Devil's Cut

by J. R. Ward

  He would be faithful to her always in Charlemont, and also wherever they had vacation homes, his indiscretions discreet and never spoken of between them. She would be utterly monogamous to him, recognizing that her value was in both the appearance and reality of her virtue. He would respect her, quite sincerely, as the mother of his children, but he would never seek her opinion about anything concerning their money, his business, or plans about their homes, bills, or major purchases. She would resent him over time but resign herself to her role, taking enjoyment in besting groups of women with her status, diamonds, and the performance of her children, all of that one-upmanship occurring in social settings that were photographed by Vanity Fair and Vogue.

  He would die first, either of throat or tongue cancer because of his cigar habit, or at the wheel of his vintage Jag, or perhaps from a cirrhotic liver. She would be relieved and never remarry, her choice to remain a widow one made not out of loyalty to him but rather because she would lose her life estate on the farm and in the other houses as well as the enjoyment of the interest on the stocks and money he would leave in trust to his children. In her later years, she would enjoy her freedom from him and the company of her grandchildren, until she died in this very room, some fifty years from now, a private nurse by her side.

  Not a bad run for either of them, considering all the other variations on the human condition one could get stuck in by virtue of the genetic lottery. And perhaps he would volunteer for precisely that blueprint, perhaps when the need to procreate finally struck him as a priority--which it absolutely had not up until now.

  But until then?

  "I'm so sorry"--Peyton/Preston...or was it Prescott?--"but I'm leaving for the day. My estate manager and the cleaning people will be here, and I don't think it's appropriate for you to be in this sort of dishabille around them?"

  She stretched again, and if her goal was enticement, he was afraid she was falling far short. Having already had all of that, there was nothing left to conquer and little to actually connect with.

  And when he didn't respond as she had no doubt hoped--i.e., by throwing himself in between her legs--she pouted. "Where are you off to in all that black? A funeral?"

  "Nothing of the sort." He approached her and leaned down, brushing her lips with his. "Come now, let's get ourselves dressed."

  "I thought you preferred me naked?" She licked her mouth with the tip of her pink tongue. "That's what you told me last night."

  Samuel T. glanced at his watch to avoid telling her that he didn't remember much of the particulars past eleven p.m. Maybe ten-thirty.

  "Where is your dress?" he asked.

  "Downstairs. On the red sofa."

  "I'll go get it. Along with everything else."

  "I wasn't wearing panties."

  Now, that he did recall...from when they'd had sex in the Charlemont Country Club's shoeshine room at around eight. The party they had both been at, a gathering to celebrate the impending nuptials of one of his fraternity brothers, had progressed from the grill room out to the pool. It had been himself, fifty of his brothers, and then Prescott/Peyton--or had it been Peabody?--and a number of other Tri-Delts who were sorority sisters of the bride.

  Your typical May evening out, the kind of thing that was as lovely and forgettable as she was.

  He'd be lucky if he remembered any feature of either as he drove away from his farm.

  "I'll be right back," he said. "Get yourself up, dearest one. The day isn't getting any younger and neither are we."

  When he returned with her Stella McCartney dress and her Louboutins, he was relieved to find her out of bed--and he had to admit, she cut quite a vision standing at the window on one side of his fireplace, her rather spectacular rear assets on display.

  With her hands on her hips and her head tilted to the side, he was willing to bet she was trying to figure out exactly how much of the view he owned.

  "As far as the eye can see," he said dryly. "In all directions."

  She twisted around and smiled. "Quite a spread you have, then."

  "My father and mother own the thousand acres to the east." As her eyes bulged, he simply shrugged. "I just have this smaller parcel."

  "I had no idea there was so much land in Kentucky."

  What did one say to that? Somehow, he didn't think quoting the study that suggested intelligence was passed on to children through the mother's side of things--and that perhaps she might be concerned on that point--was going to help matters much.

  "Here." He held out her things. "I really must go."

