The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings #2) - J. R. Ward Page 0,22
only one person she could think of to call. One person whose voice she wanted to hear. One person … who would understand on a visceral level what she was feeling.
But Edward Baldwine didn’t care about the liquor industry anymore. No longer was he her competitor’s heir apparent, her counterpart across the aisle, the sarcastic, sexy, infuriating friend she had long coveted.
And even if he had still been the number two at the Bradford Bourbon Company, he certainly had made it clear that he didn’t want anything to do with a personal relationship with her.
In spite of that … crazy hook-up … they’d had at that caretaker’s cottage out at the Red & Black.
Which she still couldn’t believe had happened.
After all the years of fantasizing, she had finally been with him—
Sutton pulled away from that black hole of going-nowhere by remembering their last meeting. It had been in a farm truck parked outside her house, and they had fought over that mortgage she’d given his father. Right before the man had died.
Hardly the stuff of Hallmark cards.
Yet in spite of all that, Edward was still the one she wanted to talk to, the only person other than her father whose opinion she cared about. And before his kidnapping? She would absolutely have dialed him up, and he would have answered on the first ring, and he would have supported her at the same time he would have put her in her place.
Because he was like that.
The fact that he wasn’t there anymore, either?
Just one more of the losses.
One more thing to miss.
One more piece of the mourning.
Letting her head fall back, she stared at the river and wished that things were as they had once and always been.
“Oh, Edward …”
EIGHT
Samuel Theodore Lodge III drove his vintage Jaguar convertible down River Road at a measly fifteen or sixteen miles an hour. Traffic was no slower or faster than it ever was, but he was less frustrated than usual at the delay because this morning, he didn’t have to go all the way in to his law office in Charlemont proper. No, today, he was stopping off first to meet one of his clients.
Although to be fair, Lane was more family than anything else.
The big estates up on the hills were to his left, the muddy waters of the Ohio were to his right, and overhead, the milky blue sky promised another hot, humid May day. And as the balmy breeze ruffled through his hair, thanks to the top being down, he turned the local classical music station up so he could hear Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2 better.
On his thigh, he played the left-hand part. On the wheel, he commenced the right.
If he had not been a lawyer, as his father, his uncles, and his grandfather had been or currently were, he would have been a classical pianist. Alas, not his destiny—and not only because of the legal legacy. At best, he was serviceable at the keys, capable of impressing laymen at cocktail parties and at Christmas, but not talented enough to challenge the professionals.
He glanced at the passenger seat, at an old briefcase that had been used by his great-uncle T. Beaumont Lodge, Jr. Like the car, the thing was a classic from an earlier era, its brown hide well worn, even bare in patches on the handle and the flap with the gold embossed initials. But it had been handmade by a fine Kentucky craftsman, built to last and look good as it aged—and as it had been in his uncle’s time, its belly was full of briefs, notes, and court filings.
Unlike in T. Beaumont’s time, there was also a MacBook Air in there, and a cell phone.
Samuel T. was going to pass the briefcase down to a distant cousin, someday. Perhaps a bit of his love of the piano, as well.
But nothing was going to a child of his own. No, there would be no marriage for him, and no children out of wedlock—not because he was religious, and not because it was something that “Lodges simply don’t do,” although the latter was certainly true.
It was because he was smart enough to know he was incapable of being a father, and he refused to do anything that he did not excel at.
This lifelong tenet was why he was a great trial lawyer. A fantastic womanizer. A highbrow drunkard of the very finest order.
All of which were a ringing endorsement for dad of the year, weren’t they—