Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  “Where’s the ladder?” I asked. Dante looked at me as though he had no idea what I was talking about. “To the crawlspace?”

  “There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of the mudroom.” He gave me another glance. “You should sit down.”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  “You should change first.”

  My first reaction was to demand a retraction. I’d changed quite enough already, thank you, but then I realized I was wearing a satin T-shirt and flimsy knit pants—both in a color unsuited to a crawlspace with spiders. “I guess I should have taken the suitcase.”

  He smiled. “There’s nothing appropriate in there, trust me.”

  “If I’d known I’d be chopping wood and fixing roofing, I would have packed the Handybitch overalls I did two years ago.”

  “Handybitch?”

  “Both clients thought it was funny, okay?”

  “You made two pairs.”

  “By hand. That’s the company. That’s how it works.”

  “Not much of a job,” he groused, but he sounded less judgmental than he had that first night.

  “Not for you, maybe.” I followed him to his bedroom. “You don’t need custom clothes. You look good in everything.”

  I remembered our conversation last night about how much I liked his dick. What had I said? Magnificent? Or had I just thought it?

  In any case, it was true enough to send a shiver through my body, and I wondered if I could cash in my favor before I faced a brown recluse.

  But the sooner I faced the creepy-crawly space, the sooner it would be done. I could delay gratification this one time. Afterward, he could wash the cobwebs out of my hair in the kitchen sink. Or we could get a hotel room and make up for last night’s lost bath.

  Dante gave me a pair of his sweatpants. He was much taller than I was, so I had to roll up the waist and stuff a few feet of leg into the Wellies. His old, blue hoodie smelled like him and was so big it swallowed me in an ocean of fabric.

  When I came out of my old room, he was waiting in the hall.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Shut up.” I fell in beside him as we walked to the mud room-slash-library.

  “I barely recognize you in a flattering color.” He took a pair of black kneepads from a cabinet and indicated I should sit on the bench.

  “Yellow happens to be the color of happiness and positivity.”

  He crouched at my feet and lifted my left heel. “Happy and positive.” He laid the plastic shell over my knee and strapped it closed over the sweatpants with sharp efficiency. “Those words describe you”—he let my foot drop and took the other—“not at all.”

  “You think you’re insulting me.”

  “I think I’m showing you respect for being a serious person,” he said, whipping on the second kneepad, then standing.

  “I’m flattered,” I said sourly.

  He stood and took down a pair of yellow gloves. “Your favorite color.”

  I stood and tried to take the gloves, but he pulled them away and took my hand so he could put them on.

  “When you want to fuck a woman,” I said as he Velcroed the gloves tight around my wrist. The top of the thumb had been cut off. “Do you make sure she’s too boring for words? Does she have to be dour and frowny all the time?” I gave him my other hand. “Asking for a friend.”

  He turned my palm up and ran his finger over the edge of the bandage. “When I want to fuck a woman,” he said as he slipped on the second glove, “I accept whatever she is. Boring, dour, or happy and positive.” He reached for the string hanging from the rectangle in the ceiling and pulled down. “It’s not my business.”

  “I don’t understand you. Like, at all.”

  He didn’t care. He had a cord to pull. The trapdoor above creaked as a split of blackness widened into a gaping, damp maw with a folding staircase for teeth. He snapped the ladder into place while I cringed and tried to look away from the blackness above, but it had its own suction. Only a click to my left turned me away. It was Dante checking the flashlight.

  Seeing it worked, he turned to me, ready to say something, then stopped himself. “You shouldn’t go up.”

  He read me like a bad billboard on Sunset. Not that I was trying to hide the fact I was scared, but I didn’t want his sympathy.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’ll fuck you anyway.”

  Oh, no way. I wasn’t a charity screw. We had a deal.

  “Thanks.” I snatched the flashlight from him. “But no thanks. Am I using my phone with no connection? Or should I take yours up? Because I can’t email them to you from here.”

  “We can AirDrop.”

  “Is that the one where your phone touches mine inappropriately?”

  “Only with consent.” He stepped away from the ladder so I could mount it. “Once you’re up, I’ll go up to the roof and track your progress from there. We should be able to hear each other—you can tell me where you are and what you’re seeing.”

  “Okay.” I laid my hand on the wood. “Do I get your number?”

  He looked at me from the tips of my toes to my eyelashes as if seeing me for the first time. “For?”

  “For to call you, duh.”

  His lips tightened, and his eyes narrowed as if he was focusing on something blurry in his head. “Since I’m right here, I assume you mean once we’re back in Los Angeles.”

  “I might… you know…” I shrugged. “Have a clogged drain or a spider in the tub or… whatever. So.” I pressed my thumbprint to the home button, unlocking it.

  He took my phone out of my hands.

  “I’ll make sure the plumber’s not ripping you off,” he said, tapping in his number. “And if I kill a spider for you…” He tapped the contact closed and handed back the phone. “You dispose of the body. I’m not a mortician.”

  “I had a squirrel in my bathroom once,” I said, sliding the hard rectangle into the back pocket of the loose sweats. “I hit it with a curling iron.”

