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 culpa wine-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.
Their father cleared his throat and looked at each of his children in turn. “Now that you’re both here, there’s a matter I would like to discuss with you.”
Samuel and Marlowe straightened up in tandem, all too familiar with the carnage that often followed that line of dialogue.
“It has come to my attention that a new hire was made recently. One that I was neither apprised of or approved.” His father took another sip of his scotch. “Arlington Banks.”
Samuel’s teeth clenched. “It was my understanding that you were to be consulted on VP-level positions and above. Arlie—Arlington Banks is a senior food stylist.”
“This is precisely the kind of thing I mean.” His father leaned forward, skewering Samuel with his gaze. “You obey the letter of the law, but don’t think twice about hiring her when you know the kind of family she comes from.”
Samuel drew a long, steadying breath to combat the pure limbic rage crackling along his nerves. “And what does that mean?”
“After the regrettable incident with her mother, how can you possibly think of bringing her into this organization without consulting me first?”
Regrettable incident.
A rather sanitized way of describing the events leading to Arlie’s mother being accused of stealing and her father showing up drunk and enraged once she’d been fired.
“Children shouldn’t be judged by the sins of their parents,” Samuel said. The irony of this statement was not lost on him. He had learned at his father’s knee how to exploit small businesses, promising them aid while slowly draining their profits.
And then there was Millhaven Foods, which he tried never to think about.
“Corrupted roots produce corrupted fruit.” His father adjusted the salad fork in his place setting so it was the precisely mandated half inch from its neighbor. “As I informed Miss Banks this morning.”
Samuel saw red. The back of his high-backed chair made abrupt contact with the marble floor and sent a resounding crack rolling through the dining room as he stood. “You did what?”
Swirling the glass of tawny liquid, his father didn’t even bother to look him in the eye. “I ran into Miss Banks quite unexpectedly and felt it incumbent on me to share my thoughts. As I am well within my rights to do in my own home.”
“How dare you?” This question had circled in Samuel’s thoughts from the time he had been ten years old.
Then, it had been summoned when his father had insisted that his mother, happy and beautiful in a knee-length, emerald-green dress, change before a benefit, informing her that she didn’t make the “correct impression.”
But this was the first time he’d actually spoken the words out loud to the man.
“Perhaps you should take an evening constitutional to recover your composure. You seem quite out of sorts, Samuel.”
Across the table, Marlowe sent him a wide-eyed don’t do this look.
It was already done.
Or he was. He had been for a long time.
“Arlie Banks is a talented, passionate professional, and will be an asset to Kane Foods International. You’re just too blinded by a ridiculous grudge to see it.”
An ugly smile folded his father’s papery cheeks. “I suspect I’m not the one who’s blinded when it comes to this particular topic.”
Samuel’s fists tightened, his mind seething with all the things he wanted to say.
“You may serve,” his father said, motioning to the table with all the ceremony of an orchestral conductor.
Only then did he notice the white-coated team bearing silver-domed dishes, nervously hovering in the doorway from the kitchen. On cue, the staff descended, simultaneously placing the dishes in front of each of them before removing the lids with a flourish.
“Do sit down, Samuel.” Unfolding the pristine white napkin, his father laid it across his lap with practiced ease.
“I’m not hungry,” he announced. This too was a lie. Samuel was ravenous. But not for food.
He needed to see Arlie.
Now.