She frowned. “I can’t look you in the eyes, but you want me to tell you when I need tampons or something? Yeah, okay. I’m the servant, Mr. Crowne, not you. I fetch, I obey—it’s completely against everything in my marrow to ask you for things.”
She stared at her fingers.
I gripped her chin. “You’re the servant, and I’m giving you an order. When you need something, you tell me. Okay?”
“Okay.” Her raspy submission went straight to my cock.
I let her go, sparing a glance. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Snitch in pajamas was somehow more covered than Snitch in the day. A long-sleeved nightgown that went past her knees and covered her collarbone. If it wasn’t for this morning, I’d think there were scars or tattoos covering her body.
“In this world, someone like me, it’s better to blend in than stand out.”
I laughed. “You did a shit job of that.”
First she’d caught my attention; then she’d caught the attention of Lottie’s friends.
Her eyes flashed. “I was in seven out of eight of your classes at Crowne Point High. I’m willing to bet you don’t remember me in any of them.”
My brow raised, interested. “You went to CPH?”
“I’ve lived here since I was fourteen. I’ve served you at all your breakfasts and dinners, placed your Christmas presents under the tree, shined the frame on Mr. Charles Crowne’s portrait and waxed the floors after you scuffed them. You knocked my books out of my hand and kicked my soap bucket over more times than I can count.”
I dragged my hands through my blond hair.
She chewed her lip. “This has been my home for the almost a decade.”
“It’s my home—”
“Not really,” she shouted. Fucking yelled. It was enough to shut me up. Snitch didn’t yell. “You might live above us, but you live in a house, not a home. You have no love or laughter. You interact with cruelty. We’re like ghosts to you. We live here, it’s our home, but if you notice us, you exorcise us.”
I sat up, twisting my legs off the bed, elbows on my knees, until I was leaning off, closer to Snitch. Her honesty was so fucking addicting. I licked my lips, leaning forward.
“I learned to drive here,” she continued. “I broke my heart here…”
Who the fuck broke her heart?
My hands were in fists before I realized.
“I lived in a house until Crowne Hall, and now I have a home.”
Disbelief froze my tongue, washing over my face. “You actually like it here?”
I just assumed everyone hated it. I know my siblings did. I know my mother did. My grandfather only showed up on holidays he hated it so much. How could servants like it here? The thought didn’t even compute.
“The only thing wrong with Crowne Hall are the Crownes. We are like ghosts to you, but you? You are monsters to us. We tiptoe around you and pray we never wake you.”
I leaned closer, until I could smell her. “No one ever talks like this to me.”
I’d spent a good thirty minutes talking with Lottie today.
She wasn’t mad at me anymore. She wasn’t…anything with me. But worse, I kept waiting for that pop that happened every time I was with Snitch, and it never came. We talked about the weather, about the music, respectable things that people like us should talk about.
Lust.
That’s all it was.
I’d loved Lottie for years.
She peered at me. “Do you have any real friends, Grayson?”
No.
I laughed. “You have to be insane to keep talking to me like this.”
“Maybe. My mom told me what happens at night doesn’t count. The stars blind our judgment, and night hides our fear. What she really meant was it’s easier to steal at night…easier for men to leave their wives…” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I’ll shut up now.”
“Tell me more.”
Her lips parted. “For my seventh birthday my mom taught me how to lie to the police. By my thirteenth my mom had already shown me how to use my body to get or keep a man’s attention. I guess what I’m saying is I get it. It sucks when your childhood is stolen.”
I know what it’s like to have the world on your shoulders and have no one see the weight.
What could someone like you know about me?
I was such an asshole.
“What did you mean earlier?” I asked. “About loneliness.”
She lay on her side, head propped on her hand, looking up at me. Something twisted in my chest at that image. It wasn’t casual. It was…comfortable. And I liked that.
“Well, the way I see it,” she said. “No matter how many friends or family or just people surround us, we all have that thing we can’t tell somebody, a jagged shard of glass cutting our soul. You know?”
Shit, yeah. I did. Too well.
“So we bleed silently. Alone.” She sighed. “But…if you’re lucky, you might find someone who has a similar piece of glass to your own. So then you don’t bleed alone. That’s what’s so addicting about loneliness. The hope against everything that maybe one day you won’t be alone.”
A heaviness weighed her lids, and she messed with her springy curls still wet from her shower, as if distracting herself. What was the jagged piece poking Snitch? The thing she felt she couldn’t tell anyone?
“Have you found someone, Snitch?”
She rolled her lips, uncharacteristically silent. When she finally spoke, her husky voice was barely louder than the crash of waves.
“Are you bleeding, Grayson?” she asked.
I met her eyes, voice rough. “I don’t know. Am I, Snitch?”
Snitch got to her knees, sliding between the open space in my legs. I could barely think on that before I was wrapped in a hug. I went stiff. Suspicion and uncertainty froze my muscles.
“What are you doing?” My words were stiffer than my body.
“Hugging you,” she said.
“I know that. Why?”
