All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (66 page)

Two mornings of waking up and finding herself alone. He had gone out again while she slept, leaving only a cryptic note –
Back soon, R.
He hadn’t gone out running; he’d returned, not dripping from a hard workout, but neatly dressed in polo shirt and jeans. He’d sat casually in the bedroom’s one chair, watching her pack her bag, talking about his occasional lectures in historical preservation at the architectural school. He’d offered no explanation of his absence.

She couldn’t ask,
Where did you go this morning?
He might have replied,
Where did you go last night?

They walked around to the terrace, a long L-wing on the northern end of the house, and mounted the stairs at its midpoint. Richard put his hand on her waist to guide her away from the house into the bend of the wing – how quickly they were becoming used to each other’s touch. “Here.” He halted her at the end of the terrace and turned her away from the house. “See through the trees there?”

The warm wind was gently tossing the tree branches that obscured their view, so it took her a few seconds of peering intently in the direction of his pointing hand before she saw the rotunda of the University of Virginia. “Oh, I see it!” Her cheek brushed the hand resting now on her shoulder as she turned to look at him. “Jefferson really liked domes, didn’t he? Is that the Palladian influence?”

He sounded surprised. “Yes, it is, as a matter of fact, but how do you know about that?”

“I read it in your book.”

“You read the book? Laura, you amaze me. When was this?”

“I found it on the Internet last winter.” She let herself lean back against his shoulder. “In fact, if you saw a spike in your sales in one day – that was me. I bought ten copies.”

“Ten? That was excessive. I would have given you one.”

“I wanted to boost your royalties.”

He laid his hand against her hair, and she thought that nothing in her life had ever felt as warm and secure as Richard resting his hand like that against her. “You probably doubled the sales for the month. Julie’s college fund thanks you.” They heard a group of tourists approaching, and he put his arm loosely around her shoulders and guided her over to the stairs leading down to the dependencies. “So what do you plan to do with all your copies?”

Laura pretended to give it some serious thought. “Hmmm. I don’t know. Give them out as Christmas gifts to my friends.”

“I’m sure they’ll appreciate that. You’ll probably get them back next year.” A burst of laughter came from above them. Monticello was beginning to fill up. “Sales are going okay. A lot of universities and libraries have picked it up, what we expected when we planned the project. University press books don’t hit the bestseller list.”

“Cat Courtney could help boost sales,” said Laura, tongue-in-cheek. “I’m on tour this fall – we could buy up the remainder and give it out at the champagne receptions. Sort of a gift with purchase, like at the cosmetics counter. They can choose between it and the DVD and screen saver.”

Pause. “That’s unusual sarcasm from you, Laura Rose. You
are
kidding, aren’t you?”

She grinned back at him. “My manager would never allow it. Cat merchandise only. Sorry.”

His voice dropped into a lazy intimate tone. “I’d like a copy of that screen saver.”

“I’ll email you a copy when we get home.”

They had reached the ground floor now, and now they met more people. The mountain that had seemed so empty when they had walked up – but, of course, everyone else had taken the bus ride – seemed to be getting crowded. In unspoken agreement, Richard and Laura turned away from the dependencies and walked out on the roundabout that encircled the great western lawn.

I loved that we were there alone at Monticello, Richard, no one else around. I felt so close to you, as if we had stepped back in time before Diana ever was….

They walked along the herringbone path, close but not touching now. Peggy must have loved the riot of flowers in these gardens; she had taken such pride in restoring the gardens at Ashmore Park to the glory days of the Great Lakes shipping heiress. Laura had planted a flower garden a few years before, but she’d missed the prime planting season when walking pneumonia had felled first Meg and then Cam, and only a few sections had bloomed properly. All for naught, she thought, the garden was Emma’s now. Maybe if she bought a house, she could plant another garden.

“Last time I came up here,” Richard said, “one of those singers was here – I don’t know her name, she’s the one who prances around the stage mostly undressed—”

His out-of-the-blue comment was so welcome that she forgot her depressing lack of a garden and the even more depressing thought of the night before. “Which one? They all prance around undressed.”

