“I do love Fire Creek. But I love my family more. I’m actually capable of love. That’s the difference between us.” He moves past me toward the door, but just as his feet pause at the threshold, I say one more thing to him. “If you ever darken my door again, I’ll put a bullet in you. Are we clear?”
He doesn’t acknowledge the statement just walks on toward the shiny new Mercedes that he’s leased for himself. I know he leased it because he can’t afford to buy it, the shit. I watch him drive off and take another long pull from the bottle. That son of a bitch will burn if it’s the last thing I do.
5
CHAPTER FIVE
Clayton
* * *
I’m back in the office the next day. It’s after lunch, which I avoided like the damn plague. Half a fifth of bourbon makes the idea of food surprisingly unpalatable. I’m so hungover I could die. Not to mention the fact that Annalee left me with my balls tied in a knot and then Samuel showed up like shit sprinkles on a dirt cake.
The door to my office opens and Quentin walks in. The smell of the sour mash cooking up wafts in with him and I have to question whether I finished off the bourbon or whether it finished off me.
“You look like ass,” Quentin states.
“I feel like it too. What do you want?”
“I went by the house this morning. I have no idea what’s going on but it looks like a damned tornado went through it. Mia has shit torn out all over the place…she looks a little crazed.”
Recalling the conversation with her the night before, I sigh. Everything is coming to head—with Mia and Bennett, with our shithead father, and now Annalee has given me a deadline. “If you’ve got anything on Samuel I can use, I need it now. I’d like to wait, to gather a little more evidence before I go in for the final push, but time is a luxury we don’t have anymore.”
“It isn’t much. The lead in Knoxville didn’t pan out… or maybe they just chickened out. So we’re left with a stripper in Vegas, but no one cares about that. There’s the gambling and kickbacks from our state representative, but dragging a politician into this mess could bite us in the ass,” Quentin points out. “We need the big stuff that you won’t even tell me about, and I don’t know how to get it.”
It was true. Pissing off politicians when you were in the liquor business was never a good idea. As for the big stuff, I still have no proof, only speculation. He was the last person to see Katherine Shelby alive, but a missing debutante and a paint job on his boat isn’t enough to get him charged. “I’ve got the tax records,” I reply. “I’ve got the documented affairs from before Mama’s accident, the final tally of what’s left of her money after he spent it all on his mistresses.”
Quentin makes a disgusted sound. “Do I want to know how much?”
I pull the statement from a file in my desk drawer and lay it in front of Quentin. “Less than twenty thousand. He ran through a ten million dollar estate like it was beer money at the track. There’s still a couple million in another trust which matures in about five months. That would pay for her caregivers for the rest of her life… or it would give Samuel one hell of a weekend.”
Looking over the piece of paper, Quentin’s jaw clenches with fury. “Cars, clothes, apartments, jewelry, trips to Europe and the Bahamas! He’s been taking his whores on pleasure cruises while we’ve been working our asses off? And Mia… for the love of God! She hasn’t left Fontaine other than a day trip to Lexington, or back when she was commuting to school, in over a decade!”
I know that. I know every bit of it straight to my soul, but it won’t give us the leverage we need. “It’s not enough… we might be able to get him to give up the distillery, but with the promise of Mama’s trust, he won’t forfeit guardianship of her… and that’s nonnegotiable right now,” I reply coolly.
Quentin crosses his arms over his chest and tips the chair back. It’s his thinking pose, even as a kid, he’d sit like that whenever he was working something out in his head.
“What’s going on in your head, Quentin?”
“The investor I mentioned.” he offers, “He’s in.”
“He’s got the ready capital to just buy in? Who is this?”
“A friend,” Quentin hedges. “Pro football, wants to retire while his knees will still support him.”
Clayton shook his head. “I don’t know… We need long term here. Not someone who’s going to get bored and leave us floundering.”
“He’s local, or at least he used to be. He’s coming back to Kentucky for good and wants to be involved in local enterprises.”
I’ve got a good idea of just who Quentin is talking about and it’s concerning, at the very least. Quentin has a bent towards being wild and reckless himself. The last thing he needs is someone else with those same qualities involved in the day to day operations of the distillery. “Mallory?”
Quentin nods. “Keep it quiet. He hasn’t announced his retirement officially yet.”
A soft knock at the office door keeps me from saying anything more. Annalee is standing in the doorway.
Quentin gets up and immediately moves toward the door. “I’ve got that thing that I was supposed to do… for the other thing.”
“Coward,” I accuse softly.
“Fuck, yes,” Quentin answers and vanishes swiftly.
I’m not watching my brother’s retreat. My eyes on her, locked and unmoving. My wife, or at least she would be for a little while longer.
“You look awful,” she says softly as she comes in and takes a seat.
I shrug. I’m hungover. It goes with the territory. “I feel it. I can still drink like I’m twenty… unfortunately, I recover like I’m eighty.”
“You got drunk?”
I fight the impulse to roll my eyes at her scandalized tone. It would hurt too bad. “There’s two cures for blue balls, Annalee. For the record, bourbon was my second choice.”
