by J. R. Ward
One deep breath in and he was back in his childhood, when he'd come out here to muck stalls during his summers off from prep school. His grandparents had believed in instilling a good work ethic. His parents had been less concerned with so much.
Heading over to the caretaker's cottage, it was difficult to believe his brother really lived in such modest quarters. Edward had always been a force of energy in the world, moving, always moving, a conqueror constantly looking for victory, whether it was in sports, in business, with women.
And now . . . this little building? This was it?
When Lane came up to the door, he knocked on the screen's frame. "Edward? You in there, Edward?"
As if he could be anywhere else?
Bang, bang, bang. "Edward? It's me--"
"Lane?" came a muffled voice.
He cleared his throat. "Yes, it's me. I need to talk to you."
"Hold on."
When the door eventually opened, Lane saw his grandfather standing before him, not his brother: Edward was so thin that his jeans hung like old-man pants from his hip bones, and he was slightly hunched, as if the pain he'd suffered had permanently shifted his spine toward the fetal position.
"Edward . . ."
He got a grunt in return and some hand motions indicating it was up to him to open the sceen and come inside.
"Pardon me while I sit back down," Edward said as he made his way over to the chair he'd clearly been in. "Standing is not agreeable."
The groan was almost stifled as he lowered himself into position.
Lane shut the door. Put his hands in the pockets of his slacks. Tried not to stare at his brother's ruined face. "So . . ."
"Please don't bother commenting upon how well I look."
"I . . ."
"In fact, let's just nod and you can go. No doubt Miss Aurora made you come here so that you could attest to the fact that I'm still breathing."
"She's not well."
That got his brother's attention. "How so?"
The story came out quickly: ER, looked fine afterward, still working the brunch.
Edward's eyes drifted away. "That's her, all right. She's going to outlive the rest of us."
"I think she'd like to see you."
"I will never go back to that house."
"She could come out here."
After a long moment, that stare swung back. "Do you honestly think that being anywhere near me would do her good?" Before Lane could comment, Edward continued, "Besides, I'm not one for visitors. Speaking of entertaining, why aren't you enjoying The Derby Brunch? I got an invitation, which I found a bit ironic. I didn't bother to RSVP--a horrid breach of manners, but in my new incarnation, social pleasantries are anachronisms from another life."
Lane walked around, looking at the trophies.
"What's on your mind?" Edward asked. "You are never without words."
"I don't know how to say this."
"Try a noun first. A proper noun--provided it is not 'Edward.' I assure you, I'm uninterested in any soapbox preaching about how I should get my life in order."
Lane turned and faced his brother. "It's about Father."
Edward's lids lowered. "What about him."
The image of Rosalinda in that chair was preceded by an auditory replay of Chantal's voice telling him she was pregnant and not leaving the house.
Lane's lip curled up off his teeth. "I hate him. I hate him so fucking much. He's ruined us all."
Before he could start in with all that had happened, Edward put his palm out and released an exhausted sigh. "You don't have to say it. What I want to know is how you found out."
Lane frowned. "Wait, you know?"
"Of course I know. I was there."
No, no, he thought in shock. Edward couldn't have been in on the money losses, the debt . . . the possible embezzlement. The man was not just brilliant with business, but honest as a Boy Scout.
"You couldn't . . . no." Lane shook his head. "Please tell me, you're not--"
"Don't be naive, Lane--"
"Rosalinda is dead, Edward. She killed herself in her office yesterday."
Now it was Edward's turn to look surprised. "What? Why?"
Lane threw up his hands. "Did you think it wouldn't affect her?"
Edward frowned. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"The money, Edward. Jesus Christ, don't be dense--"
"Why would the fact that Father wouldn't pay my ransom affect her?"
Lane stopped breathing. "What did you just say?"
Edward rubbed his eyes like his entire skull hurt. Then he went for the Beefeater bottle next to him and took a deep draw right from the open neck. "Do we have to do this."
"He didn't pay for your release?"
"Of course he didn't. He has always hated me. I wouldn't put it past him to have engineered the entire kidnapping."
All Lane could do was stand there and blink as his head went rush-hour-traffic-jam on him. "But . . . he told the press--he told us--he was negotiating with them--"
"And I was there listening on the other end of the phone. That was not what was occurring. Further, I can assure you, there were . . . repercussions . . . to his failure to comply."
Lane's gut got to churning. "They could have killed you."
After another lift of that bottle, Edward let his head fall back against the chair. "Don't you know, brother . . . they did kill me. Now, what the hell are you talking about?"
THIRTY-TWO
She was on a strange type of high, Gin decided as she walked with her new fiance among her family's guests, nodding to those who made eye contact, speaking when required to.
The cotton-wool sensation that had enveloped her body was something between a saturation-drunk and a Xanax bender, the outside world coming at her through a filter that slowed down time, thickened the air into a custard-like solid, and removed any sense of temperature from her skin.
