Iron Born (Iron Palace Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright © 2016 Lisa Ferrari.

  Contact

  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

  Epilogue

  To Be Continued….

  IRON BORN

  Book 1

  of

  the Iron Palace Series

  Lisa Ferrari

  Copyright © 2016 Lisa Ferrari.

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contact

  Lisa Ferrari

  [email protected]

  http://lisaferrariromance.wixsite.com/books

  Chapter 1

  AND HERE I am again. Lord. I swipe my employee ID card through the time clock. I’m the last one here for the shift, too.

  I quickly scan the contract for today’s event: the DeBacker/Johnson wedding for 150; served (ie no buffet); buffet apps (the kitchen handles that), house rolls, house salad, salmon, garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, wedding cake, iced tea & water, coffee, house champagne.

  Yay.

  In the ballroom, everyone is already setting tables. I grab a rack of clean water glasses and start setting them.

  My boss, Nancy, comes over. “Hi, Claire. You’re late. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Just tired.” I try to offer a reassuring grin.

  “Low blood sugar again? I baked chocolate-chip cookies last night. They’re in the back. Help yourself.”

  Nancy smiles and power-walks in her heels across the dance floor toward her office. She’s a nice lady. She used to be almost 300 pounds. But then she got gastric bypass and lost 160. Now she does triathlons and has a hunky African American firefighter boyfriend hosing her down every other night. Her insurance even paid for the surgery. I think about it a lot. Surgery like that. Losing 160 pounds. Half your body weight. How great life must be when you’re thin and fit.

  We move on to the champagne flutes. Rack after rack. Half of them still have lipstick around the rim and we can’t set them, so we have to go hunting for more racks of clean glasses. For some reason, there are never enough.

  We move on to the bread-and-butter plates, aka the b-and-b’s. Then we place the napkins in the center where the dinner plate will go once dinner is served in about three hours. Thank God it’s a simple tent fold today and not birds of paradise, which have to be created one linen napkin at a time and then placed deftly into the champagne flute. Tonight’s napkins are silver. The bride went with silver and white for her colors. Classy. Timeless. Last night was purple and gold because they were Lakers fans. Even though L.A. is six hours south of here. To each her own.

  I don’t hate my job exactly, but it’s definitely just a job. A way to pay the bills until my book sales take off.

  If they ever do.

  Such is the life of a self-published author. My mom is always going on and on about me taking the Banquet Captain job. Nancy has hinted at it, too. (That would be tantamount to admitting that this is what I do.) My dad keeps saying I should go apply at the Verizon store because I need a career. (Because I can text really fast?)

  I have a career. I’m a writer.

  I have a degree in English Literature. And the student loans to prove it.

  I’ve written 13 novels.

  But they seem to be lost in the morass that self-publishing has become. Low sales equals no money. No money equals working here. (Temporarily!)

  Hence the consummate disapproval.

  We tray up the salads, all 150 of them.

  We ice the champagne.

  We baste, cook, and basket the rolls. (I nibble on two of them. And three of Nancy’s cookies; they’re amazing; no wonder she was 300 pounds.)

  Then we make 30 pitchers of water and 30 pitchers of iced tea, two of each per table. Once they’re set, we’re a few minutes from the arrival time so we grab our lighters and light all the candles in the centerpieces.

  It’s a small wedding this evening on the patio just outside the ballroom, overlooking the beautiful vast greenery of the golf course.

  I’ve worked at least 200 weddings in the past four years. Big weddings, small weddings, intimate and classy weddings, and rowdy and trashy weddings where someone pukes in the bathroom and we find lacy fluorescent-pink panties under one of the tables, along with empty bottles of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels somebody smuggled in. (Wally, the rather elderly security guard, told everyone he scooped up the panties with a dinner knife and threw them in the garbage. But I saw him put them in his pocket. At first I thought it creepy. But he lives alone and is a lonely, talkative man. He’s probably never seen underwear like that.)

  With the ballroom and tables ready, we head into the employee break room and take five to get a drink and put on our vests and bowties. I hate wearing the vest. My cheap black Walmart pants from China are heavy and hot. It doesn’t help that I had to buy them in the men’s section.

  I shove another of Nancy’s cookies in my mouth and feed my bowtie through the little hoop on the back of the tuxedo shirt collar. I hate wearing the tuxedo shirt, too. Long sleeves. Plated on the front. Hot. The neck is too tight and it chokes me, despite the little plastic button extender thing I bought at the tuxedo rental place. Lately, it seems like the collar is getting tighter.

  Someday, I want to burn the tuxedo shirt and bowtie.

  All trussed up, we head out into the ballroom to welcome the guests. There’s no butler passing of hors d’oeuvres this evening. Thank God. (The bacon-wrapped gouda-dipped fried shrimp are a house specialty I always pig out on, though.)

  I man the ballroom entrance and say hello to the guests and take their gifts. Gifts go on a 12-foot table near the cake. Tonight’s cake is four tiers. Silver marzipan with red roses. Pretty but big. Way too big for 150 people. They’ll probably take the top two layers home (although a lot of couples don’t, which always seems weird and kinda sad to me). I hope the baker left the box. Last night, the baker forgot, and the guys had to make one out of an empty champagne case and Scotch tape. So professional.

