by J. R. Ward
God, she was never going to forget the image of him on the far side of the rail, turning to look at her . . . losing his grip . . . plummeting out of sight--
"Lizzie--"
Throwing up her hands, she tried to keep her voice level. Failed. "If you weren't going to jump, what the hell were you doing out there? You were leaning over the drop, Lane. You were going to--"
"I was trying to find out what it was like."
"Because you wanted to kill yourself," she concluded through a tight throat.
"No, because I wanted to understand him."
Lizzie frowned. "Who? Your father . . . ?" But come on, like he was trying to figure out someone else? "Lane, seriously, there are other ways to come to terms with this."
For example, he could go to a shrink and sit on a different couch from this one. Which would decrease his chances of falling to his death down to zero as he tried to get a handle on what was going on in his life.
And as a bonus, she wouldn't have to worry about becoming a nautical felon.
Wonder if that five-dollar bill was still tucked into that gas cap, she thought.
Lane stretched out one of his arms like it was stiff and cursed as his elbow, or maybe shoulder, made a popping sound. "Look, now that Father is dead, I'm never going to have any answers. I'm stuck here, cleaning up his fucking mess, and I'm resentful as hell and I just don't get it. Anyone can say he was a shitty human being, and that is the truth . . . but that isn't an explanation of the details. And I was staring at your ceiling, not sleeping, and I couldn't stand it anymore. I went to the bridge, I went over the rail to stand where he had stood . . . because I wanted to see what he saw when he was there. I wanted to get an idea of what he'd felt. I wanted answers. There's nowhere else to go for them--and no, I was not there to kill myself. I swear on Miss Aurora's soul."
After a moment, Lizzie sat forward and took his hand. "I'm sorry. I just thought--well, I saw what I did, and you haven't been talking to me about any of this."
"What is there to say? All I'm doing is going around in circles in my head until I want to scream."
"But at least I'd know where you're at. The silence is scary on my end. Your mind is spinning? Well, so is mine."
"I'm sorry." He shook his head. "But I am going to fight. For my family. For us. And trust me, if I were going to commit suicide, the last way I'd end my life is in the same fashion he did. I don't want anything in common with that man. I'm stuck with the DNA, nothing I can do there. But I'm not going to encourage any further parallels."
Lizzie took a deep breath. "Can I help in some way?"
"If there was something you could do, I'd let you know. I promise. But it's all on me right now. I've got to find the missing money, pay back Prospect Trust, and pray to God I can keep the business going. Bradford Bourbon's been around for over two hundred years--it can't end now. It just can't."
As Lane turned to look out of that big window, she studied his face. He was, as her grandmother would have called it, a real looker. Classically handsome, with blue eyes the color of a clear fall sky, and dark hair that was thick between her fingers, and a body that was guaranteed to catch every eye in any room.
But it had not been love at first sight for her. Far from it. The Bradford family's ne'er-do-well youngest son had had pole marks all over him as far as she was concerned--although the truth was that under her disdain had been a vicious attraction she'd moved heaven and earth to ignore. And then they had gotten together . . . and she had fallen in love with him in typical Sabrina fashion.
Well, except in her case, the "staff" was a horticulturalist with a master's in landscape architecture from Cornell.
But then Chantal had gone to the press four weeks later and announced she was engaged to Lane, claiming the child she carried was his. That had ended things for Lizzie, and Lane had married the woman.
Only to disappear up North shortly thereafter.
Horrible. What a horrible time it had been. Following the break-up, Lizzie had done her best to keep working at Easterly and stay focused. But everyone noticed when Chantal suddenly wasn't pregnant anymore.
Come to find out later that the woman hadn't "lost" the baby. She had "taken care" of it at a private clinic up in Cinci.
Unbelievable. And thank God Lane was divorcing her.
Thank God also that Lizzie had seen the light when she had and allowed herself to trust the man, not the reputation. Talk about near misses.
"Sun's coming up," Lane murmured. "It's a new day."
