Chapter 8 #2
Miles fought the covers beneath which he was sleeping as his dreams jumped from one crazy scenario to another.
One minute he was flying high above the ground without a plane, flapping his arms like a gut-shot crow and trying to find a safe place to land, and the next moment he was standing in the middle of the intersection where Casey had had her wreck, watching in mute horror as her black sports car and the one-ton truck with which she had collided kept coming at him over and over from different angles.
Each time he would escape being crushed between their vehicles, the scene would rewind and replay.
On a nearby street corner, his grandmother kept pointing her finger and shouting, “I told you so! I told you so!”
He awoke bathed in sweat, only then aware that it was pouring down rain and the electricity was off.
He cursed the bad taste in his mouth and got up with a thump just as the power returned.
He could tell because his digital clock started blinking and the security lights outside came on all at once, returning a familiar pale glow to the curtains at his window.
He shoved them aside, looking down through the rain to the lawn below, and knew that the weather tomorrow would be miserable. The air would feel like a sauna and the bar ditches would be filled and overflowing.
“What the hell?”
There, through the rain, he thought he saw movement! He watched, staring harder, trying to focus on the shape. Just as he was about to reach for the phone to call the police, the figure moved within a pale ring of a security light and Miles froze, his hand in midair.
“Him.” He stepped forward, all but pressing his nose against the glass for a better look.
There was no mistaking who it was below.
It was Ryder, half-dressed and moving at what seemed a desperate pace.
He watched until the man disappeared from view before settling back down in his bed, his drink of water forgotten.
Long after it had stopped raining and he was back in bed, he kept wondering what would drive a man out of his bed and into a night like this?
Had he and Casey fought? A twinge of guilt pushed at the edge of his conscience.
She had gone through some hell of her own today.
Tomorrow he’d send her some flowers. Having settled that, he turned over and quickly fell back asleep.
It didn’t occur to Miles that Casey would ultimately wind up paying for her own flowers, and if it had, he wouldn’t have cared.
To Miles, it was the thought that would count.
* * *
Lash awoke with a curse. Water was dripping from the ceiling and onto his left cheek.
He got up to push his bed to a new location and stubbed his toe in the dark.
The roof leaked. What else was new? The real problem lay in the fact that he was sleeping on the ground floor and it was still coming in through the ceiling.
He didn’t even want to think how the upper two stories of Graystone would be suffering tonight.
Cursing his wet bed and sore toe, he crawled back between the sheets, turned his damp pillow to the other side, and lay down.
Only sleep wouldn’t come. No matter how hard he tried, his mind refused to relax.
He thought of the phone call he’d had this afternoon from the police.
Just for a moment before they’d completely explained, he’d thought they’d been calling to inform him of Casey’s death, and then he realized that because he was the family lawyer, they’d called to tell him where they’d towed her car.
What bothered him most about the incident was the lack of emotion he’d felt at the news. He loved her. At least he thought he had. Wasn’t a man supposed to cry at such a loss?
He closed his eyes, trying to imagine Casey dead, picturing the hordes of people that would come to her funeral, of the eulogy he would have delivered expounding her life.
He saw her lying in the casket, beautiful even in death, and felt guilt that he was letting himself play so lightly with something as serious as her life.
He rolled over, taking the sheets with him as turned on his side, still haunted by the sight of her face. As he tried to sleep, his thoughts began to unfurl like jumbled up scenes in an unedited movie.
In one scene, she stared at him, cool and patient, and he realized that he was remembering the way she’d looked the day of the reading of the will.
He tossed, rolling himself and the covers to the other side of the bed where Casey lay in wait for his arrival.
There she stood again, her face a study in shock that slowly turned to a cold, white rage.
He remembered that well. It was the way she’d looked when he’d announced the terms of Delaney Ruban’s will.
He groaned. He could have talked Delaney out of the foolishness.
Oh God, if only I had. But it was too late.
Lash had presumed too much and he knew it.