I watch her, noting the blush that steals over her cheeks. It’s not embarrassment putting it there. She’s still just as hot for me as I am for her, even if she is dressed like a school teacher. In jeans and a simple sweater, she’s a far cry from the pseudo-hippy I met in while in grad school. That girl would have shared the bourbon with me and then taught me lessons on the Kama Sutra.
Remembering the long, gypsy hair and the crazy clothes she wore, half of which had come from thrift stores, I smile in spite of myself. More than half probably. But it didn’t matter. I saw her the night that Kentucky beat Utah to go on to the championship game. She’d been dancing around a burning couch on the lawn of my apartment building.
There was something about her, about the way she moved, the abandon of it all that had called to me. The party had been my roommate's idea. I was supposed to be studying. It's the only time in my life that doing the wrong thing ever truly went in my favor. One look at her and that was it. I convinced her to go out with me, and I never looked back.
On our first date, she’d confessed to me that she didn’t even know what people were celebrating, but it was free beer and looked like a good time. She’d just joined in. Wild, unfettered, and more drunk on life than on the cheap beer flowing from a dozen kegs up and down the street, I’d never met anyone like her before.
“When did we get old, Ann?” I ask. “We used to drink like fish, fuck like rabbits and fight like the damn devil… Where did all that go?”
She laughs, just as I’d intended. “We stopped most of that after Emma Grace came along. She demanded a lot of attention from both of us… She has a dance recital this weekend.”
It’s already marked on my calendar. “She told me. I’ll be there.”
Annalee looks down at her feet, clearly uncomfortable. “I wanted to apologize for last night… For all of it. What happened—it shouldn’t have. And for the other day, what I said to you about the date, about going out with someone… I shouldn’t have told you that. But it feels weird to keep things from you,” she admits. “I said it to make you jealous and it was a stupid, chil
dish and selfish thing to do.”
I curse under my breath, and pinch the bridge of my nose. My head pounding like a damn steam train. “I have to apologize too.” It was a hard thing for me to say. “It’s not my place to question you anymore about where you’re going or what you’re doing… or who you’re doing it with.”
“Old habits,” she offers.
“Something like that,” I agree. Even miserable and hungover, even under the crushing weight of the knowledge that I might lose her forever, I want her. I want to lose myself in her, to inhale the scent of her and taste her on my tongue.
It must have shown on my face, some hint of what I was feeling, because as she meets my gaze, the silence between us shifts and changes. It’s charged now with something that neither one of us will dare to name. If we do, I’ll have her naked on this desk and be balls deep inside her before either of us can have a chance to think twice. “As for everything else that happened… the only thing I’m sorry for is that we didn’t finish what we started.”
She looks away abruptly. “Clayton—.”
“I don’t regret it,” I insist, and my tone is more forceful than I intended for it to be. “I ought to, but I don’t. If my asshole brother wasn’t just down the hall and two dozen workers just a floor below, I’d show you just how much I don’t regret it.”
She blinks at me, clearly unprepared for the confession. Whatever else is going on between us, she still wants me. I seize onto that. It’s the only hope I have.
Her voice is breathless as she abruptly changes the subject, “I thought I’d go check on Mia. I know you’re worried about her.”
It was a peace offering and I take it for that. I sigh and nod. “Thank you. Quentin went up there earlier but she won’t talk to him the way she’d talk to you.”
Annalee laughs. “You mean Mr. Sensitivity? Why the hell not?”
There is nothing constructive to add to that. Quentin has always been pretty oblivious when it comes to women he doesn’t intend to sleep with. I want to tell her how much it means to me that she’s looking out for Mia, that she’s still a part of the family regardless of what’s happening between us. Maybe if I wasn’t nursing the mother of all hangovers it would be different, or maybe if she didn’t have me tied in so many goddamn knots I can’t see straight. “I don’t know how to fix this for her,” I admit gruffly.
“She won’t let you fix it,” Annalee replies. “And Mia’s my family too. Not by blood, not even by marriage for very much longer, but she’ll always be my family.”
“Not another damn word about that. There’s no expiration date on this now. You gave me an option last night… a deadline. I will make it, Annalee. Whatever I have to do, by the time those papers are in your hand, this is all going to look very different.”
She doesn’t take umbrage at that, but she doesn’t acknowledge my resolve either. “I’m not sure who I’m reminding anyway… me or you. Emma Grace has dance practice after her field trip, so if I’m going to spend any time at all with Mia, I should go now.”
I watch her get up and walk toward the door. No one moves like her, I think to myself again. Whether it’s the yoga she’s addicted to, the dance classes she’d taken when she was younger, or just her own innate grace, it has always been a sight I appreciated.
“Wait.”
She turns back, glancing over her shoulder at me. “What?”
I don’t have a reason, other than that I just wasn’t ready to see her leave. “I just wanted to look at you.”
“There’s not much to see,” she protests.
I get up from the desk and move toward her until we're standing less than a breath apart. “You’re wrong about that… there’s you.”
She exhales, the sound fractured and wounded. “Damn you, Clayton.”
I touch her face, stroking the softness of her cheek and then sliding my thumb over her lower lip. “Do you remember the night we met? Sitting in that shithole of a diner talking for hours?”
