No more private jets. No more jewels and oil paintings of so-and-so’s great-great-great-grandfather. No more Easterly with its seventy-person staff and its acres of formal gardens and its unrelenting grind. No more parties and balls, Rolls-Royces and Porsches, fancy, soulless people smiling with empty eyes.

No more Bradford Bourbon Company.

Although the product itself had never been the problem.

Maybe he would even take her last name so that no one in their new life would know who he was, who his family was.

He would be as she herself was, an anonymous person living a modest life—and yes, there might not be majesty in her fantasy of the two of them. But she would take the simple graces of mediocrity over the empty grandeur of great money every day of the week. And twice on Sunday.

“You know, I can’t believe he killed himself,” Lane murmured. “It just doesn’t seem like something he would do. He was far too arrogant for it—and hell, if the great William Baldwine was going to commit suicide, it would have been more fitting for him to put one of Alexander Hamilton’s dueling pistols to his mouth and pull the trigger. But jumping off a bridge he’d considered ‘garish’? Into water he wouldn’t deign to give to a barn cat? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Lizzie took a deep breath. And dared to put into words something she herself had been wondering. “Are you … thinking maybe someone killed him?”

SIX

Red & Black Stables

Ogden County, Kentucky

Sweet smell of hay.

Oh, the sweet smell of hay and the stomping of hooves … and the ice-cold concrete of the aisle that ran between the mahogany-doored stalls.

As Edward Westfork Bradford Baldwine sat outside his thorough-bred stallion’s sawdust-floored bedroom, his bony ass was suffering from a frigid recontouring, and he marveled at how, even in May, the stone was so cold. Granted, it was dawn, but the temperature outside was seventy even without the sun’s help. One would think that the ambient benevolence of late spring would be more generous with its climatic attentions.

Alas, no.

Fortunately, he was drunk.

Lifting the bottle of—what was it? Ah, vodka. Fair enough—to his lips, he was disappointed to find such a light weight in his hand. There was only an inch left in the bottom and the thing had been three-quarters full when he had limped his way out here. Had he put all those ounces away? And damn it, the rest of his supply was at such a distance—although that was relative, he supposed. The caretaker’s cottage where he stayed on the Red & Black thoroughbred breeding farm was no more than a hundred yards off, but it might as well have been miles.

He looked down at his legs. Even hidden under denim, the reconstructed, unreliable mess he had to ambulate upon was nothing more than a painfully thin pair of unhinged pins, his modest, size-eleven boots seeming like blown-up clown shoes in proportion. And then you added the inebriation and the fact that he had been sitting here for how long?

His only chance for more vodka was going to be clawing his way forth, dragging his lower body behind like a wheelbarrow that had fallen off its tire onto its side.

Not all was essentially nonfunctional, however. Tragically, his mind remained sharp enough to constantly spit images at him, the impact of the mental constructs like paintballs shot at his frail body.

He saw his brother Lane standing in front of him, telling him that their father was dead. His beautiful, crazy sister, Gin, wearing the massive diamond of a cruel man upon her elegant hand. His beautiful, crazy mother abed and be-dazed, unaware of all that was transpiring.

His Sutton, who was not, in fact, his, and never would be.

And that was the main loop on his mental replay. After all, things before Edward had been tortured and not ransomed were a bit hazy.

Perhaps that was the solution to his inner demons. Booze didn’t go far enough—but eight days in the jungle being beaten, starved, and taunted with his impending death had certainly turned the volume down on recollections that had come before his kidnapping. And as a bonus, he was unlikely to survive a second round of such ministrations—

The sound of a small pair of barn boots coming down at him had him rolling his eyes. When they stopped in front of him, he didn’t bother looking up.

“You again,” he said.

In reply to his cheerful greeting, Shelby Landis’s voice was something out of a children’s cartoon—or at least its feminine pitch was. Its intonation, as usual, was more drill sergeant than Cinderella.

“Let’s getchup, here now.”

“Let’s leave me here, forever—and that is an order.”

Up above Edward’s head, behind the iron bars that kept the stallion from biting off pieces of human anatomy, Nebekanzer let out a whinny that sounded curiously close to a hello. Typically, the enormous black stallion uttered equine murder to anyone other than Edward.

And even his owner was never addressed with any kind of joy.

“We can do this the hard way or the harder way,” Shelby maintained.

“A bevy of choices you present me with. How magnanimous of you.”

And the contrarian in him wanted to be obstreperous just to find out what “harder” involved. Further, even in his weakened condition, most women of her diminutive height would have struggled to manhandle him, and that could have presented added fun. Shelby, however, had a body that had been honed by a lifetime of hours and hours of backbreaking work in and around thoroughbreds.

She was going to win this one. Whatever it was.

And his pride was all he had left with which to justify his manhood.

Although why he would care about even that, he had no clue.

Pushing himself upright was an exercise in hammer-to-nail, brutal strikes of pain battering him internally even with all the alcohol in his system. The grunting was an embarrassment, especially in front of an employee—who happened to have a good Christian’s disdain of blasphemy, no sense of boundaries, and a dead sire to whom Edward owed too much.

Which was why he’d had to hire Shelby when she’d shown up on the cottage’s front stoop with nothing but an overheating truck, an honest face, and a solid stare to her name—

A lurch born out of his lack of balance sent Edward on a path back down to the concrete, his body collapsing like a folding table, something bad happening to one of his ankles.

But Shelby caught him before he cracked his head open, her strong arms snapping out and grabbing him, pulling him against her. “Come on.”