Page 64 of The Lost Heiress
Astrid smiled at her. “Oh, yes! Though I think I may have drunk too much last night. I have a bugger of a headache. How’d you sleep?”
Florence just looked at her, searching her eyes for a sign of distress, a secret SOS, and finding none. She couldn’t understand it. For a moment, she doubted her own sanity. RJ had put his hands around Astrid’s neck and pressed her up against the wall, hadn’t he? That wasn’t some crazed, alcohol-fueled dream? No, she’d seen the primal anger in his eyes and the fear on Astrid’s face when she couldn’t breathe. That was real, a wake-time nightmare—she knew it in her bones.
“Fine,” Florence said, her voice a bit hoarse. “I slept fine.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
August 1982
Ransom Towers was distracted. In the House committee meeting on transportation and infrastructure, his mind wandered from the drafting of the Infrastructure Revitalization Act back to that last heated conversation he’d had with Bass on the tennis court. Where did Bass get off, prying into the private details of his personal life? Instructing him on what was appropriate or wise? Of course Ransom knew what the right thing to do was, and of course he had done it all on his own, without having to be expressly told. It was irritating—insulting, even—that Bass obviously did not trust his judgment enough to see through to the truth of the matter: that nothing untoward had happened between him and Ana in that hotel room in LA, however much Ransom had wanted it to.
Ransom thought of Ana then, how she had sat next to him on the couch in that dimly lit room. The way she had looked at him—so deeply, so intently—when he spoke, as if she were trying to figure him out as earnestly as he was trying to discern her. She had seemed so unaffected, so honest and sincere, so plainly herself that it intrigued him, drew him to her.
He was so intently focused on the image of her face in his mind’s eye, so distracted, that he missed the cochair of the committee calling on him. He looked up, dazed, in the middle of the meeting, when another congressman reached over and tapped him on the shoulder.
All week it continued like that. In his staff briefing, he stumbled over his words and made Jacqueline repeat three times the schedule for the day. He had trouble keeping his thoughts in line or his attention where it should be. When he lay down to sleep at night and closed his eyes, it was Ana’s face he saw—her bright-green eyes and those soft, slightly pursed lips.
So much of his life was about duty. He so rarely got to do what he actually wanted. It had almost become foreign to him to follow impulse, to chase desire, because he had denied himself those things for so long. He’d lost count of all the things he had given up, stopped cataloguing them in his mind, but he felt every day the two greatest losses: without putting up a fight or hesitating in the slightest, he’d abandoned both the career he’d dreamed of since he was a boy and the girl he had loved. The two defining coordinates of a person’s life—what they did and who they spent it with. Maybe he had finally reached some sort of internal threshold of how much he could deny himself before he imploded.
And so late Saturday afternoon, after leaving a fundraising luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel, he hadn’t gone back to his town house on the Hill but had gone to the airport, where he chartered a private jet to fly him home. He’d arrived at Cliffhaven around midnight, the whole house dark and sleeping, and crept off to his room as silently as he could.
“What, do you live here now?” Saoirse asked the next morning when she ran into him in the hall. He made an excuse about some work that had to be done for the party, and she rolled her eyes and continued on her way.
He found Ana in the dining room, eating breakfast. She was wearing overalls and Converse, one leg pulled under her on the chair, and she had her head thrown back, laughing, when he entered the room. Ransom quickly gleaned the source of her amusement—next toher was Salvador Santos, drinking a cup of coffee, smiling, and looking very pleased with himself, like the cat that got the cream. Saoirse’s words from their dinner conversation at the Sunset Lounge the other week floated reluctantly back to Ransom, and something sharp and unpleasant tightened in his chest. “The two of you are always sitting next to each other at the breakfast table, whispering together. You’re not sweet on him?”
“Ransom,” Salvador called out as soon as he saw him. He scooted back his chair and rose to greet him. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Santos,” Ransom said and crossed the room to shake his hand. His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “How are you?”
“I can hardly complain,” Salvador said, glancing back at Ana. “Good food, good company.” He smiled at Ransom. “Come, join us. We were just finishing breakfast and talking about our plans for the day.”
“Yes, Salvador is being boring,” Ana said, taking a bite of her French toast.
“I’m afraid I’ve disappointed Ana,” Salvador said. “I have errands to run in town.”
“On our one day off!” Ana said, exasperated. “Meanwhile, I plan to be as lazy and unproductive as humanly possible.”
“And how does one accomplish that?” Ransom asked.
“Guilty pleasure reads, lots of napping, and eating copious amounts of food with zero nutritional value,” Ana said. “But I plan to start by hanging by the pool. It’s beautiful out.”
Ransom glanced toward the nearest window, where sunlight was streaming in. “It is nice out,” he agreed. “Mind if I join you?”
“The more the merrier,” Ana said. “Besides, itistechnically your pool.”
It was a hot day in the dead of summer, the sun blazing in the sky, so bright you had to squint to see, and so Ransom kept his Ray-Bans on ashe floated on a tube in the shallow end and waited for Ana. The water felt pleasant in the heat—lukewarm. He tried to remember the last time he’d been in this pool. It’d been years. Theo had been alive, that he could recall. Yes, Theo had had friends staying over from college, and they’d played a game of chicken in the shallow end, not far from where he was now. Ransom recalled gripping the knees of a girl he didn’t know as she sat on his shoulders and tried to wrest another girl from her place on Theo’s shoulders.
“Howdy.”
Ransom looked up to see Ana by one of the sun loungers, a T-shirt on over her swimsuit. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and she had a book in her hand.
“What’re you reading?” Ransom asked.
“Probably something you wouldn’t approve of,” Ana said. She held up the cover. “The Velvet Promise. It’s a romance novel.”
“Are you not getting in?” he asked.
Ana hesitated a moment, as if she wasn’t sure. “It’s roasting out,” she said finally. “I’ll take a quick dip.”
