Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  “Logan sends his apologies, but this house is mine,” I said, taking my eyes off her long enough to snap the towel off the ring and hand it over. “And I need to use it this weekend.”

  It occurred to me too late that I didn’t have any good answer ready if she asked me what for, and luckily, she didn’t.

  She wrapped the towel around herself, and I looked at her again.

  “Your brother said this was a family house,” she said.

  She and Logan had been friends for a long time; she had to know how things worked among the Crownes. Someone was always jockeying someone else for position, and while this house technically belonged to my parents, Logan and I both knew it was really mine.

  But I didn’t have the energy or patience to get into that with Ms. Lonelyhearts. I had plenty of things to keep me busy, and babysitting wasn’t on my to-do list.

  “Hm,” I said and strode out of the room, leaving her alone to put clothes on that beautiful body.

  Chapter 5

  MANDY

  Dante had set his two leather bags by the door of the master bedroom as if preparing to take possession. My bag was still open on the bed, and a pair of my underwear was spread into a butter-colored lace crescent.

  I certainly hadn’t left them like that.

  So, he’d known I was in the house. He knew I was in the bathtub and walked in anyway, turning off the lights to scare the shit out of me. Sadistic asshole.

  My family was linked to the Crownes by society. Same parties. Same schools, more or less. Logan became my friend because he could dish out verbal jabs and take them like a champ. When my sister, Samantha, got engaged to Byron Crowne, our families were linked by love. And when she committed suicide, they were linked by grief.

  So, I knew Dante well enough, but not that well because no one knew him.

  All the Crowne boys were handsome and charming—blah, blah, yawn—a dime a dozen, generally. Their wealth made them so desired. But Dante had an emo thing that wasn’t emo at all. It was a certain mysteriousness that wasn’t broody or melodramatic. In his teen years, he didn’t complain about being misunderstood and strain credulity with outlandishness. He stayed within fashion and behavioral conventions, and all that did was shine a light on just how different he was and how that differentness was defined by what he wasn’t.

  He wasn’t a gossip. He wasn’t loud. He didn’t speak unless he had something to say, and when he did, you listened because you had no choice. Not because you agreed or disagreed, but because his voice came from a place of command and confidence few could access.

  Some of my friends had thought he was sexy. The straight boys found him threatening but never admitted it or explained why. He scared me a little, but as intriguing as my fear was, I didn’t try to follow it down a rabbit hole of crushes and hookups. I had Caleb to hurt me.

  Paula Harris had dated Dante for a while in college, I remembered. With my underwear put aside, I stood over the open suitcase, trying to remember what she’d said about him. Anything at all. We weren’t great friends, but she must have—yes. I remembered.

  About a year after my graduation from Otis—at the Mayor’s Gala. Paula hid bruises on her wrist with a big bracelet that had his name engraved on one side and hers on the other, but it wasn’t just her name. It was something that alarmed our friend, Aileen.

  BONA

  Which—if you were Aileen and had six straight years of Latin under your belt—you knew meant property.

  That night—that same exact night—I was talking to Irene Martino, walking down the hall to the bathroom, and I turned the corner without looking and crashed into him. Boom. His chest had been a tuxedo-wrapped brick wall, and I apologized right away, but all he did was look at me as if his icy eyes could see right through me.

  At least, that was what Irene had said. For some reason, my gaze was glued to the carpet.

  Until my friend told me that later, I thought he’d started looking through me when he took my chin in his hand and tilted it up to face him. He didn’t take my clothes off with his stare. He peeled off my skin.

  “Hold your head up,” he said. “And you’ll see what’s in front of you.”

  Being in my early twenties, I took that as a scold and slapped his hand away. I wanted to say, “Yes, sir,” but managed not to. My second response was, “Use those eyes to look at not through.” But saying that would have been admitting he’d disarmed me, so I closed my mouth around it and—in a single moment of thoughtfulness in a lifetime of impulsive behavior—I chose the third option.

