Good In Bed

by Bromberg, K

  “The board follows my lead,” Dad sat back in his chair. “And management is contingent on my approval. I don’t have to put my children in charge, you know.”

  “What if I’m like this asshole?” Logan jerked his thumb at me. “I’ll be dead before I’m married.”

  “He has a point,” I added.

  “The fact that Byron’s happy has changed the whole equation for us. So, you can blame him for what I’m about to offer, but it’s not negotiable.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” But Logan didn’t move. He sat at attention with his foot shaking in pent-up frustration.

  Dad said, “Effective immediately, I’m resigning as CEO of Crowne Industries so I can spend more time with my ailing wife. I’ll maintain a controlling interest in voting shares, but I’ll otherwise take on an advisory role from my new home in Bel-Air.”

  “Who’s running it, Dad?” Logan growled.

  “Byron.”

  “What?” Logan snapped.

  “Whoa, whoa!” I held out my hands to slow this fucking freight train down to the sound barrier.

  My brother looked as baffled as I was. “Why?”

  Dad leaned up and folded his hands on the desk. “Byron, you were raised to do this. You’re more experienced, and with what’s coming…” He jerked his chin toward Mom and Olivia at the table outside. “You’ve become a serious, capable, and thoughtful man.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “That’s the point. You’re the only one who can do it well and easily give it up when Logan gets settled.”

  “Married,” said Logan. “You mean married.”

  “Joe says you haven’t bought another property. Correct?”

  I’d lost interest in putting my name all over the city. Pissing in every corner, as Olivia would say. I’d finished the builds I had going, was managing the properties I’d decided to keep, and now I spent my days and nights enjoying her and the anticipation of our son. “Correct.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “If I don’t?”

  “Yes or no.”

  He was depending on me. Without my agreement, he’d either have to place someone over Logan—someone who wouldn’t step down without a fight—or stay on and lose time with Mom.

  “Yes,” I said. “I got it.”

  My brother looked at the ceiling. I knew he felt betrayed by both of us.

  “So. Logan.” Our father leaned toward his second son. “Go out. Have fun. Meet people. Learn what you can from Byron.”

  “How long?” Logan’s expression was pitch black.

  “If you’re not married by your fortieth birthday, we’ll revisit.” Dad put his hands on the desk and stood. “Meeting adjourned.”

  Epilogue 2

  OLIVIA

  In the dark and quiet of the night, I was on my back with my knees up, watching the ceiling fan rotate. Byron was curled up next to me with his hand on our son’s kicking pulse, finishing a story.

  “And then he stood up and said, ‘Meeting adjourned,’ and walked out.”

  “Wow.”

  “Logan just sat there staring straight ahead.”

  I faced him. “You’re not going to do it, are you? Run the whole thing? I mean, you just said you would so your brother could keep the job. Right?”

  He shrugged.

  “Byron Crowne!”

  “What? I know how.” He rolled onto his back and laid his wrist on his forehead. It was his turn to watch the fan. “It’s just hiring the right people and delegating. Half of that’s done already.”

  “No, I mean you’re not actually going to support this medieval requirement that he get married?”

  “Is that what you meant?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, you wouldn’t mind if I did?”

  “What? Run the company?”

  “You’ve been working all this time. I’ve been slacking off, and I need… something.”

  “A life?”

  “You’re my life, Beauty.”

  “Lord Byron.” I rolled onto my side and draped my arm over his chest, feeling the muscle under his T-shirt. “You are a clever, brave, and dangerously handsome individual. A man like you shouldn’t be locked up. You need to do things. Take on projects. Fight hard and win big.”

  He stroked my arm absently, and I wove my legs in his.

  “Then I just give it up when Logan turns forty or gets a wife?”

  “Yep.” I ran my hand over his torso. I was huge and cumbersome, but I wanted him. My body flipped like a switch as if I wasn’t already pregnant.

  “Surrender,” he said.

  “You get used to it.” A trickle of moisture ran from between my legs to the back of my thigh.

  “Just… here you go. Take it all…”

  “Byron?”

  “Yes?” He kissed my forehead.

  “I think my water broke.”

  ***

  We had the obstetrician on the phone as we piled into the Bentley. He’d started out calmly telling us we could make it back to LA with hours to spare but seemed less convinced as the contractions got closer. By the time we pulled into Sequoia, he was barking out instructions as he muscled toward the car.

  We held it together long enough to get to delivery.

  It was all a blur after that. I was a rag doll made for poking, carrying, and feeding ice. The pain was behind the epidural, but I was tired… so tired. Pushing took so much strength. More than I had on a good day. I wept with exhaustion, and still, for the hundredth time, they made me push one more time.

  And like that, through the noise of the machines and the men and women talking, there was an earth-shattering cry of frustration and rage from a set of tiny new lungs.

  “Hey.” Byron’s face blocked the light, and his mask moved when he spoke. “You did it.”

  “I did it,” I repeated mindlessly.

  “You were amazing.”

  “I was…” The fugue was lifting into stark awareness. “Where is he?”