Who could have known? The Casey he thought he knew would never have gone into the flatlands and come out married to some hitchhiker, to some stranger she found in a bar.
And therein lay part of Lash’s dilemma. He’d bet his life and the restoration of his family’s honor on a woman who had never existed outside the realm of his imagination. In other words, he’d bet the farm on a woman who didn’t exist.
“Casey.”
The sound of her name on his lips made him crazy.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling.
If things had gone the way they should have, she would be here, right now, in bed beside him.
He closed his eyes and saw her smile, imagined he could feel the touch of her hand on his face, the breath of her laughter against his neck.
He reached out, tracing the shape of her body with his fingertips, watching her eyes as they grew heavy with passion.
He grew hot, then hard and aching, and when there was no one around to take care of the need, he reached down and dealt with it on his own, calling her name aloud as his body betrayed him.
* * *
“More flowers for little sister,” Joshua announced, carrying another vase of cut flowers into the library and setting them on a table just out of the sunlight.
Casey smiled, more at the use of her childhood name than for the flowers he carried into the room. She started to get up when he waved her back.
“You stay where you’re put,” he ordered. “I’ll be bringin’ those cards to you.”
Casey laughed. “You sure are bossy today.”
Joshua lifted the card from the flowers and dropped it in her lap.
“No more than usual, I’d say.”
He straightened the edge of the blue afghan covering her legs then patted her knee as he’d done so often when she was a child.
His dark eyes searched the marks on her face.
Her lip was no longer swollen, but the bruises were spreading and the scratches had scabbed over.
The sights deepened the frown on his brow.
He couldn’t have cared for her more if she’d been born of his blood.
“You be needin’ anything, you just give me a ring, you hear?”
Casey reached out and caught his hand, pulling it to her cheek.
“Thank you, Joshie…for everything.”
He shook his head, embarrassed at emotion he couldn’t hide. “Don’t need to thank me for doing my job,” he muttered, and stalked out of the room as fast as his legs would take him.
Casey glanced at the card, then back at the flowers.
These were from Libertine Delacroix and they were pulling double duty: get-well sympathies and congratulations on Casey’s recent wedding.
She smiled. If Delaney were here he would be eating this up.
Libertine was at the top of the county’s social echelon.
She had a summer home in Ruban Crossing and the family home on the river outside of Jackson.
The doorbell rang at the same time that the telephone pealed. Aware that Joshua couldn’t be in two places at once, she picked up the phone.
“Ruban residence.”
“Casey? Is that you?”
It was Lash. At that moment, she wished with all her heart that she’d let the darned thing ring.
“Yes, it’s me. What can I do for you?”
She heard him clear his throat and could imagine the papers he would be shuffling as he gathered his thoughts. However, he surprised her with a quick retort.
“I heard about your accident and am so very glad that you’re all right.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, well… I know this may be an inconvenient time, but I was wondering if I might come by. There are some papers you need to sign.”
She frowned. The last person she wanted to see was Lash and the last thing she wanted to do was think about her grandfather’s death. But if there were more papers to sign regarding Delaney’s will, she would have to do both.
“Well, I was just about to—”
“It won’t take long.”
She was honest enough to know that what she’d done by marrying Ryder had probably ended a lifetime of plans Lash must have had.
Everyone knew that Lash’s father had gone through the Marlow money as if it had been water and that his mother had run off with a trucker soon afterward.
Everyone also knew that while Lash was a lawyer of the courts, his only ambitions leaned toward the restoration of his family name and the family home.
And, if she’d married him as Delaney had planned, it could have happened.
He would have had unlimited money at his disposal.
She shuddered. It was a wonder he didn’t hate her guts. She thought of the wedding gift he’d sent that was still in her desk drawer at the office. In spite of his own disappointment, Lash had found it within himself to do the right thing and wish her well. She sighed. Guilty conscience won out.
“I suppose so,” she said. “If it won’t take long.”
“Certainly not, my dear. I can promise that what I need won’t take long at all.”
“Then I’ll be waiting.”