Beautiful Beast by Aubrey Irons (3)

“Does a king live here?”

My father smiles, ruffling my messy hair as we stand on the stone steps of the mansion. I look up at the enormous iron and wood door, up higher at the impenetrable stone walls, covered in ivy and looking for all the world like a medieval fortress.

“No, pumpkin, just a man and his family.”

“But this is a castle.”

My dad winks at me. “Is it?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well then maybe I am working for a king, who knows.”

I know he’s teasing me. But I’m at that perfect age in life where you’re still able to straddle that divide between fantasy and reality. And right now, I choose to believe we’re about to meet a king.

In a sense, we do.

Bennet Crown opens the door himself that day. They had house help, of course - Carl and Mrs. Tottingham were working there at the time. But Bennet liked opening his own front door.

“Mr. Bell,” he reaches out and shakes my father’s hand, smiling warmly as he steps aside. “Please, come on in.”

“Hank is fine, Mr. Crown,” my father says in that just shy of subservient way people without money tend to talk to people with money. It’s something I’ll resent him for later.

“Only if it’s Ben instead of Mr. Crown, please,” Bennet smiles.

He leads us through the enormous house, and my jaw practically drags across the floor.

“Dad,” I hiss, tugging on his sleeve and looking up at the huge, vaulted ceiling of the rooms we walk through.

He shakes his head in that “not now” way, but Bennet Crown smiles at me.

“Trust me, it’s less impressive when one of the ceiling light bulbs goes out.” He winks at me before turning to my dad and gesturing with his chin. “The greenhouse is out this way.”

* * *

“So what do you think?”

My dad puts his hands on his hips, nodding slowly like he does when he’s surveying a new project - like he’s visualizing where everything will go in his head.

“The space is great, and it gets the light, that’s for sure.”

He nods at the piping running the length of the roof of the ornate, immaculate greenhouse, the fresh dirt perfectly laid out on both sides of the walkway down the middle.

“Those have salt filtrations on them?”

Bennet smiles, laughing quietly as he shakes his head. “See, this is why I hired you.”

My dad shrugs, nodding. “It’s just, this close to the ocean, the sea air is murder on roses.” He furrows his brow. “Mr. Cro- Ben, I know we’ve already spoken about this on the phone, but are you sure you don’t want to do something like Hydrangeas or Rugosas that’ll do a lot better in this-”

“It has to be roses,” Mr. Crown’s voice is stern for the first time since he opened his door, before he softens, shaking his head.

“It’s for Vanessa. They’re her favorite, and these ones…” He shrugs.

“The Old Heritage and Ophelia blends,” my dad smiles. “That’s quite a rare old-growth flower.”

“Hank, the whole of the grounds will be of course under your care. But this greenhouse and those roses?” Ben smiles. “Well, think of them as a priority. I know they’ll be in good hands with you.”

“They’ll be in the best hands with my dad.”

Ben chuckles as my dad shoots me a quick look and ruffles my hair again.

“Once we get the salt filtration going, the sea air won’t be a problem.”

“Are we near the ocean?”

Here’s the fun thing about the Hamptons: you can drive for miles less than a thousand feet from the Atlantic Ocean and never see it, because it’s been walled off by manicured hedges, ivy-covered walls, and the sprawling, lavish mansions of the rich.

Dad laughs. “Yes, Ana, we talked about this.”

We’re still in the side yard of the house, surrounded by the gorgeous trees and hedges of the Crown Estate, but I’m looking around anyway like I’ve somehow missed an ocean.

“It’s just past those weeping willows, actually,” Ben Crown gestures with a smile. “If you’d like, and if it’s okay with your dad, you can go check it out. My son, Sebastian is down there now.”

* * *

“This is private property, you know.”

I blink, startled by the dark, piercing eyes of the boy standing with his hands on his hips, blocking my path. Beyond him, a wooden dock stretches past a sandy beach out into the grey-blue Atlantic Ocean.

“I- I know.”

I’m instantly thrown off by him. I’m instantly backpedaling and feeling like I need to apologize for something even if I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong.

“Who are you?” he says sharply.

“Now, Sebastian, let’s be sure that we mind our mann—”

He holds up a hand, silencing the young woman behind him who looks to be a nanny of some sort - the woman who does stop talking when the ten-year-old tells her to.

“You,” he points to me. “I asked you.”

“I’m Anastasia.”

He says nothing, his face flickering with that look that I’ll come to know, and fear, and hate, and love - the one that’s half a triumphant grin and half a defensive scowl at the same time.

“What are you doing here?”

“My dad’s going to work here. He’s going to make sure the trees and flowers and stuff grow.”

“The sun makes trees grow, not your dad.”

I scowl, eyeing the fierce-eyed, dark-haired boy. And I want to tell him to get lost or to stop being such a jerk, but I know this is important to my dad, and I know he always says that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

“You have a really nice house,” I venture instead.

“I know.”

I frown once more but brush it off once again.

