Sudden Pleasures (31 page)

“It would have been inconvenient to stay in a hotel,” he said. “I needed to be where the wardrobe was. It’s my business! And how the devil was I supposed to tell you? ‘Oh, by the way, baby, our hostess relieved me of my virginity when I was sixteen, but don’t let it bother you. She’s a real nice gal.’”

“Don’t you dare hide behind your business, Ryan! All you had to do was explain to me about that summer. I would have understood. Do you think I’m so unsophisticated that I would have had a hissy fit, and refused to stay with the contessa? Hell, the woman is over twenty years older than you are, even if she does still look good, and after all, I am your wife. If you were still in love with Bianca di Viscontini you would have married her. But you should have told me, and you didn’t. How can I ever trust you again, Ryan? How do I know what else you are keeping from me?”

“Baby, listen to me.”

“Do you have something I could possibly want to hear, Ryan? I don’t think so. At least not now. The couch in your office opens into a bed. Go sleep there tonight.”

Suddenly his voice was cold. “I will not sleep in my office while my mother and the rest of my family are in the house,” he snapped. “You can make whatever arrangement you want tomorrow when they are gone, but not tonight.”

“Very well,” Ashley agreed. “Tomorrow I will return to my old bedroom. You can have this. And, Ryan, you are not to tell anyone that I am pregnant. I had intended announcing our
happy
news tonight, until your sister decided to drop her bombshell.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It would have been a bit anticlimactic, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m going to bed,” she replied, and she slept as far away from him as she could that night, taking the bolster that usually lay at the head of their bed and running it lengthwise like a barrier between them. But the real barrier was the fact that he was a fool, Ryan knew.

The next morning they joined their guests for the breakfast buffet before the limousine arrived to transport them all home. The chatter was light and inconsequential. And afterward Ryan’s eldest sister, the formidable Bride, took Ashley aside.

“I want to apologize for my sister,” she began. “Okay, so we all were counting our chickens before they hatched, and Ryan’s marriage took us by surprise. Especially as neither of you made any bones about the fact that it was to save yourselves, and not true love. But we’re not fools. Well, maybe Dee is. We can see that you and Ryan do love each other at this point, and we don’t want to see either of you unhappy because Dee can’t get over her past. She hurt a lot of people last night. I’m sorry. The rest of us feel terrible about what she did. I hope you won’t hold it against us. This was really a wonderful Christmas, and to be honest, we haven’t had such a nice time in years. Any of us.”

“Apology accepted,” Ashley said. “And don’t worry, Bride. I’m not going to throw your brother out. But he is going to get a very hard lesson in sensitivity training. I do love the big lug.”

Bride smiled warmly. “Geez,” she said. “You really are the right wife for him, Ashley. He needs someone who won’t put up with his crap. We’re with you all the way.” And Bride Mulcahy Franklin actually hugged her sister-in-law.

“What’s that all about?” Ryan murmured to Frankie.

“I think your wife has just joined the enemy,” Frankie replied with a grin. “Serves you right too, dummy.”

“No lectures, kid,” he growled at her. “You don’t want me poking into why you buy sexy apparel from Lacy Nothings now, do you?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” Frankie said mysteriously.

“Hey, Uncle Ryan, could I talk to you a minute?” Frankie’s son asked.

Ryan looked to his youngest sister.

“Oh, go ahead,” she said. “He’ll never let you be until he does. Make it quick, Michael. The car is here, and we’ve got to go.”

Ashley bade each of her guests good-bye, and Deirdre burst into tears as she faced her hostess.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “It’s the change. It makes me do cruel, stupid things.”

“It’s okay, Dee,” Ashley assured the woman, but she thought,
I’ll probably never really like you for what you did last night.

“I don’t know why I said what I said,” Deirdre sobbed. “Robert is mad as hell at me now, and I don’t blame him. I really am sorry.” Then she joined the rest of them in the limousine.

