“Of course, she had to talk to you,” he added, “I see that now. She needed you, she needed that link with reality. She didn’t need your sulking. She sure as hell didn’t need this kind of rage. I only hope,” and she had never dreamed his voice could cut her so into ribbons, “that you didn’t treat her to years of this nonsense after you left.”
She was bleeding from the thousand thrusts of his words. Jealous. Jealous of Francie. Listening all those nights to Francie, her fingers biting into the pillow to contain her anguish. Later, in San Francisco, in their tiny apartment, watching Francie swell with the child Laura could never bear. For a lifetime, aching with words unspoken and love unwanted.
For fourteen years, she had sheltered behind a great wall, and in one second it came crashing to the ground.
She looked at him, he who had so ruthlessly mocked her defenses, he who had scarcely noticed the lovesick Laura Abbott whose great crime had been to love him, and she remembered that the last thing in the world he wanted was honesty between them.
“Jealous?” she whispered, “oh, yes, I was jealous.”
His head snapped up, and his eyes flared in attention.
“Times, that spring, I’d look at you both, and I wanted to tear her heart out—” Her voice faltered, and she pulled herself back together before he could humiliate her further. If he meant to mock her, though, he stayed strangely quiet, with only the rigid set of his shoulders to signal his watchfulness. “But then – I kept thinking, she was just in the right place at the right time—”
“Better to tear my heart out than hers.”
“Yours?” she said. “Why? You went to her—”
And then she stopped, for the startled look in his eyes and the sudden compassion that then softened his mouth warned her that she had spoken in terrible error.
She barely breathed, waiting for him to say something, anything, to break the silence.
He ran his fingers through the silver threads at his temple. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought – I never meant—” He stopped, and he met her eyes with a touch of chagrin. “I didn’t know you felt that way about her. I thought you were angry with me.”
She held her breath.
“I thought,” he added quietly, “you were jealous of me, for taking her away from you.”
She stood dead still then, in the horror of her inadvertent confession. Anger, betrayal, everything dropped away in that second, as her mind pitilessly replayed her words.
He said nothing else. He merely stood there, watching her with wary compassion, waiting for whatever she cared now to say. All pretense had collapsed between them, as she grasped the unbelievable fact that he had never truly known how she felt about him.
She had betrayed everything – or almost everything; he still did not know, and he never would, please God, that his blood lay upon her hands. But he knew the rest of it. He knew now the rage she had nourished in her heart; he knew all the despair and love she had thrust down ruthlessly until she had forgotten that they still lived.
He knew.
He might even understand. Seventeen years ago, when Diana had made her unspeakable confession, he must have swallowed a rage even more overpowering, a love even more unwanted.
She had nothing further to lose.
She said numbly, “I’d lie awake at night, listening to her talk about you. She told me everything, every detail, you wouldn’t believe what she told me.” He winced, and she noticed it without interest. “I’d listen, and I cursed the day I came down with the flu. It might have been me, if I hadn’t gotten sick, I’d have typed your thesis, I’d have stayed home with you that night, you’d have turned to me—”
“Laura—” A new note in his voice. He didn’t want to hear this, but, oh, dear God, she would not be denied. Not now. Not when he already knew the truth. Her need to tell him far outweighed his need not to hear her out.
“I’ll hate myself in the morning, I know, I know, I don’t care. It can’t be worse than fourteen years wishing I’d been there instead of her.” In the dim light, through the tears, he had blurred and faded, a tall white-shirted presence before her. “I loved you, Richard. I’d loved you forever, I lived for a smile from you, anything, just as long as you noticed me—”
“Damn it, Laura,” but anguish had destroyed anger. He spoke in tired sorrow. “Stop this. Now.”
