The Bourbon Kings

by J. R. Ward

  . . . 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.

  "Lane, can I talk to you?"

  He cleared his throat. Sat up straight like a man.

  Apparently, he hadn't imagined this.

  "Yes, of course. What do you need? If it's a reference, I'll have the butler--"

  "I'm sorry." As her voice cracked, she took a shuddering breath. "I'm so, so sorry."

  What was she--

  "Oh, my father." He shrugged. "I guess you overheard something. Yes, he's gone. Funeral in a week. Thanks for the kind words."

  "I'm not talking about that. Although, well, I am sorry that you lost your father. I know that wasn't a good relationship for you, but it's still hard."

  "Well, I happen to excel at relationships that are not good. I'm quite facile with them."

  Even to his own ears, his voice sounded fake, the words not ones he would normally use, either.

  Edward, he thought numbly. He sounds like Edward.

  Lizzie came forward, and then he was more than a little surprised to find her kneeling before him. And she was--

  "Why are you crying?" he asked. "Are you all right--"

  "God, how can you ask that? After what I did--"

  "What are you talking about--"

  In their typical fashion, they were speaking over each other, and because he didn't have the energy left to decipher anything, he shut up in hopes she would do some explaining and clarify things.

  "I was wrong," she choked out. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you. About Chantal. I just--I didn't want to get hurt again, and I jumped to conclusions, and oh, God, I know your father was the one. I know he was the one. He was the one who hit her, he was the one who got her pregnant. I'm so sorry."

  Tears streamed down her cheeks, falling like rain from her face, landing in the bluegrass at his feet.

  Lane blinked. It was all he could--

  Jesus, his brain wasn't able to process any of this. He literally couldn't understand what she was saying--

  Reaching behind her back, she pulled out something. A sheaf of papers? That was folded in half?

  "Sorry isn't enough," she said. "I've hurt you too badly for that. So . . . I need to do something concrete, something to prove that I'm really with you, that I love you, and I'm . . . I'm really with you."

  She held the pages out to him. "I need to show you, not tell you."

  Lane shook his head. "Lizzie, I don't know what--"

  "Take it," she said.

  He did as she asked only because he didn't have the brains to think of a reason not to. Opening the crease, he looked at . . .

  A whole bunch of letters. Followed by some numbers.

  The second sheet was a map?

  "It's the deed to my farm," she whispered. "I know compared to everything you have, it's not much. But it's all I have in this world."

  "I don't understand?"

  "With the kind of money problems you're facing, it won't help with that kind of debt. But it's worth enough to pay for good lawyers, for people who can help you sort everything out." She tapped the document. "I paid it off yesterday. I don't owe anything on it. And I've been approached to sell it before. It's good land. It's valuable. And it's yours."

  His breath left his body.

  His heart stopped.

  His soul broke in half.

  "I love you, Lane. I'm sorry I doubted you. I feel . . . God, you have no idea how badly I feel. Let me make it up to you the only way I know how. Or . . . throw the papers in my face if you want. I won't blame you. But I had to do something that mattered. I had to . . . offer you everything I am and everything I have--"

  Lane wasn't aware of reaching for her.

  But he knew the moment she was up against his chest.

  Wrapping his arms around her, he lost his shit completely, the dam cracking open, everything coming out in sobs.

  And Lizzie, with her strong body and her big heart, held him for as long as it took.

  "It's going to be okay," she told him. "I promise you . . . somehow, it'll be okay."

  When he finally had it together enough to pull back, he had a quick urge to reach between his legs and make sure he was still a guy. But Lizzie didn't seem to care about him being weak.

  He wiped her face with his thumbs and kissed her.

  "I love you, Lizzie." Then he shook his head. "But I don't know about God."

  "What?"

  Lane took a shuddering breath. "It's just something that Miss Aurora always told me."

  "What's that?"

  He kissed his woman again. "I don't know if I have God . . . but I'm sure of this. I have you . . . and that makes me wealthy beyond means."

  Bringing her back against him, he held on to her and stared up at Easterly.

  To hell with flying into a mountain, he thought.

  As of this moment . . . he was now the head of the family, such as it was.

  And he would be damned if things went to hell and gone on his watch.

  A SNEAK PEEK AT WHAT'S NE
XT IN THE BOURBON KINGS SAGA

  The final shoe dropped the next day.

  And really, when everything was said and done, Lane couldn't be all that surprised. With the way things were going at Easterly, the dominos were still falling, the path to either his family's destruction or glory as yet being forged around curves and straightaways that only destiny or fate or God, if you believed in Him, knew and was prepared for.

  Lane was in the parlor, pouring himself a Family Reserve to prepare to meet his lawyer, Samuel T., when he heard the noise outside. Someone was yelling. A woman's voice. Someone was--

  Heading out and opening the front door, he realized the words weren't English, but rather in German.

  "--Scheisse! Oh mein Gott ein Finger! Ein Finger--"

  Falling into a run that splashed bourbon out of his rock glass, he jogged around to the river side of the mansion.

