Beautiful Beast by Aubrey Irons (4)

The blackened, shattered iron framing of the greenhouse claws up at the sky, exposed like ribs of some sort of prehistoric dinosaur. There’s a sinking feeling as I gingerly step around it, glass crackling under my heels and the smell of smoke still lingering in the air.

My face twists as I turn, seeing the damage to the gardener’s cottage I spent most of my formative years in. Bastian wasn’t kidding - it’s a wreck. The cottage basically comes up against the side of the greenhouse, so with a fire that was big enough to destroy that structure, the damage to the cottage was extensive. The whole wall on the side closest to the greenhouse is a pile of blackened rubble, yellow caution tape crisscrossing the exposed rooms inside like a crime scene.

I grew up here. As much as I hated this place, this cottage was home for the eight years I lived here in South Neck. And as much as I never wanted to even come back here, there’s something that cuts deep seeing your old bedroom like a cutaway dollhouse, exposed to the elements like this.

More glass snaps under my feet as I make my way around to the front, only to see the caution sign from the Fire Marshal about structural damage taped across the front door.

Part of me wonders just how long Bastian considered making me stay in here rather than the main house, just because that’s who he is.

I run my hand across the doorframe, even if I don’t go in. My fingers come away black with soot, and I quickly look away. The truth that my dad could have died here a week ago hits me like a slap. He almost did, actually, which is why he’s in the burn unit over at Holy Cross Hospital.

Me being here to work in place of my father is ridiculous, and I know Bastian knows that. You could find a hundred other gardeners and landscape architects without even leaving the Hamptons. And none of them might be as good as Hank Bell, but I can promise you that every single one of them is better than me. Yes, I’ve been around gardens and plants for my entire life, and yes, I know more about taking care of growing green things than the average Joe-everyone. But gardening was never my thing. Plants never gripped me the way they did my dad.

Music did, though.

It’s funny how randomly we take after our parents. On the one hand, there’s the father who raised me alone from the age of four when my mom died. The guy whose day-in and day-out all about plants, and soil composition, and watering and pollination cycles, and nitrate filtration systems, and I go ahead and take up music, like the mother I barely knew.

Genetics are fucking weird.

That said, my Texan father’s love affair with all things Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Hank Williams certainly didn’t hurt.

I head back to the main house as the sky starts to turn shades of orange and purple, suddenly very ready for that dinner.

Crown Manor has been in Bastian’s family for four generations, back to his great-grandfather. Enoch Crown built his fortune in plastics as it was coming up as a new technology, a product he sold to his friends - friends like the Carnegies, or the Rockerfellers, or the Fords. And knowing the right friends made Enoch wealthy beyond belief.

Clayton Crown, Bastian’s grandfather, expanded the plastics business, reaching out to his new friends at the Coca-Cola company for their new packaging ideas of soft, non-glass bottles. Eventually, he sold Crown Plastics to a conglomerate of foreign investors and cashed out.

Bennett, Bastian’s father, was in finance, using the connections his family had forged through the years to dominate his way through board rooms and corporate mergers and takeovers.

And then, there’s Bastian. And if ever there was a poster child for “trust fund kid,” it’s him. While some kids prepare for college in high school or think about the jobs they’ll train for - even the ultra-wealthy of South Neck - Bastian’s trajectory was slightly different. No, the bastard devil-prince of the Hamptons spent his formative years on three things: girls, partying, and being the biggest dickhead he could possibly be. After all, what motivation would a kid like that have to do anything in this world besides spending the ludicrous amount of money sitting in an account with his name on it? Trust fund kids of Bastian’s caliber have zero need or drive to contribute or add anything to this world, and as far as I know, Bastian never has.

When Ben and Vanessa were still here, the Crown house was always sparkling like a jewel by sundown. Warm light from the downstairs windows, garden lights out by the hedges, the stained-glass window in the old ballroom shining in blues and reds and greens and oranges. Once it was just Bastian in that place, the house grew darker, though Carl and Mrs. Tottingham did their best to keep it lit.

Now, it’s like the battle of the electric bill has been won, by Bastian. No garden lights to light the way to the back door. No cheery glow from the dark living room. No music on the speakers - Billie Holiday if it was Vanessa picking it, Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones if Ben. This place used to be a home.

Now, it’s just a big, stony, dark, silent house.

I pause at the kitchen door, my hand hovering over the knob. Again, in eight years of living on the Crown Estate, today marks the third time ever that I’ve been inside the main house itself. The day I arrived, the day I left, and today, the day I came back. Somehow, stepping in a fourth time now still feels like I’m breaking ten-year-old Bastian’s decree that I never step foot inside “his” house.

I roll my eyes. It’s a silly thought - not just because I’m going to be housed in the manor while I work here now, but because here I am still adhering to the egotistical, snide little demands of a petulant ten-year-old.

I shove the doubt away as I close my fingers over the brass, twist, and step inside.

Mrs. Tottingham welcomes me into the kitchen but quickly scurries me out to the main dining room with a piece of bruschetta in my hand to nibble on. She waltzes out a minute later with a tray of food in her hands and a big smile on her face as she bustles over to the table.