  “You really do need someone to come over and take care of you.” He reached around me and took out the phone. When I grabbed for it, he yanked it away. “It’s going to slide out of that pocket.”

  “The squirrel ran out the shower window with a burned nose.”

  “Mammals are tough like that.” He unzipped my hoodie a little, then stopped.

  “He was never the same again.”

  “Not surprising.” He smiled, slipping the phone into a hidden pocket inside the sweatshirt. “Call me before you traumatize another small animal.”

  He pulled the zipper all the way to the top and smoothed the front down tenderly, then flipped up the hood and tucked my hair in. Though that felt nice and seemed affectionate, it also seemed as if he was doing it out of necessity.

  Spiders. He didn’t want my hair to catch spiders.

  “Put your weight on the beams,” he said.

  “What are those?”

  “They’re the thicker wood pieces.” He swung his arm toward the kitchen. “There’s insulation between them, and it’s just lathe and plaster. It’s not strong enough to hold you.”

  “Got it.” I looked at the ceiling, distracted.

  He stepped away, giving me a look I recognized.

  He thought I was going to nope out.

  Well, he had a lot to learn about Couture Mandy.

  “Get up there before it’s too late. I don’t want to rush your reward.”

  I took a deep breath and climbed. I got far enough to peek into the dark emptiness of the crawlspace before my head hit the ceiling. He stood all the way down there, at the base, where it was light, holding the ladder steady, which he didn’t need to do. It wasn’t that kind of ladder.

  He was making sure I was going to do this.

  “Are you going to the roof or no?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. One more step up this ladder and I would have to get on my hands and knees. “I’m fine,” I added as if I was.

  “Good girl.”
He gave me a lazy swat on the ass. There was no real force behind it, but there was an edge of warning in his voice that sent heat streaming through me, that promised pain and then pleasure I wanted very badly.

  He got out of my line of sight, and I heard the rustle of fabric as he got on his coat. Without him there, I flicked on the flashlight and swept it across the space.

  I was sure it was a damn fine flashlight, but it somehow only managed to illuminate what was directly in its cone of light. Outside that, it was pitch dark, which meant I couldn’t keep anything I saw in my head long enough to relate it to what I’d just seen.

  Wood. Dripping sounds.

  Insulation. Nails.

  The door closing behind Dante.

  A dead hornet’s nest.

  Wet wood.

  A cardboard shoebox.

  Spiderwebs.

  It’s fine. Absolutely fine.

  When I heard a knock above me, I jumped so high I hit my head. “Ow!”

  “You all right?” Dante’s voice came from the other side of the roof.

  “I’m fine.” I sounded annoyed, but I was relieved to hear him. “So, what am I doing?”

  “Crawling.”

  Coming out of his mouth, even through the roofing, the word had a physical presence that was honey-sticky and thick with promise.

  “Where?” I asked,

  “See anything wet?”

  “I’m ignoring the double entendre.”

  “Good, because I didn’t make one.”

  His presence made me comfortable enough to forget the darkness and the flesh-rotting spiders. I shined the flashlight around the corners until I found a beam above that got darker at the top.

  “This way,” I called. “Toward the kitchen.”

  “Go and I’ll follow.”

  Pulling myself fully into the crawlspace, I took a deep breath full of stale air and old wood, held it, and crawled.

  Chapter 21

  DANTE

  “Go,” I said, “and I’ll follow.”

  As I walked slowly above her, I tried not to think too hard about what I’d just done. The sight of her in my clothes, her collarbones revealed by the shirt’s gaping neck, the sweats slipping off her hips… She looked right that way, the same way she looked right in this house and in my bed.

  Knowing she was under me, crawling, made me want to rip the boards off and take her like an animal.

  Patience.

  We had a deal in place. Maybe we would make another one. We lived in the same city and traveled in the same circles. I’d check in on her in LA. See if the paparazzi could leave her alone. Make sure the burns on her hand and heart had healed.

  It was a big city. It would be fine. Good, even. As long as she could keep a secret, which I’d know the next time I saw Logan.

  The phone’s chime was a merciful distraction. Lyric’s name was on the screen and, next to it, a photo of her sunbathing in St. Tropez.

  She had, of course, set that photo on my phone herself. Lyric was both the only sister I had and the baby among her five brothers—which meant she usually got what she wanted from us, our parents, and everyone else.

  A spoiled brat and my favorite.

  No one ever expected us to be close—she was as silly as I was serious, lazy where I worked. I didn’t understand Lyric’s priorities or her life, but she was the only person who could always make me laugh and probably one of the only people in the world who understood my sense of humor.

  I crouched and got my voice close to the roof. “I’m going to take this,” I told Amanda.

  “Okay. Wait. What does that mean?”

  “It’ll be a minute.” I walked to the other side of the house and answered the phone. “Lyric.”

  “Hey, nerdbro,” she said. “How’s no-man’s-land?”

  “It’s all right. The rain finally stopped. Roof’s having some problems though.”

  “Wow, yeah, I really don’t care. Listen, I’m at Crownstead.” She invoked the name of the estate in Santa Barbara. Our parents had lived there for a while, but now it was Lyric’s personal hideaway, the same way the Cambria house had become mine. “On what’s supposed to be a vacation from you people—”

  “Implying you’re gainfully employed?”

