The Angels' Share

by J. R. Ward

  But God curbed his crassness as that boot came off with a roar. "Damn it!"

  "I think you've broken it."

  Bracing his hands against the armchair, his heart jumped rope with his ribs. And when all that passed, he sagged.

  "I'll bring my truck around--"

  "No!" He puffed through his clenched teeth. "You are doing no such thing."

  As Shelby looked up at him from the floor, in the back of his mind, he took note of how rare it was for her to meet his eyes. She was always willing to parry his verbal jabs, but rarely would her stare linger anywhere near his.

  Her eyes were . . . rather extraordinary. Rimmed with thick, dark, natural lashes, they had flecks of the dawn light in their sky blue color.

  "If you're not gonna go to the hospital, what's the name of your private physician? And do not pretend you don't got one. You're a Bradford."

  "Not anymore, darling."

  She winced at the sobriquet, as if recognizing that she was not the sort of woman that would ever be called such, especially not by someone with his pedigree. And he was ashamed to admit it, but he'd wanted to hurt her for no good reason.

  No, actually, that wasn't true. The lack of a reason, that was.

  Shelby had an unerring ability to catch him in vulnerable moments, and the defensive part of him hated her for it.

  "How long did you take care of your father?" he demanded.

  "All my life."

  Jeb Landis had been a terrible drinker, gambler, womanizer . . . He had known horses, though. And had taught Edward all he knew at a time when Edward had never thought of going into the racing business as anything other than a rich man's hobby--and certainly never envisioned himself employing the man's daughter.

  Hell, he hadn't even known Jeb had a child.

  For some reason, Edward found himself wondering how many sarcastic cuts Shelby had taken over the years, the ego-draining obstacle course presented by her miscreant sire training her well . . . for her going on to care for exactly the kind of man Edward had become.

  It was as if Jeb, in sending her here, had been determined that his cruelty survive his grave.

  Edward sat forward. Reaching out a trembling hand, he touched Shelby's face. He'd expected her skin to be rough. It was not.

  As she recoiled away, he focused on her lips. "I want to kiss you."

  *

  Back at Lizzie's farmhouse, Lane stared out at the rising sun as her words hung in the quiet air between them.

  Are you thinking maybe someone killed him?

  Hard question to answer, especially when, for him, he felt cheated because he hadn't been the one to kill the man. And wasn't that a tough pill to swallow, especially as he watched a fresh day dawn across the flat Indiana landscape.

  In the face of so much resplendent beauty, his dark thoughts seemed like f-bombs uttered at an altar.

  "Well?" Lizzie prompted. "Are you?"

  "I don't know. There are a number of people who have a motive, for sure. Most of whom I'm related to." He frowned as he thought about something Deputy Ramsey had told him down by the river. "You know, the security cameras on the bridge haven't been turned on yet."

  "What?"

  Lane made arches in the thin air. "There are cameras mounted on the spans, and they were supposed to be recording footage that night. But when the police checked the feeds, they discovered that they hadn't been initiated yet."

  "So no one knows what really happened, then?"

  "Guess not. But Metro Police do think if he jumped it had to be from there. The other bridge is too hard for someone to get to the open drop--which is something Mitch said they were going to fix on the Big Five now." Lane shook his head. "As for murder, though? No, I do think he jumped. I believe he killed himself. The debt, the embezzlement--it's all coming crashing down, and my father knew this. How the hell could he have held his head up in this town now? Or anywhere else for that matter?"

  "Do you know when they'll release the body?"

  "Ramsey told me as soon as the autopsy was finished. So it has to be only a matter of time." He refocused on her. "Actually, there is something you could do to help me."

  "Name it. Anything."

  "It's about the visiting hours for my father. As soon as the remains are released, we're going to have to have people to Easterly, and I want it . . . I mean, I want everything to be as it should."

  Lizzie took his hand and gave it a squeeze. "I'll make sure it's done right. Of course."