His hand stroked its way up her bare foot and onto her ankle, lingering on her skin in a manner she wasn't sure he was aware of. He did that a lot, touching her absently, as if when his focus shifted away from her, his body was compelled to close the mental distance with physical contact.
"God, I love it out here." He smiled at the golden light that drew long shadows out on her lawn and across the fields that had just been seeded. "It's so quiet."
That was true. Her farmhouse with its tract of land and its distant neighbors was a world away from his family's estate. Out here, the only disturbances were plows off in the distance and the occasional rogue cow.
Easterly was never quiet, even when its rooms were silent. Especially now.
The debt. The deaths. The disorder.
"I just wanted to know what he experienced when he died," Lane said softly. "I want it to have hurt. I want him . . . to have hurt."
Lizzie pointed her toes to stroke his forearm. "Don't feel badly about that. The anger is only natural."
"Miss Aurora would tell me I should pray for him, instead. Pray for his soul."
"That's because your momma is a saint."
"Too right."
Lizzie smiled as she pictured the African-American woman who was more Lane's mother than the woman who had birthed him. Thank God for Miss Aurora's presence in his life. There were so few safe places to go in that huge historic house he'd been raised in, but that kitchen, filled with food both of the soul variety and the French kind, had been a sanctuary.
"I did think you were going to jump," she blurted.
He looked directly at her. "I have too much to live for. I have us."
"I love you, too," she whispered.
God, he seemed so much older than even a week before, when he had arrived on a private jet from his hideaway in Manhattan. He had come back to Easterly to make sure Miss Aurora was okay after she had collapsed. He had stayed home because of everything that had happened in such a short time, the trajectory of his family hitting an iceberg hidden in the currents of fate and destiny, the seemingly impenetrable hull of the Bradfords' two-hundred-year history, of their extraordinary financial and social position, pierced by a reversal of fortune from which a recovery seemed . . . impossible.
"We can leave." Lizzie arched her foot again. "We can sell this place and take the money and live a very nice life far away from all of this."
"Don't think I haven't considered it. And hey, I could support us by playing poker. It's not classy, but I'm learning that bills don't care where the money to cover them comes from." He laughed in a hard burst. "Although my family has been living off of liquor revenue all these years, so how should I ever judge?"
For a moment, her heart sang as she pictured the two of them on another farm in another state, tending a small patch of good, clean earth that yielded corn and carrots and tomatoes and green beans. She would spend her days working for a small city taking care of their municipal plantings. And he would become a teacher at the local high school and maybe coach basketball or football, perhaps both. Together, they would watch each other's faces grow lined from laughter and love, and yes, there would be children. Towheaded, straight-haired children, boys who would bring home tadpoles and girls who would climb trees. There would be driving permits and high school proms and tears when everybody went off to college and then holiday joy when the house would fill back up with chaos.
And when the sun finally set upon them, there would be a porch
with a pair of rocking chairs on it, set side by side. When one passed on, the other would soon follow. Real Nicholas Sparks stuff.
No more private jets. No more jewels and oil paintings of so-and-so's great-great-great-grandfather. No more Easterly with its seventy-person staff and its acres of formal gardens and its unrelenting grind. No more parties and balls, Rolls-Royces and Porsches, fancy, soulless people smiling with empty eyes.
No more Bradford Bourbon Company.
Although the product itself had never been the problem.
Maybe he would even take her last name so that no one in their new life would know who he was, who his family was.
He would be as she herself was, an anonymous person living a modest life--and yes, there might not be majesty in her fantasy of the two of them. But she would take the simple graces of mediocrity over the empty grandeur of great money every day of the week. And twice on Sunday.
"You know, I can't believe he killed himself," Lane murmured. "It just doesn't seem like something he would do. He was far too arrogant for it--and hell, if the great William Baldwine was going to commit suicide, it would have been more fitting for him to put one of Alexander Hamilton's dueling pistols to his mouth and pull the trigger. But jumping off a bridge he'd considered 'garish'? Into water he wouldn't deign to give to a barn cat? It just doesn't make sense."
