The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

alligator skin belts.
    Ofcourse, she had resolutely refused to learn anything from those slap-happy sessions or alter her behavior in any way. Just to prove he didn’t run her life.
    And yes, things had worked out so damned well since then.
    Richard Pford’s thin, angular face came over the top of her head. “Hate me all you like, but you will
not
disrespect me like this again. Are we clear.”
    He was still pulling on her hair, forcing her neck and spine to counter his strength or risk her being decapitated.
    “What I do or do not do”—she grunted—“will not change anyone’s opinion of you. Nothing ever has.”
    As she glared at him, she also smiled. Behind those rat eyes of his, right now, he had gone on a little trip down memory lane, his low self-esteem running through the script of insults that had been ladled out at him while they had been classmates at Charlemont Country Day. Gin had been among the name-callers, very much a mean girl who had run in a pack. Richard, on the other hand, had been a scrawny, pimply kid with a grating sense of entitlement and a voice like Donald Duck. Not even his family’s extraordinary wealth had saved him socially—or gotten him laid.
    And indeed, nineties slang had yielded such stellar nomenclature, hadn’t it: loser, scrub, tool, dork, fucker.
    Richard shook himself back into focus. “I expect my wife to be waiting at home for me when I have a business engagement she is not welcome at.” He yanked on her hair. “I do
not
expect her to be on a jet to Chicago—”
    “You’re living in
my
home—”
    Richard snapped his hold on her again, like he was schooling a dog with a choke chain. “
Especially
when I told her she was not permitted to use any of my planes.”
    “But if I’d taken a Bradford one, how could I have been sure you’d find out about it?”
    The look of confusion on his face was worth everything that was happening—and what was going to come next.
    Gin tore herself free and got back on her feet. Her Gucci dress was twisted about, and she debated whether to leave it that way or straighten it.
    Disheveled,she decided.
    “The party was divine,” she said. “So were both the pilots. You certainly know what kind of men to hire.”
    As Richard exploded up from the floor and raised his hand over his shoulder, she laughed. “Be careful with the face. My make-up artist is good, but there are limits to concealers.”
    In her mind, throughout her body, crazy mania sang like a choir at the altar of madness. And for a split second she thought of her mother, lying in her bed just down the hall, as incapacitated as any homeless addict on the streets.
    When a Bradford became hooked on opiates, however, they got them from their private physician and it was Porthault rather than cardboard, private nurse rather than shelter. “Medication” instead of “drugs.”
    Whatever the vocabulary, one could appreciate how it might be better and easier than dealing with reality.
    “You need me,” Richard hissed. “And when I buy something, I expect it to function properly. Or I throw it out.”
    “And anyone who wants to be the governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky someday should know that beating his wife presents a terrible PR problem.”
    “You’d be surprised. I’m a Republican, remember.”
    Over Richard’s shoulder, the oval mirror above one of her pair of eighteenth-century Italian Louis XV commodes presented her with a perfectly framed image of the two of them: her with her lipstick smudged like blood on her jaw, her blue dress hiked up to the lace tops of her thigh highs, her brunette hair in messy waves like the halo of the whore she was; him in his old-fashioned nightshirt, his hair eighties Wall Street–side part, his Ichabod Crane body strung like a wire about to get tripped. All around them? Silk drapes like ball gowns next to windows tall as waterfalls, antiques worthy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a bed as big as a reception hall with a