  "Thank you." He bent down and pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. "You know, it's funny . . . I don't care about honoring his memory. It's not for my father. It's for the Bradford family name--and yes, that's superficial, but I kind of feel like not on my watch, you know? Those people who come are going to be looking for signs of scandal and weakness, and I'll be damned if they'll get it. And I'm also concerned that Mother will want to make an appearance for something like that."

  Yes, it was true that "young" Virginia Elizabeth Bradford Baldwine, who was now over sixty, hadn't been out of bed in the last three years for anything other than hair tending, but there were some standards even an addict like her was going to recognize, and her husband's visitation was one of them. And people had been calling the house already, asking about what arrangements were being made. Not that that was about his father, either. Charlemont high society was as competitive as the NFL, and an event like a Bradford's visiting hours was the Super Bowl.

  Everyone wanted a good seat at the fifty-yard line.

  It was all just so fake. And though he'd always known that, it hadn't been until Lizzie had come into his life that he'd cared about the emptiness of it all.

  "I'm going to promise you something," he murmured. "After this is all done . . . after I've fixed all this? Then you and I will leave. Then we get out. But I have to stay to clean up this mess. It's the only way I'll ever be free of this family. Righting the wrongs of my father is the only path to earning my freedom--earning your love."

  "You already have that."

  "Come here."

  He reached for her and pulled her into his lap, finding her mouth in the morning light. Getting her naked was the work of a moment, and then she was straddling him and he was yanking his sweatpants down.

  "Oh, my Lizzie," he groaned against her mouth.

  Her breasts were full in his palms, and she gasped as he cupped them. She was always a revelation, always new to him . . . every kiss, each touch like coming home and going to the moon at the same time.

  Perfection.

  As she lifted up on her knees, he shifted himself into position, and then they were together, her moving on top of him, him holding her close. She took all of him with perfect coordination, and with her eyes closed tightly, as if she didn't want any distractions from what she was feeling.

  He kept his open.

  Oh, she was beautiful, the way she arched back, her head falling away, her breasts lifting, the light bathing across her magnificent nakedness and her blond hair.

  This he would remember as well, he told himself. This moment on the far side of the fall, the near-drowning, the panic . . . this wonderful, vital moment with the one he loved, where they were both alive and together and alone, sequestered in a privacy no one else could touch and nobody could take away, he would recall this along with everything else that had happened tonight.

  Yes, he thought. He needed to recharge his strength, his hope, and his heart with times and memories like this with his Lizzie.

  He had battles to fight, and questions as to whether he was worthy, and worries about what was coming ahead. But she gave him the power to be the warrior he wanted and needed to be.

  Forget the money, he thought.

  Everything he really had to have in life was right here in his arms.

  "I love you," he gasped. "I love you . . ."

  SEVEN

  Edward was surprised when Shelby didn't jump to her feet and strut off in a huff out the door. After all, good Christian wome
n who were told that their employer wanted to kiss them tended to get rightfully offended. But the longer she stayed where she was, staring up at him with his boot in her hands, the more intimidated he became.

  It was not supposed to go like this, he thought to himself. He'd banked on her backing away from him, leaving him alone, forgetting about the damn doctor.

  "Sometimes the land must accept the storm," Shelby whispered.

  "What?"

  She just shook her head as she moved up his lower body. "It's not important."

  And she was right. Nothing much was important at all as she was the one who kissed him, her lips soft and shy, as if she knew nothing about seduction.

  That was not a problem for him.

  Edward took things from there, and he found himself being more careful with her than he had been with a woman in . . . well, maybe, ever. He kept his hands light as he circled her torso, urging her in between his legs and up against his chest. Underneath her sweatshirt, her body was as hard as his was, but for a different reason. She was tight from all that physical labor, honed from her health and her efforts, from her work with animals that weighed a thousand pounds more than she did and required gallons of feed and wheelbarrows of sawdust and miles of walking from stall to stall, pasture to pasture.

