Marriage Games (The Games Duet #1) Read online

  Marriage Games

  The Games Duet - Part One

  CD Reiss

  Flip City Media Inc.

  Contents

  Adam

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Diana

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Acknowledgments

  Also by CD Reiss

  © 2016 Flip City Media Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  eBook distribution with Flip City Media Inc.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from Flip City Media Inc., except short snippets for reviews. Pirates will walk the plank .

  I made all of this up.

  Brand names are written in to add flavor, not fact.

  Any similarities to persons living or dead are

  the result of coincidence or wish fulfillment.

  You take your pick.

  ISBN: 978-1-942833-30-7

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my sister and brother authors in the indie publishing world.

  For your sharing, your kindness, your ethical behavior in a chaotic industry that could be so much more brutal—I have one thing to tell you.

  Come closer.

  I’m going to whisper it in your ear.

  You’ve created something beautiful.

  Part I

  Adam

  Chapter 1

  PRESENT TENSE

  The morning my life changed was no different than any other. I woke. I showered. The tie I chose wasn’t much different than the other ties in the drawer, and the suit I put on wasn’t much bluer than my other blue suit. It wasn’t my favorite or my most hated. It fit the same as every suit I’d had made after I got married. Bigger in the shoulders. Smaller in the waist. Sleeves more generous at the bicep. She liked when I worked out, so I did.

  The morning everything changed, I felt the same as I always felt, more or less. I had plenty to do, but not too much. She was probably already in a meeting with our other editorial director. I was heading for a sheer drop into death at a hundred miles an hour while I looked up at the clouds.

  The morning my life changed, I started a grocery list for the housekeeper.

  The loft was bathed in light, trapezoids of sun cast over the hardwood. Twenty floors beneath me, the capillary of Crosby Street coursed the blood of steel and noise on its way to the artery of Lafayette.

  My life changed on a weekday, with the gurgling of the coffeepot behind me, my jacket slung over the barstool, and the milk souring on the counter.

  I put it away, because she never did.

  I had no sense of impending doom. No gut feeling that that day was different from any other. It’s unreasonable to expect I would. In an age of science and reason, why should I sense disaster before it arrived?

  Yet I didn’t see it coming.

  Her handwriting—flowery, curlicued, an expansive rendering of Catholic School standards—was at the bottom of a typewritten note. I poured my coffee, assuming it was a deal memo waiting for my signature to go next to hers.

  I was wrong.

  It was the first time I was wrong about her intentions, but not the last.

  Dear Adam:

  I don’t know how to say this.

  Chapter 2

  PAST PERFECT

  First times.

  The first time I saw her.

  I had the power. I held all the cards. The publishing empire her parents had built was crumbling with the entire industry. They had one willing buyer. Me. She walked into the conference room behind her father, John Barnes, who left his oxygen tank and his ego at the door.

  The space folded around her.

  The first time I saw her, I had to hold my breath.

  The first time she spoke, I exhaled.

  “Mr. Steinbeck,” she said, taking her place among the lawyers and executives. My name was uttered with more respect than I deserved. She was a child of literature. Saying Steinbeck with respect was a habit.

  “No relation,” I said. “I’ve never seen a farm.”

  “Obviously.”

  Her hair was straight, brown, to her shoulders, and her eyes were the color of broken safety glass.

  We sat. Opened our folders. Numbers got flung around. Her father’s breathing became more labored. Emphysema. Three-pack-a-day habit stopped too late. She kept looking at him, getting more and more agitated as the meeting went on.

  What would she do for him? If I pretended I didn’t see her father’s distress, would she jump in to help him? Would she make a hasty decision to get him out of the room?

  The first time I tested my future wife, she failed. Or passed, depending on how you look at it.

  “What you’re offering,” I said, “is a forty-nine percent stake in a company that no one else in the business believes will make money over the next five years. You’ve tapped out your credit, and you want R+D to come in, bail you out, and let you keep the keys to the kingdom.”

  “No one at R+D knows the publishing business and we have some ideas—”

  “No one at this table knows the publishing business. But only one of half this table knows business. And you’re not sitting on it.”

  I slid her a folder. It contained McNeill-Barnes’s profit projections for the following five years. It was ugly. Even the best-case scenario had them drowning.