  “You could have looked yourself, you know.”

  “You’re right,” he said with a nod that was gracious far beyond his years. “Pardon me.”

  “It’s fine,” Irene chimed in, looping her arm through mine. “See you later.”

  She dragged me away, but I looked back. I had to. I could feel him following, pulling at me, and I had to know if it was my imagination.

  He hadn’t followed. He was ten feet away, down the hall where we’d left him.

  It was my imagination, and it hadn’t been, because he was turned toward us, looking not at but through me again, as if there was so much to see.

  The same way he’d looked at me for a split second in the Cambria bathroom… as if I wasn’t covered in skin, but an emotional armor that would crumble if he decided to attack.

  “Hm,” I said to myself, mocking his last word to me as I shoved my feet through the underwear he’d touched. “‘Hm,’ my ass.”

  Dressing quickly in gym shorts and an oversized sweatshirt the color of a traffic light drivers speed up for, I threw my hair up onto the top of my head with a velvet scrunchy, then I stormed out to give Dante Crowne a piece of my mind.

  The house was super small. Two bedrooms and one bath. Nothing like the Crowne’s Bel Air estate, which would have been its own zip code if more people lived in it.

  When I arrived in the kitchen, Dante was filling a teapot. His shirt was open at the neck. The tightness of the sleeves, as well as the fit of his jeans, did more for his shape than a thousand hours at the gym… though the gym was definitely on his schedule.

  He didn’t even look at me. The huge glass doors were wide open to the pounding rain. The patio was covered, so the house didn’t flood, but it was weird enough to put a hold order on my anger. Lightning struck, and before I could count, thunder split the air. I gasped.

  “Another one overlapping,” he said as he shut off the water. Another crack followed as if summoned by the God with the Teapot. “It’s right over us.”

  “Can we close the doors?”

  “No.”

  “It’s cold.”

  He turned on the burner, glancing at my bare legs for half a second. “Put on pants.”

  The chill had visibly hardened my nipples even through the ginormous sweatshirt. Pants might have warmed my core and kept the skin on my thighs from goose-bumping, but I doubted they would make my nipples invisible to him.

  Lightning again.

  One Sama—

  Thunder.

  “What are you making?” I asked.

  “Hot water.”

  Infuriating. How could he pretend not to know what I meant? Was it just for the sake of using as few words as possible?

  “Once the water’s boiling, what are you putting in it?” I said with the faux patience of a third-grade teacher at two in the afternoon on a Friday.

  He smirked, making me feel like a child when he was the one being unbearable. “Lemon and bitters.” He waved at the bowl of plump yellow fruit on the counter. “If the lemons are good. I had our caretaker pull a couple from the tree when she brought supplies.”

  That explained a lot of things. The cans. The fruit. The full freezer.

  “Bitters are in the refrigerator door if you want,” he said.

  What I wanted was something to do. Condiment bottles clicked in the door when I opened the fridge. The shelves held the usual, and I plucked through until I found a slim bottle of bi
tters. I put it on the counter next to him.

  “Thank you.” He held the lemon under his nose and—finding it acceptably aromatic—slid a knife from the block. He said nothing as he got out a small cutting board and shaved away the yellow skin.

  “Are you doing a cleanse?” I asked. “Lemon and bitters? Is that a new thing I haven’t heard of?”

  Without a moment’s pause to decide if he wanted to admit to doing a cleanse, he said, “Amanda, I need you to leave first thing in the morning.”

  “Mandy. It’s Mandy. It’s been Mandy since middle school.”

  With expert precision, he separated the zest from the rind without a speck of bitter rind in the bowl. “Did you spell it with an I-E and dot the I with a heart?”

  He had no way of knowing I’d done that. Lucky guess and fuck him for it.

  “Fine,” I said. “Whatever. I’ll go in the morning, okay? I can’t get any signal here anyway, and there’s no Wi-Fi, so it’s boring.”