  She wasn't wearing a bra.

  He discovered that as he pulled that sweatshirt up and over her head. She wasn't wearing a shirt, either. And her breasts were perfect, as small and tight as the rest of her was. The fact that her nipples were a girly pink was a surprise . . .

  And it was right about then that he stopped himself.

  Even as a delicious greed clawed into his gut, something far more imperative flared in the back of his head.

  "Are you a virgin?" he said.

  "No."

  "I think you're lying."

  "Only one way to find out, ain't that right?"

  A strange, unfamiliar hesitation froze him and he looked away, not because he didn't like what he saw--but because he did. Everything about her modesty and her awkwardness made him want to pounce on her and take her, claim her like a man did when he found something no one else had had.

  And everything about the way she didn't back down told him she'd let him do that and so much more.

  Shifting his eyes away, he took a moment to think about this, in a fashion that was characteristic of the way he'd always been as opposed to what he'd become--and that was when he saw the money.

  One thousand dollars.

  Ten one-hundred-dollar bills, the bundle folded once, the ends fanning out.

  Over on the sideboard by the door.

  He'd left the cash there the previous Friday for one of the prostitutes he regularly paid to be with him. And in fact, a woman had shown up that night--except instead of her acting and dressing like the one he'd really wanted . . . the actual female herself had come to him.

  His Sutton.

  They'd had sex, but only because he'd assumed that the perfect doppelganger for Sutton Smythe had finally presented itself. His first clue that something was off? After it was over, the female had left the money where it was. His second? The following morning, he'd found a purse on the table by his chair. When he'd opened it, he'd found Sutton's driver's license inside.

  Sometimes, he still wasn't sure whether it had actually happened or if it had been a dream. Although the tension when he'd returned the purse to her the follow evening had been nuclear--so yes, it must have occurred.

  And yes, he knew precisely why he'd had sex with her. Sutton was a classy, dignified, brilliant businesswoman who he'd been in love with for too many years to count. Why she had allowed him to touch her, kiss her, come inside of her?

  Yes, she'd told him she thought she was in love with him, too. But how could that possibly be true?

  Edward refocused on Jeb's daughter. Gathering her sweatshirt in his hands, he put it back on her gently, covering her nakedness.

  "No doctor," he said remotely. "I don't need one."

  "Yes, you do."

  It was disconcerting the way she calmly rose and went over to the phone like nothing had happened. And when she picked up the receiver from the old-fashioned, wall-mounted dialer, he frowned and resented her pragmatism.

  "Moe gave me the number," she explained as she began making circles with her forefinger. "Dr. Qalbi is the name, right."

  "Oh, for fuck's sake, if you knew all that, why did you pester me about it."

  "I was giving you a chance to be reasonable. I should have known better."

  "Goddamn it."

  Turning to him, she put the handset up to her ear. "I told you. Do not take the Lord's name in vain in my presence, and no cursing. Not 'round me. And yes, I know you'll never be in love with me. It will always be her."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" he shot back.

  "You say her name in your sleep. What is it? Sut . . . Sutter?"

  Edward let his head fall back as he closed his eyes in frustration. Maybe he was just dreaming this. Yes, perhaps he had simply passed out against Neb's stall, and this was all just a figment of the vodka swill that was currently passing for his bloodstream.

  One could certainly hope.

  *

  "Miss Smythe? More coffee?"

  As Sutton jerked to attention, she smiled up at the uniformed older woman with the pot in her hand. Ellyn Isaacs had been working at the family's estate for as long as Sutton could remember, a grandmotherly figure who always made her think of Nancy Drew's Hannah Gruen.

  "No, thank you, Mrs. Isaacs. It's time for me to go, much as it pains me."

  "Your car is waiting for you."

  Sutton blotted her mouth with a monogrammed damask napkin and got to her feet. "I'll just go get Daddy."

  Mrs. Isaacs smiled and straightened the pressed white apron that hung over the front of her gray dress. "Your father is in his study. And I'll let Don know you're coming out."