“Because for this moment I’m Story, and you’re Gray, and right now it’s okay.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I was hugged. Probably when I was five, before Grandfather put a stop to “such nonsense.” I didn’t know how to react, so I stayed frozen. She smelled like marshmallows, and warmth suffused through my body.
She pulled away too soon, head tilted. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
I itched to drag her back, crush her against my body, close my thighs so she couldn’t leave.
Fuck. She was sliding into my bloodstream.
My voice was hoarse. “What am I going to do with you when the sun comes up?”
She fell back to the floor on an exhale, pulling the blanket I’d given her back over her body.
“When the sun comes up, I’ll go back to being Snitch, and you’ll go back to being Mr. Crowne.”
I opened and closed my fist, trying to steady the throbbing. I didn’t fucking like that.
I wanted to stay like this.
Bleeding together.
“Get up here,” I grated.
There was an audible pause before she said, “Like, on your bed?”
STORY
* * *
I swallowed and said again, “On your bed?”
“I can hear you rolling around all night, and I can’t fucking sleep.”
“I’m fine, really.”
“You need somewhere better to sleep.”
“I don’t!”
He exhaled. “Story, what the fuck did we just talk about? When you need something, you tell me.”
Story. He called me Story. Shivers like slowly melting snow dripped down my spine.
“Um, I…guess…I wouldn’t mind….sleeping on a bed…”
I climbed up but made sure to stay on the edge. Still, I was only a few inches from being shoulder to shoulder in Grayson Crowne’s bed.
With Grayson Crowne.
I focused on breathin
g.
Grayson lifted his arms over his head. I snuck a glance at him. His black sleeve had ridden up past carved biceps and triceps. The moonlight outlined the pout in his lips, the concentration in his jaw.
I wondered what he was thinking. He always acted like he didn’t care, that his thoughts only grazed the surface, but then why didn’t he ever sleep? Why did he stay up, staring at the ceiling?
“Does Lottie know she’s the reason you have a sucker habit?” He shot me a look, the one that said I was poking in things I shouldn’t be. Still, I pressed on. “I think she’d like to know.”
He made a noise in his throat but said nothing.
“Are you upset that I messed things up with her…again?”
His jaw twerked. “I should be.”
“You’re not?”
He ignored me, and I rolled over on my side, watching him. I think I must have really been insane to keep asking him questions, but occasionally he answered them, and I was addicted to that.
It was worth the burn when he didn’t.
The night wrapped around us like a blanket, and I remembered my mother’s words. Even if she’d been talking about stealing, her words never felt truer than now. In the dark with nothing but the lullaby of waves, my fear was stolen.
“Why do you love Lottie?” I asked.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Nosy.”
“Just with you.”
A wrinkle formed in his brow and he shifted, like something had poked his back. He turned onto his shoulder, and then we were eye to eye. All my breath vanished. Up close, I could see the ridges of his nose. Sadness lurked along the silver striations of his blue irises.
I trailed my fingers along the grooves of his broken nose.
His eyes popped, then narrowed. “You have a death wish, Snitch.”
I can’t stop myself with him. All of my self-preservation flies out the fucking window.
No friends.
No home.
No family.
One chance at love that I stole.
A horde of admirers, and no one. Lonely. That must be so lonely.
I kept trailing my fingers along the crooked ridges of his nose. “You get into a lot of fights.”
His hand covered mine as if he was going to take it off, but then it just stayed. Covering mine, engulfing my fingers with his heat.
“My grandpa broke my nose when I was fourteen,” he said.
My fingers froze on the bridge.
“He found me crying. Over Lottie…ironically…said he would give me something to cry about.”
“Grayson…”
His eyes met mine, burning, but a small crooked smile quirked his lips. “I didn’t get it fixed out of spite. He wanted the perfect son Dad never was. Every time he looks at me he has to see his imperfection.”
Grayson dragged my hand down from his nose, across his lips, to his jaw, holding me there. Holding my hand with his, a look in his eyes that I was too afraid to decipher.
I swallowed. “Am I the only one who knows the truth about you? Not even your best friends?”
“After all you know now, you think I’d tell anyone? My ‘best friends’ Alaric Carmichael and Geoff Black have sold every word I’ve ever told them.”
Tell me who sent you and I might let you live…The Carmichaels? The Blacks?
The very first night with Grayson slammed into me. Oh my God. He thought his best friends had sent me?
He tried to shrug it off like it was no big deal. “You learn early to keep shit to yourself.”
“Because they can’t take what they can’t find,” I said. “You can talk to me. I know I’m not supposed to have this secret. It’s not mine. But you can talk to me.”
Another look I was afraid to decipher, then his eyes fell to my lips.
“You have witchcraft on your lips,” he said quietly, reverently.
“Henry V,” I whispered.
His eyebrows lifted ever so slightly at my words; then he yanked me to him by the waist, separating my thighs with his knee, hiking me up against his thigh. I had no panties on, and my naked flesh pressed against his. I knew the moment he figured it out, because he grinned.
“Dirty little nun,” he said, voice rocky. “Do you always sleep without panties?”
