On that note, maybe he and his stallion could get adjoining cells in here. He’d certainly appreciate the company, and the perennial spring thunderstorms were harder to hear in the middle of this concrete jail building.

“Them new foals all doin’ well,” Shelby murmured. “They love the meadows. Moe and I are rotating ’em pasture to pasture.”

He thought of his stable manager. Such a good guy, real salt of the earth Kentucky horseman. “How’s Moe?”

“Good.”

“How’s Moe’s boy?”

“Good.”

As a blush hit her cheeks, Edward was so glad he’d pushed her in the direction of that kid, Joey, and away from himself. Just because you were used to dealing with a problem didn’t mean you needed to sleep with it, and for a short while there, Shelby had teetered on falling into him, no doubt because the chaos was familiar.

And in turn, he had tottered on falling into her, because suffering hated solitude.

When they both went quiet, he was tempted to wait out the real reason she had come to see him. However, in spite of the fact that he had nothing to do but time, he couldn’t stand the inefficiency.

“You didn’t drive all the way down here in the middle of the night to talk about the farm. Why don’t you just out with it.”

Shelby’s eyes lifted to the ceiling, and the fact that she seemed to be praying to God did not fill him with happy anticipation. Maybe this was about money? The breeding farm, which had been started by his great-great-grandfather, had been the last place Edward had expected to end his career, not just a step down but a slip, fall, hit-your-head-and-pass-out from the lofty CEO-ship of the Bradford Bourbon Company. Yet what had been just a rich man’s hobby to his ancestors had turned out to be a salvation for him—and he’d thought that he’d left the enterprise in the good books.

“Now hold on,” he said, “if this is about cash flow, we were just beginning to show a profit. And there was enough money in the operating account—”

“I’m sorry?”

“Cash. In the operating account. I left fifty thousand in there at least. And we’ve got no debt, and the sales of the yearlings—”

“What are you talking about?”

As they looked at each other in confusion, he cursed. “So you’re not here because the bank account has run dry?”

“No.”

That should have been a relief. It wasn’t.

Shelby cleared her throat. And then those eyes of hers locked on his. “I want to know why you lied to the police.”

Lane could have gone back upstairs, but he didn’t want to disturb Lizzie, and there was no rest for the weary. His brain was a shack in a tornado, his thoughts getting splintered and becoming flying debris thanks to all the emotions roiling inside of him—and as much as he loved being in bed with his woman, the idea of lying there in the dark, his body frozen in deference to her while this F5 raged within his skull, seemed like hell.

He ended up in the kitchen.

Walking into the dim open space, he didn’t bother with any light switches. There was plenty of ambient illumination from the back courtyard, and the restaurant-worthy stretches of stainless-steel counters and professional-grade appliances rebounded the glow, making it seem as if twilight was taking a breather inside until it was called in for duty again the following evening.

The bowling alley–sized space was split into two halves, one for banquet cooking when you had a dozen chefs grinding out hundreds of passed hors d’oeuvres, followed by identical plates of some fancy sprigged and sauced delicacy, and finally a small army’s worth of miniature pots de crème in ramekins. The other side was for Miss Aurora’s family cooking, when she was whipping up breakfast for the guests in the house, pulling together lunch, and making dinners for four or six or twelve.

How many people had been fed out of here, he wondered. Conference hotels probably did less business, especially back when his parents had been up and functioning: While he’d been growing up, there had been cocktail parties every Thursday, a formal sit-down dinner every Friday for twenty-four, and then Saturdays had been reserved for three- or four-hundred-person gala events for charities and civic causes and political candidates. And then there had been the holidays. And Derby.

Hell, Derby brunch here this year had served mint juleps and mimosas to more than seven hundred people before they went to the track.

Now, though, crowds like that were part of Easterly’s past. For one, there wasn’t the money to afford them. For another, given the fact that only a handful of people had showed for his father’s visitation, the bad news about “the Bradford Bankruptcy” had clearly driven away the hordes.

Funny thing, how rich people were so insecure. Scandal was only good if it happened to someone else, and then only at a gossip-distance. Anything closer than chatter and it was like they were afraid they’d catch the insolvent virus.

Lane went over to the center island and pulled out a stool. As he sat down, he looked across at the twelve-burner stove top and remembered the number of times he’d watched Miss Aurora do her thing with her pots and her pans there. To this day, his idea of comfort food was her collard greens and fried chicken, and he wondered how he was going to get through life never having either done her way again.

He thought back to when he’d touched down in Charlemont just weeks ago. He’d come because one of Miss Aurora’s relatives had called him and told him his momma was dying. It had been the only thing that could possibly have gotten him back here—and he’d had no idea what was in store for him.

For example, he’d had no idea that he’d find the family’s controller dead from suicide in her office.

Hemlock, for godsakes. Like something out of the Roman court.

Rosalinda Freeland’s death had been the start of it all, the tipping domino of bad news that had sent all the others falling, from the money that was missing at the Bradford Bourbon Company to the debt that his father owed the Prospect Trust Company to the emptying of his mother’s trust to the unacknowledged son Rosalinda had had with Lane’s father. Lane had been in a scramble ever since, trying to find the bottom of the losses, restructure the company, save his family’s house, and grow into the role that everybody, including himself, had assumed was his older brother Edward’s mantle to bear.

And then his father’s body had been found floating in the Ohio River.

Everyone, including law enforcement, had assumed that the cause of death had been suicide, particularly after the autopsy and medical records had showed William Baldwine had had metastatic lung cancer from his having smoked all his life. The man had been dying, and that reality, along with all the financial laws he’d broken and funds he’d squandered, had been the kind of thing anybody would kill themselves to get away from.

Oh, and then there was also the little picky detail that the guy had gotten Lane’s estranged wife pregnant.

But really, on the list of William’s sins, that was practically a footnote.

Suicide had not been the cause, however. And a finger, literally, was what had pointed to the truth.

His Lizzie and her horticultural partner, Greta, had been in front of Easterly, replanting an ivy bed, when they had found a piece of William Baldwine. His ring finger, to be exact. That discovery had brought the Charlemont Metro homicide department to the house, and the subsequent investigation had led the police out of the county, but not out of the family.

To Edward at the Red & Black Stables.

Lane groaned and rubbed his aching eyes as he heard his brother’s voice in his head: I acted alone. They’re going to try to say I had help. I didn’t.

You know what Father did to me. You know that he had me kidnapped and tortured. . . .

For all intents and purposes, William had tried to murder his own son. And didn’t that provide an intent and a purpose for Edward.

Let this be, Lane. Don’t fight this. You know what he was like. He got what he deserved, and I don’t regret it in the slightest.

Yes, the revenge motive had been clear.

With a curse, Lane reached across and pulled a copy of the most recent Charlemont Courier Journal over. And what do you know, a picture of Edward emerging from the back of a squad car at the big jail downtown was right above the fold.