Richard, on the other hand, seemed very alert as he told everyone about their engagement, the pride in his face akin to a man who had just purchased a new home in Vail or perhaps a yacht. He did not seem to notice the subtle shock that was so very often quickly hid--or maybe he didn't care about that.
You win.
As she heard Samuel T.'s voice in her head, she took a deep breath.
Timing, timing, she thought. Timing was everything.
That and money.
Samuel T. and his people were very wealthy by any standard, but they did not have a spare fifty or sixty million to fill up the debt cavern in her family's balance sheets. Only the likes of Richard Pford IV did--and Gin was prepared to leverage her newfound position as the jackass's wife to help out her kin.
But that was going to have to wait until after she put a ring on him--
A hold on her elbow brought her head around.
Richard leaned in. "I said, come this way."
"I'm going to go inside for a moment."
"No, you're going to stay by my side."
Looking him right in the face, she said, "I'm bleeding between my legs, and you know why. That's hardly something I can ignore."
An expression of both shock and distaste tightened those features she was already learning to hate. "Yes, do take care of that."
As if her body were a car with a dent that required fixing.
Walking off, she found that weeding around groups of people who spoke too loud and laughed too much caused her a prickling anxiety--and yet the feeling did not dissipate as she stepped into Easterly's cool, quiet interior.
She had bled after Richard had been done with her. But she'd already attended to that need with a panty liner.
No, she'd come inside for a different reason.
And she knew just where to go.
The last time she had had sex in this house--excluding that brief hookup in the garden the other evening and what had just happened in her bedroom earlier--had been well over two years ago: She had ended most of her Easterly romps and excursions as soon as
Amelia had gotten old enough to know what a slut was.
No reason for the dear girl to witness in person what others were going to tell her about her mother. At least that way, Gin had always thought, mommy might be able to sport a credible denial.
But . . . two years ago, on a random Thursday evening, after an uneventful sit-down dinner, she had found herself slipping up.
In the wine cellar.
Proceeding down to the staff hallway, she went past Rosalinda's and Mr. Harris's offices--or rather, where the butler's still was and the controller's had been--and opened a broad door to reveal the stairwell to the basement.
She was entirely unsurprised to find the glow of a light down at the bottom.
There was only one reason for it to be on, especially as all of the bourbon, champagne and chardonnay for the brunch had been delivered to the staging area--and in any event, no part of the family's private collection would ever be used for such an occasion.
Her descent was silent, the pattern of squeaking boards long since memorized from back in her days as a teenager stealing bottles out of the depths of the tremendous basement. As she came to the bottom of the steps, she slipped off her shoes and put them aside. The uneven concrete was a cold relief on the soles of her feet, and her nose threatened a sneeze as the mustiness registered in her sinuses.
Passing by the bomb shelters that had been made in the forties out of lead walling set at right angles, she padded along, wrapping her arms around herself--although that was mainly a reflex, something she did because she should have been chilled down here.
She still felt nothing.
The wine cellar was separated from the larger basement by a fire - and bulletproof glass wall that was outfitted with polished wood supports and a door that had a code to it. Inside, the gleaming, mahogany-paneled room was fitted, floor to ceiling, with handmade bottle shelves, thousands of lots of priceless wine, champagne and liquor protected from both shifts in temperature and thieves of the human variety.
There was also a tasting table in the center surrounded by oxblood club chairs--and she was right, the thing was being put to use.
And there was a tasting of sorts going on.
Samuel T.'s sacrificial lamb was stretched out on the glossy surface, her blond hair spilling all over to hang off the table's far end, her naked body gleaming in the low lighting from the brass fixtures. She was completely naked, her peach dress having been thrown carelessly on the top of one of the chairs, and Samuel T.'s head was between her thighs, his hands gripping her hips as he worked her.
Stepping back into a dark corner, Gin watched him finish what he was doing and then rear up over the woman. With rough hands, he freed his erection and mounted her.
The woman cried out loud enough so that her hoarse voice could be heard on the other side of all that glass.
For once, Gin did not put herself in the female's position.
She had seen him have sex many times before--sometimes when he'd known about it, sometimes when he hadn't--and inevitably, her body had always responded as though she were the one beneath him, on top of him, pushed up against a wall by him.
Not now.
That would have been too painful.
Because she knew she was never going to have him again.
You win.
After all their years of battling, she had put down her armaments first--and he hadn't believed her. And when he finally had taken her seriously, events had conspired against them.
He was not going to play this game with her anymore. She'd seen the hints of resolve when he'd blown off her declaration of love the day before--and the final nail in the coffin had been put in out in the garden.
It was done.
Gin stayed where she was until he orgasmed, and she had to blink away tears as his head jerked back on his spine, and his neck strained, and his body pumped hard four more times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his face showed no evidence of pleasure, the release having apparently been something generated only by his body.
Throughout the bucking, he remained as grim as she felt, his expression blank, his half-open eyes unfocused.
Meanwhile, however, the female went into spasms that were too ugly to have been faked: No doubt the darling girl would have preferred to impress him with more artful expressions of passion in hopes of this being the start to something, but movie-star sex poses were hard to maintain when Samuel T. was inside of you.
