The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings Book 2) (8 page)

And finally, when she had gone off to Harvard, it had been only her father—at which point, Mrs. Isaacs had begun serving him his morning repast at his desk.

It was a habit that he had not broken even after Sutton had come back from business school at the University of Chicago and started to work for the Sutton Distillery Corporation.

As she folded her napkin and placed it beside her hollowed-out grapefruit half, her muffin-crumbled plate and her vacant hard-boiled egg holder, she wondered why she insisted on sitting down here alone every morning.

The tie to the past, perhaps. A fantasy of a future, maybe.

The massive house that she and her father now inhabited by themselves—except when Winn came to visit—was twenty-five thousand square feet of historic, upkeep-intensive grandeur, all the antiques in it passed down from generation to generation, the art museum-quality, the carpets from Persia except for when they’d been handmade in France. It was a resplendent sanctuary where brass railings and gold-leafed fixtures glowed from countless polishings, and hanging crystal twinkled from the ceilings and on the walls, and wood well-mellowed from time’s passage offered warmth sure as a banked fire.

But it was a lonely place.

The sound of her stilettos was muffled as she had been taught how to walk properly, the quiet rhythm of her footsteps echoing in the lovely emptiness as she proceeded to the front of the house, passing by sitting rooms and libraries, parlors and powder rooms. Nothing was out of place, no clutter to be found, everything cleaned with reverent hands, no lint or dust anywhere.

The doors to her father’s study were opened, and he looked up from his desk. “There she is.”

His
hands went to grip his chair arms out of a reflex born from always rising to his feet whenever a woman entered a room or left it. But it was an impotent gesture, his strength no longer there, the sad impulse that he couldn’t follow through on something she ignored with determination.

“Are you going in now, then?” he said as he dropped his hands into his lap.

“We’re going in.” She went around and kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s go. Finance Committee starts in forty-five minutes.”

Reynolds Winn Wilshire Symthe, IV, nodded at the bound book on the corner of the desk. “I read the materials. Things are doing well.”

“We’re a little soft in South America. I think we need to—”

“Sutton. Sit down, please.”

With a frown, she took a seat across from him, linking her ankles under the chair and arranging her suit. As usual, she was dressed in Armani, the peach color one of her father’s favorites on her.

“Is there something wrong?”

“It’s time to announce things.”

As he said the words she had been dreading, her heart stopped.

Later, she would remember every single thing about where the pair of them sat facing each other in the study … and how handsome he was with his full head of white hair and his perfectly pressed, pin-striped suit … and how her hands, which were just like his, had knotted together in her lap.

“No,” she said flatly. “It is not.”

As Reynolds went to extend his arm toward her, his palm flapped across the leather blotter, and for a moment, all Sutton wanted to do was scream. Instead, she swallowed the emotion and met his attempt to connect them halfway, leaning over the great expanse of his desk, messing up the piles of papers.

“My darling.” He smiled at her. “How proud am I of you.”

“Stop it.” She made a show of turning her wrist and looking at her gold watch. “And we have to go now so we can meet with Connor before we start—”

“I’ve already told Connor, Lakshmi and James. The press release will
be issued to the
Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
as soon as your employment contract is amended. Lakshmi’s drafting it as we speak. This isn’t just something between you and I anymore.”

Sutton felt cold fear, the kind that pricked the back of your neck and made you sweat under your arms. “No. It’s not legal. It has to be ratified by the board—”

“They did it last night.”

She sat back, separating them. And as the hard chair hit her shoulder blades, for some absurd reason she thought about the number of employees they had worldwide. Thousands and thousands. And how much business they did between their bourbon distilling, the wine subsidiary, and then their vodka, gin, and rum lines. Ten billion annually with a gross profit of nearly four billion. She thought of her brother and wondered how he was going to feel about this.

Then again, Winn had been told two years ago this was the way things were going to go. And even he had to know that she was the one with the business head.

Sutton looked at her father—and promptly forgot about the corporation.

As her eyes blurred with tears, she threw out all decorum and regressed back to when her mother had been lost. “I don’t want you to die.”

“Neither do I. And I have no intention of going anywhere.” He laughed ruefully. “And with the way this Parkinson’s is progressing, I fear that is more true than I should like it.”

“Can I do this?” she whispered.

He nodded. “I’m not giving you the position because you’re my daughter. Love has a place in families.It is not welcome in business. You are succeeding me because you’re the right person to take us into the future. Everything is so different from when my father gave that corner office over to me. It’s all … so global, so volatile, so competitive now. And you understand all of it.”

“I need another year.”

“You don’t have that. I’m sorry.” He went to move his arm again and then
gritted his teeth with frustration—which was the closest he came to ever cursing. “Remember this, though. I didn’t spend the last forty years of my life pouring everything I had into an endeavor just to turn it over to somebody who wasn’t fit for the job. You can do this. Moreover, you
will
do it. There is no other option than to succeed.”

Sutton let her eyes drift down until they settled on his hands. He still wore his simple gold wedding band. Her father had never remarried after her mother had passed. He hadn’t even dated. He slept with her picture beside his bed and with her nightgowns still hanging in their closet.

The romantic justification for that was true love. The actual one was probably part loyalty and reverence for his dead wife, and part the disease and its course.

The Parkinson’s had proven to be debiliting, depressing and scary. And was a testament to the reality that rich people weren’t in a special class when it came to the whims of fate.

In fact, her father had been slowing down markedly these last couple of months, and it was only going to get worse until he was bedridden.

“Oh, Daddy …” she choked.

“We’ve both known this has been coming.”

