Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  He hefted the suitcase, looked at it, then at me. “Hm,” he said and started down the hill.

  I followed under the umbrella. “What’s hm about this time?”

  “I thought it would be heavier.”

  “Are you trying to insult me?” The tease flew out before I could remind myself that I didn’t care what he was trying to do.

  “No, actually.”

  I had to keep my eyes forward as we walked, or I’d fall, but he sounded almost as though he was smiling.

  “What made you think I usually travel with my rock collection?” I said.

  “I assumed you’d bring lotions and creams and whatever you use to keep yourself beautiful.”

  Was he making fun of me? He was too serious a person to hand out compliments.

  “You don’t know you’re beautiful?” he asked into my silence.

  “Are you trying to get in my pants?” I shot back. I didn’t add, If you are, the answer is yes.

  “As much as I’d like to get those yellow pants off you,” he said, definitely smiling now, “it’s not to get my hands on the woman in them.”

  I gave him a hm of my own.

  The rain was still falling around us, each drop exploding off the fabric of Dante’s umbrella, pop, pop-POP, pop, under a roof—as if we were in a room together, somewhere small and close. My body was unbearably aware of the nearness of his as we walked.

  Pop, pop, pop-POP, pop.

  I was glad I couldn’t hear my own heartbeat above its rhythm.

  We rounded a corner, and there it was—my little buttercup car, waiting to carry me away.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked.

  “I came the back way along Siena Road,” he said. His pace picked up slightly, as if he couldn’t wait to finally get rid of me now that the car was in sight. “What I meant when I asked if you knew you were beautiful—”

  “Don’t,” I interrupted. Dante’s brain had finally caught up with his mouth, and he was about to either retract the compliment he’d accidentally given me or pile it with a metric ton of platonic vanilla encouragement.

  “I think I need to explain.”

  “You do not.”

  “After I said it, you asked if I wanted to fuck you.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Only to find out you don’t like my pants.”

  “I don’t like yellow.”

  “And you don’t want to fuck me. I get it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to fuck you.”

  We were at the car now. I could have grasped the door’s handle. Once I did, I was homeward bound, where the paparazzi waited and bricks went through my window.

  Home, where I was a whore with a big, red W and the man who said he’d love me forever never actually did. I’d tried to figure him out a hundred times, taking apart every word choice he made and the timing of every message he sent.

  Crazy. I must have been crazy.

  Well, I wasn’t going to be crazy anymore.

  “I don’t have time to figure out what you mean,” I said, holding out my key fob to pop the trunk of the car. “So, say it or don’t.”

  Preferably don’t. I forgot to say that part.

  He led me to the back of the car, still sheltering me with the umbrella.

  “I’d love to fuck you,” he said as if he was talking about meeting me for brunch.

  But I barely heard him as I looked into the trunk, which was empty except for the stack of tabloids turned facedown. I knew what the front said, and Discount Mandy replayed it just so I’d remember.

  RENALDO & THE HOMEWRECKER:

  HOW MANDY BETTENCOURT’S BIG PLANS BACKFIRED

  Dante’s statement needed a reply, but I was paralyzed before the stack of shame. That was what waited for me in Los Angeles. The eyes and the cameras. The name-calling. The invasive pressure of never knowing who was watching me or what they were thinking.

  My stupid broken heart didn’t have the defenses to leave the house. There would be no avoiding Renaldo and his new woman in Los Angeles, no turning away from the knowledge that everyone knew. I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, anything enough.

  But my promises to myself…

  But the woman I wanted to be…

  Did Couture Mandy have to be squashed underfoot before she had a chance?

  “This isn’t about who wants to fuck,” I said, slamming the trunk closed. He didn’t respond, and for a second, wild, desperate hope set a blaze in my heart. Words spilled out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Please, Dante. I know we—I know we don’t get along. But the house is big enough for both of us. I can stay out of your way. I just really, really need to be someplace safe right now.”

  He considered that, considered me. I felt naked under his gaze, stripped and scrutinized, as though he was trying to figure out how to break me down for parts.

  “You really want to stay?” His voice was quiet, but it filled the space between us already steamy with our breath.

  “Yes. I need to.”

  He was obviously thinking, eyes flitting over my face, jaw clenched as if he was biting back words he’d want to take back.

  “Then beg me for it,” he said through his teeth. “Beg and you can stay.”

  Beg? My mouth made the word, but my breath was caught in a flood of arousal at the tone of the command and the thought of kneeling at his feet like a beggar.

  Any sense of self-worth I’d cobbled together was shouted down by that hidden headline. I was an animal fleeing home to find shelter anywhere else. He couldn’t scare or intimidate me out of here. Dante Crowne had nothing on the combined forces of Tatiana, DMZ, and a lifetime of heartbreak at the hands of careless men.

  He wasn’t careless though. He was anything but. My heart seemed to make more blood, filling my veins with a pounding heat at the possibility of being under him that drowned out the pride of refusal.