  “Okay, so being a Crowne is a full-time job because even from up here, I know waaayyy too much about who’s gonna win gold in the Family Olympics and which of you sorry shitsacks are gonna be eating dirt. That’s you, by the way.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Logan says Mandy Bettencourt was up there with you?”

  “Logan says?” If I’d let Amanda leave half an hour ago, I wouldn’t have had to deflect, but instead, I’d let my impulses run the show.

  “Do I stutter?”

  “Stuttering’s a normal condition a normal person might have.”

  “Whatever. Logan said when he called me. Ella says Mandy was supposed to be home last night, and Ella posted up at her house to ward off the paps, but apparently Mandy never showed. So, now Ella’s freaking out, which of course means Logan is extra freaking out, and now, instead of picking up their fucking phones and grilling you themselves, they want me to drive my ass up to Cambria, grab you, and scour every ditch on the side of the highway for her car, but I think she’s still there and there’s things happening.” She took a deep breath. “Which, if they are, please don’t tell me, okay? Call them and either tell them she’s there or you’re sure she’s alive somewhere so that they leave me alone and I can enjoy my vacation, which I earned after that nightmare of a press trip to the Maldives. Please do not ask.”

  “I won’t.”

  There was a pause, giving my mind the fuel supply for an unhelpful thought. I’m not fucking her right now, but I could be, and then, Maybe when this is all over, when the Hawkinses have been defeated, my victory lap will be fucking Amanda Bettencourt like she deserves, and then—knowing the dangerous part of the conversation had passed—I wondered if Amanda was still where I’d left her.

  “Kidding aside,” Lyric said. “You get so boring when you’re brooding. You aren’t having another existential crisis?”

  Finally, a question I could answer honestly. “I’ve always been very sure that I exist, so crisis averted.”

  Of course, Lyric couldn’t accept the agony of rhetorical defeat. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes.” I crouched at a rustling sound and knocked on the roof three times. “But do you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Whatever. Is she alive or not?”

  Three quick, impatient knocks came back, and I smiled. Her bratty streak was adorable.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Call Logan and Ella, okay?”

  Maybe we wouldn’t fuck, but she could still be my sub. I’d show her self-regulation, and she’d be a fun-loving brat who’d make me nuts.

  “Dante,” Mandy called from below, “where have you been?”

  I hung up the phone without saying goodbye to my sister and checked the length of the call. “It’s been forty seconds.”

  “You said you wouldn’t leave.”

  “I’m sorry.” I put my hand over where she was as if that would transmit sincerity and regret. I shouldn’t have taken the call. It wasn’t important, and Amanda needed me.

  “Wow.”

  “‘Wow’ what?”

  “You apologized.”

  “When I’m wrong.”

  “Huh,” she huffed as if surprised and interested.

  “Have you found anything?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a squeak. “It’s huge.”

  This time, I knew she wasn’t making a double entendre.

  Chapter 22

  MANDY

  The flashlight illuminated a web tucked in the corner of a damp wooden beam. In the middle of it sat a hulk of a spider with translucent red skin and legs that didn’t splay, but held the bulbous body over its web as if using the length to get enough spring to make it to my eyeball.

  Dant
e asked me if I’d found anything just as the creature moved, and I was trembling too hard to answer. It was coming for me, and I was belly-crawling over beams, leaning on elbows and kneepads, unable to run or feint when it came for me.

  There was darkness in every direction, and I couldn’t move my flashlight off the spider because I had to be able to see it if it took advantage and struck. Spiders almost never attacked humans—people had been telling me that for years—and yet it didn’t make me feel any better. Fear wasn’t rational. Fear was something soft and crawling moving closer in this inky dark.

  “Amanda?” Dante’s tone had gone from brisk to worried.

  He was standing almost directly above me, but he still sounded impossibly far away. The spider bent its legs, revving up to pounce, then walked up to the top of the crossbeam for a better angle. My attention followed it, noticing the wet streak where it met the planks and not caring one bit.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, a little farther away now, as if he was looking for me. “Do you need to come down?”

  The spider didn’t launch itself but resettled, and I let the sound of Dante’s voice wrap around my mind. He’d guided me through all kinds of shit in the last few days, and either he’d soothed the spider, or he’d soothed me.

  I could trust him. I would get this done.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Where are you?”

  The roof creaked as he walked back to me, and the spider seemed not just smaller, but harmless.

  “Right here,” he said from just above, so close he must have been kneeling. I put my hand on the raw wood to feel the pressure of his weight.

  “Just a spider,” I said.

  “Tell me what it looks like, and I’ll tell you if it’s a problem.”

  Size of a Humvee. Translucent membrane over a bag of blood.

  Did I really want to know?

  I did not.

  “I can see where the wood’s wet,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Should I go toward the bathroom or the other way?”

  “Go to the source.” His voice was equal parts authoritative and soothing, and I melted into its embrace. “You sure you don’t want to come back down again? I can hire someone to do this. It doesn’t have to be you.”