Taking a deep breath, Sutton was aware that this was the only time she could ever let any vulnerability show. This was her one chance to be honest about how terrifying it was to be thirty-eight years old and at the helm of a global corporation upon which her family’s fortunes rested—and also stare down the barrel of her father’s death.

Brushing away a tear, she looked at the wetness on her fingertip and told herself that there would be no more leaking after she left the house. As soon as she got to headquarters, everyone was going to measure her to see what kind of leader they had. And yes, there would be snakes coming out of the woodwork to undermine her and people who didn’t take her seriously because she was a woman and she was family, and her own brother was going to be angry.

Just
as importantly, she couldn’t show any weakness to her father after this, either. If she did, he was going to worry whether he’d done the right thing and possibly even second-guess himself—and stress did not help people with his condition.

“I’m not going to let you down,” she said as she met him right in the eye.

The relief that suffused that handsome face was immediate and made her tear up again. But he was right; she no longer had the luxury of emotion.

Love was for family.

It was not for business.

Getting to her feet, she went around and gave him a quick hug, and when she straightened, she made sure her shoulders were back.

“I expect to continue to use you as a resource,” she announced. And it was funny to hear that tone in her voice: It was not a request, and it was not something she said to her father. It was from one CEO to his or her predecessor.

“Always,” he murmured as he inclined his head. “It would be an honor.”

She nodded and turned away before cracks in her façade showed. She was halfway to the door when he said, “Your mother is smiling right now.”

Sutton stopped and nearly wept. Oh, her mother. A firebrand for women’s rights back when that hadn’t been permitted in the South, in their kind of family.

Oh, she would have loved this, it was true. It was everything she had fought for and demanded and stomped about.

“It’s not why I picked you over your brother, though,” he added.

“I know.” They all knew why Winn wasn’t a real candidate. “I’m conferencing you in during Finance meetings even though officially you have no role. I expect you to contribute as you would have done.”

Again, not a request.

“Of course.”

“You will continue to serve on the board as Trustee Emeritus. I will nominate
you myself as my first official duty at the next board meeting. And you will be conferenced in during Executive Committee and all Trustee meetings until you are no longer able to breathe.”

She said all of this while staring into the foyer.

The chuckle her father let out held so much fatherly pride and businessman-to-businesswoman respect she started blinking hard again.

“As you wish.”

“I shall be home tonight at seven for dinner. We will eat in your room.”

Usually by then he was back in bed, his will exhausted from dealing with his body’s rebellion.

“And I shall look forward to it.”

Sutton made it all the way to the study’s door before pausing and looking back. Reynolds seemed so small behind that desk, even though the dimensions of neither the man’s form nor the furniture had changed. “I love you.”

“And I love you almost as much as I loved your mother.”

Sutton smiled at that. And then she was on her way, going over to the console table by the front door and picking up her briefcase, before heading out into the warm May morning.

Her legs were shaking as she walked to the Bentley Mulsanne alone. She had expected her father to be ahead of her, the subtle
whrrrrr
of his motorized wheelchair something she resolutely ignored.

“Good morning, Miss Smythe.”

The uniformed driver, Don, had been her father’s chauffeur for two decades. And as he opened the rear door, he couldn’t quite manage to meet her in the eye—although not out of dislike or mistrust.

He had been told, of course.

She squeezed his arm. “You’ll stay on. For as long as you want the job.”

The man breathed a sigh of relief. “Anything for you.”

“I’m going to make him proud.”

Now Don looked at her. His eyes shimmered with tears. “Yes, you will.”

With a nod, she got in the back, and jumped as the door was shut with
a muffled
thump
. A moment later they were off, smoothing their way out of the courtyard, off the estate.

Usually, she and her father discussed things on the way downtown, and as she stared at the empty seat beside her, it dawned on her that the day before was the last time that the pair of them would ride to headquarters together. The final trip … had come and gone without her knowing it at the time.

Wasn’t that the way of things.

She had assumed there would be many more ahead of them, countless mentoring, ceaseless drives side by side.

Denial was lovely while you were in it, wasn’t it. But when you stepped out of its warm pond of delusion, reality carried a shivering, cold sting. And yes, if the partition separating the front from the back of the car hadn’t been down, she probably would have wept as hard as if she were going to her father’s funeral.

Instead, she placed her palm on the seat that had been his, and looked out the tinted glass. They were getting on River Road now, joining the line up of traffic that eventually funneled into the surface arteries that ran under the highways and bridges of Charlemont’s business district.

There was only one person she could think of to call. One person whose voice she wanted to hear. One person … who would understand on a visceral level what she was feeling.

But Edward Baldwine didn’t care about the liquor industry anymore. No longer was he her competitor’s heir apparent, her counterpart across the aisle, the sarcastic, sexy, infuriating friend she had long coveted.

And even if he had still been the number two at the Bradford Bourbon Company, he certainly had made it clear that he didn’t want anything to do with a personal relationship with her.

In spite of that … crazy hook-up … they’d had at that caretaker’s cottage out at the Red & Black.

Which she still couldn’t believe had happened.

After all the years of fantasizing, she had finally been with him—

Sutton pulled away from that black hole of going-nowhere by remembering
their last meeting. It had been in a farm truck parked outside her house, and they had fought over that mortgage she’d given his father. Right before the man had died.

Hardly the stuff of Hallmark cards.

Yet in spite of all that, Edward was still the one she wanted to talk to, the only person other than her father whose opinion she cared about. And before his kidnapping? She would absolutely have dialed him up, and he would have answered on the first ring, and he would have supported her at the same time he would have put her in her place.

Because he was like that.

The fact that he wasn’t there anymore, either?

Just one more of the losses.

One more thing to miss.

One more piece of the mourning.

Letting her head fall back, she stared at the river and wished that things were as they had once and always been.