All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (37 page)

“I don’t buy that,” Richard said. He’d tamped down the anger. He sounded flat, but she saw that he had his mask on again, that damnable mask he had used for so long to keep the world at arm’s length. As much as Julie Ashmore or Cat Courtney, Richard Ashmore armored himself against exposure. “Diana is no longer in my life, Laura. Not in any way that counts. You won’t – you can’t – cause me problems with her. She has no hold over me. Nothing today changed that.”

“I saw—” But she had no words to tell him what she had seen, how terribly it had disturbed her to see him with Diana. She couldn’t let him see inside her soul – the jealousy, anguishing over those bonds that still stretched between him and his wife, the pettiness, raging because Diana was his day and she was only his night. She mustn’t ever let him see how it had torn at her to see Diana standing beside him, her hand on his arm, the mistress of Ashmore Park.

“You saw what?” She heard a new note in his voice, the wariness of a man of secrets who had never intended her to see beyond the surface.

Laura said into the dark, “I saw that she is still your wife.”

Nothing. He stood still. The towel wouldn’t absorb another drop; she let it drop by her feet and bent to take off her wet shoes.

He said only, “She was the wife of a young man who no longer exists.”

She nodded. She didn’t look up.

“Diana has nothing to do with you. You ran away, Laura. I watched you – you just picked up and left. You didn’t bother to say goodbye to anyone. You didn’t bother to find me to see what I thought or felt. You just ran.”

Oh, please don’t say you saw me throwing up all over your roses.

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? When things get tough, you run. You ran from Dominic, you ran from St. Bride, and you’re running from me.”

As if those roses meant anything. So what if she’d ruined them? She tugged her shoes off and wondered why she was worrying about some flowers she had never seen before and would probably never see again as long as she lived.

“Why?” He stood over her, so close that she felt the warmth from his legs only inches from her face. “Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you let Diana get to you? You are Cat Courtney, for God’s sake. You’re young, you’re healthy, you’re talented – you have it all, Laura, you have everything she doesn’t. Why do you always assume you’re going to lose?”

She lifted her hands in answer and then let them fall. She crossed her arms on her lap and bowed her head over them.

He said he doesn’t want you to leave. He said it’s the two of you.

She didn’t know what to say to him. She’d run out of words.

She’d run out of energy. She’d given a performance that evening, all the more draining for being unforeseen. She was always exhausted after a concert. Her manager knew not to schedule anything the morning after; she usually spent the time alone, reading or writing, pulling herself together to face the world once again. Richard didn’t know that about her; he didn’t know that she had reached the end of her tether, or surely he wouldn’t hammer at her like this, demanding that she overlook the way Diana had managed to reassert her claim on him, destroy her dreams, and expose her to the world, all in the space of one hour. The way she, in turn, had struck back.

He broke the silence. “At least – if you’re going back to Texas tonight, let me take you to the airport. Although I doubt you’ll get a flight in this weather—”

Laura lifted her head. “I wasn’t going back to Texas.”

He absorbed that, and waited. She added, “I was coming over to see you.”

That seemed to surprise him, but only for a moment. She saw his face grow taut. “With an overnight bag?”

She nodded.

“So – you were planning one last night together, and then you were going to leave?”

She lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” No mistaking the anger that licked along the edge of his voice. “I don’t require charity. If you want to leave because you’ve had enough of me and my complications, that’s your right. But you don’t leave to protect me, and you don’t come over to make love to soften the blow.”

She shut her eyes against his anger. She wondered where the tears had gone, why they wouldn’t flow. She needed the release of tears; she needed the release of the tension in her body. She said softly into the dark, “I wasn’t trying to soften the blow.”

Nothing passed between them, it seemed for ages. She knew vaguely that he tried the lights again; she saw, from the corner of her eye, that he picked up the towel she had dropped and draped it over the stair rail to dry. Max, emboldened by the presence of his hero, came creeping out from wherever he had been cowering long enough to rub against Richard’s legs and utter a pitiful complaint about the storm.

The area behind her eyes felt heavy with pain masked by the aspirin she had taken earlier. She watched him at the window of the drawing room, gazing out into the storm, his face in silhouette still and hard.

How long he stood there watching the storm, how long she sat there watching him, she didn’t know. She knew only when he came back to her. “Let’s go.”

“Go?” Where? Was he actually taking her to the airport? Had he decided that he’d had enough of
her
? She felt herself starting to shake, from her wet clothes or from her shot nerves, she couldn’t tell. “Go where?”

“Home.” She couldn’t read his voice. “If your electricity is out, then the alarm system is out. I’m not leaving you here by yourself without power. We can continue this at my house.” He put out a hand to her. “It’s uncomfortable in here.”

“Won’t – won’t your power be out?”

Richard shook his head. “Ashmore Park is on a different grid, plus I’ve got a generator. I know these storms – you won’t get the power back until morning. Come on.” His voice altered. “Get some dry clothes on, and we’ll go.”

It seemed pointless to offer any resistance. She let him raise her to her feet and guide her up the stairs to her room. He came up behind her; maybe he didn’t trust her not to fall into a trance in the middle of her room, staring out into nothingness. Maybe he didn’t trust her – oh, she didn’t even know anymore. Maybe he didn’t trust her out of his sight. She had shaken him tonight, more than she had known she could.

Maybe he hadn’t known until now how much he wanted her in his life.

She felt her way to the armoire where she had stored her clothes and then remembered. “Oh, no,” and her heart sank.

“What’s the matter?”