Gin stepped even further back, until the cold, damp wall informed her there was no more retreat permitted.
She knew he was going to leave fast.
And he did.
Moments later, the vapor lock was sprung as the door was opened, and Gin curled in on herself, dropping her eyes and not breathing.
"Sure," Samuel T. said in an even tone. "I'd love to."
"Will you help me do up my dress?"
"You can reach it." He was already striding off. "Come on, we better go."
"Wait! Wait for me!"
Giggles. Jiggles, too, no doubt, as the sound of high heels clipping along the concrete echoed around like the woman was running to catch up to him.
"Hold my hand?" the female asked.
"Sure. I'd love to."
There was a smack of two sets of lips meeting and then the sounds of footfalls on concrete diminished into the distance.
After a while, Gin stepped out of the shadows. The light had been left on inside the wine cellar--which was very unlike Samuel T. What most didn't know about him was that he was a slave to his compulsive need to have things in order. In spite of the fact that he was a hard-living playboy, he couldn't handle things out of place. Everything from the suits he wore to the cars he kept, from his law practice to his stables, from his bedroom to his kitchen to his bathrooms, he was a man with control issues.
She knew the truth, though. She had seen him get stuck in rituals, had had to talk him out of them from time to time.
It was an intimacy she was willing to bet her only child's life on that he shared with no one else--
Now, she shivered. But not because of the cold air and the damp.
The inescapable sense that she had well and truly ruined something robbed her of breath. Tucking in upon herself, she retreated back against the wine cellar's glass wall, slid down to the concrete floor . . . and wept.
THIRTY-THREE
As Edward listened to Lane's report on the family's finances, and then the further news that their mother had been declared incompetent, and finally the details around the hemlock suicide, he found himself . . . curiously detached from the whole story.
It wasn't that he didn't care.
He had always worried about his siblings, and that kind of regard didn't go away, even after all he had been through.
But the string of bad news seemed like explosions happening far off on the horizon, the flashing and the distant roar something that captured his attention, but didn't affect him enough to get him up out of his chair--literally or figuratively.
"So I need your help," Lane concluded.
Edward brought the gin bottle to his mouth again. This time, however, he didn't drink. He lowered it back down. "With what, precisely?"
"I need access to the BBC's financial files--the real ones that haven't been scrubbed for the Board or the press."
"I don't work for the company anymore, Lane."
"Don't tell me you couldn't get into the servers if you really wanted to."
Lane had a point. Edward had been the one to set up the computer systems.
There was a long silence, and then Edward followed through with another hit of the liquor. "There's still plenty of money around. You have your trust, Maxwell has his, and Gin only has a year or two to go--"
"That fifty-three million dollar loan with Prospect Trust is coming due. Two weeks, Edward."
Edward shrugged. "It has to be unsecured, otherwise Monteverdi wouldn't be so worried. So it's not like they're going to come for the house."
"Monteverdi will go t
o the press."
"No, he won't. If he did make an unsecured loan of that magnitude using Prospect Trust funds, he'd had to have done it behind his Board's back and in violation of federal trust company laws. If it's not repaid on schedule, the only thing that will happen publicly is an announcement that Monteverdi is taking early retirement to 'spend time with his family.'" Edward shook his head. "I understand your wanting to know more, but I'm not sure where you think that's going to get you. The debt is not yours to worry about. You live in Manhattan now. Why the sudden interest in those people who live at Easterly?"
"They're our family, Edward."
"So?"
Lane frowned. "I get that you don't feel like William Baldwine's son. After the way he treated you all these years, how could you? But . . . what about the house? The land--the business? Mother?"
"The Bradford Bourbon Company has a billion dollars in yearly revenue. Even if you go net, not gross, on that figure, whether the personal debt is fifty or even a hundred million, that is not a catastrophic event considering how much stock the family owns. Banks will loan between sixty to seventy percent of value against an investment portfolio--you could finance the payback of that amount on your own right now."
"But what if that isn't all that's been borrowed? And shouldn't Father be held accountable? And again, I ask, what about Mother?"
"If I went down the rabbit hole of wanting some kind of justice against that sire of ours, I'd be flat-out insane. And the last time I heard, Mother hasn't been out of her bed except to take a bath in three years. Whether she's at Easterly or in a nursing home, she won't notice the difference." As Lane let out a curse, Edward shook his head again. "My advice to you is to follow my lead and distance yourself. I should go even farther away, actually--at least you have New York."
"But--"
"Make no mistake, Lane--they will eat you alive, especially if you follow this avenging road you're on." As he fell silent, he felt a brief moment of surging fear. "You're not going to win, Lane. There are . . . things . . . that have been done in the past against people who tried to come forward about certain issues. And some of them were done against family members."
He should know.
Lane went over to the bay window, staring out as if its drapes were not closed. "So you're saying you won't help me."
"I'm advising you that the path of least resistance is best for your mental health." Physical, too. "Let it go, Lane. Move past, move on. That which you cannot change must be accepted."