Page 10 of Clayton (Bourbon & Blood #2)

Four

CLAYTON

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.