I pressed down harder on the gas pedal, and savored the rush of the wind through my hair. Barely saw the kudzu-covered vines rush past in a blur of green, or the occasional boulders jutting up through the earth. I was out on the back roads, lost in the rolling hills and barren fields, and I didn’t care to be found.

I wanted to lose myself in the rush, in the speed, in the rolling landscape, but I couldn’t escape the pictures running through my head. Pictures of Hunter and Paige, laughing and talking and smiling…together.

Together…I could learn to hate that damn word.

I wasn’t driving anywhere in particular, just driving. Trying to get away from those pictures, those pictures that twisted up my insides with how sad they made me, because two people I cared about were happy, so shouldn’t I be happy? But I couldn’t be. I couldn’t make myself be. And the pictures caught up with me no matter how hard I pressed the gas pedal.

I knew I couldn’t go home—I mean, back to Hunter’s estate. What if Paige was there? What if Paige was still there in the morning? I couldn’t face that. I couldn’t even begin to think about facing that.

I’d really backed myself into a corner here, and I had no idea what I was going to do next.

But I’d be fine. Of course I’d be fine. After all, I couldn’t date Hunter anyway. I was focused on my career, like I should be. Kicking ass and taking names, proving the Douchebros wrong and almost driving my car into a tree—

“Aaaaaaaaaah, shit shit shit!” I hit the brakes just in time, screeching to a halt before I could end all my angsting prematurely via an oak that looked like it had survived Sherman’s March. I leaned back against the driver’s seat, breathing heavily, trying to slow down my heart. Shit. I’d almost gotten myself killed. No guy was worth that.

I just needed a moment. I just needed to relax.

Too bad I could barely remember how to relax anymore.

Then I saw the glow from the dive bar’s neon lights in the distance, and I thought I just might be able to remember.

* * *

The lights spluttered as I entered the bar, casting flickering orange and blue shadows on the grimy walls hung with moth-eaten hunting trophies. The jukebox blared out an old blues tune with a soulful wail, and the cigarette smoke hung as heavy as the clouds in my soul.

Perfect.

I slid onto a cracked red leather bar stool next to a bunch of old biker types with mustaches that could have doubled as their motorcycles’ handlebars, wearing more leather than a herd of Angus cattle. They shot me a surprised look, but apparently one look at my face was enough to settle the question of why a city slicker was patronizing their establishment, and they went right back to what sounded like a well-worn argument about the virtues of American-made motors.

The bartender was an older fellow with hair that was the whitest thing in the whole dingy place. “What’ll it be, little lady?”

I surveyed the row of dusty bottles behind him and saw a few that looked promising. “Tequila, please.”

“Any particular kind?”

“Bring me your top three.”

He poured the shots, and I tossed the first one back quickly, feeling the burn travel through my throat down to my stomach. The sweet icy almost-pain of it was perfect, sandpaper scraping away the sticky sweet taste of all the nicey-nice deception I’d been trying to practice lately.

The bartender cracked a surprisingly gentle smile. “You drink that like it done you a personal injury.”

I shrugged. “Got to take it out on somebody. And the law frowns on me taking it out on the one who deserves it.”

“Ain’t that the same old story,” he said, nodding appreciatively at my logic. He turned toward the biker guys by the jukebox, and hollered to them: “Sonny! Put on that song!”

“What song?” a guy with more silver jewelry than an entire Nevada mine asked.

“Don’t you ‘what song’ me!” the bartender said with a roll of his eyes. “The song that lady with the leopard print tights sings about a man what done her wrong!”

“Oh, that song. Well, why didn’t you just say?” He whacked the jukebox and a new mournful wail issued from it, this one with a distinctly country twang.

“Dolly Parton,” the bartender said thoughtfully, his face creased in bliss. “Ain’t a thing about heartbreak that woman don’t know.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, tossing back the second shot. It burned even more, and I coughed. In my experience, alcohol worked a damn sight better than country music when it came to heartbreak. Still, it’d been a sweet gesture on his part. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep these coming.”

The bikers joined us up at the bar. They looked considerably less threatening as they bobbed their heads to the song’s melody. One of them even had a twinkle in his eye that reminded me of my late grandpa, if Gramps had had a tattoo on his shoulder of a cobra sinking its fangs into a heart while an eagle dug its claws into the cobra’s coils.

Cobra Tattoo caught me staring and smiled. “Ah, I see that old bit of ink’s caught your eye. A little souvenir from my own piece of heartbreak.” His eyes grew misty. “Juniper Raleigh, her name was, and I thought she set the stars in the sky. Hair like a bonfire and eyes like fireworks. I courted her for damn near five years before she’d say yes to a night at the pictures, but in the end she said yes to marriage too.”

“That doesn’t sound too heartbreaking,” I said, my tongue loosened by the tequila. “Did she break up with you or something?”

