The Bourbon Thief

“Irish immigrant stonemasons hired by my great-grandfather?”

Paris’s eyes widened slightly. Then she laughed. Finally. He knew he’d scored a point on her. True, most of the rock fences in Kentucky were built by slave labor. His was not, however, and somewhere he had the paperwork to prove it. While he didn’t know the game he and Paris were playing, he knew that while he wouldn’t win it, if he played it well enough, he might not lose it.

“You’re funny. And you’re handsome.” She tossed the compliment at him like a dollar bill at a stripper’s feet. “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t have to fake anything with you. If I hadn’t wanted to sleep with you, I wouldn’t have. It was convenient that you were attractive. Otherwise, I might have simply hired someone to break into the house while you were away. Does that help?”

“I feel so much better now,” he said. “While we’re being honest...is it true? You’re widowed?”

“I am. Widowed at thirty-four.”

“Awfully young to lose a husband.”

“Not my husband, although he died too young for my liking. He was twenty-eight years older than I am.”

McQueen nearly choked on his Pappy’s. The youngest woman he ever slept with was eighteen years his junior and that relationship had lasted about as long as a bad movie.

“Twenty-eight. I guess that’s what they call a May/December romance.”

She smiled and it was a debt collector’s smile, and something told him she had come to make him pay up. “Twenty-eight years? That’s a January/December romance in a leap year.”

McQueen chuckled and raised his glass to her.

“What?” she asked.

“You get enough bourbon in you and you sound like a real Kentucky girl.”

“I am a real Kentucky girl. Born in Frankfort a stone’s throw from the Kentucky River. That’s not an exaggeration. With a good arm, you could hit the river from our porch.”

“That’s not a good neighborhood.”

“It was the only neighborhood we had. If you have a roof over your head and food in the fridge and nobody breaking down your door, it’s a good neighborhood.”

McQueen tried to take another drink of his bourbon and found his shot glass empty. He set it down again on his knee.

“So you slept with me and stole a million-dollar bottle of bourbon. You must really want that bottle.”

“I don’t want it, no. But I need it.” For the second time that night he saw a glimpse of the real woman behind the mask of the femme fatale, the woman in red. A determined woman.

“For what?”

“To finish something someone else started.” She glanced down at the bourbon in the glass she’d balanced on her knee. “You know what a bourbon thief is, Mr. McQueen?”

“It’s a sampling tube,” McQueen said. “You stick it in the bunghole of a bourbon barrel and extract the contents for tasting.”

“Isn’t that one hell of a visual metaphor?” Paris asked.

McQueen laughed big and long and loud.

“What’s your point?”

“Do I look like a bourbon thief to you?”

“You look like a woman who’s never stolen anything in her life.”

“I haven’t. That bottle belongs to my family. You will return it one way or another.”

“Apparently I’m going to give it to you by morning in exchange for a story. That’s quite a feat.”

“It’s quite a story.”

“Go on, then.”

McQueen looked at her as she crossed her long legs, pulled her hair over her shoulder and met his eyes without a hint of fear even though she was on the hook for a million-dollar heist. It made him nervous, what she was about to tell him, but he wanted to know. Knowledge was power and power was money, and no man ever got rich buying stock in ignorance.

“On December 10, 1978, two very important events in the history of Red Thread occurred—the Kentucky River broke its banks and crested at a record forty-eight feet, and the granddaughter of George J. Maddox, the owner of Red Thread Bourbon Distillery, turned sixteen years old. That was the beginning of the end of Red Thread.”

“What was? The river flooding?”

Paris gave him a smile, a smile that made him momentarily rethink his decision to not call the police.

“Tamara Maddox.”

3 (#ulink_49a54720-9569-5e32-ae7f-34079b80647c)

Veritas

1978

Tamara Maddox wanted to ride her horse the morning of her sixteenth birthday.

And whatever Tamara Maddox wanted to do, Tamara Maddox did.

In all fairness to the girl, spoiled as she was and she knew it, anyone would have wanted to get out of that house and any excuse would do. They’d been fighting again, Granddaddy and Momma. If only they yelled, that would have been one thing, something Tamara could roll her eyes at, laugh at, ignore by turning the volume up on her radio. But no, they whispered their fights behind closed doors, hissing at each other like snakes. Neither of them had the courtesy to tell her what they were fighting about, so Tamara assumed they were fighting about her.

Fine. If they wanted to fight on her birthday, she’d leave them to it. She had better things to do. And the urge to go riding only grew when she saw a blue Ford pickup truck with a white cab wheezing its way down the drive to the stables. What was Levi doing here on a Sunday? She hoped it was because he knew it was her birthday, but even Tamara Maddox wasn’t spoiled enough to think that was the case. Still, one more reason to go riding when one reason—she wanted to—was more than enough for her.

Tamara changed out of her pajamas and into her riding clothes—tan jodhpurs, black boots, a white blouse and a heavy coat—braided her long red hair and raced out to the barn. It was cold today—only forty-five by the thermometer in the barn—but she’d ridden in worse weather. Plus, the rain had stopped finally, and she’d been going stir-crazy inside the house. All she needed was an hour outside in the air with Kermit, her pale black Hanoverian pony, and everything would be all right again.

And if it wasn’t, at least she’d see Levi today, and if that didn’t make a girl feel better, nothing on God’s wet green earth would.

Levi barely acknowledged her when she ran into the barn. Nothing new there. She had to work for his attention and she worked for it very hard. In the summer she’d often catch him shirtless as he mucked out stalls and threw hay bales around. In winter she had to content herself with the memories of his lean strong body that she knew was hidden under his brown coat with the leather collar and a chocolate-colored cowboy hat. Mud crusted his boots. He had dirt on his cheek. And if he got any more handsome, she would die before she hit seventeen. She would simply die of it.

Tamara walked up to him as he was carrying a bale of straw and knocked on his shoulder like she was knocking on a door.

“Nobody’s home,” Levi called out before she could say a word.

“I would like to ride my horse right now, please and thank you.”

“Nope.”