Ashley almost felt sorry for her as her sisters moved away from the weeping Deirdre, and she heard Bride tell her sibling to belt up and stop howling.

“Can you ever forgive him?” Angelina asked before she too entered the car.

“Of course,” Ashley murmured low. “But not until I’ve taught him a lesson about trust. You trusted your husband, didn’t you? And he you?”

Her mother-in-law nodded. “Trust is every bit as important as love and sex,” she answered. “Don’t be too hard on him,
cara
. Men have many virtues, but usually common sense isn’t among them. And men, for all their sizes and ages, never really grow up. They are all boys at heart, no matter how old they get. Trust me on that one.” She kissed Ashley’s cheek. “You will go into church before the baby is born, won’t you? It would make me very happy if you did.”

Ashley colored. “Did Ryan tell you? I’ll kill him!”

Angelina shook her head in the negative. “
Cara
,” she said, “I’ve borne seven children. I know the signs. I won’t say anything until you are ready to make your announcement, and then I shall be totally surprised with the rest of them.”

Ashley laughed softly. “I can see I won’t get much past you, Lina. I was going to tell everyone last night, but then Deirdre started babbling.”

“Of course, and then afterward you could say nothing.”

“I’ll call you,” Ashley said, and then she ushered her mother-in-law into the car. She stood with Ryan as the stretch limousine drove down the hill and out of sight.

“Come in out of the cold,” he said to her.

Wordlessly Ashley reentered the house. “I think,” she told her husband, “that you’d better stay in town for a few days. I’m sure R&R could use your presence.”

“Are you kicking me out?” he wanted to know.

“Only for a few days,” she said. “Go tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to go,” he said stubbornly, following her upstairs into their little sitting room. “I want to straighten this out right now.”

“Ryan, there is nothing to straighten out. I do not hold a youthful indiscretion against you any more than you hold Carson, Chandler, and Derek against me. But as I told you last night, I would have liked to have known about Bianca before I accepted her hospitality. Did she know I didn’t know?”

“Yes. A few nights before we left Venice we talked. She told me I should have told you, but that, not having done so, I had best remedy the error sooner than later,” Ryan said.

“You spoke on the terrace below our bedroom. I saw you,” Ashley responded.

“You never said anything,” he replied, surprised.

“No, I didn’t. I assumed you would speak of it eventually, and I certainly didn’t suspect you of any infidelity,” Ashley said. “I didn’t believe you were that kind of man. Now I’m not so certain about that.”

“I am not that kind of man,” he said.

“If you say so,” Ashley responded dryly.

Ryan gritted his teeth. Why the hell was she making this so difficult? So he hadn’t told her that Bianca banged him when he was sixteen. So what? “I’m not going anywhere,” he repeated.

“I’ll sleep in my old room then,” Ashley told him.

“Go ahead,” he said. “You’ll miss me, baby. You will.”

“I’ll survive,” Ashley answered him sharply. “You would be surprised at how well I can survive without your exalted presence, darling.” But she hated sleeping alone now. And she wasn’t interested in uninhibited sex on the Channel either. What she really wanted was to talk with her brother. He’d been dead for so long, but she still missed him. Ben always knew how to help her. Ashley had always used the Channel for sex, but now she wondered if she couldn’t use it to bring her brother back. Oh, she knew he wouldn’t really be there, but she needed someone of her own to talk to, not someone on Ryan’s side, no matter how nice they were.

Ben
, she said to herself,
I want you back. I have to talk with you. Let’s meet down on the beach. Remember that October day when we just sat and talked? That’s what I want now. For us to sit and talk.
She pressed the button that let the wall covering the flat screen television open. She pressed the on button on the channel changer, programmed in the Channel, and then she hit the A button, and enter. And there she was on the beach below the bluff on which Kimbrough Hall stood. And there was her brother, Ben, coming toward her. She ran into his arms. Though he would be over forty now, he looked as he always had.

“Hey, kiddo, what’s the matter?” he asked, his blue eyes sympathetic. He led her to the bench by the water’s edge. “Tell your big brother, and I’ll try to make it all right.”

