Nine
When Samuel stepped into the formal dining room of the Kane family’s private residence at Willow Creek, his father was waiting for him.
Because of course he was.
Perched at the head of the fifteen-foot-long antique dining room table with the SUV-sized fireplace crackling behind him, Parker Kane resembled an exceptionally well-dressed Satan. His posture was the same as it always was at their formal family dinners: back straight, shoulders squared, forearms—but not elbows—extended on the table before him. His hands, palms down as if he, and not gravity, held the table to the earth.
“Samuel.”
If life had taught him anything, there were plenty of nicknames that could be derived from his name. But damned if his father had ever used a single one. Samuel had been to friends’ houses as a boy on “play dates” foisted on him by his mother, and often wondered at how freely and casually affection was expressed between fathers and their sons. An arm draped around the shoulders. Hair ruffled into absurd feathers by a warm paternal hand.
Witnessing it had always made Samuel’s heart feel like a small cold stone in his chest.
Not that his mother hadn’t tried to make up for what his father lacked. Often as not, Samuel would duck from under her hand like a cat, glancing in his father’s direction to make sure he’d seen that he didn’t require cuddling and coddling.
“Father.”
Parker Kane gestured to the chair he expected to Samuel to take. For the first time in his life, and for reasons he could not say, Samuel walked to the opposite side of the table and parked himself halfway down.
A lifelong expert in anticipating his father’s displeasure, Samuel instantly registered the ponderous crease appearing between his eyebrows, once an inky black but now threaded with silver. Beneath them, his blue eyes hardened from lake water to iceberg.
“Is there a particular reason you chose not to join us on the jet?” The polished-marble sound of his father’s voice sent a chill rolling down Samuel’s spine. As he had since he was eighteen, he had to remind himself he was no longer afraid.
“I had a video call with the Campbell team.” Samuel leaned back in his chair. “Are you equally distressed about Mason failing to show up yet again?”
“No.” His father signaled to the perfectly starched attendant, who darted to his side like an eager hummingbird. “Aisla T’Orten 105, neat.”
The MBA in Samuel couldn’t help but calculate what two ounces from a $1.4 million dollar bottle of 105-year-old scotch would cost.
Roughly, a hundred grand would soon be disappearing down his father’s gullet.
“For you, sir?”
“Nothing,” Samuel said with a stab of savage satisfaction. Few things angered his father like the willful rejection of the luxury he so benevolently doled out. Which was precisely why Samuel had made a lifelong habit of turning away advantages afforded him. From working a summer job at a car wash to covering the tuition of a university not approved by the Kane patriarch to wearing off-the-rack suits and shirts.
The dining room attendant bustled off, leaving them in an awkward silence broken only by the crackling fire.
“Mason will be flying up tomorrow,” his father said. “He had pressing business to attend to.”
Right, Samuel thought. Like pressing his dick into some bored, married socialite. “Again?” he asked, startled by the sudden sound of his own voice in the cavernous dining hall.
“What did you just say?” Thunderheads gathered in his father’s voice.
“I said, again?” Blood thundered in Samuel’s ears as adrenaline surged in in his veins. What in God’s name was he doing?
“I don’t believe I take your meaning,” his father said, calmly lacing his long fingers together and resting them on the table before him.
Samuel had learned early and often that the more polite his father’s diction became, the more likely the conversation was to end in scorched earth, crushed egos, and occasionally, tears. His own, in his childhood. These days it was primarily members of the board of directors, and the occasional sales executive, whom Parker Kane reduced to quivering-lipped, brimming-eyed apologies.
And sometimes a mea culpawine-and-cheese basket.
This was the time to back down. To back up. To move in any other direction than the trouble his mouth seemed determined to catapult him into.
With growing dread, Samuel realized he had no intention of stopping. “Don’t you ever get tired of making excuses for him? Of trying to make it seem like he actually gives a damn about Kane Foods?”
At that precise moment, the attendant returned to the table, scotch gleaming like petrified amber in the Baccarat cut-crystal tumbler. “Here you are, Mr. Kane.”
“Thank you,” his father said in the surgically precise tone he reserved for anyone in a service position. He lifted the glass, letting the firelight play with the crystal’s refractive angles. “Mason is a maverick. A risk taker. He doesn’t use numbers or rules or schedules as a crutch. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“No,” Samuel said, relishing the shock on his father’s face. “It’s you who don’t understand. But you will.”
“Oh, good,” Marlowe said, breezing into the dining room with her obsequious Yalie fiancé in her wake. “You haven’t started yet.”
In a cloud of good perfume and bad cigars, they assumed their appointed places at the table opposite Samuel. Their father stood, planting a dry kiss on his sister’s cheek before clapping Neil affectionately on the back.
Samuel watched as Neil allowed his sister to pull out her own chair before he took his own. After they were seated, he flopped a possessive, Versace suit-coat-clad arm around her elegant bare shoulders. Samuel suffered a sympathetic shudder of revulsion as Neil’s waxy, tapered fingertips lazily trailed up Marlowe’s neck.
The attendant reappeared, taking Marlowe’s order of Willow Creek house cabernet and Neil’s request of whatever it was their father was drinking as he “trusted his taste.”
Obsequious little prick.