“I thought it was a castle when we first—”

“It’s not.”

I bite my tongue, glaring at the mean little boy.

““Your dad’s going to work here?”

I nod.

“So you’re both going to live here?”

I nod again, slower.

“Well, the house is off limits to the help.”

“Now, Sebastian—”

He holds up his hand again, silencing his nanny once more without even turning towards her.

“So don’t try and come inside.”

“I don’t want to anyways,” I snap. “You’re right, this isn’t a castle at all.”

He smirks. “And what gave it away.”

“Because you are not a prince.”

* * *

It’s the smell of pie-crust, and whatever vaguely orange and lavender scented cleaner she’s been using to clean the Crown Mansion for thirty years now that envelopes me as Emily Tottingham pulls away from the bear-hug she’s just given me.

It’s the smell of a home forgotten.

We’re out in the main foyer of the house now, the doors to the study and that dark, shadowed hallway that leads towards wherever Bastian’s slunk back to thankfully shut.

“It’s so lovely to see you here again, dear.”

The drawn and rounded vowels of her English accent are like another hug - another reminder of memories from this place. And she means the words, even if there’s a tightness on her face that doesn’t quite convey the message as much as it might have years ago. I muster about as much of a convincing smile back as I can, her hands still on my arms after the hug.

I could lie like I did to Carl. I could say it’s “lovely to be back here, too,” or something equally as fake, but I don’t. I’ll save the lies for myself, for when I’m convincing myself I’m going to survive being here.

Lies like “it won’t be that bad,” or “he’s not that bad.” Because it will be that bad, and Bastian Crown is every bit as bad as he always was.

Actually, no, he’s not.

He’s worse.

“You’re upstairs, in the east wing,” Mrs. Tottingham goes for one of my bags, but I shake my head as I shoulder one and grab the handles of my rolling suitcase and guitar. She gives me a sharp look, and I immediately smile, genuinely this time.

“I can carry them, really.”

“And I’m not some frail little old biddy yet, you know,” she says with a sharply raised brow.

I grin, still not letting go of my bags, and she eyes me again before shaking her head in that tsking way she’s always done.

“How’s your father doing, dear?”

The grin fades as my eyes drop to the floor.

“He’s good. He’s still asleep, but they took him out of intensive care yesterday, and now they’re just keeping him in the burn unit to monitor some of the healing. I just wish—”

My voice breaks as I look away.

“Oh, deary,” Mrs. Tottingham pulls me into a big hug, stroking my back. “There, there.”

“I just wish I could talk to him,” I say quietly.

Due to the smoke damage to his throat and lungs, the doctors have him in an induced sleep. Not a coma, but a sort of medicated rest so he doesn’t strain anything.

Not being able to talk to him, or tell him I’m here, or that I love him is maybe worse than seeing him so weak like that, behind the clear plastic “clean room” barrier of the recovery room.

“Terrible,” Mrs. Tottingham’s brow knits as she sighs heavily and pulls away from me, shaking her head. “Just a terrible accident.”

There’s that word again: accident. In the rest of the civilized world, an “accident” on the job like my dad’s would mean understanding, and help, and probably some paperwork, not to mention financial compensation. The Crown Estate, however, is very much removed from the rest of the civilized world.

It wasn’t always, of course. When Bastian’s father hired my dad, having an accident like the one that happened earlier this week would have meant all those things - time off, sympathy, worker’s compensation, job security. But those days are long gone. In fact, I barely ever knew those days. These days, it’s Bastian’s world here at the house. Bastian who views his help as servants he unfortunately has to pay, and who views accidents like my dad’s as “willful negligence.”

It’s the fire - sorry, the “act of willful negligence” - that’s brought me back here. “Here” being Crown Manor, or hell, even back on Long Island at all, despite promising myself I’d never set foot here again. People pay an insane amount of money to come “out East” to visit the Hamptons for vacation - infinitely more to live here. It’s the playground for New York’s elite, with picturesque, charming, Martha-Stewart-esque towns with the shopping of Madison Avenue and the wealth of the Upper West Side.

South Neck, home to the Crown family estate, and the Bell family gardener’s cottage is the crown jewel of the whole thing, with an average home price hovering around $24 million. I haven’t been back here since the summer after high school when I moved to New York City. Not once. I might have, I guess, if my dad had ever pushed it. But he didn’t. That, and he was always more than happy to come to the city to visit me, instead of the opposite, which suited me just fine. After the way things ended so abruptly, the night when Bastian and I—

Well, like I said - I never once planned to come back here.

That was before the fire. That was before I got the three phone calls in a row from Carl while I sat in the waiting area of the Luminous Records talent office in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, to let me know my father was on his way to the hospital with third-degree burns and smoke inhalation.

They say it started with a clogged duct in the temperature and air filtration system of the greenhouse - the old glass and wrought iron structure that stood next to the gardener’s cottage I grew up in on the Crown Estate. The greenhouse which was home to the prized, award-winning rose garden that was Vanessa Crown’s favorite thing in the world, next to her only son.