“The cancer took her,” he said simply. “Over in a year. Hell of thing.”

“Oh,” I said. I felt like the world’s biggest jerk. “Sorry for…well, I guess I didn’t say that too respectfully.”

“I was only nineteen, and I thought the world had come crashing down,” he said with a forgiving smile. “And it had. It always does, with heartbreak. Other people might not be able to see it, but when your heart’s in pieces it’s like your own personal Armageddon. I’m not going to hold a bit of blunt speaking against someone who’s standing on such trembling ground.”

His simple acceptance threatened to bring tears to my eyes.

“It’s—a guy,” I blurted, surprising myself. “I love—no, no, I don’t. There’s no way I love him. I’ve only just started to know him. But I wanted to get to know him. I wanted to find out if I could have loved him, really loved him. I wanted that chance. And now it’s just…” My hand was trembling on the counter. “It’s just gone.”

Shit, this wasn’t what I needed. I wanted a raucous night out, the sweet numbing of liquor, not a drunken crying fest. One more shot ought to do it—

I reached for the tequila but Cobra Tattoo made a gesture like I was reaching for a live cobra, and I stopped. He strode over and took a sip from the glass; grimaced.

“Dwayne, you letting her drink this hogwash?”

The bartender—Dwayne, apparently—shrugged. It was a shrug with a slightly defensive look. “Figured she was old enough to pick her poison.”

“There’s poison and then there’s poison.” Cobra Tattoo shook his head at me severely, or it would have been severely if that kind twinkle in his eyes hadn’t made him look like a down on his luck cross between Santa Claus and Dumbledore. “Girlie, this tequila’s no good. Not that I’m a fan of tequila much in the first place, but this label? The things they do to an agave plant would make you cry. For heartbreak you don’t want nothing but the best to ease that pain, make it burn across your heart before it can fade away.”

Normally I bristled at this much intimation that I didn’t know what I was doing, but he spoke so earnestly that I couldn’t bring myself to bite his head off. “Okay. What tequila should I drink then?”

“Shouldn’t be drinking no tequila at all! That’s a drink for gals who go on spring break and show off their titties for a free T-shirt, not a serious stand-up gal like you.” He clasped my hand like he was trying to pull me free from quicksand. “You need Knox bourbon. Best in the South.”

Despite all the talk of heartache, the friendly conversation had been keeping a portion of the pain at bay.

Until I heard Hunter’s last name.

Pain lanced through me like a sword, shot through with the memory of his scent and the touch of his mouth.

The way he said my name, the way I had wanted to hear him say my name…

Great. Even in a hick bar, I couldn’t escape Hunter.

“No thanks,” I said.

My voice had come out clipped and cold, and I saw a faint start of surprise from most of the biker guys and the bartender, but Cobra Tattoo’s expression of kind joviality never faltered.

“Well, it’s your choice, but you don’t know what you’re missing.” He sat down on the stool next to me, leaning back against the counter as his eyes went misty and far away. “Nothing like it in the world. First taste of it I had was at the wedding to my Juniper. It was like someone had taken all the fire in her veins and brewed it up into magic. I kissed her and the taste of it was on her lips and I never wanted it to fade.” Sadness seeped into his voice, tinged it mournful, wistful, resigned. “Drank it for the second time at her funeral. Brought tears to my eyes with how close it made her feel. Like I was kissing her all over again. Still drink it on her anniversary.”

“Homer, are you trying to make that girl jump off a cliff?” the bartender interrupted. “She came here to forget her heartbreak, not take on yours too.”

“Well, shit, he’s got a good point about the liquor though,” interrupted another one, the deep-voiced one—Sonny, wasn’t it?—who’d thumped the jukebox into life earlier. “Hell, when my folks kicked the bucket and I had to take over running the household, that was when I got my first taste of Knox bourbon. It was sweet but hard, like a promise and a regret. Can’t nothing beat it for the hard times.”

“It ain’t just for the hard times, though,” the bartender protested. “Why, my very first sip of it was a joyous occasion—birth of my first child, my daughter Nancy.”

“It’s a rite of passage, not a consolation or a celebration,” argued another of the crowd. “You don’t feel a real man ‘til your pappy or your grandpappy’s given you one of their old bottles to open up and share. Lets you know they trust you, lets you know they know you’re ready to carry on the old tradition.”

“Hey,” I interrupted. “You all going to keep jawing, or are you going to give me a taste of this famous bourbon?”

There was a shocked silence, and for several seconds I thought I had pushed it too far.

And then the whole room burst into laughter.

“I like this one, Dwayne!” Cobra Tattoo—no, Homer, it was Homer, I should remember that so ‘Cobra Tattoo’ didn’t pop out of my mouth—said. “Pour her the best you got, so she keeps coming back!”

