When he finally had it together enough to pull back, he had a quick urge to reach between his legs and make sure he was still a guy. But Lizzie didn’t seem to care about him being weak.
He wiped her face with his thumbs and kissed her.
“I love you, Lizzie.” Then he shook his head. “But I don’t know about God.”
“What?”
Lane took a shuddering breath. “It’s just something that Miss Aurora always told me.”
“What’s that?”
He kissed his woman again. “I don’t know if I have God … but I’m sure of this. I have you … and that makes me wealthy beyond means.”
Bringing her back against him, he held on to her and stared up at Easterly.
To hell with flying into a mountain, he thought.
As of this moment … he was now the head of the family, such as it was.
And he would be damned if things went to hell and gone on his watch.
A SNEAK PEEK AT WHAT’S NEXT IN THE BOURBON KINGS SAGA
The final shoe dropped the next day.
And really, when everything was said and done, Lane couldn’t be all that surprised. With the way things were going at Easterly, the dominos were still falling, the path to either his family’s destruction or glory as yet being forged around curves and straightaways that only destiny or fate or God, if you believed in Him, knew and was prepared for.
Lane was in the parlor, pouring himself a Family Reserve to prepare to meet his lawyer, Samuel T., when he heard the noise outside. Someone was yelling. A woman’s voice. Someone was—
Heading out and opening the front door, he realized the words weren’t English, but rather in German.
“—Scheisse! Oh mein Gott ein Finger! Ein Finger—”
Falling into a run that splashed bourbon out of his rock glass, he jogged around to the river side of the mansion.
His beloved Lizzie was standing over her horticultural partner, Greta, and the German was pointing in the dirt and yelling all kinds of things.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
He knew the answer to that one as he saw that Lizzie’s eyes were popped wide under the brim of her floppy hat.
“Lane …” she said without looking at him. “Lane … we have a problem here.”
She reached out and pulled Greta back until the woman fell on her butt in the newly mowed grass. “Don’t touch anything. Lane, come over here, please.”
Heading right up to her, he put his arm around her waist, more worried about his woman than any earthworm. “Whatever it is, I’m sure—”
“It’s a finger.” Lizzie nodded to the raw patch in the ivy. “That’s a finger. In the dirt.”
Both his knees cracked as he got down on his haunches. Planting his free hand in the grass, he leaned in for a closer look into the shallow hole that—
It was … yes, it was a finger. A human finger.
The skin was smudged with earth, but you could see that the digit was intact all the way around—and God, it was fat, like the thing had either swollen since it had been cut off or … torn off, or whatever. The nail was even across the top, and the base of the length, where it had been severed from its hand, was a clean slice, the meat inside gray, the pale circular dot on the bottom the bone.
But none of that was what really interested him.
The heavy gold circle around it was the issue.
“That’s my father’s signet ring,” he said in a flat tone.
Patting his pocket, he took out his phone, but then didn’t dial anything.
Instead, he looked up, up, up … and saw his mother’s bedroom window.
His father’s battered body had washed up on the far side of the Falls of the Ohio River mere days ago. The coroner’s unofficial, pre-autopsy ruling was that it was a suicide—and given everything Lane had been learning about the dismal state of his august family’s finances, he had to agree.
Over fifty million dollars in debt was no laughing matter—when you were supposed to have a net worth of nearly a billion dollars.
But it seemed extremely unlikely that one would cut one’s own wedding finger off and bury it beneath one’s soon-to-be widow’s window. Especially if the husband in question had recently gotten someone else pregnant.
“Dear God,” he whispered.
At that very moment, the sound of someone pulling around the pea stone driveway broke the silence.
“May I join the party,” Samuel T. said as he got out of his vintage Jaguar. “Or is this little gathering by invitation only.”
As Lizzie’s hand went to Lane’s shoulder and squeezed, he looked up at her even though he addressed his lawyer. “Call the police, Sam. Right now.”
“Why? If you’ve found hidden treasure, we should keep it to ourselves—”
“I don’t think my father committed suicide.”
Samuel T. stopped short. “I beg your pardon?”
“I think …” Lane glanced at his lawyer and then went back to looking at Lizzie—because, once again, he needed her strength. “I think someone might just have murdered my father….”
And what worse? He was going to be a prime suspect.
After all, the wife he was divorcing … was the one his father had gotten pregnant.