“And when you turned to her, and she told me – oh, God, it should’ve been me, not her—”
“Stop – you don’t want to tell me this—”
“At least, I loved you. You weren’t the first for her, you weren’t even the second.” A sob sliced through her words. “She wasn’t good for you, any more than Di was. Look what they’ve done to you, they’ve robbed you, they’ve taken all the kindness and goodness – you’re so cold now, you keep going away and leaving this shell where you used to be – I wouldn’t have done that to you—”
“No,” he said wearily, the cracks growing in his emotional fortress, “you wouldn’t have. Stop – there’s no point to this—”
“Oh, yes, there is – you never saw me, you could have had me and you chose her instead—”
She broke down then, and sank to her knees.
He came down with her, cradled her in his arms, smoothed her hair and her back, whispered to her words that she scarcely heard and could not comprehend. She understood other things: the heat of his hand as he brushed her cheek and her throat, his breath against her temple, the security of his body. He leaned back against the cabinet and brought her up against him so that she wept into his shoulder.
“Cry it out, Laurie.” He was rocking her against him. “Don’t bottle this up anymore. It’s eating you alive.”
She had lost all sense of herself, of the years she had held her love inside, hidden, unwanted. Always unwanted. She knew only that he held her, her, not his wife sleeping in a dream-filled neverland, not Francie lost these years to the embrace of the sea. She spoke into his collar, afraid to look at him, afraid to lose the wildness that had seized her soul.
“I missed you. I always missed you. You were always out of my reach…. First Di, then Francie…. I was never there, I always reached you too late. It was okay about Di, I knew about that forever, I knew you belonged to her. I wanted you to be happy with her—”
“I know, Laurie. I think you were the only one.”
“But Francie – oh, God, Richard, you broke her heart, and I was glad, glad! She was hysterical, Di ripped her apart, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want her to have you—” She turned into the plain of his shoulder. “She trusted me, she didn’t know I listened to her at night, talking about you, and I hated her so badly – I really hated her—”
“No,” he said, “she didn’t know.”
“I made her leave. I was going away, and I put it straight to her, I said, ‘I won’t be here, do you want to come or not?’ I promised I’d take care of her—”
His hand came up to hers. “To get her away from me? You did the right thing—”
“I saw it all like those spinning wheels, you on the inside, me outside, and when the wheels stopped, I’d always been carried away from you.” She became aware that she was gasping for breath, that her heart had started to race, that his matched hers beat for beat. “You spun out of reach with Di, then Francie, then I took myself away, so they would stop spinning—”
“Good,” he said, “good. Let it go. Let me go. I’m no good for you, I never have been.”
“But they didn’t stop!” A last, forgotten sob caught in her throat. “I thought they had, I’d never have come back if I’d thought there was still a chance—”
“It’s not a chance you’d want.”
“Yes, I would!” She put her heart into her words, beyond pride, beyond caring, beyond any sense of self-preservation. “Don’t tell me what’s good or proper for me, I don’t care! I did the right and good and proper thing, and all I got was twelve years of trying to be someone I wasn’t and trying to love someone I couldn’t. I�
�d take the chance, Richard, if you ever wanted me, I’d destroy the world and laugh among the ashes.” Her voice sank into a whisper. “If I’d seen you in London – we came so close—”
The word sent a shock racing through him. Lying against him, she felt it sparking along his body; she knew the tightness of his arms, the breath he forgot to take, the painful beat of his heart. Within a second or two, the dark comfort of his arms disappeared. She found herself abruptly upright, abandoned to her grief, and Richard had withdrawn from her, his arms crossed on his chest.
He said coolly, “What are you talking about?”
All at once, a vast exhaustion swept across her, an exhaustion born of Richard’s rejection, Lucy’s condemnation, Julie’s playacting, Diana’s blood. She had left her daughter, her West End success, all the safety of fourteen years to come to this moment, sitting on a cold kitchen floor explaining a life’s worth of loving despair to a man who had no use for it.
She said wearily, “The woman in London.”
