Ali studied her mother from under her lashes. The hand kiss hadn't looked at all funny to her. And her mother had a flower in her hair.
"Michael seems to think both of you are doing more than just all right."
"You ought to get back into riding yourself, Laura." Delighted with the progress, Margo nibbled on a cube of cheese. No, that palm buss hadn't looked funny. It had looked perfect.
"I'll think about it." Because she wanted to watch Michael climb the hill back to Templeton House, she looked deliberately west, out to sea.
She couldn't sleep. Being bone-tired didn't seem to make any difference. Laura wanted to believe that it was because the night was so clear, so full of stars, that it would be a shame to waste it. But she knew it was the dreams that kept her from bed.
She had begun to dream of him, and the content, the detail of the content, both shocked and amazed her.
She could, with concentration, control her thoughts during the day. But how could she control what snuck into her dreams?
They were so… sexual. "Erotic'' was too tame, too formal a word for what went on in her head during sleep.
She should have been able to accept them, laugh at them, even share them with her friends. But she could do none of those things. Quite simply, she mused as she wandered the silent garden, because she had done none of those things that her subconscious created.
That rough, sweaty, elemental sex was a far cry from the dreams of her girlhood—except for those few scattered and shocking dreams she'd had about Michael as a girl. Those had been hormonal aberrations, Laura assured herself, not wishes. And they were best forgotten. In any case, most of her dreams had been soft, lovely, when she'd imagined love in all its forms to be tender and sweet. There'd been no ripping of fabric, no bruising hands or frantic cries of release in her innocent fantasies.
And none, she thought with a grimace, in the reality of her marriage.
Peter had never torn her clothes, dragged her to the ground, driven her to screams. He had, long ago, been tender, almost sweet. Then he had been disinterested. She would take the blame for that, for being too inhibited, too naive, too rigid perhaps to inspire in him unthinking lust. It was easier to accept, and perhaps to start to forgive, his faithlessness now that she understood those darker needs.
Now that those darker needs had been awakened in her.
But dreaming of wild sex and acting on such dreams were still two different matters. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her jacket, breathed in the night, and hoped to cool her thoughts before bed.
She would not go to Michael. Whether it was cowardice or wisdom, she would not go to him. He was beyond her scope, she decided as she walked through the arbor and studied the dark stables with the swirl of fog at their base. He was both too dangerous and too unpredictable for a woman with her responsibilities.
And despite the years he had been Josh's friend, she didn't know him. Certainly didn't understand him. Couldn't risk him.
So she would be what she had been raised to be: a strong woman who understood and met her obligations. She would fill her life with what she had been so fortunate to be given. Children, home, family, friends, work.
She needed nothing else. Not even in dreams.
She saw the lights flash on in the apartment above the stables. Like a voyeur caught spying, she slipped back into the shadows. Did he dream too? she wondered. Of her? Did those dreams make him restless and achy and confused?
Even as she wondered, she saw him come bursting out of the door, hair flying. His boots echoed hard on the steps as he raced down them and into the stables.
She stood where she was a moment longer, unsure. But something was wrong. A man like Michael Fury didn't run in a panic for nothing. He was a tenant of Templeton House, she reminded herself. And she was a Templeton.
Self-preservation could never hold out against duty. Laura ran across the lawn with the moonlight chasing her.
There were lights on inside the stable now. Laura shielded her eyes against the glare, but she didn't see him. She hesitated again, wondering if she should leave. Then she heard his voice, the words low and unintelligible. But the concern in them was clear. She walked down the wide brick aisle and looked into the open foaling stall.
He was kneeling beside a horse, his hair falling forward like a black wing to curtain his face. His dark T-shirt was rumpled and revealed arms toughly muscled and the faint shine of a thin scar above his left elbow. She saw his hands, wide, tanned, gently stroking the bulge of the mare's heaving sides.
She had a moment to think that no woman on the brink of childbirth could ever want for more loving comfort, then she was inside, kneeling with him.
"She's going to foal. There, sweetheart." Instinctively, she went to the mare's head. "It's all right."
"Always in the middle of the night." Michael blew his hair out of his eyes. "I heard her upstairs. Guess I've been listening for her."
"Have you called the vet?"
"Shouldn't need him. Last time he checked her out, he said i
t should go smooth." In an impatient move, he tugged a bandanna out of his back pocket. "What are you doing here?"