Clayton (Bourbon & Blood Book 2) (6 page)

When he kisses me, I can’t think. I can’t breathe. I can’t do anything but feel his lips on me, the slide of his tongue between my lips, penetrating, blatantly sexual. His hands drift down to my ass, cupping each cheek and pressing into me. I can feel the thick length of him, hard and full against me. He rocks his hips and all I can think of is how good it would feel for him to be inside me.

I can’t do this. I’m weakening, falling under his spell. It takes everything in me to push him back. I press my hands against his chest and he steps back, reluctantly.

“I can’t help wanting you,” I tell him. “But wanting you doesn’t make you good for me.
You’re not good for me, right now.
You have to go… now.”

“Annalee.” He just says my name. Nothing else. He looks at me for the longest time and then just turns on his heels and leaves.

I watch him walk out and it takes everything I have in me not to call him back, not to strip my clothes off and attack him naked in the foyer. I follow after him, just to the kitchen door and before I can catch myself I say something that I know I’ll regret. “The final papers should be here by the end of next week… You wanted time, Clayton, and that’s what I’m willing to give you. Once I sign them, there’s no going back.”

He stops in his tracks. He doesn’t look back at me. Just stands there for a moment and lets that sink in. After a moment, he gives a brief nod and heads for the door.

I’ve fucked up. I’ve given him another chance to break my heart, because if he doesn’t tell me the truth in the next ten days, then I’ll have to say goodbye to those hopes and dreams all over again.

I head back into the kitchen and open the freezer door. There’s a pint of Ben and Jerry’s in there that belongs to Emma Grace. I’m going to have to owe her one. I’m going to eat the whole damn thing.

P
ulling
into the parking lot of my shithole condo, I sit there in the car so fucking mad I can’t see straight. Of course it doesn’t help that my damn dick is still so hard I’ll do myself permanent injury if I try to walk from the car to the front door.

It isn’t just being horny. It isn’t just that I haven’t been touched by anything softer than my own damn hand in more than a year. It’s her—it’s always been her. She twists me up in knots and turns me inside out.

I lean the seat back and just stare up through the moon roof of the car for a minute. It was something we used to do, long before Emma Grace came along. A country road on a clear night in my old car, and we’d stay like that for hours. Until she climbed over the console and straddled me.

I grip the steering wheel in a mixture of frustration and anger. My mind keeps supplying all those tempting images of her, of us together. And it’s not doing a goddamn thing to relieve my current physical misery.

Liquor. If I can’t have what I want, I decide, I’ll just drink until I don’t fucking care. Getting out of the car, I walk to the front door, but as I insert the key into the lock, the door swings inward.

Fuck.

There, sitting in my living room like he’s got every fucking right to be there, is Samuel Darcy.

“I’m in no goddamn mood to deal with you tonight. You need to leave and you need to do it now,” I tell him.

“I’m concerned about your sister,” he says, acting as if I hadn’t just told him to get the fuck out.

“Mia’s a big girl. She can take care of herself,” I reply. I need that drink now more than ever. I walk into the kitchen and open the cupboard. I pull down a half full bottle of Maker’s Mark. I don’t even bother with a glass, just carry the bottle back to the living room with me.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for drinking that,” Samuel scolds. “Fire Creek is better.”

“Since we’re in a shortage, I figured I’d buy something readily available and save our bottles for paying customers… More to the point, I didn’t ask your fucking opinion. Get out.”

“Son, I will go when I am goddamn ready,” he replies.

“Then say what you mean to and go.” I take a healthy swig of the bourbon, letting it burn all the way down. Maybe it’ll put out the other fires raging inside me.

“She’s getting tangled up with Bennett Hayes again. I don’t need to tell you what a disaster that could be,” Samuel states. “It’d be a shame for Mia to lose her head over this man and for poor Patricia to have no one to properly look after her.”

“She’s a grown woman—her choice and her business. And for the record, no one will ever take better care of Mama than Mia does. Like you’d fucking know, of course. What rent-a-slut did you tear yourself away from tonight to come here?” My reply is terse. I want him gone. I’m freaked the hell out by the fact that he’s been in my house, alone here to go through whatever the fuck he feels like, while I’m away. I make a mental note to change the locks.

“Clayton,” he says smoothly, “I know that we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things—.”

“On anything, old man.”

He goes on as if I didn’t just interrupt and insult him.

