The Bourbon Kings

He cleared his throat as it rang once. Twice—

“Good morning, this is Mr. William Baldwine’s office. How may I assist you—”

Assuming his father’s clipped business tones, he said, “Get me Monteverdi at Prospect on the line right now.”

“Of course, Mr. Baldwine! Right away.”

Lane cleared his throat again as classical music came across the connection. The good news was that his father was anti-social unless human interaction benefited him business-wise, so it was unlikely there were any recent personal conversations between the two men that would give the lie away.

“Mr. Baldwine, I have Mr. Monteverdi on the line.”

After the click, Monteverdi jumped right in. “Thank you for finally returning my call.”

Lane dropped his tone and added a boatload of Southern: “I need one hundred and twenty-five thousand into the general household—”

“William, I told you. I can’t make any more advances, I just can’t. I appreciate your family’s business, and I am committed to helping you sort all of this out before the Bradford name runs into difficulty, but my hands are tied. I have a responsibility to my board, and you told me the money you borrowed would be repaid by the annual meeting—which is in two short weeks. The fact that you require additional funds—of such a small amount? My confidence is now not high.”

What. The. Hell.

“What is the total owed?” he asked in his father’s heavy Virginian accent.

“I told you in my last voice mail,” Monteverdi bit out. “Fifty-three million. You have two weeks, William. Your choice is to either repay it, or go to JPMorgan Chase and get them to do asset lending against your wife’s primary trust. She has over a hundred million in that account alone, so their lending profile is met. I sent you the paperwork on your private e-mail—all you have to do is put her signature on them and this goes away for the both of us. But let me make myself perfectly clear—I am very exposed in this situation, and I will not permit that to continue. There are remedies I could bring to bear that would be very uncomfortable for you, and I shall use them before anything affects me personally.”

Holy.

Shit.

“I’ll get back to you,” Lane drawled, and hung up.

For a moment, all he could do was stare at his phone. He literally couldn’t string two thoughts together.

Then came the vomiting.

With a sudden heave, he jerked in half, barely getting the wastepaper basket over in time.

Everything that he’d eaten in the staff room came up.

After the gagging subsided, his blood ran cold, the sense that nothing was as it should be making him wonder—then pray—that this was some kind of nightmare.

But he didn’t have the luxury of fading into neutral—or worse, falling apart. He had to deal with the police. His sister. And whatever was going on here …

God, he wished Edward were still around.

TWENTY

An hour later, as Gin slid into the passenger seat of her brother’s dark gray Porsche, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “This has been the worst six hours of my life.”

Lane made some kind of grunt, which could have meant a lot of things—but most certainly didn’t come close to the “Oh, God, I can’t believe you lived through that” she was looking for.

“Excuse me,” she snapped. “But I was just in jail—”

“We’re in trouble, Gin.”

She shrugged. “We made bail, and Samuel T. is going to make sure that it stays out of the press—”

“Gin.” Her brother looked over at her while shooting them into traffic. “We’re in real trouble.”

Later, oh, so much later, she would remember this moment of their eyes meeting across the car’s interior as the start of the downfall, the tip of the first domino that made all the other ones fall so fast it was not possible to stop the sequence.

“What are you talking about?” she asked softly. “You’re scaring me.”

“The family is in debt. Serious debt.”

She rolled her eyes and slashed a hand through the air. “Seriously, Lane, I’ve got bigger problems—”

“And Rosalinda killed herself in the house. Some time in the last two days.”

Gin put a hand to her mouth. And remembered calling the woman and getting no answer just hours ago. “Dead?”

“Dead. In her office.”

It was impossible not to have a case of the skin crawls as she pictured the phone ringing next to the corpse of their controller. “Dear God …”

Lane cursed as he glanced in the rearview mirror and changed lanes with a jerk of the wheel. “The household’s checking account is overdrawn, and our father has somehow managed to borrow fifty-three million dollars from the Prospect Trust Company for God only knows what. And the worst part? I don’t know how much farther this goes and I’m not sure how to find out.”

“What are you … I’m sorry, I don’t understand?”

His reiteration didn’t help her at all.

As her brother fell silent, she stared out the front windshield, watching the road ahead curve to the contour of the Ohio River.

“Father can just repay the money,” she said dully. “He’ll repay it and it’ll all go away—”

“Gin, if you need to borrow that kind of cash, it’s because you’re in deep, deep trouble. And if you haven’t paid it back? You can’t.”