The Bourbon Kings
Page 92

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 to the press.”