The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings #2) - J. R. Ward Page 0,19

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 libraries, 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