  “You’re past a simple bankruptcy proceeding,” I said. “You’ve already cut too much staff to argue for the jobs you
’ll save. And as far as the chilling effect on American literature, no one gives a shit.”

  John Barnes’s breath caught and he wheezed. He wasn’t looking at the folder; he was looking at me.

  “What do you want?” he whispered.

  “The whole thing. No less. My buyout number’s on the bottom of the page.”

  The first time I shocked my future wife, she didn’t show it. Not much. But her lower lip went slack, and she blinked out of cadence. She closed the folder. “You’re after the building.”

  I leaned back. “It’s a nice piece of property.” My eyes fell to her breasts. I could detect the entire shape of them from the slight shadow at her collar. I wondered what they tasted like.

  “It’s a converted SoHo warehouse.”

  She was about to make a point, but her father wheezed again. She lost her train of thought. I felt sorry for her. She loved him. Her devotion moved me. More than the taste of her tits, I wanted a taste of that devotion.

  She tapped her pen and picked up her point. “This building? It’s a unicorn for developers. For this number, we could just sell it and keep the company.”

  “Not with the liens.”

  The first time I cornered my future wife, I thought I’d won a decisive battle in a war I assumed I understood. Five years later, with the syncopated blast of an ambulance twenty stories below our loft and a typewritten note on the kitchen counter, I realized I’d done neither.

  Chapter 3

  PRESENT TENSE

  Dear Adam:

  I don’t know how to say this. But I have to.

  I can’t be married to you anymore.

  The note was two pages long. I couldn’t read it. My coffee chilled in my hand.

  Every drop of blood in my body rushed to my face, leaving me with an empty hole in my chest and rigid, white fingers that tingled before going numb.

  I crumpled the note until it was a dense, tight sphere of betrayal, and I stuffed it in my pocket. I had to piss. Of all things. I had to walk to the bathroom, open the door, and take out my dick. Do all the things I had to do with this fucking cliff I was driving toward without brakes.

  I called her. No answer. Voice mailbox full. Called again. Same. I texted.

  —Where are you?—

  —We need to talk—

  No reply. I couldn’t stare at the phone any longer. She thought she was leaving me, and I still had to piss. I had no time to think, much less manage these absurd bodily functions.

  As I stood over the bowl, my thoughts ran out of me, rapping like a playing card in bicycle spokes, downhill faster and faster.

  It’s another man.

  I’ll kill him.

  Check everything.

  Lock out the banks.

  Tuesday after the Unicef Gala.

  Fucked her Tuesday.

  She came.

  Did she come?

  Definitely came.

  What did I do wrong?

  It’s me.

  What’s his name? I’ll kill—

  Apologize for nothing.

  Get access to her email.

  Where is she?

  Apologize for everything.

  She didn’t mean it.

  Do something.

  Do something.

  Do.

  Something.

  I slammed the toilet seat down. Fuck pissing. Fuck locking the door. Fuck this fucking walk down the fucking block. It was winter. I cut through the cold like a dull knife. McNeill-Barnes was down the block and I didn’t have the bandwidth to be cold. Fuck all the shit I had to do when I should be doing something.

  Chapter 4

  PAST PERFECT

  Diana. Diana McNeill-Barnes. What would I do to possess her? Would I change my cellular structure? Turn my back on my identity? Walk away from it, never talk about it, burn it so thoroughly into a pile of dust that not telling her wouldn’t be a lie?

  Would I make a bad business deal for her happiness?

  “I’m going to do it,” I said.

  Charlie and I were at the Loft House—a hip little private club with original art everywhere and a membership waiting list as long as my leg. The top-floor restaurant overlooked the city on four sides. We were on the southern tip, where we could see the point of Manhattan jut into the ocean.

  “Break her?”

  “I’m going to marry her.”

  He shook his head, tapping his aboriginal cane. He was a war veteran in his late forties. If you knew history and heard his accent, you might be curious enough to ask him what was the last war Australia fought. He’d tell you “the ones that are bought and paid for,” then he’d ask if you wanted to see his war wounds.

  Best to decline.

  Charlie had been the first to hear about her eleven months before. The first to question my instincts.

