“It’s true, I want to get home, and we will. Soon.” I felt Edward’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t look at him without giving myself away, and I wasn’t quite ready for that. “There’s some other things we’re tying up here first, and neither of us want to miss out on the fun surrounding a wedding. Please let me plan something. It would be my honor.”
Another quarter of an hour later, with permission granted to throw a dinner party in their honor, the couple made their goodbyes. I slipped away to check on Cleo in the adjoining suite, then, finding her still asleep, I returned to the living room where Edward was settled on the couch, his legs crossed and his arm draped across the back of the sofa, waiting for me. “Would you come sit with me, bird?”
A sharp ache pierced between my ribs, a longing for the order rather than the request. The dominance had even been toned down in our sex after we’d come to our truce. I’d hoped it might spice up again after Cleo, but the handful of occasions we’d found time and energy to make love since her birth we’d done exactly that—made love. I wasn’t complaining, I really wasn’t. I enjoyed what we had, and if we kept the status quo for the rest of our lives, I would die a happy woman.
Still, I knew we could be more. That we were more. That the absence of his command was really an absence of my submission. I’d walled off a part of me from him and so he’d walled off a part of himself from me. Intentional or not, I wasn’t sure, though I suspected it was the latter. Maybe he noticed it too, but I doubted he’d done it purposefully. And now that this was how we were with each other, perhaps he was as uncertain as I was how to return to what we’d been.
“If you’d rather not…” he said when I hadn’t moved or responded.
I shook my head from my thoughts. “No, I want to. Sorry. I guess the champagne gave me a little bit of a buzz.” I sat next to him on the sofa, curling my feet up underneath me as I burrowed into his side.
“Are you too buzzed for a serious discussion?”
“Nope. Just buzzed enough to feel good. Are you going to kill it?”
“I don’t plan on it.” He drew me tighter to him, stroking his fingers down my arm. “I’m only wondering why you want to delay going back to London. Have you changed your mind about living there?”
“I haven’t. I’m dying to take Cleo home and settle in where there’s more space. Even with the additional suite, this place is rather small and stifling.”
He was silent a beat, and I sensed he was trying to figure me out. I liked his curiosity enough to not rush to giving him answers. It was rare that I had an upper hand with him, and I wanted to relish it a little longer before laying down my cards.
“I hope you didn’t offer to throw the engagement party on my account,” he said after a time. “I’m very appreciative, but it wasn’t necessary.”
I sat up so I could look at him. “Yes, it was for you, you silly. And for her. I’m not that close to Genevieve, but I do love her and want to be part of her life.”
“I love that about you.”
His declaration gave me the confidence to reveal more. “But also it was for me. It will give me something to do besides be cooped up in here all the time while we go after Werner.”
The air turned electric. I could feel the charge emanating off his body as he studied me. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, I think it should stay in the family.”
“And you have a plan for that? I doubt you would bring this up if you didn’t.”
It wasn’t quite a plan that I had, but rather a desire. A desire to give my husband what he needed. A desire to lay my heart at his feet. A desire to show him that I was a strong woman, but not so strong that I couldn’t also be sometimes mastered.
Just, how to turn that desire into action?
I turned my body so I was facing him completely. “I’ve been so stuck on making sure you didn’t go head-to-head with Hudson, and I still feel that’s the right choice, but I was too preoccupied to realize there are other ways to get what it is you’re after. Not the CEO position—even if we could manage that, this isn’t the time. Cleo needs a father who isn’t working all the time, and that would definitely keep us in the States, which is not where I want to be in the long run.
“But majority shares—or at least equal shares with Hudson. That could be doable.”
His eyes narrowed, considering. “You think Hudson might be amenable to selling us one percent now that Genevieve is marrying his brother?”
“Possibly. I think it’s worth trying. But if he won’t, there could be another way.” I ran my teeth across my bottom lip. “I want to help you find a way.”
“Go on.” I could practically hear his pulse tick up.
My own heart was racing. “Hudson owns forty-two percent. We own forty percent. There are still those other eighteen percent shares.”
It wasn’t news to him how the shares had been distributed. Werner Media was still privately-owned—family-owned for the most part. The company had been started years ago by my grandfather and his brother, Chester. When Uncle Chester had died, his fifty percent had been distributed among his children, just as Grandpa Werner’s shares had been passed to my father and Uncle Ron, but no one had had the ambition to run the company like my father had. So little by little, he’d bought family members out of most of their shares. A few relatives had since sold their remaining shares to outside parties who were unwilling to sell again, but there were four cousins that still owned two percent each.
Edward guessed where I was going and shook his head. “I’ve already approached the other shareholders. They’ve all said no to selling.”
“You approached them when you were still an enemy of my father. Now you’re part of an alliance with him. You’ll have been validated in their eyes. Also, since the values of those shares have dropped recently with Ron’s trial, some may be more interested in bailing now.”
“Possibly.” He wasn’t convinced, but I hadn’t expected he would be.
The real benefit of my involvement came with what I offered next. “If none of the outsiders are interested, I could talk to my cousins. None of us are particularly close, but I’m pretty sure I have some sway with two or three of them, especially if I leveraged some family secrets here and there. Buying out any one of them would make us equal with Hudson. Buying one percent off two of them would do the trick too.”
His eyes sparked with something I hadn’t seen in months. “Buying them all out would put us ahead of Hudson.”
For half a second, I worried I’d made a mistake bringing this up. I didn’t want to hold him back, but his ambition scared me at times. It was too monstrous. Too much a life of its own.
Instead of pulling back, though, as I would have done in the past, I gave him the chance to step up to the common ground as I had. “I don’t think we need to be greedy. He still has power in unexpected ways. I’d prefer to strive for equality. For now.”
Again he considered. Seconds passed, long and thick, until he reached his hand up to caress my cheek. “This isn’t for you. This is for me, isn’t it? You’d really help me go after those shares?”