“The fact of the matter is, I have Mia’s and the distillery’s best interest at heart. There’s a lot of old gossip… wives’ tales, if you will, about whether or not the Hayes family is entitled to a piece of the Fire Creek legacy. The two of them being together will only fuel that fire.”

“That fire rages out of control for every resident of Fontaine, mostly because they all know it’s true. I don’t know the particulars, but hell, even
I
know it’s true. If someone says a Darcy, or at least a Darcy from previous generations did something shady… hell, that’s just like saying the sky is blue in my book. You’ll have to do better than that.”

Samuel’s expression hardens and for just a second, I can see the monster in him. “He doesn’t want her. He just wants what she can give him access to. I hate to see her waste herself on a man like that… I’ve been trying to get her to go with me to the Annual Bourbon Association gala. There are some people in the industry that it would be very beneficial—.”

I stand up and open the door. “She’s not your whore. You’re not her pimp. You don’t get to turn her out. Go.”

“Clayton—.”

“You get the fuck out. If I have to throw you out, I’m going to do it with a lot more force than either of us will like.”

Samuel gets to his feet, straightens his suit jacket and tie and looks at me as if he’s disappointed in me. Like he has the right. “I had thought with your love of Fire Creek, you’d be more receptive to doing what it takes to make the distillery a success.”

“I do love Fire Creek. But I love my family more. I’m actually capable of love. That’s the difference between us.” He moves past me toward the door, but just as his feet pause at the threshold, I say one more thing to him. “If you ever darken my door again, I’ll put a bullet in you. Are we clear?”

He doesn’t acknowledge the statement just walks on toward the shiny new Mercedes that he’s leased for himself. I know he leased it because he can’t afford to buy it, the shit. I watch him drive off and take another long pull from the bottle. That son of a bitch will burn if it’s the last thing I do.

I
’m back
in the office the next day. It’s after lunch, which I avoided like the damn plague. Half a fifth of bourbon makes the idea of food surprisingly unpalatable. I’m so hungover I could die. Not to mention the fact that Annalee left me with my balls tied in a knot and then Samuel showed up like shit sprinkles on a dirt cake.

The door to my office opens and Quentin walks in. The smell of the sour mash cooking up wafts in with him and I have to question whether I finished off the bourbon or whether it finished off me.

“You look like ass,” Quentin states.

“I feel like it too. What do you want?”

“I went by the house this morning. I have no idea what’s going on but it looks like a damned tornado went through it. Mia has shit torn out all over the place…she looks a little crazed.”

Recalling the conversation with her the night before, I sigh. Everything is coming to head—with Mia and Bennett, with our shithead father, and now Annalee has given me a deadline. “If you’ve got anything on Samuel I can use, I need it now. I’d like to wait, to gather a little more evidence before I go in for the final push, but time is a luxury we don’t have anymore.”

“It isn’t much. The lead in Knoxville didn’t pan out… or maybe they just chickened out. So we’re left with a stripper in Vegas, but no one cares about that. There’s the gambling and kickbacks from our state representative, but dragging a politician into this mess could bite us in the ass,” Quentin points out. “We need the big stuff that you won’t even tell me about, and I don’t know how to get it.”

It was true. Pissing off politicians when you were in the liquor business was never a good idea. As for the big stuff, I still have no proof, only speculation. He was the last person to see Katherine Shelby alive, but a missing debutante and a paint job on his boat isn’t enough to get him charged. “I’ve got the tax records,” I reply. “I’ve got the documented affairs from before Mama’s accident, the final tally of what’s left of her money after he spent it all on his mistresses.”

Quentin makes a disgusted sound. “Do I want to know how much?”

I pull the statement from a file in my desk drawer and lay it in front of Quentin. “Less than twenty thousand. He ran through a ten million dollar estate like it was beer money at the track. There’s still a couple million in another trust which matures in about five months. That would pay for her caregivers for the rest of her life… or it would give Samuel one hell of a weekend.”

Looking over the piece of paper, Quentin’s jaw clenches with fury. “Cars, clothes, apartments, jewelry, trips to Europe and the Bahamas! He’s been taking his whores on pleasure cruises while we’ve been working our asses off? And Mia… for the love of God! She hasn’t left Fontaine other than a day trip to Lexington, or back when she was commuting to school, in over a decade!”

