn’t care, he said you might get together with this guy, and that’s okay, he wants you to get him out of your system, because he’s going to marry you. Then he told Emma he wants to get engaged on your birthday and get married at Christmas, and then we can all go to London for your last concert, and then you can come home and settle down and we can all be a family.”
Laura’s mind went blank with fury.
“Mom? Did you hear me?”
She made herself breathe in and out. “I’m here. Is that all he said?”
“Uh – no.”
Oh, dear God, what else? “So then what?”
“Well – uh – so then Emma said, boy did she sound mad, so that was his plan to get his hands on your money, so then he’d have more than her, and that wasn’t fair, and was he planning to – I don’t know, mingle the money or something—”
“Commingle?”
“Yes, that’s it.” Meg sounded relieved. “She said – well, she said you were dumb as rocks, so you’d do what he said and you’d never know any better. Then – Mom, do you really want to hear this?”
She said grimly, “Every last word.”
“Okay. Well, Mark got really mad at that, and he said you weren’t dumb exactly, just off in outer space, and you need someone to take care of you so people won’t take advantage of you, and she should look for a house to buy because he wants you to move back in with him, and she said no, and he said you told him you wouldn’t live there until she moves out because—”
Laura closed her eyes. “Because two women can’t live under the same roof?”
“Yes!” said Meg triumphantly. “Exactly! And she went ballistic! She was screaming and crying and saying you had seduced him like you di
d Dad – it’s okay, Mom, don’t start freaking out about my virgin ears – and then I heard her getting close to the door, so I ran into the kitchen till I heard her go upstairs.”
“Oh, my God.” She had to think about this. She’d known that Emma disliked her. Emma’s reserve about her had hardened the moment Kate St. Bride’s will was read. But she could hardly blame Emma for her reaction. Mark—! She couldn’t imagine what he had been thinking. What had possessed him to make such an announcement, throw gasoline on the barely contained fire of Emma’s jealousy?
How could he have so drastically misinterpreted her reaction to his advances in Central Park?
And what did he mean, she was in outer space?
“Meg.” She had to allay her daughter’s concerns. “I’m not marrying Mark. We’re not getting engaged, I promise you. And we are not going to live there, sweetie. When I get back from tour, I’m going to buy a new house for us. Meanwhile – I’ll call him and straighten this out, okay?”
“Oh, you can’t, Mom. He went to Japan this morning.”
Blast! She didn’t want to call him on the plane; he might have the other executives with him, and the conversation she intended to have with him demanded privacy. All she could do was send him a strongly worded email. She hoped savagely that he’d be good and jet-lagged when he read it.
“I’ll talk to him when he’s available,” Laura said. “Meanwhile – thanks for telling me, Meg. Don’t worry about this, okay? I’ll take care of it.”
Meg said, “Mark is all wrong for you. So you’re really going to buy a new house?”
“Yes.”
“But what if Mark won’t let you spend the money from the trust fund—”
“Meg,” she caught her voice rising, “you need to understand this. I don’t need the trust fund. It was generous of your father to leave it to me, but I do not need it. I’ve made enough money as Cat Courtney to take care of you and me and your children and grandchildren for our entire lives. I can afford to buy us any house we want—”
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 3