Lizzie took a deep breath. And dared to put into words something she herself had been wondering. "Are you . . . thinking maybe someone killed him?"
SIX
Red & Black Stables
Ogden County, Kentucky
Sweet smell of hay.
Oh, the sweet smell of hay and the stomping of hooves . . . and the ice-cold concrete of the aisle that ran between the mahogany-doored stalls.
As Edward Westfork Bradford Baldwine sat outside his thoroughbred stallion's sawdust-floored bedroom, his bony ass was suffering from a frigid recontouring, and he marveled at how, even in May, the stone was so cold. Granted, it was dawn, but the temperature outside was seventy even without the sun's help. One would think that the ambient benevolence of late spring would be more generous with its climatic attentions.
Alas, no.
Fortunately, he was drunk.
Lifting the bottle of--what was it? Ah, vodka. Fair enough--to his lips, he was disappointed to find such a light weight in his hand. There was only an inch left in the bottom and the thing had been three-quarters full when he had limped his way out here. Had he put all those ounces away? And damn it, the rest of his supply was at such a distance--although that was relative, he supposed. The caretaker's cottage where he stayed on the Red & Black thoroughbred breeding farm was no more than a hundred yards off, but it might as well have been miles.
He looked down at his legs. Even hidden under denim, the reconstructed, unreliable mess he had to ambulate upon was nothing more than a painfully thin pair of unhinged pins, his modest, size-eleven boots seeming like blown-up clown shoes in proportion. And then you added the inebriation and the fact that he had been sitting here for how long?
His only chance for more vodka was going to be clawing his way forth, dragging his lower body behind like a wheelbarrow that had fallen off its tire onto its side.
Not all was essentially nonfunctional, however. Tragically, his mind remained sharp enough to constantly spit images at him, the impact of the mental constructs like paintballs shot at his frail body.
He saw his brother Lane standing in front of him, telling him that their father was dead. His beautiful, crazy sister, Gin, wearing the massive diamond of a cruel man upon her elegant hand. His beautiful, crazy mother abed and be-dazed, unaware of all that was transpiring.
His Sutton, who was not, in fact, his, and never would be.
And that was the main loop on his mental replay. After all, things before Edward had been tortured and not ransomed were a bit hazy.
Perhaps that was the solution to his inner demons. Booze didn't go far enough--but eight days in the jungle being beaten, starved, and taunted with his impending death had certainly turned the volume down on recollections that had come before his kidnapping. And as a bonus, he was unlikely to survive a second round of such ministrations--
The sound of a small pair of barn boots coming down at him had him rolling his eyes. When they stopped in front of him, he didn't bother looking up.
"You again," he said.
In reply to his cheerful greeting, Shelby Landis's voice was something out of a children's cartoon--or at least its feminine pitch was. Its intonation, as usual, was more drill sergeant than Cinderella.
"Let's getchup, here now."
"Let's leave me here, forever--and that is an order."
Up above Edward's head, behind the iron bars that kept the stallion from biting off pieces of human anatomy, Nebekanzer let out a whinny that sounded curiously close to a hello. Typically, the enormous black stallion uttered equine murder to anyone other than Edward.
And even his owner was never addressed with any kind of joy.
"We can do this the hard way or the harder way," Shelby maintained.
"A bevy of choices you present me with. How magnanimous of you."
And the contrarian in him wanted to be obstreperous just to find out what "harder" involved. Further, even in his weakened condition, most women of her diminutive height would have struggled to manhandle him, and that could have presented added fun. Shelby, however, had a body that had been honed by a lifetime of hours and hours of backbreaking work in and around thoroughbreds.
She was going to win this one. Whatever it was.
And his pride was all he had left with which to justify his manhood.
Although why he would care about even that, he had no clue.