Dwayne obliged, and I tossed back the bourbon. This was smokier than what I’d tasted before, a faint hint of apple hiding in the oak and burnt caramel tones. The burn kicked in a second later, and oh, it was just like they said. A sweet shiver, a little bit of pain, and then a reward, not numbness—no, just a little bit of…what was the word I was looking for? Relief? No.

Exaltation.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Loosened muscles I hadn’t realized I’d been tensing.

Let the tears fall that I hadn’t realized I’d been hurting myself so badly trying to hold back.

“It takes you like that, often times,” Homer said knowingly. “Let ‘em flow, girlie. Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of in a bit of tears.”

“Tears is part and parcel of it,” another biker said, clapping me on the back. “Rite of passage, shedding the hurt of the past as you hold onto the good of it and look to the future—”

And as if my mind was a lock and his words were a key, suddenly I KNEW.

I knew exactly what direction I needed to take the brand.

I was on my feet before I knew it. “This is it!”

“This is what now?”

But the ideas were bursting behind my eyelids like fireworks, too fast for me to keep up with. Sound bites flashed through my mind: the rite of passage, classic Americana nostalgia. Real people, real memories, a taste of home. Holding onto the good of the past as we look to the future. I could feel the excitement fizzing through my brain, my hands waving through the air as if trying to sculpt my ideas out of the ether.

“I know exactly what I need to do! I know exactly what I have to write, how I have to write it, the art direction for Sandra, I have to—I need—” I grabbed at my keys. I knew I was grinning like a crazy person; I could feel it practically splitting my face, but I couldn’t care less. “I have to get to work!”

“An artist,” Homer said with a tolerant grin. “I ought to’ve known.”

“Copywriter,” I said distractedly, trying to find my car key. My fingers did not seem to be entirely functioning, they kept slipping all over the place.

“Artists,” the barkeep said with a sigh. And then he snagged my keys. “More than my job’s worth to let you drive, girlie. Let me call you a taxi.”

I fished my cell phone out of my purse, and grinned. “I’ve got something better than a taxi.”

Later, there would be plenty of time to feel sorry for myself. For this blissful second, though, I was on top of the world. Because I had the one thing I lived for.

I had an idea.

* * *

Martha tolerated my nonstop chatter all the way back to the estate and through the night, retreating to the kitchen to bring me supplies of coffee and doughnuts. I was so excited that I barely tasted them as I scarfed them down. I was too excited for them to be anything but fuel for the whirlwind I was caught up in, calories to burn as my thoughts ignited in a bonfire of inspiration. No sooner had I licked the sugar from my fingers than I was back to work, filling a notebook with my scrawls; my footnotes had footnotes. When I felt like I couldn’t work by myself—Martha didn’t count; she was technically still awake, but her eyes had glazed over hours ago—I pulled out my phone and woke up my art partner Sandra with numerous apologies.

Twenty minutes and several promises that I wasn’t too drunk later, we both had our laptops out and were set to Skype through the whole night—in whispers to keep from waking her son—hammering out artwork and slogan ideas. Sandra pulled up some photos of the area, including a Prohibition-era shot of the very building I had just been drinking in, which Sandra tinted in the colors of Knox bourbon until it looked good enough to drink. We tossed font ideas back and forth, trying out each of my new slogans in different locations—upwards left? Down right? Centered, so as to draw attention to the proud Greek columns in the manor house photo?

I felt like I was soaring, like my heart was a hummingbird beating out of my chest, like my ideas were coming too fast for my breaths to keep up with them. This is going to be my big break!

I hadn’t felt half so alive in years.

When I finally came out of my daze of inspiration and said goodbye to a yawning but excited Sandra, birds were chirping outside the window, which was letting in the warm sun of a day I hadn’t even noticed dawning. The clock read 9 am, and the walls, desk, and floor were covered with so many sheets of paper it looked like they had been buried under an avalanche. An avalanche of less than pristine snow, however, since said pages were crammed full of the ideas that were going to bring Knox bourbon back to life in a way that hadn’t been dreamt of since Mary Shelley. Hunter wasn’t going to believe his eyes!

And, my brain fizzing with too little sleep and too much adrenaline, that thought led me to what seemed like the next logical step to keep the momentum going:

I had to tell Hunter!

I grinned, wide and purely delighted. Oh, I couldn’t wait to see his face! Let’s see how useless he thought advertising was after I knocked his socks off with this!

I bustled out of the library and into the manor house. It was a good thing that by now I was so used to this labyrinth that I didn’t have to pay careful attention to every landmark, because I wasn’t seeing anything this morning but a bright and beautiful future full of promotions.

I could hear him puttering around in the kitchen, and my grin widened to a measure that would have done justice to a Cheshire cat.

“Hunter, I—” I began as I entered.

But it wasn’t Hunter sitting at the breakfast table.

It was Paige.