  Why did I sound like such a dipshit?

  Did I feel so safe in that house that I thought the bricks would stop coming through my window at home? I wasn’t trying to impress him, but I’d said it for his benefit somehow.

  Did I just want to do what he told me?

  Dante nodded to himself, satisfied that he had what he needed from me. “You came here for the excitement.”

  It wasn’t even a question, barely a prompt. The word was a command, casually dropped with slivers of lemon into two glass mugs.

  If I told him in lurid detail why I was running away, maybe he’d let me stay.

  Maybe I could drive to Harmony and appeal to Logan.

  The fact was Dante wouldn’t be moved, and the Crowne name trumped Logan’s permission.

  I’d leave in the morning and not a moment sooner. It wasn’t my fault he and his brother had gotten their wires crossed. Nor was it his, and down deep, I kind of felt bad about…

  No.

  Stop.

  Post-Renaldo Mandy didn’t feel bad about anything she did to inconvenience men, and she didn’t stay where she wasn’t wanted.

  But I didn’t have to tell Dante Crowne what I was getting away from just because he wanted to know.

  “I’m getting away,” I said.

  “From.” Again, not a question. A command.

  “Everything,” I said, figuring two could play at this game.

  The teapot whistled.

  “Specifically.” Dante shut off the flame.

  I assumed he was going to play the one-word-then-silence game, and I was determined I wouldn’t lose it again, but he outmaneuvered me by filling two mugs with boiling water as he filled in the blanks in my story.

  “The paparazzi,” he said. “The gossip sites. Being held to account for fucking a married man for years.”

  The words were accusatory, but his tone sliced off the judgment, leaving not a speck of bitterness to taint the facts. I wanted to be angry at him, but without his contempt, I couldn’t be, and since the only thing I’d done wrong was keep a secret, I couldn’t be offended either.

  “Yes,” I said with my chin high. “I don’t know how that matters to you.”

  He dropped bitters into the lemon water until it turned the color of tea. “It doesn’t.” He handed me a cup. “You’re lucky I showed up.”

  “I don’t feel lucky.”

  Leaning on the counter, he finally faced me, and the scalding tea went cold in my hands.

  “Warm water’s recycled through the pipes to keep bacteria from building up. When the keypad out front is used, it turns off the tank heater so the tankless—which runs on electricity—can go on. You’re two hot baths away from running low enough on water to set off the emergency pressure attenuator, and you didn’t have the solar cells set to carry enough load to run the tankless more than two days. The entire system would have shut down—including the front gate—and that little car you left in the middle of the drive doesn’t have the horsepower to ram it down. You would have been walking on the side of the road in the rain, hungry because the stuff you brought won’t make a meal. We don’t have servants here. You couldn’t get Sugarfish delivered even if your phone worked.”

  That too was said without judgment or negative emotion. I wasn’t sure if he was a sociopath or a god. Both could be handsome, and both were capable of fucking a woman and leaving without a second thought.

  “Well.” I shrugged, putting on the same lack of emotion. “Fuck you, then.”

  “You shouldn’t need to take such pains for a man like Renaldo DeWitt.” He shook his head, and it was the first time he judged me. It was awful, but it was also comforting. Dante Crowne might have contentedly sipped scalding water as if he were impervious to pain, but he was human.

  “What he had wasn’t a marriage.” That was as close as I could come to letting Tatiana’s secret slip, but I only sounded like a cookie-cutter mistress making judgments about a marriage based on the lies of the husband she was fucking. “And I’m not here to get away from him,” I objected with absolutely zero cool. “I can’t leave the house without someone taking a picture of me. I’m everywhere, and they put… words over my face. Whore and slut and… worse. I’m a meme. They doxed me, and I had a brick launched through my bedroom window.”

  Dante washed and dried his cup with practiced grace. All his money, and he did household chores. I didn’t know whether to be disgusted or impressed.

