LITMIR.BIZ

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break McQueen’s heart to excuse himself from his current conversation with someone who was either an investment banker or a venture capitalist. He had stopped listening the moment Miss Christmas walked in. He went over to her and sat in the empty bar stool to her left without waiting for an invitation. He owned the place. No reason not to act like it.

      He didn’t say anything at first. He let the silence linger and grow as heady as the muddy Ohio River on a hot night, the kind that made even the sidewalks sweat. Maybe he could talk the lady into a stroll over to the river while the night was still warm. Maybe he could talk her into something more.

      “What can I get you?” Maddie, the pretty blonde bartender, asked the woman.

      “How about a shot of Red Thread?” the woman said. “I like to match my drinks to my hair ribbon.”

      “Red Thread?” Maddie glanced at McQueen, a silent plea for help. “I don’t think...”

      “Red Thread’s been out of business for thirty-five years,” McQueen said to Maddie.

      “Oh, good. Thought I was going crazy. Could have sworn I knew every bourbon there was,” Maddie said. “Any bottles left?”

      “Not a one,” McQueen said, not a white lie, not a black lie. A little red lie.

      “What a shame,” Miss Christmas said, although she sounded neither surprised nor disappointed. Christmas was right. Her voice had a frosty tone to it. She was cool. He liked cool.

      “A damn shame. They say it was the best bourbon ever bottled.” McQueen waited for the lady in the red dress to speak again, but she stayed silent, listening, alert, eyes only for Maddie at the moment.

      “What happened to it?” Maddie asked him.

      “Warehouse fire,” McQueen said, shrugging. “It happens. You distill alcohol and store it in wooden barrels? Fire’s your worst nightmare. Red burned to the ground in 1980 and never reopened. No one knows who owns it anymore.” McQueen had tried to buy the old Red Thread property himself but had no luck. He’d gotten as far as finding the shell company—Moonshine, Ltd.—that owned the acreage and the trademark, but it didn’t seem to have a human being behind its name. “I would know because I’ve looked.”

      “Isn’t that interesting...” Miss Christmas said with the hint of a smile on her red lips, and he couldn’t tell if she meant it or if she was being sarcastic. She spoke with a Kentucky accent, faint but recognizable to someone who spent half his time in New York and half his time in Louisville. Kentucky accents sounded like home to him and his ears always perked up when he heard one.

      “Can I get you something else?” Maddie asked the woman.

      “Four Roses, neat. Double pour.”

      “A lady who knows her bourbon and isn’t afraid to drink it straight.” McQueen turned ten degrees on his bar stool toward her. “A woman after my own heart.”

      “I’m a Kentucky girl,” she said with a graceful shrug. “And bourbon’s like the truth, you know.”

      “How’s that?”

      “The first taste burns, but once you get used to it, it’s the only thing you want in your mouth.”

      Miss Christmas brought the shot glass to her lips, took a sip and didn’t flinch as she drank it. The bourbon didn’t burn her.

      “Tell me something true, then,” McQueen said. “What’s your name?”

      “Paris.”

      “Beautiful name.”

      “Thank you, Mr. McQueen.”

      “You know who I am?”

      “Everybody knows who you are. You own this bar,” she said, nodding at the words The Rickhouse, Louisville, Kentucky, engraved on the mirror behind the bar, the image of a turn-of-the-century wood warehouse also etched in the glass. “I hear you’re opening another bourbon bar in Brooklyn.”

      “You don’t approve?”

      “Leave it to white people to turn a beautiful drink like bourbon into a fetish. Find a way to make pumpkin spice bourbon, and you’ll be a billionaire.” She took another sip of her Four Roses, all the while looking at him out of the side of her eyes.

      “I’ll tell you a secret.”

      “Tell it.”

      “I’m already a billionaire. But I’m always looking for a new way to waste my money. Why not?”

      “You need another business? You tired of owning your basketball team already?”

      “I only own part of the team.”

      “Which part?” she asked. “I know which part I’d like to own.”

      McQueen laughed. “Tell me something, Miss Paris—what do you own?”

      Now it was her turn to spin on her bar stool, ninety degrees, and she met him face on with full eye contact, fearless and shameless.

      “I could own you by morning.”

      Her words rendered McQueen momentarily speechless. He couldn’t remember the last time any woman had so thoroughly stupefied him. Bourbon on her lips and curves on her hips. He was halfway in love with her already.

      “I would like to see you try,” McQueen said. “And that’s not a challenge. I really would like to see that with my own eyes.”

      “Shall we?” she asked, raising her eyebrow a fraction of an inch.

      He had to know her. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we shall.”

      They left the bar together but drove separately to his house. As he wove his way through downtown traffic, he saw that somehow he’d lost her behind him. He’d given her his address and she surely didn’t need to follow him to find it. An irrational fear took hold of him between the red light and the green, a fear she’d changed her mind, driven off, considered a better offer somewhere else with someone else. No, surely not. She’d wanted him, he knew it. He’d seen avarice in her eyes at the bar, and whether it was for his face, his money or his reputation as the richest man in Kentucky, he didn’t care. They were all true, all parts of him, anyway. Whatever part of him she wanted, he didn’t care as long as she wanted him. She did want him, didn’t she? Irrational thoughts. Irrational fears.

      Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he must see her tonight, be with her. Anything less would be calamitous. A man needed wanting. What was the point of having wealth, power and the body of a man half his age if no one bothered to use him for it?

      McQueen pulled into his driveway and saw a black Lexus already there and waiting. Self-respect prevented him from sighing in his relief, but even a self-respecting man was allowed to smile. She’d simply taken a different route. No big surprise. If she lived anywhere around here, she’d know about his house. Everybody in town knew about Lockwood—named not for the forest that surrounded the property he kept locked behind stone walls, but for the man who built it in 1821. Old by American standards, but McQueen’s family was Irish. A two-hundred-year-old house was just getting comfortable by his grandfather’s standards. And McQueen tended to judge everything by his grandfather’s standards.

      Lockwood was a redbrick three-story Georgian masterpiece with double-height white porticos protected by a twelve-foot-high wrought-iron gate. He and Paris parked in the circular cobblestone driveway in front of the temple-style porch. She emerged from her car all long legs and slim ankles and red shoes, and she didn’t blink at the house. It seemed to make no impression on her whatsoever. Miss Paris must have her own money. The shoes, the dress, the Birkin bag that was nearly identical to the one his ex-wife carried? All that screamed money to him. No one was that unimpressed by money except people who have it.

      Before entering the house, she paused on the front porch and glanced back at the gate.

      “What?” he asked.

      “Pretty

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