Chapter 61
TRISTAN
“Iam not giving her up,” I announce to the room. “So get used to it.”
“Tristan, I don’t think anyone was asking you to do that,” Katie whispers. She’s smiling at me, and I shrug, but I can feel my face heating.
I had to make sure. I need everyone to know where we stand.
My siblings all look up from their places around my coffee table.
Katie’s hand is wrapped in mine. It’s Sunday dinner, and I’ve brought her before, but based on everyone’s wide eyes, they realize exactly what the implications are.
Katie is gripping my palm like she’s trying to fuse our hands together.
“Katie,” Emory breathes. She scrambles to stand and wraps my girlfriend in a hug. “He’s never brought anyone home before,” she teases. Katie chokes a laugh and hugs her back, and something settles in my chest.
Aiden is smiling at me over his wife’s head, that secret Aiden smile that is more eyes than mouth. Good job, he mouths, and damn if it doesn’t feel like parental approval as his words wash over me.
Sienna is hissing something over video call to Whit. I hear the words “bet” and “owe” and I roll my eyes. She gives him a neck-slicing gesture before she turns the camera and leaps up to wrap her arms around Katie too, then me.
“Knew it,” she whispers. Her arms tighten as I try to shove her off. “Hurt her and I’ll gut you.”
“I’ll gut me first,” I grumble, and she seems satisfied with this answer.
We take our seats on the couch, and Katie is a full six inches away. I drag her against me.
“Seriously?” she hisses.
“Get used to it.”
Her face is pink and her smile is small and bitten off.
My chest swells. “You will get used to it, Bailey.”
The flush spreads to her neck. Is this what marriage would be like? Making my future wife blush in public? If so, sign me up. She is deliciously bitable when she blushes. She is also, to my great surprise, really fucking nervous.
She keeps smoothing her hands down her dress. She wore a dress, like she has someone to impress, and it makes my chest pinch every time I look at her.
I think, and she would never admit it, that she so badly wants to belong. She already does with my siblings, but she has no idea.
Sienna’s smile is evil. “So, Tristan, how’s the spouse search?”
I throw a piece of bread at her, and she laughs, and the tension cracks.
“Congratulations, you two.” Emory squeezes Katie’s knee and she seems to settle into herself.
Under her nerves and her sweaty palms, I see a flicker of the woman she will be in the decades to come.
Confident, calm under pressure, loyal to a fault, full of heart and feelings that are too big for her to contain.
A leader to rival Emory as she comes into her own, and god, I can’t wait to see it.
I drop a kiss on her shoulder, and my siblings groan.
“Tristan, gross,” Sienna exclaims. “Prepare a girl first.”
Katie is laughing and blushing until my sister slides her the phone. “Here. Say hi to Whit. And then pick dinner.”
“I need to pick?” Katie looks briefly uncertain.
“It’s tradition.” Emory curls next to Aiden and he tucks an arm around her, almost unconsciously. They are impossibly connected, and I can’t wait to have that with Katie. “New family members have to pick dinner.”
“Hello, sister,” Whit says from the screen.
“Stop pressuring her.” Everyone turns to me, brows raised. “Katie doesn’t have to marry me unless she wants to.”
“I want to.”
All heads swing her way. My heart is in my throat. “What was that?”
She’s biting her lip, trying not to smile. “I’ll marry you. Um, if it helps with the inheritance stuff. I’ll totally marry you.”
“That’s the only reason?” I growl.
Everyone is laughing, but I have eyes only for Katie. “I’m doing this over later. Better.”
She grins at me. “Make it good.”
“We need a plan.” I turn to the room. “Grandfather was…let’s say hesitant at the thought of my marrying her.
” I wrap my hand around Katie’s and squeeze so she knows we stand together.
“I am willing to accept a fight from him, but what I’d like is to fight fire with fire.
I want him out of the business and out of our personal lives. ”
Whit and Sienna are sitting up straighter, nodding. Aiden looks thoughtful.
“Ideas?”
Aiden leans forward, elbows on his knees. “The twins marry. Mom modified their trusts years ago so they get shares before thirty. We can all inherit enough shares to oust him before your next birthday.”
Whit and Sienna nod, and my heart swells. “You’d do that?”
“Of course we would.”
“Mostly for Katie,” Sienna says, and I roll my eyes.
“What if you just—took over?” Katie asks quietly. “I mean, I don’t want to overstep.”