  “Why don’t you go back?” I insisted. “Why do you need to be here? Taking a break from owning some snooty clubs a few thousand miles away?”

  Of the million ways he could have reacted, the last I expected was for him to step closer, towering over me as he lifted my chin with one crooked finger just as he had when he told me I had to take my eyes off the floor to see forward. Had he smelled like ground coffee beans that night too? Had there been a deep musk and a profound tenderness as he looked not at me, but right through me?

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “You’re going to wake up and take a shower, not a bath. You’re going to get into that sexy little car of yours, back it out past the gate, and drive away like a good girl.”

  Of course, he was right.

  I was going to obey him. He was the one with the house and the name. He was the one of us who needed the least, so he was the one with the power, inspecting me as if I was a lemon he’d peeled before juicing dry.

  He was exerting exactly the kind of control over his life and the people in it that I wanted for myself.

  Maybe Dante Crowne was exactly the guy to help me become Couture Mandy.

  His shapely lips twitched so slightly I would have missed it if he hadn’t been standing so close. Everything was in that twitch, and nothing was outside it. It was a bomb—the pure potential of an unlit fuse contained in a metal shell that would make perfect shrapnel.

  What did an explosion look like for Dante Crowne? Had Paula Harris found out and paid for the knowledge in bruised wrists?

  “I’m not your bona.”

  “No, you’re not.” He lowered his hand. “I take grown women. They know what they want. They’re mature enough to consent and confident enough to trust me. They’re not hollow, desperate little socialites waiting for someone to tell them who they are.”

  My brows knotted and mouth opened, but when he walked away, the denial caught in my throat.

  “We understand each other,” he said, sliding the back doors closed, cutting the patter of rain and rumble of thunder that had faded many Samandas away. “I’ll be in the master.” He snapped the lock. “Rinse your cup before you go to bed.”

  Oh, no. He wasn’t going to walk out with the last word. At least, not those last words.

  “I run a business!” I cried.

  He stopped, turned, crossed his arms. “What kind of business can you leave for however long you thought you were hiding out?”

  “Not that it’s your concern”—I crossed my arms to mirror his posture—“but I only have a few employees. I do a few spe
cial pieces a year. So, there’s downtime while I collect inspiration.” Every word sounded silly and trite. I had to hit him where it hurt. He’d insulted my career, so I could at least hit his chain of elite European clubs. “We don’t all need to run empires to make up for our little dicks.”

  Insulting penis size was beneath me, but I was mad, and he’d never have the opportunity to prove me wrong, so fuck it. I said what I said.

  “What you describe isn’t a business,” he replied with a smirk that was equally sexy and infuriating. “It’s a vanity project.”

  My blood went red hot. How could he think that? I worked my ass off. I’d risked everything I’d been given, knowing my family couldn’t afford to throw another dime my way if I failed. My company was the one thing in my life I’d done myself, and it was the one thing I was proud of. How dare he—Dante Crowne—say all that made me shallow?

  I should have insulted the nepotism, but I was too angry to go high. “Well…” I balled my fists at my sides. “I’m sorry I’m not deep enough to be one of your submissive whores.”

  It was the worst I could think of. It was meant to wound him, but I hadn’t aimed carefully or thrown hard enough, because he reacted as if I’d proven his point.

  “If you were my whore, you’d be kneeling at my feet, naked with your ass up, offering it up for my pleasure, hoping I’d hurt you. Afraid I wouldn’t. You’d sleep at the foot of my bed to please me. You’d open your legs when I told you and take my cock down your throat to thank me. You’d let them call you a whore if I asked you to because with every orgasm I let you have, you’d know you were only mine.”

  I was wet. I should have been appalled and repulsed, but I was breathless, covered in skin that tingled as if it was heated from the inside.

  “So, no, Amanda,” he continued. “You’re beautiful and sexy, but you’re the only thing standing in your way. You’ve stuffed your needs into a bag and thrown them into the river because they scare you. But I see them because I am the river.”