He laughed. “You have a point. She was blonde and built and looked barely out of high school, that’s all I remember. I think Julie listens to her. But the girl had this unbelievable entourage – at least thirty people, and not one of them knew who Jefferson was except the head on the nickel. A sad commentary on modern American education.”

“I can do a little better than that,” said Laura. “He’s the face on the two-dollar bill, right?” She laughed at his expression. “I know who he was. I’m not a complete ignoramus.”

“I would hope not. You had a good education. I’m paying through the nose for Julie to go there.” He leaned to pick a blade of grass and started to bend it around his fingers. “So where’s your entourage, Cat Courtney?”

“No thanks.” She pretended to shudder. “I couldn’t stand to be surrounded night and day.”

He turned to her. “You’ve not very diva-like, are you? No stories of you throwing a fit because someone forgot to get you the right kind of bottled water. You fly under the radar, don’t you?”

She felt on familiar ground now. “When I first signed with the label, Cam hired a manager for me. He knew before I did that Cat Courtney was going to be bigger than – than just me writing songs at night. So I’ve got this manager, Dell Barnes – he’d handled some other singers, and right off the bat Dell told me that I could be a diva or I could be an artist but practically no one gets away with being both.”

“And, being Dominic’s daughter, you’d choose to be an artist.”

“We weren’t brought up to be divas.”

“No.” Richard threw the blade of grass into the breeze. “I’ll give Dominic that. He had enough temperament for all of you, but he didn’t tolerate it in you girls.”

“Yes.” They had reached the apogee of the roundabout, and with a quick touch on her upper arm – that unspoken language of hand caressing her skin! If only it meant that he could love her – he turned her to look back at the great western front. “I’d never seen myself as a star. I always thought I’d just keep on writing songs and poems and stories, put them away, and maybe someday I’d get to make an album to prove that I could sing. Dell and Cam saw much more, and Dell said that I needed a persona to back up my music. No one was going to suspend belief for all that pathos coming from a mom with a grade-schooler. I’d used the name Cat Colby in San Francisco, and Dell took that and helped me create Cat Courtney. She’s as much his creation as mine.”

He didn’t speak for a moment. “I thought – we all thought that Cat Courtney was just a way to keep us from finding you.”

Laura heard a quizzical tone in his voice. “Well – I won’t say that wasn’t part of it. It was. But I really liked being able to go to the grocery store, or drive Meg to school, or go shopping without people knowing who I was, and we saw all those tabloid stories about the royals and Hollywood, and I didn’t want any part of that. I didn’t want an entourage or a bodyguard, or to be at the mercy of the paparazzi. So Dell mapped out a strategy to promote me in Europe, so I mostly work over there, and then the rest of the time—” she shrugged— “I can just be myself here at home.”

He said musingly, and ripped comfortable ground out from under her, “I have to wonder how you get away with it, going out in public, and not being seen for Cat Courtney. I
look
at you, and I see it so clearly.” Oh, she did not like the direction of this at all. “I suspect people recognize you more than you think.”

She shook her head.

“Then how do you pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?”

Her heart was beating hard. “Richard, you’ve seen how I live. I don’t go to parties, I don’t give interviews, I don’t go to openings or fashion shows – I lead a very quiet life. Besides, you know me. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t see Cat Courtney.” She stopped to catch her breath. “My fans are older. They’re not the kind to mob me. They’re the kind to line up politely and pay big money for the champagne receptions so that they can say they’ve met me.”

“Speaking as a specimen of the group, I imagine you sell pretty well to middle-aged men,” said Richard. “And, may I say, Miss Courtney—” he raised an eyebrow at her— “you’re not exactly covered head to toe on stage yourself. That concert we saw – I held my breath waiting for that dress to fall down.”

“Haute couture. It only looks as if it’s going to fall down.” She tried to sound light. “Believe me, I’m pinned and boned within an inch of my life. Those dresses wouldn’t fall off in a hurricane.”

The silence returned between them and stretched into an almost tangible being. She found her fingers shaking and deliberately pressed them against her side. Uncanny, his questions about Cat Courtney, as if he knew – Had he seen a hint of Cat, had he seen the echo of that woman on Ash Marine? Was she turning into as big a fraud as Julie?

