by Bromberg, K
“Tell me,” I begged.
“His fiancée? Samantha Bettencourt?”
“You told me what happened.”
“She wasn’t wearing her engagement ring when she went swimming in the middle of the night. No one knew where it was. Turns out, the plumber found it in the drain catch under the house and hocked it. Three carats. Showed up in a pawn shop in Whittier. Hush-hush.”
“So… they broke up before? And she didn’t tell anyone?”
“No one told anyone. It would look bad. You know how those people are. They hire PR firms to manage their kids’ images the day they’re born. I mean, bad enough there was a broken light in a billionaire’s pool. But she was swimming at three in the morning, fully dressed.”
“He killed her? Are you saying—?”
“No, no. No evidence of that.” She wiped a brown ring off the counter with a napkin. “But it does raise questions. Don’t you think?”
* * *
Samantha Bettencourt had thrown her ring down the toilet. Maybe it had slipped off her finger, but what were the odds? Slim. Real slim.
If the PR was to be believed, she and Byron were the “perfect couple.” There had been no indication that they’d broken up prior to her death, but that didn’t mean anything. Linda was right. Families like the Bettencourts and Crownes tightly controlled their image. Nothing was reported that the family didn’t want everyone to know.
The breakup would have made waves. Every woman in socialite circles would have gone on full alert if the oldest Crowne brother had become available.
Which one had done the breaking up?
I walked into my office, imagining scenarios. Infidelity. Commitment-phobia. Stupid, arrogant behavior on Byron’s part.
By the time I got to Amara’s desk, I’d decided it was his fault because he was the most awful man ever to walk the earth. Then as I saw the vase of roses on her desk, I had to wonder why it mattered.
“Who’s the lucky guy?” I said, indicating the two dozen roses. They weren’t a single color, but a motley selection of pink, red, white, and yellow.
“You,” Amara said. “So. Who’s the lucky guy?”
“No clue,” I lied, plucking the card from the clip. I had a clue.
“Whoever he is, he’s indecisive.”
“Not my type, then.” I slid the handwritten card out of the envelope.
Dear Ms. Monroe,
I hope you can accept my apology for last night. I was out of line.
(I wasn’t sure of your favorite color, so I got all of them.)
Byron
Not exactly indecisive, but covering his bases.
I bet I can make you beg for it like a starving animal.
Out of line didn’t even begin to describe what had happened. Now there were witnesses and a paper trail. I was as responsible for the kiss as he was, but before that, he’d been disrespectful. Disgusting. Insolent. Egocentric. He’d treated me like a hill he wanted to climb, and I was no man’s mountain.
I lifted the roses from the vase and dropped them in the garbage.
“Well, then,” Amara said.
“We’ll keep the vase.” The note went into the blue recycling bin.
“You got it,” she replied as she picked up the phone. “Olivia Monroe’s desk.”
I strode into my office. Forgiveness wasn’t my forte. Offering it would have given him an opening to shove the door open further, and he’d have taken it as a sign to stroll right in.
“Olivia,” Amara called, “it’s Crowne.”
Of course it was. He wasn’t going to give up. I should have known that.
I stormed into my office and snapped up the phone, leaving the door open. “You’re fucking kid—”
“Hold for Mr. Crowne,” a young woman’s voice said before the click.
Crap. I’d cursed at his secretary. As much as I’d been righteous in my rage, I shouldn’t have directed it at her. By the time he picked up, I was cowed by my own behavior, which made me hate him even more.
“Ms. Monroe,” he said. That voice. It existed on a dozen resonant wavelengths.
“What do you want?” Still sharp. At least I wasn’t cursing.
“I want to know if you read the note before you threw it out.”
It was almost as if he knew me.
“I did.” I held back a thank-you or offer of forgiveness.
“Should I hang up?”
Was he retreating? That wouldn’t do. I didn’t want him to run. I wanted him to fight until the bell rang even if I didn’t want him to get what he was fighting for.
“Why?” I asked. “You’ll only stay on if I accept your apology?”
He breathed a laugh. Either he thought I was funny, or he really expected forgiveness. “Which color rose do you prefer?”
“What’s the difference?” I dropped into my chair.
“So I know what to send next time.”
“There’s not going to be a next time.”
I could practically hear him smile in the pause that followed.
“What did you do when you got home?” he asked as if he knew I’d abused a washcloth.
“Went to bed.”
“Do you want to know what I did? It made a mess.”
“Let me ask you something. Do you do this shit to all the women lawyers you’re up against?”
“Let me ask you something. Do your hands shake and does your breath get all heavy for every man you take to court?”
“Only the ones I want to destroy.”
“Good,” he said as if we’d decided something. “I only say this shit to women I want to destroy. But I don’t think we mean the same thing.”
I knew what he meant. It was perfectly clear to my body, which redirected all its fluids to my panties.
“Meet me tonight,” he said.
“For what?”
“Business.”
