“Mom,” I breathed, and I put down the pink alstroemeria I’d brought with me. They had been her favorite. “I’m sorry I haven’t been back. I won’t be gone so long again.”
With Dad gone, I could come back a few times a year. The thought actually made me smile.
“Oh,” Bea whispered. “I didn’t even think about bringing Mom flowers.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I did it for both of us.”
The minister called everyone over to that open hole in the earth and I stood beside Hank King’s casket, in between my two sisters, and felt nothing.
You were a son of a bitch, Dad. And you don’t deserve my grief.
Sabrina and Bea cried enough for me, anyway.
We dropped white roses onto his casket and then climbed back into the limo. Bea put her head on my shoulder and I could feel her shaking breaths. Sabrina looked out the window. Even puffy eyed from crying she was beautiful.
“I feel like everything is different,” she said. “Like…it’s all going to change.”
“Why?”
“If we don’t have Dad?” she asked. “And the ranch? Will we see each other?”
“We didn’t see each other before,” Bea said.
“We’re still sisters,” I said, holding Bea’s hand.
“Hardly,” Sabrina said.
“I think it will be better without Dad,” I said. “Easier. We can come back to the ranch more often. We can have holidays here. Summers.”
“Who wants this ranch?” Sabrina’s beautiful face wrinkled with disgust.
“Don’t say it like that,” Bea snapped. “This was our home.”
“Stop,” I said, before the two of them could get into it any further. “We’ll find out when the will is read.”
“I bet you get it,” Sabrina said to me, and I laughed.
“That’d be a mistake.” I turned and looked out the window, too. And soon the limo was filled with our silence.
Dad, I thought, don’t fuck us up with this will.
Back at the ranch, the party was kicking into full swing. All of Dad’s business associates were there, drinking his bourbon. White-gloved waitstaff walked around with canapés and glasses of wine. I had a flashback to the engagement party and nearly turned around and left.
But my sisters and the thought of the damage that damn will could cause kept me rooted to the spot.
The secret was to go dead inside. Like when I had to do any public speaking. I just… went numb. And cold and far, far outside my body. Like a distant moon or something.
Of course, when I stepped into the house, the first person to come up to me was Clayton.
I was rocked slightly by the sight of him in his trim black suit and crisp white shirt. He seemed so much bigger than I remembered. And the memory of how, at one time, he’d belonged to me—or I’d thought he belonged to me—and I’d been able to walk up to him and put my head against that wide plane of his chest and be comforted by the warmth of him…
Well, for a moment, the cool slipped and the pain was sharp.
“Everything all right?” he asked in a low, quiet tone, like he was trying to be respectful or some shit.
“Peachy,” I said and walked away from him, right to the first glass of wine I saw.
I downed it.
“Well, well,” a man said as he walked up to me. His smile was completely inappropriate for a funeral; it was like he was trying to swallow back his glee and just couldn’t seem to do it. He was familiar, but just about everyone in this room was kind of familiar. There was something deeply unsettling about him, though.
Fuck, I thought. What was his name?
“The prodigal daughter returns to put her old man in the ground.”
“James!” The name appeared out the fog. James Court. Yeah. I did not like this guy. His interest in me had seemed…gross.
“You know, I’m over at Chase Financial now,” he said.
“I didn’t know.” And I really didn’t care.
I looked over my wine glass for one of my sisters, hoping I could catch her eye and get a rescue, but the only one looking at me was Clayton. And he was looking furious.
“Now that the old man is dead, maybe you and I could come to our own agreement,” he said, and I was shocked, because it seemed like I was getting propositioned at my father’s funeral. “You’re still not the King sister I’d like to fuck, but if you were good enough for Rorick, I suppose I could take a shot.”
I didn’t realize he was going to touch me until it was too late. A strand of my hair had fallen out of the bun I’d wrestled it into and lay against the skin of my neck, and he reached out and touched the hair and the skin of my neck, and a wave of revulsion rolled over me so thick and so fast I nearly gagged.