  “Doctor’s checking him out.”

  “Want to see.” I took Byron by the neck of his scrubs and clenched the fabric in my fist. “Now. I want him now.”

  “Hang on.” He moved, letting the bright light hit my face.

  I opened my fist and closed my eyes. “Byron. Where are you?”

  The light was blocked again, and I opened my eyes to find him there. He laid a weight on my chest, and I wrapped my arms around my son. I burst into tears again, not with exhaustion but gratitude.

  This warm little baby, smelling of soft biscuits and vanilla milk, was everything I’d ever wanted, and the man standing over me with a smile under the blue mask was everything I’d been afraid to hope for.

  I’d been given more than I’d ever dared to fight for.

  I had it all.

  * * *

  Thank you for reading Iron Crowne.

  Logan’s story, Crowne of Lies, is FREE on Kindle Unlimited.

  Get CROWNE OF LIES today!

  Keep flipping to read an excerpt from Logan’s story.

  Crowne of Lies

  Logan Crowne needs one year from Ella.

  Twelve months living in his house, holding his hand, wearing his ring on her finger, and in exchange, she’ll get her father’s company in the divorce settlement.

  They have one year to convince his skeptical parents that they’re happily in love, and he’s settled enough to run Crowne Industries.

  Ella wants the company badly enough to live with a man who will never love her. She’ll sleep in his room and kiss him for show.

  Her heart may melt whenever he’s around, and his touch may ignite a fire inside her, but surrender will break her heart.

  She’s sure she can last a year without giving him her body.

  She’s wrong.

  Get CROWNE OF LIES today!

  Crowne of Lies Excerpt

  LOGAN

  “I think we should win,” Byron said. “That’s what I think.”

  The
conference room we’d occupied for the past four hours still smelled of dinner, and the halls outside it were quiet. The head of supply and the VP of operations were catching my brother up on shit he would have known if he’d been around.

  “There’s no point to winning the contract if we overpay for it,” I said.

  “We can make money back,” Byron said as if there was nothing more obvious. “Losing damages our reputation. Forever. You want to risk that for a few pennies on the dollar?”

  This fucking guy. He couldn’t read an EPS report or between the lines of an MD&A, but here he was tossing numbers around as if he were on a Mardi Gras float.

  My phone rang. Mandy.

  “I think we should pick this up in the morning,” I said, standing.

  The operations VP closed his folder.

  I slid into the hall, whispering, “Well?”

  “You owe me,” Mandy said.

  “She in?”

  “Open to the idea. It’s going to cost you.”

  “How much?” I closed the door to my office.

  “A strategic buyout of her father’s company.”

  “I need you to be more specific. This WalMart or the corner store?”

  “If I tell you who she is, you’re on for a meeting. Okay?”

  The interior walls of my office were glass, and I watched Byron walk down the hall with the VP, talking like a man making a point. Probably selling him on spending a few more pennies on the dollar.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “The company is Basile Papillion.”

  “Ella,” I said without hesitation.

  “I knew you’d remember. See? It was meant to be.”

  * * *

  Ella Papillion.

  What did I remember?

  Cute. Very cute, actually. Smart. Dead mother. The age difference was a joke now, but at the time, she’d seemed too young to touch.

  I remembered her alongside Millie, my senior year girlfriend and director of the school theater production. Her costumer had been a sophomore, still been young enough to be called a prodigy, pins in her mouth, hunched over a sewing machine or sketching so quickly my girlfriend hardly had to finish a sentence.

  Cooper Santon was supposed to be investigating the rest, but I couldn’t wait. I had Mandy arrange a meeting for the next evening. Ella insisted on her place. I was already halfway across Beverly before Cooper called. I pulled over to take it.

  “You have five minutes,” I said when I picked up.

  “You didn’t give me a lot of time.”

  “Fast, cheap, and good, Coop. You get two out of three in life and I didn’t bother with cheap. So tell me what I paid for.”

  “Okay. Ella Papillion. She still works at her father’s company. Lives on—”

  “Highland Ave. I know.”

  “It’s not zoned for a residential lease.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of time.”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “There aren’t any liens against her.” He rattled off the relevant facts. “No drug arrests. No mental health issues I can see. And—you said this was important, so I made sure before I called—the internet’s clean. No bad publicity with her name on it.”

  “No drug arrests.”

  “Right.”

  “The specificity is weighing on me, Coop.”

  “That’s what you asked about. Specifically.”

  “Has she broken any laws that matter?”

  “She was into graffiti as a kid. Got picked up for vandalism and trespass in 2007. Pled and took the fine. Then again in 2008. Community service picking up garbage on the side of the 101.”

  That was after I knew her. She’d left Wildwood School a few months before I graduated, leaving Millie without spring production costumes. Must have had a few downhill years after her father got remarried.

  All of that was a long time ago. I had a few hours to decide if I could live with it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Do you have an opinion? A gut reaction?”

  “Depends what you want with her. Would I date her? Yeah.”

  “Would you marry her?”