Pushing himself upright was an exercise in hammer-to-nail, brutal strikes of pain battering him internally even with all the alcohol in his system. The grunting was an embarrassment, especially in front of an employee--who happened to have a good Christian's disdain of blasphemy, no sense of boundaries, and a dead sire to whom Edward owed too much.
Which was why he'd had to hire Shelby when she'd shown up on the cottage's front stoop with nothing but an overheating truck, an honest face, and a solid stare to her name--
A lurch born out of his lack of balance sent Edward on a path back down to the concrete, his body collapsing like a folding table, something bad happening to one of his ankles.
But Shelby caught him before he cracked his head open, her strong arms snapping out and grabbing him, pulling him against her. "Come on."
He wanted to fight with her because he hated so much of himself and his condition. This was not him, this cripple, this drunkard, this miscreant malcontent. In his old life, before his own father had had him kidnapped and then refused to pay the ransom, none of this would be happening.
"I don't know if you should be walking."
As Shelby spoke, he swung his "good" bad leg out because the knee didn't like bending, and then relied on her to carry his weight because the ankle he'd just hurt wouldn't have any of it. "Of course I shouldn't. You've seen me naked. You know how bad off I am."
After all, she'd caught him in the bath . . . when she had barged past a closed door, clearly expecting to find him dead and floating in the tub.
"I'm worried about your ankle."
He gritted his teeth. "Such a Good Samaritan."
"I'm calling the doctor."
"No, you're not."
As they emerged into the sunlight, he blinked, although not because he was hungover. One had to be sober for that. And indeed, compared to the coolness of the stables, the golden morning air felt like cashmere against his prickling skin, and oh, the view. All around, the rolling bluegrass fields with their five-rail fences and solitary maples were a balm to the soul, a promise of succor to the impeccable equine bloodlines that would wander and crop at the segregated meadows as they bore forth future generations of Derby and stakes champions.
Even Triple Crown winners.
; The earth and its bounties could be trusted, Edward thought. Trees could be relied upon to provide shade in summer's heat, and thunderheads never failed to give you rain, and brooks might swell in the spring and go dry in the fall, but a man could predict their seasons. Hell, even the fury of tornadoes and snowstorms had rhythms that were not personal and never, ever unscrupulous.
Whatever wrath might come down from the heavens was not directed upon any specific person: Although one might feel targeted, in fact, that was never the case.
The same was true for horses and dogs, barn cats and raccoons, even the lowly, ugly possum and the snakes who ate their young. For certain, his stallion, Neb, was a mean cur, but that animal never pretended to be aught than he was. He didn't smile in your face and then tear into your back as you turned away.
Humans were so much more dangerous than so-called "unpredictable" animals and finger-of-God events.
And yes, that made him bitter.
Then again, he was bitter about most things these days.
By the time he and Shelby came up to the caretaker's cottage, his internal rants were tempered by the pain that had bubbled through his intoxication, as if the overload to his nervous system forced so much electrical impulse to his brain that his synapses had no choice but to downgrade his pessimism.
The old door creaked as Shelby pushed it wide, and the one-room interior was as dark as night, the heavy wool drapes pulled closed, the sole light in the galley kitchen like a coal miner's helmet lamp, dulled and at a loss to cover all its territory. The furniture was sparse, cheap and old, the opposite of the precious things he'd grown up with at Easterly--although he supposed that the shelves of sterling silver racing trophies across the way did hold a certainly commonality.
Breaking free of his human crutch, he shambled over to his armchair, the ratty, Archie Bunker-deep seat cupping his weight like a meatpacker's palm. His head fell back and he breathed through his mouth while attempting not to inflate his ribs any more than he absolutely had to.
A tugging on his right foot had him looking down. "What are you doing?"
Shelby's blond head was angled at his boot, her workman's hands moving so much faster over those laces than his ever could. "I'm taking this off so I can see how bad your ankle is."
Edward opened his mouth, a sarcastic bomb on the tip of his tongue.
