All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Read Free

give her a hug for me, will you? Then turn her over your knee and paddle the hell out of her for doing this to us!”
    ~•~
    He felt on edge now. Julie had lent him her excitement, Lucy her hope and anxiety, but his own feelings encompassed so much more than anticipation of a gala evening on the town. It took him three attempts to knot his tie acceptably, and his fingers were so tensed that he could not insert his cuff links. Diana had performed that for him during their first year, when she still liked being his wife, before Julie was conceived and the world fell apart.
    But his thoughts did not linger on Diana, sleeping off her excesses in her secluded chambers. He was keyed up because in an hour he would see her , she who had haunted him for ten years. He would be in the same room with her, he would hear her voice, he would look at that familiar, once-loving face. He did not feel like a husband seeking out an errant young sister-in-law, and he knew it.
    “Oh, Dad, you look so handsome,” said Julie, when he knocked on her door to escort her. “Too bad you can’t have a real date tonight, instead of just me.”
    “And give up taking the prettiest girl in London to the theater?” He smiled down at her. At fifteen, she had all the promise of Diana’s great beauty.
    “Well,” Julie pursued, as they took the lift down to the ground floor, “you shouldn’t be with just a kid. You should be going with – with – someone sophisticated and beautiful – someone like Laura. That’s the sort of woman you should date.”
    He looked at her sharply – he had a longstanding policy of not discussing his private life with anyone, including his daughter – but Julie had inherited the Abbott acting ability, and she was looking particularly innocent right now. He wondered if Lucy had said anything to her and rejected that thought out of hand. Little in life could be counted on, but Lucy’s discretion was solid. Perhaps this was only another manifestation of Julie’s natural longing for a mother, and so he said nothing to her.
    ~•~
    Cat Courtney.
    The Great Cat, a reporter had dubbed her, linking her to that other beauty whose passion for privacy had become the stuff of legend. A merry chase she had led the media these last years, a Cat-and-mouse game played from the safety of a wall of managers and shell corporations. Her New York address was empty, her biography patently false.
    Her fans did not care. She drew them from all walks of life, young, old, her own tired contemporaries. Men sensed that she had long since lost all innocence; women recognized her pain. Cat Courtney knew all the anguish of loving a man who looked right through her.
    You never saw, you never knew, I drifted by, a ghost of a girl….
    She had loved him once. She had followed him around, baked his favorite cookies, defended his wilder ideas, smiled bravely when he married her older sister. He stood before the giant lobby poster of her incredible, lost face, and on cue his shoulder began to ache.
    Thank heavens for Julie. She exclaimed over the ornate settings of the old theater, begged him to buy her the Cat Courtney bear (long curls, provocative outfit, two emerald glass eyes), speculated on the shadowy figures in the boxes, swore she saw Royalty, and fell into blissfully silent worship when the current James Bond took his seat three rows ahead. He retreated from her raptures by reading Laura’s official biography in the glossy program.
    Julie read along. “Is this true, Dad? She’s married to some professor at Harvard?”
    “No.” Lucy had checked that out and found it as false as Cat Courtney’s Foreign Service father or her Juilliard education.
    “Then why—”
    “She doesn’t want us to know, Julie.”
    Indeed, Laura plainly did not. Her manager had so routinely met Lucy’s calls with the statement that Cat Courtney had no living relatives that Lucy had long since abandoned that avenue.
    “I wonder what she’ll sing,” mused Julie,