The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings Book 2) (51 page)

Gin felt in a bit of a daze as she went across and signed some things at a countertop. And yes, the pen was attached to a date block with a little metal leash of tiny silver links. The thing hissed like a snake as she scribbled her name here … here … and … right here, thank you.

“This is your key,” the woman said. “And I’ll take you to the box now.”

Ryan spoke up. “Do you want to go in alone, Gin?”

“No, if you can carry that?”

“Absolutely.”

The three of them entered the vault that had been opened just for her, and she was escorted to a safe-deposit box down by the floor that seemed like the size of a kitchen trash bin. Taking back the key, the manager leaned in and put it into the slot, added one of her own and then the hatch was opened.

The
woman extracted a square metal container out of the compartment with a grunt. “This is our biggest size.”

“Please don’t hurt yourself.” Gin turned to Ryan. “May I?”

She wanted to be the one to put the gold in there—and as soon as she did, she stared at the two of them.

“I want you to be my witnesses. This is for my daughter. In case anything happens to me, this is all hers. I’m giving it to Amelia.”

Gin took a sealed envelope out of her purse. “I put it in this letter. This is for Amelia.”

And the provisions for who got the gold weren’t the only things she’d written down. Samuel T. was in there as well.

He would no doubt be a fantastic father. Once he got over the shock … and the surge of hatred for Gin.

Laying the letter on top of the nylon sacks, she could feel the pair of them looking at her funny, and she couldn’t say she blamed them. After all, her father had just killed himself—or maybe hadn’t, who knew.

They were probably wondering if she was next.

“And if I’m found dead, I want you to know that Richard Pford did it.” She looked them both in the eye, ignoring the alarm she caused. “That’s also in the letter. If I’m killed, he murdered me.”

L
izzie could hardly eat.

It wasn’t that the company was bad. It wasn’t that the small dining room, with its collection of Imari platters mounted on its cream silk walls and its Aubusson rug, wasn’t elegant. And there certainly wasn’t anything wrong with Miss Aurora’s food.

It was more the fact that her man was about to play poker for a pot totaling over fifty thousand—

Million, she corrected herself. Fifty
million
dollars.

God, she couldn’t get her mind around the sum.

“—good idea at the time,” Lane was saying as he sat back from his second helping and wiped his mouth. “The river was at its high point,
and come on, Land Rovers are hearty vehicles. I wanted the challenge. So I took Ernie—”

“Wait,” she said, plugging into the story. “Who’s Ernie?”

Lane leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. “My first car. Ernie.” Jeff spoke up from across the table. “Why do I think this doesn’t end well for Ernie?”

“It didn’t.” Lane took a sip of his ginger ale. “Anyway, I went down to River Road, broke through the police tape—”

Miss Aurora shook her head, even as she was trying to hide her grin. “I’m so glad I didn’t know about this before now or I woulda had words with you, young man.”

“You may still get your chance,” John said with a laugh as he reached for his Coke. “The night is young.”

“Anyway,” Lane interjected, “I learned that as long as you keep moving forward, you got it. That water came all the way up until it was lapping over the hood.”

“This was without a snorkel?” Lizzie said. “Or with?”

“Without. And that was kind of the problem. See, there was this tree floating under the surface—”

“Oh, God,” Lizzie muttered.

“—and it caught me right at the grille. My velocity slowed … and yeah, that was when Ernie died. He was stuck there until the river went down, and you want to talk about silt? The inside of that car looked like it had spent a fortnight out in the desert during a sandstorm.”

As people laughed, Lizzie had to ask, “Wait, so what happened next? What did you tell your father?”

Lane grew serious, the smile leaving his face. “Oh, you know … Edward came in and saved the day. He had a bunch of money that he’d been investing—it wasn’t family cash, it was from summer jobs and birthday presents. He bought me a used one that looked just like Ernie, same interior, same exterior. A few more miles, but like Father was going to check the speedometer? Without Edward … man, that wouldn’t have gone well.”

“To
big brothers,” John said as he raised his glass.

“To big brothers,” everyone answered.