“No. Keep going. What do you mean?”
“I’ve worked for you for a long time. All of you. I love you. I’d stand with you against him. If I feel that way, other employees must too. If you have all of them on your side, it wouldn’t really matter what he wants.”
“That’s a great idea,” Aiden says quietly. “It solves the issues we’ve been having with the head distillers too. I mean, assuming Tristan has a way to pull it off.”
“Katie.” I turn to her. Her eyes are bright and she’s leaning forward on her knees. “You say to lead with your heart, right? Do the things that make you want to cry?”
She nods, looking wary.
I know what I need to do.
“You want me here for this?” Aiden and I are outside Grandfather’s office in the stillhouse the following morning.
It’s a thick and humid June day, but inside the stillhouse is quiet and cool.
The air smells like wood and whiskey and carries the tangible weight of our history. “I need to do this alone.”
He smiles, then pulls me into a brief hug. “Love you, Tris.”
I nod, throat too thick to speak, before he shoves his hands in his pockets and walks away. I watch him go, with his spine straight but head bowed, like he feels that same weight I do.
If I’m successful today, we won’t feel like choking when we walk in here.
Aiden’s kids will have a brighter future.
Aiden will spend his days making whiskey and I’ll spend my days running the company and loving Katie.
We’ll have everything we want. It feels impossible, but I’ll reach for it with everything I have.
I take a deep inhale and push open the door. Grandfather spares me a brief glance, then gestures for a chair. He’s reading something on his tablet, and I remember Dad telling us that meetings are power plays.
Well, fuck that. They aren’t for me. I perch on the windowsill, next to a bar cart of some of our most prized vintages, and look out at the field beyond the wavy panes of glass.
“I’ve been thinking,” I say before I snag one of the engraved crystal tumblers from the bar cart and start tossing it from hand to hand.
Grandfather’s eyes watch it, narrowing. I swear his face twitches.
“Have you?”
“I’d like to give my shares away.”
Yup, it definitely twitches.
“That is assuming you inherit them,” he says icily.
“Oh, I will.” I give him a bright smile. “Katie agreed to marry me.”
His face tightens. “And to whom are you giving these shares? To her?”
“Nah.” I toss the tumbler higher. The crystal catches the weak sunlight that filters in. The Prince crest blazes like fire before the tumbler drops back into my hands. “I’m going to give them to the employees of Prince Bourbon.”
“You’re what?”
I set the tumbler down on the bar cart and push to stand. We face off over the scarred oak desk. There’s a long gash on the top from when I broke a bottle in here. I was eight. Dad made me clean up the broken pieces with my hands.
“Our employees are losing faith in us. Between Dad’s death, the turmoil last year, and our failure to announce a new CEO, the senior distillers are looking to quit when Mac retires.
There are rumblings of discontent.” I hold up a finger.
“And before you try to stop me, remember that our employees are our lifeblood. The senior distillers know more than Aiden and I do about making whiskey. We owe these people everything. I will not let this company fail. I will die before I let our employees think we don’t care about them.
So yes, every current and future employee of Prince Bourbon will receive a portion of private stock.
From my shares. To show them that they are family too.
The details of the vesting plan are in your inbox. ”
When I finish, I’m breathing hard. I press my lips together to keep from saying more. Grandfather has never respected emotion, and now that I seem to be full of it, I know he won’t respect me.
I am prepared to tell him that Sienna and Whit are going to marry, and that we’ll oust him as CEO and install me, but he rises from his desk. He’s slow. The chair scrapes over the wooden floorboards.
And then he’s coming around the desk, cane in hand.
“I am so proud of you,” he says. I’ve never heard this tone from him before. He sounds—I’d call it emotional with someone else. Sincere.
I don’t know what to do.
“All I wanted for you, Tristan, was to care. To show some sign of leadership. To show me that you want this as much as you should. And now you have.”
He lays a hand on my shoulder. A fine tremor racks my spine.
“I will happily retire and turn the company over to you. And if she is what brought this change in you, then I will happily give you my blessing.”
I nod, not sure what to say, except “Thank you.”
Grandfather turns and fumbles for the desk drawer and pulls out a black velvet box. “For her, then.”
I tuck it into my pocket and dip my chin before I turn for the door.
“Tristan?”
I still, head bowed, hand on the ancient brass knob.
“Your father would be proud of you too.”