“I was washing clothes tonight.” Everything was still in the washing machine. She didn’t have that much with her; most of her wardrobe was hanging in her closet in London. She shrugged. She would just have to make do. “This will dry on me.”

“We’ll throw everything in the dryer when we get home.”
Home
. His home, not hers, but she felt better – even if they were talking about drying clothes – that for the moment he still thought of them together. He picked up the bathrobe she had thrown across the bed and put it around her shoulders, his fingers brushing against her. “Here, that ought to help. Do you need anything?”

She shook her head. He went downstairs to put her bag in his car, and she made her way to the kitchen to dish more kitty treats out for Max. Another minute, a pause to find her sandals, and she stepped back out into the fury of the night. The rush of cold air felt welcome after the stale air of the house; she touched her face and found her skin cool and soft from the rain.

Lightning streaked across the sky, for a few seconds making the circular drive light as morning. She saw him more clearly now, and she saw what she had not seen before – he was as weary as she, tension running through his body as it ran through hers. He locked the door behind her and held the umbrella over her as she got into the car.

They spoke little as he drove. He concentrated on the road ahead, barely visible through the windshield. The rain beat on the moon roof; the only light came to them from lightning flashes. Laura leaned back against the headrest and tried to let the tension of the day melt into the night storm.

And slowly, through her exhaustion – mental, emotional, physical – urgency she hadn’t known in a long time began to build. It started as a small pulse in her blood and built up, a hard rhythm keeping time with the pulse of the storm, stripping away her outer self. The compliant sister, the brave widow, the seductive singer – all came peeling away in large strips, leaving her bare. Her heart began to accelerate; her breathing became shallow and faster, and deep within, in some profound female river, she felt dark, unexpected longing surging into life.

There wasn’t going to be any sweet goodbye tonight.

Through her lashes, she stared at him, silhouetted against the rain-washed window. She looked at his hands – those long, elegant fingers, his hands tapering into the wrists that disappeared into the cuffs of his shirt. Beautiful hands, with their controlled male power – hands to stroke a woman’s back, trace through her hair, bring her to the brink of oblivion.

The car shot through the waters, an extension of the masculine force she sensed rising in him. He felt it too, she saw, this unexpected bonding with the forces of the night storm. The tide was beginning to intensify in him, a longing to plunge together into the rising waters of desire. He knew now, if he hadn’t before, how precariously they stood on the fragile sandbar together, a great river flowing around them, threatening to crest and tear them apart. The currents of their pasts, his and hers, had proven stronger than they had imagined; he knew, and she knew, how powerful were the forces raging against them.

He had felt it that night, and it had mattered. For the first time, he had faced the possibility of losing her, and
it had scared the hell out of him
.

He felt, as she did, the flow of the powerful car along the dark road with only the sound of the heavens hurling themselves at the earth to keep them company. No other cars here on this country road; they might have been alone in the world, all nature’s ferocity breaking around them, safe in their silent shelter from the storm. Their speed through the darkness echoed in the dark primeval depths of them both, depths that could never stand up to the light of civilized day.

But no light of day intruded into this night.

“We lucked out,” Richard said into the silence, “the water’s rising fast. Another few minutes, and we would have been stuck for the night.”

Laura said, “What about your gates?” and she heard the sudden huskiness of her voice.

“I left them open,” he said, and she knew that he heard it also.

He felt the violence of the night too; he felt the welling up of the life force of the earth, opening up to the torrents from the great void of the sky. The air between them tensed, still and taut in anticipation of that storm yet to break. Slowly, she laid her hand high on his denim-covered leg; she felt the hard masculine skin and bone beneath; she felt rather than heard the swift intake of his breath.

She thought he might say something about her hand, what it meant, but he said only, “You were magnificent today.”

She jerked her hand away and stared at him. “I thought you were angry,” she said finally.

“No.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Why would I be?”

“Because—” Laura bit her lip hard and tasted blood. “Because I didn’t play fair. Because I used Cat Courtney to flatten her.”

“Diana deserved everything she got.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “And, yes, you did use Cat. Very effectively too.”

She turned her eyes from him and stared straight ahead. “You aren’t angry because,” she took a deep breath, “I brought up Francie?”

The name fell into the well of silence between them, and rippled out.

He said at last, “You have a right to sing the songs you’ve written.” She couldn’t interpret his tone. “I don’t know that dedicating that song to her was the wisest thing you could have done – you knew that was going to provoke Diana.” He paused. “She still asked for it. That was rotten of her to out you and then demand a free performance.”

She swallowed hard and felt the tension stretch between them like a taut stringed instrument. Pull it much tighter, and it might snap. She looked out at the passing trees, and she saw only the bleakness of the night.

She had never felt so uncomfortable with him. Roger could talk about a jumble of emotions and how she had to work it all out – she felt those emotions all agitating in her now, exhaustion, fear, and the fiercest physical tension she had ever felt in her life. She flexed her fingers on her lap and saw them, in her mind’s eye, curling around the Standing Stone of Ireland, and she jerked herself back to reality. How in the name of heaven could she be thinking of that now? What was wrong with her?

She wondered what he planned to happen when they reached Ashmore Park. And then an unwelcome thought hit her.

“Is Julie there?”

“No. I drove her to the lock-in. I watched,” she heard him trying to lighten his tone, “to make sure she made it inside before I left. Not that the church has power right now – I hope there are plenty of flashlights so the kids don’t go sneaking off into corners. This isn’t supposed to be a make-out party.”

Not like the adults. She remembered that they had planned to drink wine and watch a movie before they had their own make-out party – well, he had probably ditched that idea.