The Bourbon Kings

“I don’t care,” came Gin’s voice with greater clarity. “It’s just at the courthouse.”

“Your father is dead.”

Lizzie recoiled, bringing her hand to her mouth. What?

Richard Pford continued, “We will wait to be married until after the funeral.”

“I’m not mourning him.”

“Of course not. That would require having a heart, and we both know that the absence of one is an anatomical anomaly of yours.”

Lizzie backed off. Stumbled. Fell into the dresser.

After a moment, she continued with the wipe down and then went back to the door into the hall. Her heart was beating so loudly, she couldn’t hear well enough and decided, screw it. If she got caught, what were they going to do to her?

She could just tell anyone she was checking for flowers.

But no one was out there.

Blindly heading for the staff stairs, her mind was racing, her thoughts slamming into one another, splintering, falling to pieces.

At the core, though, she came to one, inescapable conclusion.

She had made a terrible mistake.

The kind for which forgiveness was going to be next to impossible.

Down on the first floor, she stopped dead in her tracks. And realized that, of all the places to stall out, she had picked Rosalinda’s office.

William Baldwine was dead, too.

How? she wondered. What had happened to him?

In a series of flashes, she saw Lane standing in the greenhouse, his face shut down, his voice flat as asphalt. Then she heard his friend telling her that, contrary to happily banging Chantal on the side, Lane had seen no one, done nothing.

And then the bomb burst in that mirror upstairs. And the lingerie.

Her last image was of Chantal out by the pool that morning when the woman had insisted on a refresher on her lemonade.

At the time, the fact that she had been wearing a silk wrap hadn’t seemed especially significant. But now …

She’d been pregnant and just starting to show. Which was why she had asked for a virgin—no alcohol.

Chantal had been sleeping with William Baldwine. Cheating on the son with the father. And she had become pregnant.

She must have told William, Lizzie thought. After the Derby.

And the man had lost it. And hit her up in that dressing room.

Then he had kicked her out of the house. Or something like that.

Shaking her head, Lizzie put her hands to her hot face and tried to breathe.

Her one and only thought was that she had to make it right with Lane. She had condemned him based on her own fear of being hurt again …

… when in reality there was a very, very strong possibility that, in fact, he’d had nothing to do with any of it.

Dropping her arms, she knew words were not going to be enough. Not for this one.

When the solution came to her, she checked her watch. If she hurried …

Breaking out into a run, she flashed through the kitchen, and Miss Aurora looked up from the stove.

“Where you going?” the woman asked. “What’s on fire?”

Lizzie skidded into the door out to the garages. “I’ve got to go to Indiana. If you see Lane, tell him I’m coming back. I’m coming back!”

FIFTY

It was actually pretty nice out here, Lane thought as he took a seat in the garden.

Looking around at the ivy-covered walls and the orderly flower beds, across the sparkling blue pool and the French doors of the business center, he imagined all the work that it took to maintain this “natural” beauty.

It was impossible not to picture Lizzie out here, but he shut that down quick.

No reason to bother with those kinds of things.

Bowing his head, he rubbed his eyes. Samuel T. had called about the situation with Chantal, and he knew he had to call the guy back. Mitch had also left a message, likely about the preliminary results of the autopsy. And meanwhile, up on the second floor, Jeff was going through all the financial stuff.

There were funeral arrangements to be made.

He had no energy to deal with any of it.

Damn it, Miss Aurora, he thought. Let me go. Just let me get out of this.

He loved that woman so much. He owed her even more. And yet even with his momma kicking him in the can, he just wasn’t in this fight anymore.

Raising his eyes to Easterly’s incredible white expanse, he stared at the mansion as a real estate appraiser would. Sutton Smythe’s mortgage notwithstanding, they could probably clear most of the debt with Prospect Trust by a sale of the place.

Hell, with his father dead, maybe he could just go to Sutton and ask her not to send the money and rip up that mortgage?

Edward, he thought. He would send Edward to do that one.

Or maybe not. Maybe he would simply let it all go.

Maybe instead of trying to fly this broken aircraft they were all in, he would let the goddamn thing crash into a mountainside.

He might die a coward who had let his momma down, but at least it would be over with faster than trying to yank at the controls and attempt to land on some airstrip far, far below—

Lane?

He closed his eyes. Great. He was starting to hallucinate.

Like Lizzie would actually come find—

“Lane?”

Jerking around on the stone bench, he saw that … well, hypothetically, he saw that she was standing a couple feet away from him.

And what do you know, in the light of the very late afternoon, she was as beautiful as she had always been. Natural, lovely, with her bright blue eyes and her sun-streaked hair, and that Easterly uniform that really shouldn’t have been sexy, but which was on her.