“Oh, Benji, why did you have to get killed in that damned war?” she asked him.

“Hey, kiddo, that was my fate, but you didn’t fantasize me just to ask that. What’s the problem?”

Ashley started to cry, and between sobs she told him.

Ben listened quietly, and then when she had concluded her tale of woe he said, “Kiddo, you know you can’t hold it against him that he was either too dumb or too scared shitless to tell you about the contessa. You’ve married one of the good guys.”

“But I don’t think he would ever have told me about her if his damned sister hadn’t shot her mouth off,” Ashley said.

“Have you told him about the Channel?” Ben asked her.

Ashley’s jaw dropped, but then she quickly said, “That’s different!”

“Nope, it isn’t, kiddo,” Ben told her. “Look, everyone has something in his or her life that for whatever reason they don’t want to share. It doesn’t mean they’re thoughtless or being dishonest. It just means they don’t want to share it. You going to tell Ryan about the Channel, Ashley?”

“Of course not! It’s a women’s thing. No woman who gets the Channel talks about it to a man,” she replied. “It’s an unwritten rule.”

“I rest my case, kiddo,” Ben said. “Look, Ashley, we never know what’s going to come at us in life. I never expected to die in Desert Storm. Frankie never expected to lose her husband in the attack on the Twin Towers. You don’t want to waste a moment of the time you’re given. So Ryan
neglected
to tell you about the contessa. Maybe he was never going to tell you about her. Call it a sin of omission.” He smiled at her. “Hey, kiddo, you love him. Now don’t waste any more time being pissed at him. I can tell you that you’ve scared him to death, Ashley. He won’t make the same mistake again.” Ben laughed, and his eyes crinkled just the way she remembered them doing.

“I miss you so much,” Ashley said. “You’re right about Ryan. He’s smart in so many ways, but where women are concerned he’s just a big dumb jock. And I do love him. I really got lucky, Benji, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, kiddo, you did,” her brother said wistfully, with a smile.

“We’re having a baby,” Ashley confided.

“Yeah, I know,” Ben replied.

“I think I got pregnant that last night in Venice,” she told him.

“Nope,” he said, a twinkle in his blue eyes. “But it was before you got back to Egret Pointe, kiddo.”

“Not that last night, but before we got back?” And then Ashley blushed a deep pink color, remembering their trip.

“Yeah.” Ben chuckled. “It was then.” He put his arm around her and gave her a loving squeeze. “Well, I’ve got to be going now, kiddo.”

“Can we talk again?” Ashley asked him.

He shook his head. “You’re not on the Channel this time, little sister. You’re dreaming,” he explained. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise. The folks who run the Channel aren’t on my boss’s invite list. But the place is harmless for most women. They don’t linger that long as a rule.”

“But I distinctly remember turning on the television and programming you in as a new fantasy,” Ashley insisted.

“Did you, Ashley? Maybe you were just too tired and upset to realize what you were doing.” He stood up, and she did too. Then Ben Kimbrough bent down and kissed his younger sister gently. “So long, kiddo. Oh, Granddad and our folks say hello.”

And before Ashley could say another word her brother began walking down the beach, disappearing into a mist that had suddenly come in off of the water. “Ben,” she said softly, but he was gone, and the mist was surrounding her too. To her great surprise she awoke. The flat-screen television was still hidden behind its wall. The remote lay on the nightstand next to her bed. Beyond her bedroom windows the day was gray, and she could see that snow had begun to fall.

Ashley slowly got out of bed.
Ben!
She had spoken to her brother. She had! She smiled. And as always his advice had been good. It was good now. She was going to take it, because she didn’t want to end up like Deirdre, foolish and bitter. Glancing at the clock on the mantel, she saw it was about to strike six a.m. Ashley opened the door to her old bedroom and hurried down the hall to where Ryan lay sleeping in their own bed. Entering the room, she slipped into bed beside him, and at once his arm encircled her.