Even as he answered, she heard the lie in his flat voice. “There was no woman in London. Lucy dreamed that up. She took the fact that I finally accepted reality and she manufactured an affair that has done nothing but agitate Diana for no good reason.”
“But – you stopped wearing your ring, you didn’t feel married anymore—”
His fingers caught her chin and forced her to look at him. “Lucy knows nothing! Do you think, do you really think, that I would carry on an affair with someone I’d just met, on what was only a two-week vacation, right in front of my daughter? Diana – and my marriage – meant more to me than that. I didn’t take it off until—”
And then he stopped, and his mouth shut abruptly.
She heard what he’d said at the same moment he did.
All fury, all pain, had drained away, in the face of the truth. She said dully, “Do you know what I thought? This time we’d come so close, we’d come to the same place in our lives…. You were there, and so was I, and you even tried to see me, you said so yourself. And I—” Her shoulders lifted and fell in defeat. She was already beginning to hate herself for confessing all her heart. “I never knew. I missed you again.”
Silence. A great, dark moor of silence.
Then, his voice exhausted, a man reaching the end of his emotional tether.
“No, Laura. You didn’t miss me.”
But even as he said it, the room vanished, and his voice faded down a long tunnel. She stood at his desk again, staring at the sketch of her own hungry reflection, and his words broke and scattered and coalesced again into new, unknown patterns. You didn’t miss me…. His eyes closed against hers, but his hand touched her fingers, played with her ring, twisted it around so that the diamonds caught the overhead light. It came to her then, a slow awakening, that he had taken her hand long minutes ago, through all the accusations and bitterness, and he still held it.
Oh, dear God, how had she not seen it, the ring was just an excuse…. After Mom and Dad died, he stopped feeling married…. One year, that was all, since Peggy and Philip had died…. Julie and I saw you in London…. A man watching a woman while she cooked him dinner, like a suitor – the closest he could bring himself to courting a woman he wanted, just to sit and talk…. A man sketching a woman whose desire meant something to him, his voice taut and teasing as he described her back to herself…. Quid pro quo, princess. Not much fun to be on the receiving end….
No, you did not miss me in time.
I have lived my life to come to this.
She came back to herself and to him, sitting there on the floor. He studied her ring as if it mattered, and she looked up at him, and met eyes that watched her gravely. Her blood began to race, sparkling through her veins like the finest spirits, and she was helpless to keep her desire from shining back at him.
No clock ticked off the seconds – or minutes – or ages – to measure the length of that silent appraisal. Only the swinging pendulum of her heart kept time, a deliberate metronome with its own inexorable beat. Slowly, slowly, she raised herself to her knees in front of him, she reached out to touch him, and her fingers knew him, fine firm skin, as she drew her finger lightly across his face, over the twitching muscle of his mouth. And then, lightly, she touched her lips to his.
“Laura.”
She waited, and never breathed.
“Laura,” he said again, and she watched him go to war, judgment against desire, head against heart.
She said nothing, afraid to break the silence of the great battle she saw in his eyes. She watched and waited as the seconds wore on, and she saw Richard Ashmore’s eyes change from the eyes of a sinner faced with his greatest temptation to the eyes of a lover faced with his greatest prize.
“Damn you, Laura,” he said, and his arms reached for her, “damn you, damn you, damn you.”
But she didn’t care. His body bearing hers down onto the cold stone floor was a lover’s body, his voice a lover’s caress. His mouth, warm, alive, moved over hers like fire, across a parched desert of forgotten desire. She welcomed his weight, she welcomed the unyielding hardness of his body above her and of the floor below, and she linked her hands at the base of his neck against his hairline, and surrendered to the sanctuary of the arms that held her against him as though he would never let her go, would, indeed, fight to keep her.
As she would never let him go, as she would fight to keep him.
He explored her, long lean fingers learning her hair, the curve of her neck, the plain of her shoulder, the slope of her breast. She welcomed the swell of pleasure that overcame her, pleasure long lost and now reclaimed, an old familiar friend, and she surrendered into the swell, knowing only the touch of a hand on her breast, and it was Richard Ashmore’s hand.