She meets my gaze steadily, but there's a slight tremor in her. I can feel it when I touch her. “I remember everything,” she utters.
“And then driving home, parking in front of your house,” I pause for a second. “And a good night kiss that turned into so much more.”
“Clayton, we can't go back... We're not those people anymore,” she whispers.
“We are,” I insist. I press her back against the door, letting her feel how much I want her, how hard I am for her. “I want you the same way now that I did then. I crave you like I always did. Tell me you don't feel that way!”
“Don't do this to me, Clayton,” she whispers brokenly.
“What am I doing, Annalee?”
“Don’t be the man now that I needed a year ago. Don’t offer me what I wanted and needed when it’s probably too damned late!”
She pushes me away, and I let her. Mostly because I can see the hurt in her. Beyond the confusion, beyond the need that won't leave either one of us alone, I know she's still hurting and the last thing I want to do is hurt her more. She turns and flees, her heels clicking on the floor as she all but runs from me.
I go back to my desk and lean back in the chair, scrubbing my hands over my face. There is too much between us. Too much for me to let go and too much for her to look past.
The fury inside me, the controlled rage that I normally keep locked down tight, roars to life. With a sweep of my arm, I’ve cleared the top of the desk. The phone crashes to the floor, papers flutter in the air before coming to rest on the ground. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Neither do the litany of curses that follow. It’s the second time in a week my destructive temper has escaped me. It’s a record.
Annalee
I arrive at the family home and Evelyn, the lady who normally stays with Patricia, answers the door. She looks at me with a worried frown. “I don’t know what has my baby so tore up, but whatever it is, it ain’t good!”
“Where is she, Evelyn?” I ask. I’m still raw from the face off with Clayton in his office. Even when we’re not trying to hurt one another, we do. Maybe focusing on Mia’s issues instead of my own will help.
“She’s upstairs in her Mama’s old room. She has torn this house apart! Everything in it is upside down… Not that it doesn’t need to be. They’ve been living in this house like it’s a museum for far too long.”
I move past Evelyn toward the stairs. She’s probably right about all of that. In a lot of ways, even though they’ve all gone on and done other things, for Mia, Quentin and Clayton, it’s like a part of them froze in time with Patricia.
I enter the bedroom and note the dated decor. Even before the accident, Patricia had been talking about wanting to update and get rid of the Laura Ashley wallpaper and bedding. The heavy oak furniture with its early American motif is just as out of fashion. But it’s not the decor that has me stopping in my tracks. Mia is sitting on the floor, cross legged, surrounded by boxes. Her hair is wild, her face is streaked with dust and she appears to be wearing clothes more appropriate to clubbing than housework. She’s so focused on the task in front of her that she hasn’t even realized I’m in the room.
“Can I help?” I ask softly.
Mia looks up at me and instantly, her eyebrow goes up speculatively. “You look rested,” she says and there’s a world of innuendo in her tone.
“He did not spend the night. I did not sleep with him,” I reply, keeping my answers concise and completely honest. “Stop poking at my love life and I won’t poke at yours.”
Mia cocks her head to the side and considers it for a moment. “Done.”
“So what am I looking for?” I ask her.
“Letters. Handwritten to my mother or father from Barbara Shelby. They may or may not be signed.”
I take a seat on one of the upholstered chairs that flank the dresser and grab one of the plastic storage totes. “Got it… Am I going to be grossed out by them?”
“Probably.”
I wipe the dust off the
top of the tote before opening it. I start sifting through the contents, piece by piece. It’s depressing and sad to think that the person who put these things in a box is lying downstairs, probably completely unaware of anything going around on her. Of course, my more immediate concerns are for Mia. Whatever is going on with her, it’s bad. I’ve never seen her like this. “Not to be too much of a nanny here but, have you slept? Or showered?”
“No, and I’m hot. Sweating like a whore in church. There’s a lot of things you shouldn’t be poking at right now,” Mia replies pointedly.
There’s a lot of warning packed into that tone. “Fair enough.”
We work in silence for the longest time, each one of us sorting through years of memories. The tedium isn’t what’s getting to me. Picking out school papers, awards that each of her children had received that had been carefully filed away, bills paid. All the little pieces of a life that just stopped. It never ended. Just stopped.
My thoughts must have mirrored Mia’s because she looks up at me. There are no tears in her eyes, not because she doesn’t need to shed them, but more than likely because she’s already cried out her quota.
“This is what’s left of her. This, right here, all these plans and tasks… I don’t want this to be someday. I don’t want to look up and realize that I let my whole life be an accumulation of things that I thought I would do or have someday.”
I meet Mia’s gaze and the papers I’ve been shuffling still in my hand. I’d hurt for Clayton when Patricia was in that accident, I’d cried for him when he wouldn’t in the aftermath. We hadn’t even been together that long, but I’d known then how much it was cutting him, how much it hurt with every progressively negative report from every doctor that examined her. Persistent vegetative state was the final word, but no one could explain why. And Mia has been left here, alone for the most part, caring for a woman with no end in sight.
Clayton (Bourbon & Blood Book 2) Page 6