  Eventually, all the guests are outside, seated on their little white folding chairs, with the long white runner between them. We man the doors as the wedding party prepares to make its entrance.

  Nancy reminds them not to lock their knees during the ceremony so they don’t lose blood pressure and faint.

  She reminds them not to chew gum. All four of the guys and three of the ladies spit their gum into the napkin Nancy has ready.

  The music begins, everyone stands, we open the doors, and the wedding party makes its way down the aisle in pairs.

  The groom does cool-bro handshakes and fist-bumps with the groomsmen as they join him one by one under the pretty white trellis decorated with big red roses.

  Finally the bride walks through the doors.

  Everyone is standing and smiling.

  Nancy gives her train a final fluff so it trails behind her perfectly as she makes her way down the aisle toward her smiling groom.

  The photographers are running around, kneeling, desperate to capture the special day without getting in the way of it.
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  We close the doors and make small-talk about what we watched on TV last night and how many events are coming up this week and if there will be panties under the table again tonight.

  Outside, two people are getting married, entering the bonds of holy matrimony before their families and friends.

  Inside, we’re not even paying attention.

  Seen one, seen ’em all.

  After the ceremony, everyone comes into the ballroom, hits the open bar, and destroys the appetizer buffet: cheese, fruit, crackers. Light stuff, so as not to spoil their dinner, which tonight is salmon. And only salmon. That’s good. No options. Easy to serve because everyone gets the same dinner.

  An hour later, the bride and groom have been introduced and are seated at their sweethearts table at the head of the room, in plain view of the other guests.

  We serve them first.

  I then carry the big black oval trays laden with ten salads each. By the time we finish serving salads, people are finishing their salad so we go back to where we started and clear the empty salad plates.

  We then move on to the dinners, the real work. Each plate has a plastic cover, so they can stack atop one another. Each loaded tray weighs about 25 pounds, and I’m the only one strong enough to carry them.

  Me.

  A girl.

  The two guys on the staff are Terry, who is sweet but very gay and very dainty. His job is to dote on the bride and groom at the sweethearts table. He keeps their champagne glasses topped off. He’s good at his job and the brides always love him. The other guy, Rex, is an older guy with a bad shoulder who just does this for, as he says, shits and gigs. He can’t, or won’t, carry trays but he always has a back-handed compliment for me when he sees me do it. Way to go, muscles! Nice job, girlfriend!

  Whatever.

  The other three members of our wait staff (all girls), Elisha, Tammy, and Renita, aren’t strong enough.

  So it’s my job. I also get to carry the wedding cake every night. After the bride and groom feed one another, they take to the dance floor for their first dance. While everyone is focused on them, I very carefully wedge my fingertips under the base of the cake, lift it, and carry it out the side door, down the hall, through the restaurant, through the kitchen, and into the break room where it’s cut and plated and trayed up. 200 weddings in the past four years. 200 wedding cakes. I’ve never dropped one. Yet.

  ONCE EVERYONE HAS eaten, we clear the dinner plates. They get loaded onto an oval tray perched innocuously atop a jack stand on one side of the room. When the oval is full, I, again, am the one who hefts it up onto my shoulder to carry it into the kitchen to the dishwasher. Again, I’ve never dropped one.

  Mercifully, dancing begins and the staff retreats to the break room for our dinner break.

  As always, I’m famished. These stupid black pants and the dumb tuxedo shirt and stupid bowtie are hot and I’m always sweaty and thirsty and starving by the time we eat dinner. I eat two meals: salmon, mashed potatoes, green beans. And three dinner rolls with butter. And two pieces of wedding cake. It has strawberry and bananas in between. Gross. But I eat two pieces anyway. Plus three more of Nancy’s cookies. They’re so good. It truly is no wonder she got up to 300 pounds.

  BY THE TIME our shift ends, we’re stuffing the last of the silver napkins into the green mesh linen bags. The bags always smell kinda gross, like bleach and rotting garbage. We toss them in the bin out back where the nice guy, Jessy, from the linen service will pick them up. We sweep the floor in our break room, take out the garbage, put away our folding table and chairs, clock out, and parade through the back door to our cars.

  As I’m heading out the door, Chris stops me. He’s a cook in the kitchen. They always seem to work different hours than we do. “Hey, Claire.”

  “Hey, Chris.”

  “You guys off?”

  “Yeah.

  “You heading home?”

  “I don’t know.” My gym clothes have been in the back seat of my car for a month. I should probably go work out. At least do some treadmill for 30 minutes.

  “Want to come over?” Chris asks.

  Chris and I went out a few times but I didn’t really feel anything for him. He’s a nice guy, but I pulled back before anything physical happened. He’s been gently pursuing me ever since, the better part of two years, ever since he got hired as sous chef.

  “I think I’m going to go to the gym.”

  “Cool. Okay, well, I’ve got to finish cleaning up. See ya.”

  Chris turns and walks across the greasy green kitchen floor and into the walk-in. I head to my car.