He hiked his thigh against my aching core and a sound fell from my lips, but before it could fully fall, he gripped my jaw, tilting it. Ripping my face closer. Locked on my lips. Jaw so tight I could see the muscle quirking.
“Have you ever come on someone’s hand, Snitch?” he asked, still fixed on my mouth. His free hand floated from my hip to the naked skin at the back of my thigh, just below my ass.
I swallowed, throat thick. “No.”
He groaned. “Do you want to?” His self-control is so fucking intense. I can feel his cock throbbing at my hip, but he just stared at my mouth.
Even as I lay spread on his thigh, he didn’t try to force anything more. His hand only held me tight to him. Oddly and surprisingly, he seemed to respect my boundaries. And yet that made it worse, because Grayson Crowne dripped sexuality. He wasn’t the threat…I was.
Maybe it was just in my head, but was he leaning closer to me? Millimeters of air that were nothing on the outside but in this moment, may as well have been miles.
His lip slowly curved, hooking right, arrogant. “Your answer is all over my leg.”
His smile was arrogant, but his tone wasn’t. It was almost sweet. Wondrous.
Our eyes collided and the breath rushed out of me. A bit of the mask dropped. Gone. Raw. A glimpse of Olympia. Grayson.
I felt like he was a second from pouncing on me.
And…I wanted that.
“I want to know what your face looks like when you stretch around my dick,” he said. “The sounds you make taking me in.”
“What about Lottie?” I whispered.
Something flickered in his eyes. Guilt?
His jaw tensed. “Maybe I’ve started rooting for you to fail.”
My eyes popped.
His own narrowed, like he’d realized what he’d let slip. In the same instant, he dropped my wrist, dropped me, and rolled back, staring at the ceiling.
“Get on the floor,” he said.
Nineteen
STORY
* * *
For days after Grayson let me into his bed, he ignored me. I woke up and he was gone, and that was the pattern for the next few days. He made sure to not look at me, not acknowledge me, never be alone with me. There was no party save the looming Fourth of July tomorrow, so I stayed in his wing. Tiptoeing like the ghost I was.
I don’t know why I expected anything different.
This day, instead of sitting in his wing waiting for him, I’d taken a shower, gone to town, and taken a much-needed break from Grayson. From the Crownes. The entire time I kept waiting for Grayson to pop up and tell me I’d broken some rule. I didn’t get to leave.
But now, as the sun sat high in the sky, I was back, and he wasn’t there. My fear was for naught. I twirled the green pen I’d bought on a whim, feeling like a fool.
Tomorrow was the Fourth of July, and the Crowne Fourth of July party was the biggest nightmare—I mean party—of the year. To the world it was a spectacular, exclusive event. To us, it was months catering to the Crownes’ insane whims. Fireworks shaped like various Crowne family members, or sand that shimmered gold in the night, to name a few.
I counted at least a hundred servants outside; they looked like a murder of crows on the pristine white beach.
The morning after the Fourth of July, the Crownes were to go on a European family vacation that would start in France and end in Switzerland. It was always our—meaning the servants’—little unofficial vacation, too. We still worked at the Hall, but it was a respite from the Crownes themselves. Now I wondered, would I be going with him?
“Story.”
I sat up at my uncle’s voice. He would have finished cleaning Grayson’s room hour’s
ago. Yet he watched me.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
“No I haven’t!” I hadn’t been avoiding him, but I haven’t been seeking him out. I had nothing good to tell him, nothing that could make this okay.
Red rimmed his lids. “I can’t leave you until I know you’re going to be safe and taken care of, Story.”
“Leave? What do you mean?”
The ocean crashed behind us as my uncle’s silence stretched.
“Are you going on vacation?” I tested, already knowing the answer.
Woodson Hale didn’t go on vacation; he didn’t retire. He’d once told me he would die here, and we’d come close. When he looked away, fear rose like acid heartburn.
“Is it back?” I swallowed, unable to say the word cancer.
When he looked back, his face was stone. “Of course not. I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been. I came here to tell you one thing, Story. If you don’t end it, I will.”
At that moment—the worst moment—Grayson came back.
Grayson slapped my uncle’s shoulder. “Woodsy! Late in the day to be cleaning.”
My uncle’s glare was trained on me. I waited, heart pounding, for my uncle to go through with his threat, but then slowly he turned his attention to Grayson.
“A job well done knows no time limit, but I’m finished now.” He gave me a knowing look, then left.
For the first time in days I was alone with Grayson. The words he’d spoken had played on a loop over and over in my head.
Maybe I’ve started rooting for you to fail.
I waited for him to say something, anything. There was a nondescript black bag in his hand. A bunch of scenarios ran through my head, ones I had no right to think. All of them included Lottie.
Maybe they went on a date. Maybe they spent the past couple of days together.
He touched her.
Kissed her.
“Were you with her?” I asked.
I actually sucked in a breath the minute the words left my mouth. I couldn’t believe I’d said them aloud. I was getting bolder—stupider.
He arched a brow. “With who, Snitch?”
He was giving me an out. The whole point of me being here was to give him back his happily ever after, not burn it further to the ground.
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