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

Courtney shook out her great mane, Diana as she had stood before him a few weeks before, offering, yielding, finally granting the desire long ago extinguished in the cold nights when he had reached for her and she had not been there.
“My wish to love you
My wish to seek you
In the silk of warm summer winds….”
    Cat Courtney looked pale, he noticed, tired beneath her stage smile. A few months before, ill health had forced her to cancel a concert tour, and a photo of the Great Cat in silhouette at a New York ballet had given rise to a rumor of a possible pregnancy. A false rumor, certainly. Her gown clung to the slender figure she had bewailed as a young girl.
    “I like her dress,” Julie whispered. “Is she as pretty as you remember?”
    “Prettier,” he whispered back, and looked through the autumnal goddess to the child twenty years gone, a child who had cheerfully given up her Saturday mornings to fly model planes with him, a child who had unabashedly loved him and trusted him never to break her heart.
    He glanced at his watch.
“Across the earth,
Across the heavens
I will seek you with my heart….”
    Cat Courtney sang for two and a half hours with only one break. By the clock, she gave a satisfying performance; by his heart, it lasted interminably. For the better part of an hour, she accompanied herself on the grand piano for a set of throbbing ballads, one of which summoned such arousing images to mind that he forced himself to think hasty thoughts about his income tax. That song, thank God, sailed right over Julie’s head.
    “That was awfully sad, don’t you think, Dad?”
    After an intermission, Cat Courtney turned from goddess into glamor queen, in an abbreviated black dress that showed off her long legs and most of her bosom. Maybe she changed to keep cool under the hot lights of the stage, but not a single male in the audience failed to appreciate the cleavage appearing centimeter by centimeter. Cat seemed not to notice. She switched from songs of love lost and never found to celebrations of love grabbed with both hands, pulsing music meant to stir every blood cell in every man in the theater. By the end of her second encore, he suspected that he was not the only hormonal basket case present.
    Julie revealed an unexpected strain of her Aunt Lucy’s bossiness as the audience started to file out. “Down that aisle, Dad. That’s how you get to the back.”
    He had to exert pressure to keep her still. “Hold on, Julie.” He did not often talk to her in that tone of voice, and she stopped in her tracks. “Look, I’m serious that this might not be a good idea. I don’t think Laura wants to see us—”
    “Let’s try , Dad, please.”
    “Or anyone else,” he continued inexorably. “She was a very unhappy girl when she left. Don’t you think she would have gotten in touch with someone – maybe not me, but at least Lucy – if she wanted to see us again?”
    The crowd eddied out around them, but he heard none of them, he felt none of the jostling. The world had narrowed down to his daughter absorbing the bitter taste of the tragedy that had torn the family apart. He had protected her from the folly of his marriage for the whole of her life, but he could not protect her forever.
    She laid her other hand on top of his. “We have to try,” she said. “I know what you’re saying, really I do. You mean that I shouldn’t get my hopes up because maybe she’ll refuse to see us, right? But it’s okay, Dad, honest. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t want to see us. She’ll know we came, and maybe someday – well, someday she might be lonely or sick or she’ll need us for something, and she’ll know we still love her. She’ll know it’s okay to come home.”
    The lights overhead caught shadows on her face, and he saw again the splendid young beauty her mother had once been. But it had been a long time since Diana had looked that innocent.
    Diana’s heart had never been that loving.
    So they