  On the drive home, I’m torn. I really do not want to go work out. I want to go home and watch Game of Thrones.

  But I have time.

  And I should go. It’s been at least a month. And I am paying for it every month.

  Resigned but also a tiny bit proud of myself for my decision, I turn into the gym parking lot.

  And the parking lot is packed.

  Holy crap.

  Like, really packed. On a Sunday evening?

  I have to park way, way, way over by the weird yellow Mexican restaurant that’s always empty. I grab my gym bag out of the back seat and wiggle around in the driver’s seat, changing out of my Walmart work pants and tuxedo shirt and into my grey sweat pants and tee shirt. I hate changing in the locker room. There always seem to be girls like Denise in some stage of undress. Denise is my best friend. We were roommates in college and somehow remained friends. She’s tall, blond, beautiful, thin, and is a very successful lawyer.

  So I change in the car.

  I hoof it across the parking lot to the gym.

  While I’m walking, my phone pings. It’s a text from Denise. She went to law school. I didn’t. She makes lots of money now and has a fabulous career. I don’t.

  What’s up???

  She always goes overboard with her punctuation. I don’t know why. Did I mention she went to law school and has a perfect life?

  Heading in to gym.

  Good for you, girl!

  I know Denise doesn’t mean it that way, but her encouragement feels condescending. Denise eats whatever she wants and never exercises and drinks like a fish and somehow stays thin. She’s always been that way.

  There’s a line out the door of people waiting to get into the gym.

  I text Denise:

  There’s like a billion people here waiting in line.

  Are they giving away free

  blowjobs and pussy licking in there?

  Sign me up!

  That’s Denise. Tall, blond, thin, rich, and a wee bit wanton.

  But then, if I looked like her, perhaps I would be, too.

  I approach the doors and walk in, shaking my head at Denise.

  The line is not to enter the gym. The line is to meet some bodybuilder guy. He’s taking pictures with people and signing autographs. I can’t see him very well, but he looks cute. Tall, with longish hair. Jeans and a white tee shirt. And built. Muscles everywhere. Wow. I have no idea who he is, but wow.

  I give the front desk guy my ID card and he scans me in.

  I find a treadmill and insert my earbuds, get my music going, and start walking. Every now and then, I glance over at the muscle guy. He’s busy shaking hands and smiling for selfies.

  But one time, he glances at me and catches me watching him.

  I immediately look away.

  I glance over a minute later and catch him watching me! He laughs and looks away. He’s laughing at me. He’s actually laughing at me. Dick.

  I continue walking and don’t look at him again.

  There are ten TVs suspended from the ceiling above the treadmills. The three closest to me are showing the Kardashians. Kim is getting her toenails bedazzled.

  After my 30 minutes are up, I slap the big red STOP button and hop off the treadmill. I haul ass for the front door and then hoof it back to my car.

  Fuck that guy.

  I get in and drive home. Go
d, what a giant dick. He’s busy meeting fans, apparently, but he still has time to laugh at the big girl bouncing on the treadmill.

  UPSTAIRS, IN MY apartment, I quickly shower, toss my work clothes in the tiny little washer-dryer stack unit, and then storm the kitchen for sustenance. I quickly whip up some scrambled eggs and microwave an entire pound of bacon using the baconator bacon buddy thing my parents got me for Christmas last year. Atkins, right?

  I flop on the sofa and devour my eggs and bacon. The bacon buddy thing actually works.

  While I’m waiting for Game of Thrones to start, my phone pings. It’s Denise.

  Did you get your sweat on?

  I guess.

  That sounds like a no.

  This pricks my indignance. At least I did something.

  I did the treadmill for 30mins.

  

  Her smiley face doesn’t help.

  But she’s right. Those were 30 very pathetic minutes. I don’t think I even broke a sweat.

  The HBO static comes on and the GoT theme begins. All things gym related are hurled aside with the most absolute of impunity.

  I kinda wanna do Tyrion.

  Five minutes into the show, I remember there is a pint of Chunky Monkey in the freezer. I decide not to eat it.

  Despite the antics of Westeros, I can’t stop thinking about the Chunky Monkey.

  Halfway through the show, I cave.

  I haul ass to the kitchen, seize the pint and a big table spoon, and am back on the sofa before any more heads can roll.

  There’s nothing like chocolate chunks, walnuts, banana ice cream, and Game of Thrones. Unless maybe if I had someone to watch it with. Preferably male. I picture that bodybuilder guy at the gym. He was fine. Like really fine. Sexy, tall, yoked. Or is it yolked? I’ve never been sure.

  No! He was an asshole. He laughed at me, the big girl in the dorky sweats strolling on the treadmill thinking she’s making progress, having the gall to disparage the Kardashians. At least they have their own show and are making money off it, cheesy and superfluous as it may be.

  I return my attention to Tyrion Lannister and my half-empty pint.

  By the time the show ends and the haunting cellos play the closing credits, the ice cream is long gone and I want to puke. Partly is was the blood on the show. But mostly it’s because I have a pound of bacon in my stomach and 1500 calories worth of Ben & Jerry’s on top of that.