Bastian.

He’s never been a forgiving person, but he seems to have taken the destruction as a personal affront to the memory of his late mother. Hence the charge of “willful negligence” and the threat of termination of my dad’s contract.

Fifteen years of service and that asshole decides an accident that could have killed my father was grounds for letting him go.

The second phone call I got that day as I frantically shoved my life into suitcases was from Bastian’s “estate manager,” Brent, who wanted to let me know that “in good faith of his service, Mr. Crown was prepared to continue my father’s contract, so long as someone was prepared to continue with the work.”

…It’s easy to daydream about telling the estate manager to please pass on a “go fuck yourself” to Bastian, until you take into account the state of my father’s and I’s finances. My dad with the enormous bills from the accident, and me with my college debt. Not to mention the small fortune in credit card advances I’ve wracked up recently to finance the demo record.

After that, a determination to never come back here and a promise to never once speak to or see Bastian Crown again sort of takes second shift to the necessities of life.

And so here I am.

“Your father says you’ve gotten quite good at that,” Mrs. Tottingham nods at the guitar case in my hand as we head down one of the long, brooding hallways of the huge old house.

She means it as a compliment, but she can’t know the knife it twists inside of me. To me at least, “quite good” means playing some open mic nights, or being able to pick up a popular song on cue when some drunk bar patron yells it out. And I’ve done all that. I’ve paid those dues across dozens of bars - first in New York and then LA, where I’ve been for the last year. No, I’ve moved past “quite good.”

Well, or at least I’ve told myself that. The demo album that’s not moving and the once-in-a-lifetime meeting with Luminous Records I walked out of might say otherwise.

“Thanks.”

It’s all that needs saying right now as I follow her through the enormous, cavernous gloom of the old house.

Mrs. Tottingham tsks again as we step through an enormous living room, scowling at the thick heavy curtains covering the wall of windows.

“He—” she scowls again. “I keep trying to tell him otherwise, but he keeps them shut a lot.” She says it almost apologetically, like a mother apologizing for her son throwing rocks at the neighbor’s cat.

And in a way, she is.

The day they buried Bennet and Vanessa, about two months after my dad and I moved here, Mrs. Tottingham did effectively become Bastian’s mother. Well, at least in the sense of being his caregiver. Sure, there was an uncle in London or something who was legally his guardian after that, and there were the lawyers and accountants to manage his affairs until he turned eighteen. But Emily Tottingham became the closest thing Bastian had to a parent after that day, at least in the sense of caring for him.

Beyond that though, Bastian became an orphan the day of the plane crash. Because after Bennet and Vanessa? Well, after that, there was no “raising” Sebastian Crown.

There was just damage control.

Mrs. Tottingham pauses in our walk to go over to the heavy drapes and yank them open, flooding the room with light. There are more sheets thrown over furniture in here, and though the place is impeccably clean, it’s still easy to see no one’s used this room in years.

“He’s—”

Her brow worries as she purses her lips and looks at the floor.

“He’s not himself these days, you see.”

I resist the urge to tell her that anything but “himself” would probably be an improvement for Bastian.

“It took a lot out of him,” she says sadly. “The crash I mean.”

Again, I resist the urge to open my mouth. I resist the urge to mention that it took a lot out of Dylan Forbes too, like his ability to be alive without machines.

I don’t, of course.

As much as I’ve done everything I can to distance myself from South Neck and the mountain of elitist bullshit, drama, and gossip that self-perpetuates here, I could’ve been on Mars and still heard about Bastian Crown driving off the road into the high-tide mark at Notting Point. I mean, the crown prince of the Hampton’s almost killing himself along with one of his friends on his birthday after a night of drugs and alcohol is news enough that it was on the front of tabloid newspapers in the grocery stores in LA.

Mrs. Tottingham shakes the shadow from her expression, her round face smiling as she turns back to me. “Well, let’s get you settled then dear, shall we? There’ll be supper on the table in a few hours.”

“You know what?” I make a face at the idea of sitting down to dinner with the pajama-clad bastard from my past. “I’ll just make myself something in the kitchen lat—”

“I’ll not be havin’ you scrounging through my kitchen like a field mouse, Anastasia.”

I laugh, a sound that feels off somehow in this house.

“Emily—”

“Ana.”

I sigh in defeat as her face pulls into a smile.

“Well, look, maybe I could get something and bring it to my room.”

“Oh, he won’t be coming down,” she says with a touch of sourness and wave of her hand. “He’ll ring later for something to be brought up, but believe me, it’ll be you, me, your dinner, my cup of tea, and you tellin’ me all about what you’ve been up to since you ran off from this old house.”

I’m too busy contemplating my move to stop her as she swoops down and snatches up one of my suitcases.

“Emily!”

She just cackles out a laugh as she drags my rolling suitcase down the long, empty hall.