And he did.
Moments later, the vapor lock was sprung as the door was opened, and Gin curled in on herself, dropping her eyes and not breathing.
“Sure,” Samuel T. said in an even tone. “I’d love to.”
“Will you help me do up my dress?”
“You can reach it.” He was already striding off. “Come on, we better go.”
“Wait! Wait for me!”
Giggles. Jiggles, too, no doubt, as the sound of high heels clipping along the concrete echoed around like the woman was running to catch up to him.
“Hold my hand?” the female asked.
“Sure. I’d love to.”
There was a smack of two sets of lips meeting and then the sounds of footfalls on concrete diminished into the distance.
After a while, Gin stepped out of the shadows. The light had been left on inside the wine cellar—which was very unlike Samuel T. What most didn’t know about him was that he was a slave to his compulsive need to have things in order. In spite of the fact that he was a hard-living playboy, he couldn’t handle things out of place. Everything from the suits he wore to the cars he kept, from his law practice to his stables, from his bedroom to his kitchen to his bathrooms, he was a man with control issues.
She knew the truth, though. She had seen him get stuck in rituals, had had to talk him out of them from time to time.
It was an intimacy she was willing to bet her only child’s life on that he shared with no one else—
Now, she shivered. But not because of the cold air and the damp.
The inescapable sense that she had well and truly ruined something robbed her of breath. Tucking in upon herself, she retreated back against the wine cellar’s glass wall, slid down to the concrete floor … and wept.
THIRTY-THREE
As Edward listened to Lane’s report on the family’s finances, and then the further news that their mother had been declared incompetent, and finally the details around the hemlock suicide, he found himself … curiously detached from the whole story.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care.
He had always worried about his siblings, and that kind of regard didn’t go away, even after all he had been through.
But the string of bad news seemed like explosions happening far off on the horizon, the flashing and the distant roar something that captured his attention, but didn’t affect him enough to get him up out of his chair—literally or figuratively.
“So I need your help,” Lane concluded.
Edward brought the gin bottle to his mouth again. This time, however, he didn’t drink. He lowered it back down. “With what, precisely?”
“I need access to the BBC’s financial files—the real ones that haven’t been scrubbed for the Board or the press.”
“I don’t work for the company anymore, Lane.”
“Don’t tell me you couldn’t get into the servers if you really wanted to.”
Lane had a point. Edward had been the one to set up the computer systems.
There was a long silence, and then Edward followed through with another hit of the liquor. “There’s still plenty of money around. You have your trust, Maxwell has his, and Gin only has a year or two to go—”
“That fifty-three million dollar loan with Prospect Trust is coming due. Two weeks, Edward.”
Edward shrugged. “It has to be unsecured, otherwise Monteverdi wouldn’t be so worried. So it’s not like they’re going to come for the house.”
“Monteverdi will go to the press.”
“No, he won’t. If he did make an unsecured loan of that magnitude using Prospect Trust funds, he’d had to have done it behind his Board’s back and in violation of federal trust company laws. If it’s not repaid on schedule, the only thing that will happen publicly is an announcement that Monteverdi is taking early retirement to ‘spend time with his family.’” Edward shook his head. “I understand your wanting to know more, but I’m not sure where you think that’s going to get you. The debt is not yours to worry about. You live in Manhattan now. Why the sudden interest in those people who live at Easterly?”
“They’re our family, Edward.”
“So?”
Lane frowned. “I get that you don’t feel like William Baldwine’s son. After the way he treated you all these years, how could you? But … what about the house? The land—the business? Mother?”
“The Bradford Bourbon Company has a billion dollars in yearly revenue. Even if you go net, not gross, on that figure, whether the personal debt is fifty or even a hundred million, that is not a catastrophic event considering how much stock the family owns. Banks will loan between sixty to seventy percent of value against an investment portfolio—you could finance the payback of that amount on your own right now.”