“What business?”
“You know exactly what business.”
“You’re trying to get me disbarred because you’re scared of me.”
He laughed. “I don’t want to talk about the case. I couldn’t care less about it.”
“We have nothing else to discuss.”
“The address is on the back of the card.”
He did what I should have done the minute the conversation went off the rails.
He hung up.
Chapter 6
OLIVIA
The fake-apology note I fished out of the recycling bin had a Silver Lake address on the back.
Shocker.
Obviously, I wasn’t going over there. I was going to stay home and work. Go over a Ninth-Circuit decision on the Endangered Species Act that had nothing to do with me. Maybe have a glass of wine before bed.
I was home, in yoga pants and a beat-up T-shirt, with the court’s opinion spread out on the kitchen counter because though Dr. Galang had told me to relax, he hadn’t dictated how. As I read the last of it, I considered going up to Silver Lake.
Byron wanted something I was itching to deliver, and he knew I wanted him. I’d blown it, and I had to get control back. Avoiding him would make it worse. Getting in his face and telling him to suck a bag of dicks would put a stake in this once and for all.
I went to the bedroom to change when I saw myself in the closet mirror.
My blond hair was up in a sloppy ponytail, and the T-shirt was shapeless and unflattering. With my makeup washed away, I looked unremarkable. Maybe I didn’t have to change my clothes at all. The yoga pants would send the right signal—not interested in sex and not concerned with my business impression.
I could have probably driven there, but parking in Silver Lake was a nightmare, so I called a car.
In the back of the Uber, a block away from his little sex pad, I wavered.
“Can you wait for me?” I asked the driver when she stopped on the quiet street.
“I have another call,” she said, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “You going to be all right?”
“I’m fine. I’ll just call another if I need it.”
“Should I wait for you to get in?”
The lights were on, and a black BMW was in the driveway. He was there. I wouldn’t be left alone on the porch.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Get your next ride.”
Once I was past the front gate, she drove away. I was left with me and my stupid, reckless, hormone-driven choices.
Don’t you dare blame the fertility drugs.
The quaint little house, with its disarmingly soft lights and rosebushes, was designed to seem anodyne. As if nothing bad could happen there. A perfect property to bring strange women to. It worked like a charm on me, draining my resolve to tell him to fuck off face-to-face.
My better self tried to get a foothold on my will. As I opened the front gate and stepped onto the front walk of the little house, my choice was made and my illusions fell away.
Before I was all the way onto the porch, he opened the door. A short glass of scotch in each hand. A full day’s shadow on his cheeks. Suit trousers. Light blue shirt with two open buttons at the top, revealing just enough hair to make me imagine the rest of his body.
I already knew he was gorgeous and erotically powerful, but it was the vulnerability of his bare feet that did me in. I felt too safe, and knowing that did nothing to rouse my defenses.
“A peace offering,” he said as I approached, handing me a glass of scotch. “It’s a single malt from Japan.”
I took it. “I don’t drink on school nights.”
“Just a taste.” He held up his glass, and I clinked it.
I took the tiniest of sips. Just a taste. To do otherwise would have appeared weak.
He looked me up and down, from my Keds to my mess of a ponytail, with a slow deliberation that made me as self-conscious of the shoddiness of my outfit as the hungering of the body under it.
“Problem?” I asked.
“There’s a poetic symmetry to what you’re wearing.”
He stepped out of the doorway to let me in.
I made a quick inventory of the front room. Original art but no one flashy or famous. Expensive but nondescript furniture. A grand piano without personal photos on it. Understated for a man known to be showy with his wealth.
“You play piano?” I asked after he closed the door behind me.
“Yes.” He went to the sidebar to refill his drink. “But not in a long time. Here.” He held out his hand for my glass. “What did you think of it?”
“A little charcoal. Sweet on the back. Hints of bell turmeric and cinnamon.”
“That all?” He took my glass, brushing his finger against my thumb, leaving a trail of sensation on my skin like a boat leaving a flared wake in still water.
“It tasted like a drive up Mulholland with the top down.”
He stood there with his two glasses, silently waiting for me to explain what the hell I was talking about.
I decided to elaborate instead. “At two in the morning on the Sunday of a holiday weekend, in November when the palm trees drop their seeds and one hits you in the cheek. It hurts, but you laugh anyway because everything is just fine and Tom Petty’s on the radio.”
He smirked and laid my glass on a silver tray. “I’m glad you liked it.”
“What did you mean about poetic symmetry?” I asked.
“You were similarly dressed last night.”
“I didn’t come here to kiss you.”
He swirled his scotch. “Didn’t you?” He drained his glass and put it next to mine.
“I didn’t.”
“You came to tell me that in person?”
“You didn’t seem to believe me over the phone.”
He put his hands in his pockets, drawing my eyes to his belt and the tightness of his waist. I looked away too quickly.
“What I believe is complicated,” he said. “Because you’re complicated.”