“Not there,” she scolds, shooing me out of the seat along the side of the enormous, twenty-person formal dining room table and making me take the chair at the head.

“Now then,” she says primly, taking a seat next to me and nodding at the mouth-watering scallops over linguini with tarragon cream she’s just placed in front of me. “Tell me everything.”

I grin. “Everything?”

“Anastasia Bell, I spend my time in a big old house with a very stuffy butler and a sulking man who barely leaves his room. I am withering for some girl-talk.”

I laugh through a bite of pasta as she winks at me.

“Any gentlemen? Someone special you can sing for these days?”

I blush, looking down into my food and shaking my head. “No, I—”

It’s the sharp click of his cane against the wooden floor that has us both whirling towards the doorway.

“Mr. Crown!” Mrs. Tottingham is out of her seat like a whirlwind, pushing the chair back in and smoothing her apron. “I’ve prepared a lovely pasta with a tarragon cream—”

“What the fuck is she doing in here?”

Bastian’s dark eyes are locked right on me, but there’s a wavering bleariness to that gaze. It’s not the sharp, blazing looks I remember from growing up here. It’s not even the frosty cold one I got earlier in the study. There’s something too trying about it, like he’s forcing himself to focus. He’s still dressed in his pajama pants and a t-shirt, barefoot and bedraggled looking - his hair flopped to one side, his dark eyes piercing.

He takes a staggered, shuffled step into the dining room, his weight heavy on the cane as it drags across the floor.

“Mr. Crown, sir, I thought it might be nice for Ms. Bell to—”

“To sit at my table and pretend she’s a guest here instead of my employee?”

It’s the slurred words that give it away. That’s when I realize Bastian Crown is very drunk. I think it’s also when Mrs. Tottingham realizes it too, as I watch the look on her face creep from worry about his temper to worry about him.

“Sir, why don’t you take a seat and I’ll fix you a plate, hmm?”

She goes to help him to the table, but he waves her off, shuffling forward by himself.

I start to stand. “Look, I can just take this to my room if it’s a big—”

“Sit, stay,” he growls, moving to the far side of the table and taking a place at the head of the table opposite me. He drops heavily into the chair, his brow furrowed as he scans the empty tabletop.

“I’ll take a bourbon along with that plate, Mrs. Tottingham,” he mutters vaguely toward her.

“Seriously?”

His gaze whips around to me. “Excuse me?”

“I said seriously. You’re dru—”

“I’ll just get you that drink first, shall I?” Mrs. Tottingham quickly interjects, shooting me a look before she turns and heads through the kitchen door.

“Atta girl.”

My jaw drops a little at the crass way he addresses the woman who raised him as I scowl across the table. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Apart from still waiting for that drink,” he says loudly toward the kitchen door, before turning back to me. “Apart from that, nothing, Texas. Everything is fucking peachy.”

“There’s no reason to be an asshole.”

There’s the billow of dark storm clouds across his face as I watch the muscles in his neck tighten.

“Trust me when I say there are plenty of reasons to be an asshole.”

“You’re the expert.”

He snorts, the corners of his mouth curling slightly in an icy smile as he glares me down from across the huge table.

“Well, I’d hate to have disappointed you by changing, Texas.”

“Trust me that you haven’t.”

“And here I was so worried about impressing you.”

He smiles thinly, and we sit in silence until the kitchen door opens. Mrs. Tottingham steps quickly to the table, placing a glass tumbler of whiskey in front of the brooding Bastian before scurrying back to the kitchen.

“Your food’s getting cold.”

“I’ve lost my appetite.”

He smirks. “Please don’t think that a hunger strike is going to make me feel bad. Ever heard the expression cutting off your nose to spite your face?”

“Ever heard of a designated driver?”

His face hardens as a shadow crosses his eyes.

“Watch it,” he growls. “Don’t make the mistake of blaming me and being back here for your own shortcomings in life.”

“And don’t blame the rest of the world for you getting drunk and driving your car through a guardrail.”

The very air of the room seems to chill in the sudden frozen silence as Bastian’s eyes narrow.

“Get the fuck out of my dining room,” he says quietly.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you fucking deaf!?”

I flinch as he stands suddenly, his voice booming across the table.

“Get. Out.”

I blink, staring at him.

“I don’t want the help at my table. Out. Now.”

I stare at him in scowling disbelief a moment longer before I shake my head and stand. I shove the chair in, glaring at him before I turn to storm from the room.

“Oh, Texas?”

I pause at the door, knowing I should just keep walking. But I turn, shivering under the blaze of his heated look.

“Remember what I said. In here?” He smiles wickedly. “I own you. No, stop,” he shakes his head as I start to retort. “Resist your constant need to open that mouth. Resist that constant need to resist.”

“Fuck you.”

“Gonna have to ask nicer than that, sweetheart.”

He brings the glass to his lips, his eyes never leaving mine as he knocks the drink back and sets the glass back on the table in front of him. The corners of his lips curl slightly - that all too familiar half triumphant, half grimly unamused smile.

“And we both remember how much nicer you can ask, now don’t we.”

We lock eyes one frozen, jagged, broken second, before I whirl, wordlessly, and storm from the room.