  "Thank you."

  The family dining room was a charming little fifteen-by-fifteen, window-filled annex between the mansion's main kitchen and the formal dining room. Filled with light, especially in the morning, it looked out over the ivy-covered brick walls and carefully tended beds of roses in the formal garden, and had corresponding old-school Colefax and Fowler botanicals as fabrics. It had been one of her mother's favorite rooms in the house. Back when she had been alive, Sutton and her brother had always had breakfast here before school, the whole family chatting away and sharing things. After her mother had passed, and Winn had gone to U.Va., it had been just her father and her.

  And finally, when she had gone off to Harvard, it had been only her father--at which point, Mrs. Isaacs had begun serving him his morning repast at his desk.

  It was a habit that he had not broken even after Sutton had come back from business school at the University of Chicago and started to work for the Sutton Distillery Corporation.

  As she folded her napkin and placed it beside her hollowed-out grapefruit half, her muffin-crumbled plate and her vacant hard-boiled egg holder, she wondered why she insisted on sitting down here alone every morning.

  The tie to the past, perhaps. A fantasy of a future, maybe.

  The massive house that she and her father now inhabited by themselves--except when Winn came to visit--was twenty-five thousand square feet of historic, upkeep-intensive grandeur, all the antiques in it passed down from generation to generation, the art museum-quality, the carpets from Persia except for when they'd been handmade in France. It was a resplendent sanctuary where brass railings and gold-leafed fixtures glowed from countless polishings, and hanging crystal twinkled from the ceilings and on the walls, and wood well-mellowed from time's passage offered warmth sure as a banked fire.

  But it was a lonely place.

  The sound of her stilettos was muffled as she had been taught how to walk properly, the quiet rhythm of her footsteps echoing in the lovely emptiness as she proceeded to the front of the house, passing by sitting rooms and libra
ries, parlors and powder rooms. Nothing was out of place, no clutter to be found, everything cleaned with reverent hands, no lint or dust anywhere.

  The doors to her father's study were opened, and he looked up from his desk. "There she is."

  His hands went to grip his chair arms out of a reflex born from always rising to his feet whenever a woman entered a room or left it. But it was an impotent gesture, his strength no longer there, the sad impulse that he couldn't follow through on something she ignored with determination.

  "Are you going in now, then?" he said as he dropped his hands into his lap.

  "We're going in." She went around and kissed him on the cheek. "Let's go. Finance Committee starts in forty-five minutes."

  Reynolds Winn Wilshire Symthe, IV, nodded at the bound book on the corner of the desk. "I read the materials. Things are doing well."

  "We're a little soft in South America. I think we need to--"

  "Sutton. Sit down, please."

  With a frown, she took a seat across from him, linking her ankles under the chair and arranging her suit. As usual, she was dressed in Armani, the peach color one of her father's favorites on her.

  "Is there something wrong?"

  "It's time to announce things."

  As he said the words she had been dreading, her heart stopped.

  Later, she would remember every single thing about where the pair of them sat facing each other in the study . . . and how handsome he was with his full head of white hair and his perfectly pressed, pin-striped suit . . . and how her hands, which were just like his, had knotted together in her lap.

  "No," she said flatly. "It is not."

  As Reynolds went to extend his arm toward her, his palm flapped across the leather blotter, and for a moment, all Sutton wanted to do was scream. Instead, she swallowed the emotion and met his attempt to connect them halfway, leaning over the great expanse of his desk, messing up the piles of papers.

  "My darling." He smiled at her. "How proud am I of you."

  "Stop it." She made a show of turning her wrist and looking at her gold watch. "And we have to go now so we can meet with Connor before we start--"

  "I've already told Connor, Lakshmi and James. The press release will be issued to the Times and the Wall Street Journal as soon as your employment contract is amended. Lakshmi's drafting it as we speak. This isn't just something between you and I anymore."