“So,” Lane murmured as everybody lowered their drinks back to the table. “You ready to do this?”

John got to his feet and picked up his plate. “Soon as we help clear. I can’t wait. I’m feeling lucky tonight, son. I’m feeling lucky!”

As Jeff and Miss Aurora got up as well, Lizzie stayed where she was, and Lane, as if sensing her mood, didn’t move either as everyone else filed out.

“You sure this is a good idea?” she whispered as she took his hands in hers. “Not that I don’t trust you. It’s just … that’s so much money.”

“If I win, Ricardo Monteverdi and that loan at Prospect Trust largely goes away—and then we’ve got half a chance because Jeff is going to turn the company around. God, you should have seen him down at headquarters. He’s … amazing. Just incredible. We’ll have some lean months, but by the end of the year? We’ll be up to date on accounts payable and Mack won’t have to worry about where the grains for his mash are coming from anymore.”

“I can’t believe you’re so calm.” She laughed. Or cursed. It was hard to know what that sound coming out of her was. “I feel like I’m a nervous wreck and I’m just on the sidelines.”

“I know what I’m doing. The only thing I’m worried about is luck—and that you can’t control. You can make up for it with skill, though. And I’ve got that in spades.”

She reached up to his face. “I’m so proud of you.”

“I haven’t won yet.”

“I don’t care about the outcome—well, I do. I just … you’re doing what you said you were going to do. You’re saving your family. You’re taking care of your business. You’re … you’re really amazing, you know that?”

As she went in to kiss him, he laughed deep in his chest. “Not a recalcitrant playboy anymore, am I. See what the love of a good woman will do for a guy?”

They
kissed for a moment, and then he pulled her into his lap. Putting her arms around his neck, she smiled.

“Absolutely.” Lizzie smoothed the hair at the base of his neck. “And guess what?”

“What?”

Lizzie put her mouth to his ear. “Win or lose … you’re getting lucky tonight.”

Lane let out a growl, his hands tightening on her waist, his hips rolling underneath her. As he went to kiss her again, she stopped him. “We better head for the game room now before distraction sets in.”

“It’s already set in,” he said dryly. “Trust me.”

“Just remember,” she murmured as she got off of him. “The sooner you’re done … the sooner we can go—”

Lane burst out of his chair, nearly knocking the thing over. Grabbing her hand, he started dragging her out of the room at a dead run.

“Will you quit wasting time, woman!” he said as she laughed out loud. “Jeez, I got poker to play …!”

A
bout
half an hour later, Lane sat at the circular poker table in the game room about three chairs away from Lenghe. The spectators, by mutual agreement of the players, had taken a lineup of chairs on the far side of where the cards were being thrown so no one could see over anyone’s shoulders. Lizzie and Miss Aurora were together, with Jeff and Gary, the head groundskeeper, sitting next to them.

There was no way of pretending that this wasn’t one of those moments that was inevitably going to become Bradford lore, just like when one of Lane’s ancestors had lent money to Abraham Lincoln or another had had to fight a fire at the Old Site with water from the aquifer, or when Bradford horses had come in one, two, and three in the 1956 Derby.

That trifecta had won his grandfather enough to pay for one whole new barn out at the Red & Black—

“Are we too late?”

Lane looked over to the doorway. “Mack, you came.”

“Like I’d miss this?”

Lane’s
Master Distiller walked in with a very nice-looking young woman—oh, the assistant, Lane thought. That’s right.

“Mr. Lenghe,” Mack said as he went over. “Good to see you again.”

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite distiller.”

After the two clapped palms, Mack said, “This is a friend of mine, and my assistant, Beth Lewis.”

Introductions and greetings were made all around, and Lane couldn’t resist pumping his eyebrows at the guy behind Beth’s back. Which got him flipped off in return.

“Anyone else coming?” John asked as the group resettled.

“This is it,” Lane said.

“Heads or tails?”

“You’re the guest, you choose.”

“Heads.”

John flipped a coin in the center of the table. “Heads it is. I deal first. Big blind is one hundred, little blind fifty.”