  “I’m begging you, Dante.” I didn’t even have to pretend. “I’m begging you to let me stay.”

  “Kneel,” he goaded me, raising the original dare with a double-dog to get the fuck out of Cambria. Run. Go home to a nemesis I understood and pain I’d invite in like an old friend.

  His hard, unrelenting gaze was a physical push downward—an ultimatum he wanted me to take but needed me to refuse.

  But what did I need? My body ached to comply. The organs between my legs swelled to just let go of pretense and promise for a moment and embrace a freedom I’d been too scared to want.

  So, I knelt. My knees protested the frozen pavement, but I also felt a flash of heat go through me. It felt good to finally surrender, to just fucking submit.

  Silence. I couldn’t go back now. I’d given up on control to get control, and now that I was begging without worrying whether he really wanted me to beg or not, I had to wait for him to decide.

  Exactly what I was trying not to do.

  As I looked up, my eyes caught on the bulge in his jeans. He was hard for me.

  I’d been acting on instinct, and now I understood why. This was where I’d wanted to be all along. My body pulsed with need, my clit as swollen as he was—as if we were connected without even touching.

  His erection was a lightning rod for inspiration. My whole escape to Cambria could be more about who I was when I returned home. Was I a pushover who planned her life based on the whims of men? Or a powerful woman who paved her own path with the bodies of men who tried to get in her way?

  Obviously, my doormat days had to be behind me. The irony of making this decision from a kneeling position wasn’t lost on me, yet I didn’t think I could have gotten there on my feet if they were running.

  So, I held Dante’s gaze steadily even though I was shaking inside.

  “I want to stay, and”—I turned my eyes straight ahead, to the rod in his pants, then back up at his face—“you want me to.”

  Kneeling at his feet, in the rain, I begged for an indulgence he was unwilling to give, and yet I felt expanded, more po
werful, taller, in control of my life and decisions for the first time.

  No matter what he decided in the next moment, Couture Mandy had arrived.

  Chapter 9

  DANTE

  When I asked her to beg, I’d expected an angry slap and a quick exit. That would have been the end of this whole thing.

  Now I was visibly hard just seeing her kneel.

  Logan had said she was going through a nasty breakup. The promise not to touch her had been easy to make. I had no time for soft hearts or clingy women. No matter what she claimed, if I touched her, odds were she’d end up getting hurt. It would get back to Logan, who’d use it as proof I was as rotten as he’d always thought I was, a heartless asshole who burned through women—fucking and dumping.

  He was wrong. The fucking was always fun, but there was no dumping. Breakups were built into the agreements. A Boy Scout like Logan wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t care what my brother thought.

  His wife, Ella, was a different story. I liked and respected her. If I hurt her friend, she’d be livid, and she was the type to be upfront about how pissed she was. In a family as close as ours, that could make for uncomfortable encounters that would upset our mother.

  It wasn’t worth it.

  It really wasn’t.

  Amanda Bettencourt had to go. That was the only scenario that worked for everyone.

  But there she was, looking up at me from her knees, begging, and all I could think about was how good she looked from that angle, how close her pretty mouth was to my dick, how—in the moment her knees started to bend and I knew she was going to do it—I’d had to resist a need to take control of her body and mind. It was a familiar need, but in that split second, it had been stronger than ever before.

  “I want to stay, and…” she glanced at my erection before turning her eyes back to mine. “You want me to.”

  I’d told her she could stay if she begged. If I threw her out now, I’d be a liar.

  I still had time. I could be enough of an asshole between now and Saturday to scare her off. There was no way she could manufacture anything between us in just a few days—especially since she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in sex.

  Letting her stay kept my promise to her, and as long as I didn’t fuck her, I was keeping my promise to Logan.

  I considered letting her stay, my eyes fixed on the glossy, windswept tumble of hair framing her face. She had to be good at keeping her mouth shut—how many years with Renaldo and no one had proof of their relationship until recently?

  And again, I’d told her that if she begged, she could stay.

  If she ran away from trouble she brought on herself, that was her problem.

  If my dick was a two-by-four, that was my problem.

  If she begged defiantly instead of submissively, whose problem was that?

  “Your knees are getting wet.” I held out my hand, and she took it by the wrist, the correct hold to help someone up.

  “So,” she said when she was standing, “that beggy enough?”

  “As begging goes, it was terrible.”

  “You want me to try again?”

  Before she could drop, I grabbed her arm and held her up. “No, but this isn’t a vacation for me. I’m here to work. If you stay, you work.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she considered me sidelong.

  “You can type,” I said without asking because everyone could type.

  She shrugged as if she’d never thought about it.

  “You’ll stay and assist me. You’ll be perfect and do what I tell you without questions. That’s the deal. That’s the whole deal. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said without thinking, yet without impulsive eagerness, as if she knew what she wanted and was happy to get it.

  She was getting so much more than she’d be happy about.

  “Let’s get your bag, then.”