I know that. I know every bit of it straight to my soul, but it won’t give us the leverage we need. “It’s not enough… we might be able to get him to give up the distillery, but with the promise of Mama’s trust, he won’t forfeit guardianship of her… and that’s nonnegotiable right now,” I reply coolly.

Quentin crosses his arms over his chest and tips the chair back. It’s his thinking pose, even as a kid, he’d sit like that whenever he was working something out in his head.

“What’s going on in your head, Quentin?”

“The investor I mentioned.” he offers, “He’s in.”

“He’s got the ready capital to just buy in? Who is this?”

“A friend,” Quentin hedges. “Pro football, wants to retire while his knees will still support him.”

Clayton shook his head. “I don’t know… We need long term here. Not someone who’s going to get bored and leave us floundering.”

“He’s local, or at least he used to be. He’s coming back to Kentucky for good and wants to be involved in local enterprises.”

I’ve got a good idea of just who Quentin is talking about and it’s concerning, at the very least. Quentin has a bent towards being wild and reckless himself. The last thing he needs is someone else with those same qualities involved in the day to day operations of the distillery. “Mallory?”

Quentin nods. “Keep it quiet. He hasn’t announced his retirement officially yet.”

A soft knock at the office door keeps me from saying anything more. Annalee is standing in the doorway.

Quentin gets up and immediately moves toward the door. “I’ve got that thing that I was supposed to do… for the other thing.”

“Coward,” I accuse softly.

“Fuck, yes,” Quentin answers and vanishes swiftly.

I’m not watching my brother’s retreat. My eyes on her, locked and unmoving.
My wife
, or at least she would be for a little while longer.

“You look awful,” she says softly as she comes in and takes a seat.

I shrug. I’m hungover. It goes with the territory. “I feel it. I can still drink like I’m twenty… unfortunately, I recover like I’m eighty.”

“You got drunk?”

I fight the impulse to roll my eyes at her scandalized tone. It would hurt too bad. “There’s two cures for blue balls, Annalee. For the record, bourbon was my second choice.”

I watch her, noting the blush that steals over her cheeks. It’s not embarrassment putting it there. She’s still just as hot for me as I am for her, even if she is dressed like a school teacher. In jeans and a simple sweater, she’s a far cry from the pseudo-hippy I met in while in grad school. That girl would have shared the bourbon with me and then taught me lessons on the Kama Sutra.

Remembering the long, gypsy hair and the crazy clothes she wore, half of which had come from thrift stores, I smile in spite of myself.
More than half probably.
But it didn’t matter. I saw her the night that Kentucky beat Utah to go on to the championship game. She’d been dancing around a burning couch on the lawn of my apartment building.

There was something about her, about the way she moved, the abandon of it all that had called to me. The party had been my roommate's idea. I was supposed to be studying. It's the only time in my life that doing the wrong thing ever truly went in my favor. One look at her and that was it. I convinced her to go out with me, and I never looked back.

On our first date, she’d confessed to me that she didn’t even know what people were celebrating, but it was free beer and looked like a good time. She’d just joined in. Wild, unfettered, and more drunk on life than on the cheap beer flowing from a dozen kegs up and down the street, I’d never met anyone like her before.

“When did we get old, Ann?” I ask. “We used to drink like fish, fuck like rabbits and fight like the damn devil… Where did all that go?”

She laughs, just as I’d intended. “We stopped most of that after Emma Grace came along. She demanded a lot of attention from both of us… She has a dance recital this weekend.”

It’s already marked on my calendar. “She told me. I’ll be there.”

Annalee looks down at her feet, clearly uncomfortable. “I wanted to apologize for last night… For all of it. What happened—it shouldn’t have. And for the other day, what I said to you about the date, about going out with someone… I shouldn’t have told you that. But it feels weird to keep things from you,” she admits. “I said it to make you jealous and it was a stupid, childish and selfish thing to do.”

I curse under my breath, and pinch the bridge of my nose. My head pounding like a damn steam train. “I have to apologize too.” It was a hard thing for me to say. “It’s not my place to question you anymore about where you’re going or what you’re doing… or who you’re doing it with.”

“Old habits,” she offers.

“Something like that,” I agree. Even miserable and hungover, even under the crushing weight of the knowledge that I might lose her forever, I want her. I want to lose myself in her, to inhale the scent of her and taste her on my tongue.

