The Bourbon Kings

“Gin?”

When she didn’t turn around, but just stayed fixated on the river, he put his hand on her arm—

She wheeled around so fast that her mint julep splashed all over his jacket, leaving a damp line across his midsection.

Not that he cared.

“Jumpy much?” he drawled, trying to recover some of his mojo.

“I’m so sorry.” She reached forward with a little monogrammed cocktail napkin. “Oh, I’ve ruined—”

“Please. I have a backup in the trunk.”

Mostly because he always sweated at the boxes at the track and he’d be damned if he’d spend the rest of the night in that kind of mess.

“So, ready for the big day?” she said as he took off his jacket.

He was folding the thing over his arm when it dawned on him that she wasn’t meeting his eyes.

“Well?” she prompted. “My brother has a horse in the running. Maybe two? Sired by that nasty bastard Nebekanzer.”

Still no eye contact.

Under his breath, he muttered, “I hate jumping out of airplanes.”

That got her to look at him. But only for a moment. “What?”

As those blue eyes of hers went back out to the river, he cursed. “Listen … Gin.”

“Yes?”

She was so still, he thought. And so much smaller than he was. Funny, he never noticed the height difference when they were going at it—nearly a hundred pounds less and six inches shorter didn’t mean a thing when that mouth of hers was going to hell and back.

He took a deep breath. “So I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday. And honestly … you’re right. You’re absolutely right. About everything.”

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to get in response—but the slump of her shoulders was not it. She seemed … utterly defeated.

“I’m not any better at this than you are,” he said. “But I want to … well … goddamn it, Gin, I love—”

“Stop,” she blurted. “Don’t say it. Please … not now. Don’t—”

“Good morning, Samuel T. How are you?”

The appearance of a third party registered about as much as a house fly passing through would have.

Except then Richard Pford put his arm around Gin’s waist and kept going with, “Have you told him the good news, darling?”

For the first time in his life, Samuel T. felt the cold wash of horror. Which, considering some of the things he’d done in the last two decades, was saying something.

“And what might that be?” he forced himself to drawl. “You two opening a lucrative organ-selling business over the Internet?”

Pford’s beady little eyes grew nasty. “You have such an active imagination. It helps your clients, I’m sure.”

“With your sense of ethics in business, I wouldn’t be casting stones in that glass house, Pford.” Samuel T. focused on Gin, his chest turning to stone. “So, you have something to tell me, do you?”

By way of reply, Pford took her left hand and thrust it forward. “We’re going to be married. On Monday, actually.”

Samuel T. blinked once. But then smiled. “Marvelous news. Truly—and, Richard, let me be the first to congratulate you. She fucks like a wild animal, especially when you do her from behind—but I’m sure you already know that. Half the country does.”

As Richard began sputtering things, Samuel T. leaned in and kissed Gin on the cheek. “You win,” he whispered in her ear.

Turning away from the happy couple, he went back to his buddies. Grabbed two mint juleps from a passing waiter. Drank them as if they were water.

“What’s on your face?” someone asked him.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re leaking.”

He passed a hand over the eye that was itching and frowned as he saw the wetness. “I got splashed with a drink over there.”

One of his fraternity brothers barked out a laugh. “Some female finally throw one in your face? About time!”

“I got what I deserved, all right,” he said numbly as he grabbed his third julep. “But have no fear, gentlemen. I’m getting back on the horse.”

The table roared, men backslapping him, somebody pulling over a woman and shoving her forward. As she put her arms around his neck and leaned in to his body, he took what was offered, kissing her deeply, feeling her up even though they were in public.

“Oh, Samuel T.,” she whispered against his mouth. “I’ve waited for you to do this to me forever.”

“Me, too, darlin’. Me, too.”

She didn’t know him well enough to recognize the dead tone in his voice. And he couldn’t have cared less about the enthusiasm in hers.

He had to save face somehow … or he wasn’t going to be able to live in his skin for one goddamn minute longer.

Gin was so much better at this game than he was. If she hadn’t just succeeded in shattering his heart into a thousand pieces, he would have given her props.

As Lane pulled Mack’s pickup truck through the stone pillars of the Red & Black Stables, the alley of trees before him seemed a hundred miles long, the cluster of stables and buildings so far off in the distance, they might as well have been in a different state.

Proceeding forward, dust kicked up behind him, boiling in the morning light.

He knew this because he kept checking the rearview to make sure he hadn’t been followed.