Stepping in behind him, she massaged his shoulders. “You talked to that reporter again?”

“Yeah.” He slumped. “Oh, God, that feels good.”

“You’re so tight.”

“I know.” He exhaled. “But yeah, I just spoke with her. She’s running the story. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. One of those vice presidents must have talked. She knew so damned much.”

“How can she share that information, though? The Bradford Bourbon Company isn’t a public company. Isn’t it a violation of privacy?”

“There’s no HIPAA when it comes to businesses. And as long as she couches things in a certain way, she’ll be all right. It’ll be like when they put the word ‘alleged’ in front of almost everything when they report on crimes.”

“What will happen next?”

“I don’t know, and I’m really past the point of worrying about it. All I have to do is get through the visitation tomorrow, and then the next crisis will be honored with my full attention.”

“Well, we’re ready. Mr. Harris and I took care of the staffing, Miss Aurora is ready in the kitchen. The grounds are taken care of with a final touch up being done in the morning. How many people do you expect?”

“A thousand, maybe. At least as much as—oh, right there. Yeeeeeeeeeeah.” As he let his head fall to the opposite side, she admired the line of his strong neck. “As much as we had for the Derby brunch at least. One thing you can always take to the bank, particularly if you’ve lost your money? People looooove to stare at the carcass of greatness. And after that article tomorrow, that’s what we’re going to look like at the butcher’s counter.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Remember my fantasy where we leave this all behind?”

Lane twisted around and pulled her into his lap. As he brushed her hair back and looked at her, his smile almost reached his eyes. “Yes, oh, yes. Tell me what it’s like again.”

She stroked his jaw, his throat, his shoulders. “We live on a farm far away. You spend your days coaching basketball. I plant flowers for the city. Every night, we sit together on our porch and watch the sun go down over the cornstalks. On Saturdays, we go to the flea market. Maybe I sell things there. Maybe you do. We shop at a little grocery store where Ragu is considered a foreign delicacy, and I make a lot of soup in the winter and potato salad in the summer.”

As his lids sank down, he nodded. “And apple pie.”

She laughed. “Apple pie, too. And we go skinny-dipping—in our pond out back.”

“Oh, I like that part.”

“I thought you would.”

His hands started to wander, circling her waist, moving higher. “Can I confess something?”

“Absolutely.”

“It’s not going to reflect well on my character.” He frowned deeply. “Then again, there isn’t a lot doing that at the moment.”

“What is it?”

It was a while before he answered. “When you and I were in my father’s office, I wanted to push everything off the top of his desk and have sex with you on the damn thing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Depraved?”

Lizzie considered the hypothetical with a smile. “Not really. Although I actually can’t decide whether that’s erotic or just going to create a mess on the floor that it’s going to kill me not to clean up.”

As he laughed, she got to her feet but stayed straddling him. “But I have an idea.”

“Oh?”

Arching her back, she untucked her shirt and slowly pulled it up and over her head. “There’s a table right here—and although there’s nothing but your laptop on it, and I wouldn’t suggest throwing that on the floor, we could still … you know.”

“Oh, yeaaaaah …”

As Lizzie stretched out on her kitchen table, Lane was right on her, leaning over her, his mouth finding hers on a surge of heat.

“By the way,” she gasped, “in my fantasy, we do this a lot …”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The following morning, Lane slowed down as he approached the Big Five Bridge from the Indiana side, traffic choking up the highway with morning commuters. The Porsche’s radio was off. He hadn’t checked his phone. And he hadn’t cracked his laptop before leaving Lizzie’s.

The sun was once again bright in a mostly clear blue sky, a few streaky clouds passing by on the edges. The good weather wasn’t supposed to last, though. A low-pressure system was coming in and storms were due.

Seemed fitting.

As he downshifted into third, and then second, he saw up ahead that the delay was more than just rush hour. Up ahead, there was some construction on the span, the merging lines of cars forming a bottleneck that winked in the sunshine and threw off waves of heat. Inching forward, he knew he was going to be late, but he was not going to get worked up over that.

He didn’t want this meeting now. But he’d been given no choice.

When he finally got into the single line, things started to move, and he almost laughed when he finally pulled up next to the workers in their orange bibs, hard hats, and blue jeans.

They were installing a chain-link fencing system to keep people away from the drop.

No more jumping. Or at least, if you insisted on trying it, you were going to need to get your climb on first.

Hitting spaghetti junction, he took a tight curve, shot under an overpass, got onto I-91. Two exits later, he was off at Dorn Avenue and going down onto River Road.

The Shell station on the corner was the kind of place that was part drugstore, part supermarket, part liquor store … and part newsstand.

And he intended to go by it as he made a right. After all, there was going to be a copy of the Charlemont Courier Journal at Easterly.

In the end, though, his hands made the decision for him. Wrenching the wheel to the right, he shot into the service station, bypassed the gas tanks and parked by the double-doored silver freezer that had ICE painted across it along with a picture of a cartoon penguin with a red scarf around its neck.

The baseball cap he pulled down low over his face had the U of C logo on the front.

At the pumps, there were a couple of guys filling up their pick-up trucks. A municipal vehicle. A CG&E cherry picker. A woman in a Civic with a baby she kept checking on in the back.