  "Will you call me?" She frowned. "I put my digits in your phone, remember?"

  "Of course I do. And I will absolutely call you." It was a lie that he had used many times, particularly in these situations that required expedited egresses. "I'll be waiting for you downstairs. On the porch."

  Turning on his heel, he proceeded out and shut the door softly behind himself. As he bottomed out on the first floor, he went into his study and loaded up his great-uncle's forty-year-old briefcase with files and notes. The packing was just for show, however. Where he was going next, work was going to be the last thing on his mind.

  He was in the process of closing the old-fashioned leather satchel when his fingers lost their dexterity and the worn brass buckles became too much for him.

  Hanging his head, he closed his eyes. In less than an hour, he was going to see her, and he was not ready. Not prepared.

  Neither sober enough nor drunk enough.

  Gin Baldwine was the sort of woman who, if he was going to be in her presence, he needed to be either completely aware of himself or totally obliterated. Middle of the road was not his friend.

  Indeed, with him and Gin, it had always been extremes all around, great love, great hatred, great joy, great pain.

  Theirs wasn't a romance so much as a collision that kept happening over and over again.

  With a familiar rush, all kinds of crystal clear memories came back to him, and as the onslaught hit, he reflected that perhaps it wasn't the alcohol that had dimmed his mind to the events of the previous night with that P-named woman. When it came to Gin Baldwine, for example, he could relive countless bacchanals of longer duration and far surpassing intensity with the specificity of a New York Times article.

  Oh, Gin.

  Or, as he at times had thought of her, the Gin Reaper.

  The littlest of the Bradford family's Virginia Elizabeths was the thorn in his side, the arrow in the center of his target, the bomb planted under his car. She was the opposite of that lovely woman upstairs: She was not monogamous, she was never easy, and she didn't care if you called her.

  Gin was as predictable as an unbroken steed under saddle for the first time.

  In the middle of a Civil War reenactment battle.

  With a stone in one hoof and a horsefly biting its butt.

  Things between the two of them had been an epic competition since they'd first gotten together when they were teenagers. No quarter asked, no quarter given, nothing but a steady stream of tit-for-tat that had left everyone else around them in ruins while they had continued to square off.

  They had used so many others mercilessly in their game. Had trampled countless hearts more genuine than their own in the process.

  At least until Gin had...

  Dear Lord, he'd never thought she'd actually marry anyone--except for him, of course.

  Gin had walked down the aisle with Richard Pford, however.

  Well, presented herself in front of a judge with the other man, at any rate.

  So now it was done.

  Samuel T. thought back to her begging him to become her husband. She had come to him first--and he had blown it off as merely the newest incarnation of their legacy of chaos. But Gin had been serious--at least about the marriage issue. Who fulfilled that role was evidently unimportant--

  No, that wasn't true. The fact that she had picked Pford in the midst of her family's bankruptcy? Talk about unassailable logic. Richard's net wo
rth made Samuel T.'s own fortune seem like lunch money for a kindergartner--and that was even, as they said, before people in the Pford family started to die on the guy.

  Yet Gin was paying a high price for all that "security." True, she was never going to have to worry about money again....

  But Samuel T. thought about her bruised neck. The hollow pits her eyes had become. The fact that she had gone from being a Roman candle to a barely lit match.

  The idea that man was hurting her?

  Well, that just made a fellow want to go get a gun, didn't it.

  Opening his eyes, he tried to remember what he was doing and where he was. Ah, right. In his study, packing up work he was not going to do, before he left for a funeral that wasn't a funeral for a man that no one mourned.

  Just another day in the life.

  Proceeding out to the base of the stairs, he checked his watch and called up to the second floor. "Let's go, my love!"

  If he had to, he was prepared to carry the woman down on his shoulder and set her out on the curb. Which was not to suggest she was trash. More like a mis-delivered bouquet of flowers that had to move along to its rightful addressee.

  "Let us go!" he called out.