I have to do better than this. This is my love. I can’t be afraid to be with him.

The sun had risen high enough in the sky that the light now flooded the western lawn and made the dome gleam white in the light. Other tourists crossed their line of sight, but the grounds absorbed the sound, and in the silence, they might as well have been alone on the lawn. His arm rested around her shoulders, and she felt the heat from his skin sink into her body, and she relaxed. If they could keep it like this, if she didn’t freeze up at the thought of Ash Marine…
dragons
… maybe she could keep Cat Courtney at bay when he made love to her.

“I’m Laura, you know, not Cat.” The words came out of her mouth before she stopped to think. “Cat Courtney is just a job.”

He said nothing.

In for a penny….
“This—” she gestured at herself. “This is the reality, Richard, what you see right here. No haute couture, no wig. This is it. Gap jeans and – and no makeup and—”

“And a silver Jaguar,” he said unexpectedly.

That stopped her for a moment, until she remembered his terse words to Diana on the voice mail. “Okay. All right. A silver Jaguar. Cam gave me that for my birthday.” A guilt present to talk her back into their bedroom. “It’s extravagant, I know, but it’s not even two years old, and I’ve hardly driven it since I moved to London—”

“Hold it,” Richard interrupted, and held up his hand. “Don’t apologize. Drive whatever you like.”

“Anyway,” she persevered, “I want you to know that I know the difference between Laura and Cat. Cat’s a costume I put on to perform, but – she’s not really me. I’m still Laura.”

She made herself look at him and was disconcerted to see that he was giving her the same appraising look he’d given Diana Friday night.

“What?” The word came out before she could think to stop herself. “What is it?”

He said slowly, as if reasoning through disparate thoughts, “You said it yourself, Cat is a creation. A job.” Her heart dropped. “My God, when I saw you on that stage, I thought you looked like a goddess. Golden, very untouchable and not accessible by us mere mortals, and I have to say that was only reinforced when we were turned away backstage.”

“Oh, I am so sorry—”

He overrode her. “Until we saw you that night, I didn’t realize how much you had changed – at least on the surface. You weren’t the Laura who used to go fishing with me on Saturdays. I get the feeling that you think being Laura isn’t good enough for us – that we’re holding you up against Cat and finding something missing in you.”

She had to head this off at the pass. “You have to admit that Cat makes a bigger splash.”

Oh, stop, stop, stop, what are you doing… don’t explain, don’t excuse, change the subject….

“You may not believe this,” he said, “but you are so much more than Cat. She’s mist and smoke, like a will-o’-the-wisp dream that you forget as soon as you wake up. I’d much rather have you here in your jeans and that little shirt of yours, the wind blowing your hair around.” He stopped, and then his voice lowered into the bedroom voice that had melted her the night before. “I’d much rather wake up next to Laura.”

Oh, please, he mustn’t feel the catch in her throat at his words. If ever a man had fired a warning shot across the bow…. She felt raw and exposed, and more than a little afraid.

“Believe me,” his hand gently swept the hair off her neck, and she felt his fingers in that sensitive area right below her hairline, “you do just fine.”

She tilted her head to glance back at him, and if that happened to give him greater access to her neck so that she could melt right down into the ground, it was just a bonus. “Richard, what are you doing?” Her protest didn’t sound very convincing. “There are people around.”

He looked down at her, laughing. “Definitely Laura and not Cat. And what is it I’m doing?”

“Something you shouldn’t be doing in public,” she said primly, which earned her another laugh. She didn’t resist when he pulled her back against him. She could feel his heart against her back, his breath against the crown of her head, and she could definitely feel the effects of his voice and mouth. Her toes hadn’t curled like that in a long time. “That dome seems so strange to see on the back of the house. Every picture you ever see of Monticello shows the dome – I thought it was in the front.”

“It is in the front.” Richard sounded normal, unaffected by the closeness of their bodies. “There’s no rear to the house. Jefferson considered that the house had two fronts, east and west.”

“Have you ever been up to the dome?”