It must have shown on my face, some hint of what I was feeling, because as she meets my gaze, the silence between us shifts and changes. It’s charged now with something that neither one of us will dare to name. If we do, I’ll have her naked on this desk and be balls deep inside her before either of us can have a chance to think twice. “As for everything else that happened… the only thing I’m sorry for is that we didn’t finish what we started.”

She looks away abruptly. “Clayton—.”

“I don’t regret it,” I insist, and my tone is more forceful than I intended for it to be. “I ought to, but I don’t. If my asshole brother wasn’t just down the hall and two dozen workers just a floor below, I’d show you just how much I don’t regret it.”

She blinks at me, clearly unprepared for the confession. Whatever else is going on between us, she still wants me. I seize onto that. It’s the only hope I have.

Her voice is breathless as she abruptly changes the subject, “I thought I’d go check on Mia. I know you’re worried about her.”

It was a peace offering and I take it for that. I sigh and nod. “Thank you. Quentin went up there earlier but she won’t talk to him the way she’d talk to you.”

Annalee laughs. “You mean Mr. Sensitivity? Why the hell not?”

There is nothing constructive to add to that. Quentin has always been pretty oblivious when it comes to women he doesn’t intend to sleep with. I want to tell her how much it means to me that she’s looking out for Mia, that she’s still a part of the family regardless of what’s happening between us. Maybe if I wasn’t nursing the mother of all hangovers it would be different, or maybe if she didn’t have me tied in so many goddamn knots I can’t see straight. “I don’t know how to fix this for her,” I admit gruffly.

“She won’t let you fix it,” Annalee replies. “And Mia’s my family too. Not by blood, not even by marriage for very much longer, but she’ll always be my family.”

“Not another damn word about that. There’s no expiration date on this now. You gave me an option last night… a deadline. I will make it, Annalee. Whatever I have to do, by the time those papers are in your hand, this is all going to look very different.”

She doesn’t take umbrage at that, but she doesn’t acknowledge my resolve either. “I’m not sure who I’m reminding anyway… me or you. Emma Grace has dance practice after her field trip, so if I’m going to spend any time at all with Mia, I should go now.”

I watch her get up and walk toward the door. No one moves like her, I think to myself again. Whether it’s the yoga she’s addicted to, the dance classes she’d taken when she was younger, or just her own innate grace, it has always been a sight I appreciated.

“Wait.”

She turns back, glancing over her shoulder at me. “What?”

I don’t have a reason, other than that I just wasn’t ready to see her leave. “I just wanted to look at you.”

“There’s not much to see,” she protests.

I get up from the desk and move toward her until we're standing less than a breath apart. “You’re wrong about that… there’s you.”

She exhales, the sound fractured and wounded. “Damn you, Clayton.”

I touch her face, stroking the softness of her cheek and then sliding my thumb over her lower lip. “Do you remember the night we met? Sitting in that shithole of a diner talking for hours?”

She meets my gaze steadily, but there's a slight tremor in her. I can feel it when I touch her. “I remember everything,” she utters.

“And then driving home, parking in front of your house,” I pause for a second. “And a good night kiss that turned into so much more.”

“Clayton, we can't go back... We're not those people anymore,” she whispers.

“We are,” I insist. I press her back against the door, letting her feel how much I want her, how hard I am for her. “I want you the same way now that I did then. I crave you like I always did. Tell me you don't feel that way!”

“Don't do this to me, Clayton,” she whispers brokenly.

“What am I doing, Annalee?”

“Don’t be the man now that I needed a year ago. Don’t offer me what I wanted and needed when it’s probably too damned late!”

She pushes me away, and I let her. Mostly because I can see the hurt in her. Beyond the confusion, beyond the need that won't leave either one of us alone, I know she's still hurting and the last thing I want to do is hurt her more. She turns and flees, her heels clicking on the floor as she all but runs from me.

I go back to my desk and lean back in the chair, scrubbing my hands over my face. There is too much between us. Too much for me to let go and too much for her to look past.

The fury inside me, the controlled rage that I normally keep locked down tight, roars to life. With a sweep of my arm, I’ve cleared the top of the desk. The phone crashes to the floor, papers flutter in the air before coming to rest on the ground. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Neither do the litany of curses that follow. It’s the second time in a week my destructive temper has escaped me. It’s a record.

I
arrive
at the family home and Evelyn, the lady who normally stays with Patricia, answers the door. She looks at me with a worried frown. “I don’t know what has my baby so tore up, but whatever it is, it ain’t good!”