  As he waited for the woman to come down, he couldn't decide whether he wanted to see Gin--or was desperate to avoid her. Either way, there was no denying that he prayed she would call him for help.

  Before something happened with Pford that there was no coming back from.

  As Sutton Smythe gripped the rough railings of the cabin's porch, she took another deep inhale of the forest. The view before her was classic eastern Kentucky, the Cumberland Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains offering a rugged terrain of stoic evergreens and leafy maples, high rocky cliffs and low flowing rivers.

  This was God's country, where the air was clean, the sky was as big as the land, and you could leave your city problems behind.

  Or at least one felt that surely such issues should fade in the face of the dappling sunlight and the childhood-summer-camp nature of this retreat.

  "I made some coffee."

  As Dagney Boone spoke up behind her, she closed her eyes briefly. Yet when she turned around from the view, she had a smile on her face. The man deserved the effort. Even though he'd made it clear he was attracted to her, and wanted to pursue a relationship, he was content to sit things out as a friend for as long as it was required.

  Even if that was forever.

  God, why couldn't she just open her heart to him? He was handsome and smart, a non-douchebag widower who took care of his three kids, mourned his dead wife, and conducted himself with honor and commitment in his job.

  "You are a gentleman."

  Dagney held out the heavy mug, his eyes warm and steady. "Just the way you said you liked it. Two sugars, no cream."

  To avoid staring at him, Sutton made a show of inhaling the fragrant steam. "Perfect."

  The floorboards of the porch creaked as he went over and sat down on the swinging bench at the other end. Easing back, he kicked out with his hunting boot, the chains releasing a sweet chiming sound as he pendulum'd back and forth.

  As he looked at her, she refocused on the view, leaning up against a vertical support and crossing one foot over the other.

  "You've done a historic thing," he murmured.

  "Not really."

  "Gifting thirty thousand acres to the state? Saving these four mountaintops from the coal companies? Allowing the families who have been here for seven generations to stay on their land? I'd say that is very historic."

  "I would do anything for my father."

  As she thought of the man she loved so much, that once tall, majestic force of nature now crippled and wheelchair bound from Parkinson's disease, her sadness overwhelmed her. Then again, depression had not been far of late. In the last couple of days, all she had known was sorrow, and though experience had taught her that whatever moon or star in her This Sucks quadrant would inevitably move on to someone else's life, it was hard to think she was ever going to feel happiness again.

  And so, yes, to try to get away from herself, she had taken this trip out here with Dagney, the two of them making the three-hour drive from Charlemont with a packed dinner and breakfast, and all kinds of boundaries, emotional and physical, in place. She had been hoping she could clear her mind on the principle that geographical distance sometimes helped--and it wasn't just the travel time. These hunting cabins, isolated up on their mountain and maintained by one of the rural families she had gotten particularly close to, were as far removed from her life of luxury as you could get: no electricity, barely any running water, and BYO sleeping-bag bunks.

  "Don't mourn him before he's gone, Sutton."

  It was a shock, but not a surprise, that she thought first of Edward Baldwine.

  And as she switched tracks away from him, it was something she was long used to doing. "I know. You're so right. My father is still very much alive. Yet, it is so hard."

  "I understand, believe me. But you know, when my wife was...coming to the end of her illness, I wasted so much time trying to brace myself for what it would be like when she was gone. I kept trying to anticipate how I was going to feel, what my kids were going to need from me, whether or not I was even going to be able to function at all."

  "And it was totally useless, right?" When he didn't say anything, she glanced over and prompted him with, "You can be honest."

  "The reality...was so much worse than I imagined that I shouldn't even have bothered. The thing is, if you're being forced to jump into ice-cold water, dipping your toe in the stuff and trying to extrapolate that sensation all over your entire body?"

  "Silly."

  "Yes." Dagney shrugged and smiled into his own mug. "I probably should stop talking about this. Everyone's journey is their own."

  Pivoting toward him, she was struck by how attractive he was. And how uncomplicated. How reliable and non-dramatic.

