Crave (His Second Chance with Heiress Bryn Christmas Duet #1) - Z.L. Arkadie Page 0,4

I couldn’t shake the belief that I was too damaged to enter a partnership that was built to last a lifetime.

But maybe I wasn’t too damaged. Maybe I just didn’t know how to go about the business of meeting and mating forever and ever. Regardless, the redesign of our childhood home was a hit with my family. A house that carried the energy of a castle torture chamber and imprisoned the meanest, dirtiest, angriest ghosts had been torn down. The historical society wanted off with my head for demolishing the structure without their permission. The old white stone Christmas mansion had been built during the Gilded Age, and many sightseeing tour buses would pause outside the iron gates to get a look at it while listening to an account of our family’s lineage that started out palatable but ended with the guide mentioning my sister-in-law Holly’s book, The Dark Christmases. Fortunately, Jasper got the history police off my back. I respected historical relics, but not in the case of our personal hell on earth that was the mansion we’d grown up in. I never asked what Jasper had done to make my problems go away, and frankly, I didn’t care.

I hired Rina Ito, an architect who married East Asian and Scandinavian contemporary styles, to redesign our home. The new mansion had three levels, each separated by hip and gable roofs like Shinto shrines. The new home felt light and open, a stark difference from the bulky old colonial structure.

It took four months for the frame, walls, windows, and flooring to be erected. The builders worked long hours to get it done. The final seven months were spent on the interior. My goal was to make sure those who entered couldn’t experience a stitch of what it used to feel like to walk inside the Christmas manor. For inspiration, I took a trip with Rina and her friend Yana to Greyson Highland State Park in Virginia. Rina had suggested the excursion. As we strode along the pathways through meadows and emerald forests, we spoke very little. I remembered everything I could about each of my brothers—who they’d been when we were younger and the men they’d become after Randolph passed.

Truthfully, none of us had liked who we were when Randolph was alive. We were like lab rats, always racing in multiple directions with nowhere to go and always part of a furtive lab experiment. What happened when the rats were set free? They scattered, and that was exactly what we’d done. When we came back together again, we were all different. We had evolved.

When designing the interior, my goal was to convey our transformations. We used to be bloodred, black soot, and shadowy gray. With Randolph out of the picture, we’d become precious metal for strength, softened by fire and molded into fine human beings.

So I hired Mendes Lee, an LA-based artist famous for her metalwork. Mendes flew up to Newport and stayed with me in the guesthouse for two months. Together, we moved from the bottom to the top floors, crafting with our theme in mind. Thoughtful design went into the tiniest details—knobs, handles, lightbulbs, types of glass and wood. We even considered the light flowing in from the sun, moon, and stars when selecting window frames, paint, wall art, and other design features. In the end, we had an ultramodern and stylish yet comfortable place to live. Gone were the depravities of the past, all replaced by hope for the future.

Mendes was so proud of the scope of what we’d been able to accomplish that she contacted two of the most popular art-and-design publications in the world. After Mendes had hosted house tours with several journalists, the story “The Monstrous Mansion Reformed” caught on like wildfire.

Mendes never failed to give me most of the credit for the majority of the interior design concepts. “Bryn Christmas was very detail oriented,” she would say. “Bryn was thoughtful about how art merged with use in every part of the house, from the windows down to the bathroom medicine cabinets.”

I hadn’t realized I’d been so immersed in the project until she mentioned it. What I liked most about the renovation was the idea of destroying the old and ushering in the new.

Then, one day, Mendes called and asked if she could hire me to help with the design of her London flat. The theme would be Standing firm against the raging wind. I already knew a lot about Mendes from the days we