Lane nodded and watched the guy shuffle the cards. They’d mutually agreed on arbitrary values for the stacks of red, blue, and yellow chips, with both of them having the same number of each. There were going to be no buy-ins—which meant when you were out of chips or couldn’t make blind, you were done.

Lane put in a red chip as big blind, John a blue, and then John was dealing them two cards each. There would be a round of betting based on what they had in their hands, and then the dealer would “burn” a card by putting it aside and lay the next card face-up. More betting. Another “burn” and face-up card. More betting, et cetera, until there was a line-up of five cards that each of them was free to use to complete sequences with the help of whatever they personally had and kept private.

High card beat fruit salad if nobody had anything. Two pair beat one pair. Three of a kind beat two pair. A flush, which was five cards of one suit, beat a straight, which was five cards in numerical order, regardless of suit. A full house, which was three of a kind and two of a kind, beat a flush. And a straight flush, which was five cards in order of the same suit, beat four of a kind, which beat a full house.

A royal
flush, which was ace, king, queen, jack, and ten, all of one suit, beat everything.

And probably signified that Miss Aurora did in fact have a direct line to God.

Assuming Lane held those cards and not Lenghe.

If John pulled something like that? Well, then his wife was back in Kansas was praying harder than Miss Aurora was here in Kentucky.

Lane picked up his first hand. Six of diamonds. Two of clubs.

In short … nothing.

Not even a card high enough to get excited about.

The flop, which was what the first three face-up cards were called, was his only hope.

Across the way, John was studying his pair, his eyebrows together, his heavy shoulders curled in like he was getting ready for a tackle. He chewed on his lip a little. Rubbed the bottom of his nose. Shifted in his chair.

He was more juiced than nervous, though: With so much playing time ahead of them, no pot developed yet, and five cards yet to come, it was too soon on a lot of fronts for the guy to be exhibiting anxiety.

Lane, on the other hand, was utterly calm, more interested in what was happening in his opponent’s chair than even his own cards.

The key was remembering the ticks and twitches of his opponent. Some of them would fall by the wayside as playing wore on and they got into a groove. One or two the guy would keep, though—or fight not to show.

Or maybe something else would be revealed.

But as Lane had learned long ago, there were three things that mattered at the table even more than how much money you or your opponent had at your disposal: the math of the cards in play, which going mano a mano was going to be hard to apply with any specificity because there were no other players making bets; the cards you had and those on the flop; and your opponent’s facial and bodily reactions around their betting patterns.

John might well have been feeling lucky.

They’d have to see if it was enough.

•  •  •

A
mere
ten minutes after Ryan Berkley dropped Gin back at her Rolls behind his store, she pulled the convertible into its bay in the garage and checked her watch.

Perfect timing. Nine-thirty.

Richard had told her he had a very important business meeting that was going to go late, and that meant she was home before he knew anything.

Proceeding around to the front of the house, she passed by the windows of the old game room that wasn’t used very much. Through the half-pulled drapes, she saw her brother and an older, gray-haired man she didn’t recognize at the poker table, pairs of cards in their hands, stacks of multi-colored chips on the green felt beside them.

There was a gallery of people lined up watching them, and everyone was so serious. Her brother seemed to have more chips than the other guy, but then … no, it looked like Lane’s opponent won that one, the man flashing his cards and then dragging the pile in the center toward himself.

Gin continued on, going around to the grand entrance and looking up to the second floor.

No light on in Amelia’s room.

Entering the mansion, Gin went into the parlor and sat on the sofa that allowed her to see out into the foyer through the archway.

She waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

The sounds of the poker game bubbled through Easterly’s silent rooms. There were occasional shouts, a cheer, a curse. Laughter that sounded strange, although only because it seemed like a while since there had been any in the house.

Dimly, she wondered who Lane was playing.

She would not go down there, however … she had to be here.

Amelia finally came through the door after God only knew how long. The girl was in blue jeans, pencil ones yet again, and a blousy Stella
McCartney top that had blocks of color all over the front and groups of hashtags in the back.