  She popped the trunk of the yellow Jaguar, and I retrieved her bag, which was still lighter than I expected.

  * * *

  The get-together at Aileen’s house had been the same as any other year-end party between families attending a certain cluster of private schools. The adults unwittingly separated by gender, drank wine, beer, and whatever the staff managed to concoct out of the liquor cabinet.

  The kids divided themselves up by interest, and I wound up with the group not absorbed in video games or watching dailies of Nadia Genaldi’s movie in the basement theater.

  That night, it was Logan’s crowd I wound up with. They were playing hoodat, and I was curious, but I didn’t think I’d get picked.

  When I stepped into the closet in Aileen’s house, I hadn’t known anything about myself. I was sixteen and headstrong, full of desire but not yet gifted with control. All I knew how to do was follow my instincts, which were still clumsy and inarticulate.

  I hadn’t even particularly wanted to play the game, but Logan had bet me a hundred dollars I couldn’t win a round, and I was always eager to take his money. I had figured out by then that I had an eye for detail most of my peers lacked, which made me confident in my advantage. I wouldn’t confuse Aileen’s expensive perm for Ella’s natural curls.

  I walked into the closet absolutely sure of myself.

  The girl I found in there surprised me—when she sucked my finger into the liquid heat of her mouth once and then again. No one I’d touched had ever opened up to me that easily before, and knowing it was Amanda Bettencourt—from her height and whispered voice—didn’t soften the shock.

  My pulse throttled up like the engine of my new Aston Martin shifting gears, an increasingly urgent hum in my ears and under my skin. I touched her soft, vulnerable neck, then the space between her breasts. I felt the heat of her body seeking mine.

  She wanted to touch me so badly. She wanted to be touched, and yet she waited because I signaled it, and that control over her was more than hot. It slaked my soul. Sex and desire had seemed like no more than a quest for relief from discomfort.

  I’d recently lost my virginity to a fellow Crowne Industries intern and Harvard-Westlake classmate named Delilah Doctorow. Nice girl. Great laugh. Came like a champ. We did it against the copy machine, in the stairwell, on the conference room table, and it was a relief every time.

  But this? With Amanda in the closet? This was new, and it was huge. More than the push to quell a need, dominance over her put desire on an equal footing with contentment.

  When my fingers made contact with the tip of her belt buckle, I imagined the shape of the mark it could leave on the curve of her ass, and I knew there was something wrong with me I couldn’t change.

  With Amanda’s submission still tender on my fingers, Veronica Hawkins struck up a conversation. A week later, she found me in the locker room at the tennis club and taught me everything Delilah couldn’t. Veronica—who was married and in her forties—had yanked me out of my childhood by the collar and built me into a man.

  Everything my encounter with Amanda had brought to the surface, Mrs. Hawkins skimmed off and taught me to relish.

  As I walked back to the house with Amanda, her knees likely raw and my dick still hard, the awakening in the closet came flooding back. She’d wanted to be dominated then; she’d complied with my demands without even knowing who I was. She was the first girl to make me see that my own desires wouldn’t be sated by the usual teenage run around the bases—that I wanted something complicated and specific, dark and urgent. She had been my first sub, and all it took for her to draw me out was seven minutes in a closet.

  I felt quite certain I’d been her first too, but the difference between us was that I’d spent the years since exploring what I wanted with women who already knew.

  It was always dangerous to get involved with someone who didn’t understand herself, and that went double for subs, who needed to be so self-assured they could give their will to me fully without confusing vulnerability for intimacy, or trust for love.

  What had happened with
Veronica wouldn’t happen again. I’d been successful in avoiding it so far. Amanda wasn’t going to undo it all just because she was willing to beg a little.

  If we started playing by my rules, sore knees would feel like nothing before the end of the day. If I punished her for every infraction—I could already think of a handful she’d committed—she was going to collapse before she had a chance to feel anything dangerous.

  Which was exactly what I wanted.

  There was no way she’d make it twenty-four hours.

  “What are you smirking about?” she asked as we got to the front door.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket.

  “You’re in the smaller room,” I said, ignoring the question to look at my phone. It was Logan.

  “You’re getting signal,” she observed with a sulk.

  I handed over her bag. “Unpack and we’ll get started.”

  When she was inside, I closed the door between us and answered the call, ducking around the side of the house farthest from the second bedroom.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What time did Mandy leave? Ella hasn’t heard from her.”

  “She’s still here.”

  “Why?”

  Because when I told her to get on her fucking knees, she got on her fucking knees and begged me. “She wants to, and she’s not bothering me.”

  “Have her call Ella, would you?” he asked.

  “She has no signal. You call Ella.”

  “Do you know when she’s planning to leave?”

  “Tomorrow, I believe.”

  “Tomorrow?” He was far away, but his frustration came in loud and clear.

  “It’s raining.”

  Indeed, it was. And though it was the proper season for such an ordinary weather event, it was enough to send an otherwise normal woman into paroxysms of worry for a friend taking a long drive.