  “If I loved her. Wouldn’t give her my bank account numbers right off.”

  “Thanks, Coop.”

  We hung up and I pulled back onto Beverly with a few minutes to ask myself how desperate I really was. How important was getting married? How much time did I have before Byron wedged himself in so deep I couldn’t get rid of him? Every day for six months, he’d gotten more comfortable. He kept his woman happy, played around on the floor with his son, and ran a multinational business with me. Every day, he proved he could handle Crowne and a personal life without breaking a sweat, and every day I wasn’t married, I proved I couldn’t.

  My father held the keys. He was in charge of succession and wanted a Crowne to run the business. It had always been Byron, until his first fiancée committed suicide and he left to flip real estate. Then my father turned to me, and I jumped in with an exhilaration I’d never felt before, working at his side for six years until he decided I wasn’t happy enough.

  Byron was winning. He thought everything was about winning, but it wasn’t. It was about getting in the ring and staying on your feet for every round. Beaten bloody, aching from the battle, ears ringing so loudly you could barely hear the last bell—that was the point.

  Born two and a half years apart, we’d spent one season in the same Little League division, but on different teams. He hated baseball, and I figured he stayed in another year just to play against me. He pitched. I hit. And when our teams met in the playoffs, the fucker beaned me cold. Swore he didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe he hadn’t. But I’d be damned if I was going to let a pinch runner take that base. Damned if I wasn’t going to steal a second and drag my ass up to the plate in the next inning.

  I was a hitter. I knew where to put the ball. And when he sent an off-speed pitch I saw coming a mile away, I sent it right to his fat fucking head. He dodged but couldn’t catch it, and I got to second.

  It was the last time he let a man on base, but I stole third and made it home on a sac fly. It was the last run we needed to win, so fuck him. When we got home, he apologized and I slept like a concussed baby for fourteen hours.

  For him, anything less than total domination was a loss.

  I was more surgical. I wanted what I wanted. He could have the rest.

  And I wanted Crowne. I didn’t want to lie to get it, but I had to, and I had to lie now or let Byron take everything.

  The address on Highland was in a semi-industrial zone on a block of converted warehouses built when the neighborhood was one big storage unit for Hollywood studios. Most had been turned into restaurants and furniture stores. Ella Papillion’s sat between two galleries and had a billboard on the roof. The barred steel door and small window in front had been integrated into a graffiti-style mural that said BREAK SHIT.

  Not a great sign.

  My family would have to be convinced I’d marry into a message like that.

  I turned around the corner and found the back alley. Two cars were parked behind her building. An El Camino that had been dark blue when it came off the factory floor, but was now a cool gray, and a new black Toyota Camry.

  I pulled my BMW into the last available space and got out, then went up the concrete steps to the metal door, which was ajar. I pushed it open. “Hello?”

  The space stretched to the front of the building. Clean white wall on one side. Fucking mess of small, stacked canvases on the other, along with shelves of paint, brushes, a slop sink, a drafting table, and a mismatched couch and chairs that looked as if they’d been dragged in from the street.

  The white wall had a single, seven-foot-high, five-foot-wide blank canvas on it. The fluorescent light made it seem to glow.

  A door in the back of the white side opened, and Ella stepped through. “Hey, Logan.”

  Not the same girl. First off, she was pierced.
Nose. Ears all the way around. Her wavy black hair was pinned to the top of her head, and her eyes seemed to be a paler brown. Almost amber. The freckles I remembered from high school had paled, making her seem sexy instead of young. She wore a black choker and a sleeveless Star Wars T-shirt that hugged her curves. The ripped jeans sitting low on her waist were painted, patched with contrasting thread, and wide on the bottom in a way that was out of style, but somehow right with the red cowboy boots.

  “Ella,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

  “You too.”

  She was looking at me the same way I looked at her. Taking stock of my face, my suit, with her thumbs hooked in her belt loops, ringed fingers tapping her hips.

  Bit of a challenge, this one. Maybe I’d make a deal with her. Maybe I wouldn’t. But no matter what my decision was, I wanted her to agree to the proposal. I wanted her to want it as desperately as I needed it.

  I said, “You look good.”

  “Let’s not start with bullshit, okay?”

  Before I could answer, a man came from the same door. Six-three. Built. Dressed for business and looking right through me.

  “Logan Crowne,” Ella said. “This is my friend, Amilcar Wilton.”

  We shook hands and I wondered if the El Camino was his. That would be a kind of relief.

  “Good to meet you,” he said.

  “Same.”

  He turned to Ella and nodded. “I’m out.”

  “Yeah?” she answered as if he’d said more than two innocuous words.

  “Yeah.” He kissed her cheek, and though she and I hadn’t agreed to a damn thing, my blood ran a little hotter and my hands tightened into fists as if she was already mine.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call you later.”

  “See you,” Amilcar said to me as he passed.

  Behind me, the door closed and we were alone.

  “Cool place,” I said.

  “Thanks. You want to sit?”

  “Before I get comfortable, Mandy said you were single. That meant unattached. Completely unattached.”