“If it isn’t the prodigal son returned.”
The sound of his father’s voice was like a warning shot across his bow, and Lane covered his distaste by taking a drink of his bourbon. “Father.”
William Baldwine was almost as tall as he was, with the same dark hair and blue eyes, the same jaw, the same shoulders. The differences were in the aging details, the gray at the temples, the tortoiseshell bifocals, the furrow at the brow from decades of frowning. Somehow, though, those AARP-isms didn’t lessen his father’s stature. If anything, they just backed up the aura of power.
“Do I need to have a place set for you.” Behind those glasses, his father’s eyes regarded Lane’s clothes with the kind of disdain more appropriate to dog feces in the parlor. “Or are you leaving?”
“Let me think.” Lane narrowed his stare. “As much as I would enjoy degrading your table in this button-down, I’d have to be in your presence for at least three courses. So I think I’ll take my leave.”
Lane put his Family Reserve down on the nearest sideboard and bowed to Sutton, who was looking like she’d prefer to go with him rather than stay.
“Sutton, as always, a pleasure.” He glanced at his sire. “Father, fuck you.”
With that grenade having been lobbed, he strode through the gathering crowd, nodding at the politicians and the socialites, those two actors from that HBO series he was addicted to, and Samuel T. and his girlfriend of the nanosecond.
Lane made it out to the front foyer, and was almost at the grand door, when a set of stilettoes came after him.
“Where are you going?” Chantal hissed as she grabbed his arm. “And why aren’t you dressed.”
“None of your business.” He shook off her hold. “On both accounts.”
“Lane, this is unacceptable—”
“Those words should never pass your lips, woman.”
Chantal shut her perfectly lined mouth. Then she took a deep breath like she was having a problem tucking her anger into bed for the night. “I would like to spend some time with you this evening to talk things over, and discuss … our future.”
“The only future you need to think about is how many Vuitton suitcases you’re going to have to pack to move out of here.”
Chantal kicked up her chin. “You have no idea what you’re saying.”
He leaned in and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I know what you did. I know that you didn’t ‘lose’ the baby. If you’d wanted to keep that abortion of yours quiet, you shouldn’t have taken one of my family’s chauffeurs up to Cincinnati to that clinic.”
As she blanched, he remembered exactly where he’d been when the man who’d taken her there had tenderfooted around the reveal.
“No response? No denial?” Lane chided. “Or will those come after the shock of having been found out passes.”
There was a stretch of silence, and he knew she was weighing her options, trying to figure out which approach would work in her best interests.
“What was I supposed to do?” she finally said in a hushed voice. “You left me here with no explanation, no support, no money, no way to contact you.”
He motioned around at the oil paintings and the Oriental rugs. “Yes, because this is such a damned depraved wilderness.”
“You abandoned me!”
“So the solution was to get your figure back and try to seduce someone else, right? I’m assuming that was why you did it—you needed to fit into your size fours again, didn’t you, my darling wife.”
“Lane, you are saying things you don’t mean—”
“You killed an innocent—”
Reginald came out of the parlor with a silver tray of used glasses, took one look at the pair of them, and backtracked, disappearing once again into the now-vacant room.
Ah, yes, life at Easterly. Where privacy was less common than diamonds and doled out only in relative terms. But at least he knew he could trust that man even more than he could his own family.
Not that that was saying much.
“I’m not doing this with you here,” Lane rasped. “And you are leaving this house. As soon as the Derby’s run, your free ride is over.”
Chantal arched one of her perfect eyebrows. “Divorce me if you want, but I am going nowhere.”
“You have no right to be under this roof after that ring is off your finger.”
The smile she gave him was chilling. “We’ll just see about that.” She nodded to the front door. “Go wherever you like, run away—that’s your thing, isn’t it. You can rest assured, however, that I will be here when you get back.”
Lane narrowed his eyes. Chantal was a lot of things, but delusional had never been one. She was too much of a self-promoter for that.
And she was staring back at him as if she knew something he didn’t.
What the hell else had been going on while he’d been gone?
Out at the Red & Black, Edward sat in an old leather armchair in front of a television that was so ancient it still had bunny ears poking out on either side of its cereal-box-sized screen. The room he was in was dim, but gleaming—the result of the countless racing trophies that were crammed into the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves across the way.
The stables’ cottage had one bedroom, a bath with a claw-foot tub, a galley kitchen, and this area here, which was a library, study, living room, and parlor all rolled into one. There was no second floor, only an attic full of old horse-racing memorabilia, and no garage. Total square footage was less than the dining room of Easterly—and ever since he’d moved in, he’d learned the value of having a place small enough so you could hear and see almost everything. Back at the mansion, you never had a clue who else was in the sprawling house, where they were, what they were doing.