  “How is it possible she’s vanilla?” he’d asked the day after I took her to bed the first time. We were taking a spin around Central Park’s six-mile loop, the rattle and tick of our derailleurs punctuating heavy breaths. He was slow because of his leg. “You can’t do vanilla. It’s not natural.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s like cats and dogs sleeping together. She must be a sub. She might not know it, but she has to be.”

  “I found her ex-fiancé in some douche Wall Street bar. I got him drunk and asked him a few pointed questions.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “‘Oh, hey stranger at the bar…I was just dumped boo hoo were you ever dumped? Oh, really the bitch. My girl wanted yadda yadda in bed etc. etc. did you ever tie her up whatever whatever.’ He says, ‘She didn’t even let me pull her hair when I dogged her.’ Done. Confirmed. Took seventy-four minutes.”

  “All that proves is she’s attracted to a closet Dominant, even if the wanker didn’t know what he was doing. Did you ask her? Directly? Instead of dancing around the subject?”

  “She had a girlfriend in college. Couple of months of light bondage, but she wouldn’t let the boyfriend do anything.”

  He pushed himself off his handlebars to sit straight, arms out. “And you gave up Serena for this?”

  This? For Diana. Serena was a child, and our prescribed time had ended already. Once I’d broken her on the last day, I was done with her. Diana was a woman, and she was eternal. I loved her. I’d spent a single night with her and hours over a negotiating table battling her and I loved her.

  Between the bike ride in Central Park and sitting with Charlie in the club, drinking whiskey and telling him I was going to marry her, almost a year had passed. Diana was the sky and all the stars in it.

  “You’re never going to be right with yourself, mate,” Charlie said, leaning back into the point of Lower Manhattan.

  “That’s bullshit we tell ourselves,” I said. “It’s justification. I don’t need justification, and I don’t need the lifestyle to have a life.”

  “Keep paying dues at the Cellar,” he said before sipping his drink.

  “No need.”

  “I’ll pay them for you. Day will come when you can’t deal with power sharing another night.”

  “I can function just fine.”

  He smiled. The parentheses around his mouth got darker when he didn’t shave for a few days. “Function? My friend, I never questioned your manhood.”

  “Good idea.” I swirled my whiskey around the bottom of my glass. “I could break her, sure.”

  The thought of it swirled my insides with the drink. It was too good. The idea of her on her knees with her hands behind her back. My balls went into a knot.

  I shut out the thought. I loved her. Wanted to love her. Needed to love her, and the second she kneeled, she’d be nothing to me.

  I put the drink down. “It wouldn’t feel right. She’s not built for submission.”

  “You can’t just decide to be vanilla the rest of your life. It’s not a choice.”

  “It’s all a choice. And I choose her.”

  He brought his drink to his
lips. “She must be quite a piece of ass.”

  Chapter 5

  PRESENT TENSE

  I can’t be married to you anymore. You’re a good man. You’re good to me and my family. I can never repay you for how you helped us. But I’ve started to feel obligated¸ and I think the obligation and gratitude has clouded my judgment.

  We’d started repairing the damage to McNeill-Barnes Publishing by renting out pieces of the building on short leases and putting the staff to work in the smallest amount of space they could manage. Five years later, we’d reclaimed two floors.

  I walked through the penthouse with a sucking pain in my gut and a heart wrapped in wire. We’d built this together. Her father had stepped out of the day-to-day and onto the board, while she and I reshaped the business.

  “Mr. Steinbeck.” Diana’s admin, Kayti, ran behind me. A single mom with a nose ring and a sweet smile, she kept my wife organized. “I have a message from—”

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?” Kayti chased me.

  “My wife.” I didn’t stop walking toward her office. I could see the shadow of a figure between the frosted glass doors and the windows.

  “She left a message…”

  I opened the door.

  “Steinbeck!”

  The figure was Zack Abramson, the executive editor. Nonfiction. The stuff that had put us back on the map. He snapped a book closed and put it on the Mission-style coffee table.

  Diana liked warm things. Warm colors. Warm lighting. Warm sex.

  “She’s not coming in,” Kayti finished.

  Zack was a smug little prick who should have stayed in the acting business. He was sly and untrustworthy. He had a way of looking at people as if he had secret knowledge about them, which he didn’t. But he was a formidable editing talent, and despite all that and more, I kind of liked the asshole.

  “Did she say why?” I asked Kayti.