“Flattery is such a blunt tool, Mr. Crowne.”
“Call me Byron. Please.”
“You can call me Ms. Monroe.”
“See? Complicated. You come here looking like you rolled out of bed, then demand formality. It’s enticing. And that’s not flattery. It’s fact. So.” He crossed his arms and leaned on the piano. “Be here.”
He turned and walked to the back of the house, flicking on a light to reveal an open kitchen so immaculate and free of pots or canisters I couldn’t imagine anything had been cooked in it.
“Have you ever had snow tea?” he asked, pulling out a barstool from under the matte-black-topped island.
“Yes.” I sat, and he navigated around the island. “That’s not a rhetorical question, right? You have some?”
Snow tea was white lichen from tiny high-elevation regions in China. It had a light taste of grass and meadows that was more grounding than calming. Linda’s father had procured some for me, and I drank it at night when I couldn’t sleep.
“If you want it,” he said, turning on the burner under the chrome teapot, “I’m making it.”
“I’d love that.”
How did he know?
Of all the things to have in a kitchen that has so little.
Careful.
The package he pulled from the cabinet was half empty, suggesting he drank it here often.
Or he could have dumped it.
“What got you into snow tea?” I asked.
“I did some overland travel in China.”
“First class, I assume.”
“You assume incorrectly, but we toss lowest and highest scores. I graduated from college without a plan, so my parents sent me to work in the Crowne office in Beijing. Took me a week to realize I didn’t know people and I never would from inside those walls. So, I loaded up a backpack with forty pounds of stuff, which I dumped thirty pounds of anyway. Took the busses and trains. Learned a little of the language. Tried not to get killed.”
“How long did that last?”
“Six months. Then I went back to all this.”
The only red flag was how believable the story was.
“Did you invite me here to impress me with your hot drink selection?”
“You’re impressed? That was easy.”
I neither confirmed nor denied to him what I could not confirm or deny to myself. I was firmly planted in the gray area between what I should and shouldn’t do.
“We should talk,” he said. “Like adults.”
“About?”
“Are you always this coy?” He laid both hands on the counter, rugged fingers splayed to a size that could fist my biceps. “Or do you think the one who gets to the point first loses?”
“Maybe.” I folded my fingers together like a good student.
“Lawyers.” He shook his head. “My tongue can still taste the back of your throat. Do you want me to describe it?”
“No.”
“It tastes like a run up a mountain on a cool night to a view you can’t see in the dark but you know it’s there. All the way to the ocean. So close you can smell it and so far it’s silent.”
The teapot hissed, shielding my reaction. He shut off the burner and reached up into a cabinet, then pulled down two identical glass mugs. The kitchen was more functional than it appeared.
“You want to address what happened on Runyon,” I guessed.
“Don’t you?”
He laid the identical cups side by side and put equal amounts of tea powder in each while I tried to ignore the thrum of my heart.
Ethically, I was supposed to disclose any personal relationship with a client or opposing counsel that might color my advocacy. But this incident with Byron Crowne? A man I professed was the gold standard in assholery? It was nothing. It had to be. I’d never be that much of a doormat.
“And that brings us here,” he said, pouring hot water into the cups. “Not to what’s in the past, but what’s in the future.”
He retrieved a silver spoon. I�
��d never thought stirring two mugs of tea could be manly, but his quick, decisive spins and single taps on the rims were utterly masculine. The way he picked up the cup by doming his hand over the top and pressing his fingertips to the hot glass so that I could take the handle suggested dominance over pain and control over the elements.
“Thank you.” The burning sensation in the backs of my fingers confirmed the cup was scalding. I put it down slowly, trying to match his forbearance and barely succeeding.
When I looked at him, he was watching me so closely I knew we were playing the same game.
“The future,” I said, cupping my hand around the glass, ignoring the scorch on my palm.
“Any time after this moment.” He took a big sip of tea. If the heat didn’t peel off the roof of his mouth, I’d eat my damn shoe. And yet he didn’t just take it as if it was lukewarm…he took another without even blowing on the top.
“What do you have in mind?” I gripped the handle and took a sip. I could do this.
“Fucking you.”
I nearly spit the tea before it scalded me, but I held it, letting it blister the roof of my mouth as if he and I were being scored on our ability to hide pain.
Of course, he hadn’t played fair. Dropping that bomb as I drank was cheating.
I put down the cup, done with the pain game. “What?”
“Did I misread you last night?”
By all measures, he was asking me what I thought, but he was really telling me what he knew.
“You’re not misreading.”
He came around the island and sat on the stool next to me, legs spread as if he needed to take up as much space as possible. “Good.”
“We kissed. We’re both adults. Of course you’d think that meant fucking was in the future.”
“It’s not?” His eyebrows twitched upward in bemusement.
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Change the plan.”
I had jurisdiction over my body. He was reminding me of that at the same time as he called me to be ruled by my basest desires.