  His beloved Lizzie was standing over her horticultural partner, Greta, and the German was pointing in the dirt and yelling all kinds of things.

  "Everything okay?" he asked.

  He knew the answer to that one as he saw that Lizzie's eyes were popped wide under the brim of her floppy hat.

  "Lane . . ." she said without looking at him. "Lane . . . we have a problem here."

  She reached out and pulled Greta back until the woman fell on her butt in the newly mowed grass. "Don't touch anything. Lane, come over here, please."

  Heading right up to her, he put his arm around her waist, more worried about his woman than any earthworm. "Whatever it is, I'm sure--"

  "It's a finger." Lizzie nodded to the raw patch in the ivy. "That's a finger. In the dirt."

  Both his knees cracked as he got down on his haunches. Planting his free hand in the grass, he leaned in for a closer look into the shallow hole that--

  It was . . . yes, it was a finger. A human finger.

  The skin was smudged with earth, but you could see that the digit was intact all the way around--and God, it was fat, like the thing had either swollen since it had been cut off or . . . torn off, or whatever. The nail was even across the top, and the base of the length, where it had been severed from its hand, was a clean slice, the meat inside gray, the pale circular dot on the bottom the bone.

  But none of that was what really interested him.

  The heavy gold circle around it was the issue.

  "That's my father's signet ring," he said in a flat tone.

  Patting his pocket, he took out his phone, but then didn't dial anything.

  Instead, he looked up, up, up . . . and saw his mother's bedroom window.

  His father's battered body had washed up on the far side of the Falls of the Ohio River mere days ago. The coroner's unofficial, pre-autopsy ruling was that it was a suicide--and given everything Lane had been learning about the dismal state of his august family's finances, he had to agree.

  Over fifty million dollars in debt was no laughing matter--when you were supposed to have a net worth of nearly a billion dollars.

  But it seemed extremely unlikely that one would cut one's own wedding finger off and bury it beneath one's soon-to-be widow's window. Especially if the husband in question had recently gotten someone else pregnant.

  "Dear God," he whispered.

  At that very moment, the sound of someone pulling around the pea stone driveway broke the silence.

  "May I join the party," Samuel T. said as he got out of his vintage Jaguar. "Or is this little gathering by invitation only."

  As Lizzie's hand went to Lane's shoulder and squeezed, he looked up at her even though he addressed his lawyer. "Call the police, Sam. Right now."

  "Why? If you've found hidden treasure, we should keep it to ourselves--"

  "I don't think my father committed suicide."

  Samuel T. stopped short. "I beg your pardon?"

  "I think . . ." Lane glanced at his lawyer and then went back to looking at Lizzie--because, once again, he needed her strength. "I think someone might just have murdered my father. . . ."

  And what worse? He was going to be a prime suspect.

  After all, the wife he was divorcing . . . was the one his father had gotten pregnant.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you so much to everyone at NAL, especially my wonderful boss, Kara Welsh, and Leslie Gelbman. Thank you also to Team Waud, and to my family and friends.

  About ten years ago, I moved down South, and I have to say, I honestly love it. It took a while to get used to everything, but now that I have a profound passion for college hoops (#L1C4), a number of tremendous friends, and a house that feels like home, it is clear that this Northerner has embraced everything about living in the Derby City. To say that this book wouldn't have been possible without this town and all the people I know here is a vast understatement. And for the first time ever, there are some loose connections between certain folks in the book and people whom I know--with these kinds of characters, how can you not write about them?

  To that end, I would like to thank the following in no particular order: Leonard, my daughter, my mom, Nomers & Jonah, my pup and TatSon, my bffle & her kids, my Papa, Bob Melzer, Nique & Clarke, Mr. Henry Camp a.k.a. Uncle Stank, Dr. Michael "Bad Boy" Haboubi and his family, Dr. and Mrs. Gary Edlin (chief, your nickname will stay on the QT in this public forum), Chuck Mitchell and the lovely Renee & Cya, Mr. & Mrs. Ballard & Gracie & SophSoph, my adopted godson, Jacob (Who's the man?!), my niece, Polly, and nephew, William (Go Cards!), and their parents, Aunt Betsey & Uncle Bob, and all their family, Grandmother Sue & Geegaw, my FIL Padre & Granny Gray, Granny & Aunt Lee, Little Lee and the twins, Dr. & Dr. Fox, the Norton Family, the incomparable Roderick Hodge & his whole family, Kathy Cary, the Robinsons (esp. the Mrs. who breaks out the good stuff for me), both sets of Ronalds (the ones by me and the ones by my mom), all of the members of the Brown family on whom absolutely, positively none of this is based (and I really do mean that), Sandra Frazier, the Fellons, Ghislain & Nicholas, Karl & Elizabeth, Steph & Robert & BOB, The Leslie & Andy Hyslop, and so many more.

  And in closing, I have to acknowledge my wonderful husband Neville's grandmother, Mrs. Neville Blakemore, who will remain in my heart forevermore as the ultimate Southern Lady.

  I've tried not to leave anyone out, if I have, my apologies.

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