A long time later, he remembered the floor; he lifted himself away from her, and she panicked that he was leaving her. She moaned, a small protest deep in her throat, and held onto him, fingers clutching his shirt. When he rolled onto his back, he took her with him, and she lay across his shoulder, breathing shakily and wincing against the unforgiving light overhead.
He held her head against his heart, and when he spoke, he sounded as if she had knocked the breath out of him.
“A kiss worthy of Cat Courtney,” he murmured, and Laura lifted her head lazily to send him a brilliant smile, aware of new and glorious power.
“Anything for an admiring fan, I always say.”
“Don’t kiss your other fans like that, you’ll start a war.” He closed his eyes against her, but she refused to lose heart. It was enough, for this moment, that she lay nestled to him, enough that he kept his body against hers. “Lord, Laura, why did you come back, anyway? Why didn’t you stay in Texas and leave us all alone?”
In the wonderful euphoria of their uneven heartbeats, she saw no reason not to tell the truth. She lifted herself up on an elbow and bent over him, her free hand touching the fine thickness of his hair, punctuating her words with a string of kisses down the side of his face. “For you,” she whispered, and kissed his temple, “I came back for you—”
One second, his hands lay warm against her back; the next, they were setting her firmly away from him to a safe distance. Confused at his move, she swayed back towards him, but he had moved away from her and had risen to his feet.
“Richard—” She looked up at him, bewildered, blinking into the light, as he stood over her.
“No,” he said, “no.”
He turned towards the counter, away from her, and he put his hands on the edge and leaned against them. She saw the battle he fought to control himself, the rise and painful fall of his shoulders, and she knew that she hadn’t yet lost.
He wasn’t paying attention to her, busy as he was fighting off his demons, as she rose slowly from the floor. Her robe sagged open, her nightgown had fallen off her shoulder, but she made no move to cover herself as she approached him and laid her hand on his sleeve.
“Richard,” she said softly, “Richard.” And she le
aned in against him searching for warmth, resting her cheek against his back, loving the wall of his wonderful body.
He said, and his voice shook, “Laura, stop this. Now.”
She refused to listen. She slid her hand further down his arm, reaching for his fingers.
“No.” He stiffened against her, and instinctively she stepped back before he turned back around to face her. “This is as far as it goes.”
She shook her head, to clear it of the fog of desire that still whirled around her.
“We can’t do this,” he said, and all she really understood was the catch of his voice. “Your sister is still my wife. I may not like it, and you may not either, but she is still there, and she is not going away. I made a stupid mistake when I married her and an even stupider one when I slept with Francie, but I am damned if I am making another one with you tonight.”
Through the fog, his words scarcely made sense to her. She whispered, “Come upstairs.”
“No,” Richard said flatly, although he wanted to. She saw that in his eyes. “You are my sister-in-law. I’ve been down that road once, thank you, I’m not going that way again. I owe Diana more than that.”
He walked over to the chair at the table and picked up his jacket. Her eyes pricked her; she watched him through a haze of tears, watching him spin out of reach again.
Diana. Diana, undeserving bride, unloving wife, Diana, always the winner.
Laura, forever losing in the spinning wheels of their fortunes.
But not now, she thought, seeing him shrug on his jacket. Diana had enjoyed a long and lucky winning streak, aided by an unfiled pleading in a lawsuit and his love for the daughter she had thrust upon him. No one had ever called on her to account for her crimes.
Until now. She knew enough now to bring Diana to justice.
She spoke as he turned towards the door, ready to leave her, and fought for him.
“You’re not her husband,” she said from the desperation of her heart. “Not anymore. I watched you tonight, Richard, you’ve never seen that room before, have you? She’s never invited you there – she shut you out, years ago – you, her husband! And your room, at your house – you’ve never taken her there, have you?”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 39