  Too bad her heart had chosen another.

  "Thank you for last night," she said awkwardly. "You know, for not..."

  "I didn't come out here for sex." He smiled again. "I know where you stand. But as I told you before, if you want me to be your rebound from Edward Baldwine, I'm more than happy to play that role."

  His tone was gentle, his face and body relaxed, his eyes clear.

  Maybe I can get there, she thought. Maybe with him, sometime in the future, I'll be able to get there.

  "You're such a good man." She didn't even attempt to keep the regret out of her voice. "I really wish--"

  With a lithe surge, he got off the swing and came over. Standing in front of her, he met her in the eye. "Don't try to force anything. I'm not going anywhere. I've got my kids to take care of and a big job, and honestly, you're the first woman who's gotten my attention in the four years since my Marilyn died. So you reallllly don't have a lot of competition."

  Sutton smiled a little. "You are a prince."

  "Not my title and well you know it." He winked. "And I'm uncomfortable with the idea of monarchies. Democracies are the only way to go."

  Leaning in, she kissed him on the cheek. And as she looked back out over the view, he said, "Tell me something. Where do you actually wish you were right now?"

  "Nowhere."

  "Okay, now I have another question. Are you lying to yourself or me?"

  Sutton shook her head ruefully.

  "Is it so obvious?" She put her hand on his forearm. "And I don't mean any offense."

  "None taken. Especially if you tell me the truth."

  "Well, there's an event back in Charlemont today that I'm torn about."

  "Is it the hearing on developing Cannery Row?"

  "Ah, no. It's a private thing, actually."

  "We can head back now?"

  "It's too late. But thank you--"

  The sound of an ATV approaching through the trees brought both their heads around--and a second later, an old man dressed in hunting camo, with a shotgun strapped to his
back, motored into the clearing. With a rough sack in his lap and his well-lined face, he was every bit a mountain man, someone who had been born and been living off these hard hills for the six or seven decades he had been alive. In fact, it was difficult to place Mr. Harman's age. He could have been fifty or eighty. What Sutton knew for sure, though, was that he had been married to the same woman since he was sixteen and she had been fourteen, and they had had eleven children, of which eight had survived to adulthood.

  By now, he was a great-great-grandfather.

  As he got off his machine, Sutton waved. "Mr. Harman, how are you?"

  As she went over to the shallow steps off the porch, she saw Dagney glance off to the side and shake his head. Then he joined her.

  Mr. Harman narrowed his eyes on the other man like he was wondering how much it would take to taxidermy the guy. "The wife made you breakfast."

  "Mr. Harman, this is my friend, Dagney. Dagney, this is William Harman."

  Dagney offered his palm. "Sir, pleased to meet you."

  "We didn't stay together," Sutton said quickly. "I was in this cabin--he was in the other one, right over there."

  "I did make her coffee just now," Dagney explained as he clearly got the gist. "But that is all. I went to my own bunk when it got dark at ten. I swear on my wife's soul, may she rest in peace."

  Mr. Harman measured them for a long moment. Then he nodded once as if he approved. "We don't cohabit on our land."

  That out of the way, Mr. Harman shook what Dagney was holding out to him, and then he gave the sack to him. With a jab of his gnarled finger, he said, "Biscuits made just now. Venison sausage. Sweet tea."

  "Thank you," Sutton said.

  Mr. Harman grunted. "You got time to come see the new baby?"

  "Actually, we're heading back to Charlemont," Dagney said. "Sutton has something she needs to go to."

  "Oh, that's not--"

  "I know ya from somewheres." Mr. Harman crossed his arms over his chest and stared at Dagney. "Where'd that be?"

  "I'm the governor of our Commonwealth, sir." As Mr. Harman's eyes widened, Dagney mirrored the other's man pose exactly, linking his arms and leaning back into his boot heels. "And you know, I'd really like to come back and meet your family, hear what's on your mind, talk to you about how I can help?"