Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

“I’ve had your mouth, and I’ve had your pussy,” Dante said, hand back underwater to find my crack and part my cheeks to press briefly between them. “I promised I’d take your ass tonight.”

  He had.

  He absolutely fucking had.

  “And you’re going to let me.” His fingers rotated around my tight hole without entering, and he watched me with tense, hungry satisfaction as I adjusted to the pressure. “Aren’t you, Mandy?”

  My name in his mouth for the third time woke me out of the drug of pleasure long enough to answer. “Yes.”

  “Yes to what?”

  “Fuck my ass.” I whispered it so low even I could barely hear it. It wasn’t half as loud as the shout I made when his slick fingers slid into my asshole, stretching me with a pleasure I didn’t expect.

  “There’s your voice.” With his other hand, he reached under the water and played with my clit. “Say it louder.”

  My body felt as if it was nothing but nerve endings—the ache of his fingers inside me, opening up the space he needed while his other hand stimulated my nub. “Fuck me in the ass.”

  “With what?”

  He took my clit between two fingers and clamped it while fucking my ass with his other hand. The sensation was unbearable, and I wanted more.

  “Should I let you come now?” he asked. “Or should I wait until you’ve taken my dick all night long, until you’re sobbing for it?”

  I shook my head. I knew what I wanted, which was more of everything, but I also knew what I needed, which was to let go of control completely.

  “Use words.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  He removed his hands, and I almost cried no, but he stretched his body over mine and spoke softly into my cheek. “I want you to love it.”

  “I will. Just—” Give it to me was lost in a groan as the head of his cock pushed against my pussy.

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Relax if you can.” He got up on his knees and stroked lube on his cock.

  I took a moment to wonder how he was going to get it inside me. “I’ll try.”

  “You’re so hot,” he said, dropping back down. “So sexy. When I saw you tonight, in public, I knew you were mine.” He put the head of his cock against my ass. “Now my dick is going to let you know it.”

  He pushed slowly, forcing the muscles to yield. My breath hitched.

  “You okay, amea?”

  “Yes.”

  He pushed farther, and I must have looked pained, because he stopped.

  “Easy does it.” He stroked my clit, and I groaned as the pleasure overcame the pain. “Your ass is clenching around me.”

  Flicking me under the water, he slowly drove deeper, and it hurt. It hurt the virgin muscle and my belly, but the pain nailed down the pleasure. To give up one was to give it all up.

  “Mandy,” he said. “It hurts…”

  “Deeper.” I grunted. “All the way.”

  The pain was subsiding, but he was still going easy. This wasn’t how Dante’s whore begged. I wanted it more than that.

  “Fuck my ass,” I demanded. “Fuck it hard. Please.”

  With a whispered yes, he leveraged one hand on my knee, pushing it toward my chest while flicking my clit. A second later, he shoved his entire cock deep in my ass. All I could do was take the brutal power of his thrusts, spread and split as he fucked his way deep inside me, then deeper, over and over again, fucking the pain out of me. I watched all of it happen: the ripple of the muscles on his torso as he moved and the flex of one arm holding the weight of his body while the other teased out my orgasm.

  Finally, I heard myself saying, “Please, please, please, I need to come.”

  “You going to come for me, my filthy little whore?” His fingers tortured my clit faster.

  “Don’t stop,” I begged, clutching his chest. “Please.” I must have been sobbing, because my vision was clouded.

  “Come while I fuck your ass.”

  He’d barely spat out permission, and I dissolved, with the ring of my asshole pulsing its hunger for him. I vaguely felt him coming, hot and wet and filthy, deep inside the most secret part of my body, and I thought I might never return from being taken apart and put back together, molecularly rearranged, as the aftershocks quaked through me and I screamed his name.

  He slipped out carefully, but I keened as my body adjusted to the loss, and he pulled me into him.

  “Was that all right?” he asked, kissing my cheek and jaw.

  “My pussy feels left out.”

  He laughed. “I can’t constantly have my dick inside you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not practical.” His hands moved softly over my body, offering sweet, soothing touches to the skin he’d abused.

  “I don’t care about practical,” I said eventually. “I don’t care about anything.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I nodded against his shoulder, and he leaned back, pushing me away to look in my eyes.

  “Then I’m revising the deal,” he said, moving a lock of wet hair away from my eyes. He looked like a different man in that moment—real and approachable and warm, as if the cold, unavailable bastard had been worn down.

  “You’re revising it?”

  “I am. Unilaterally.”

  “What if I don’t agree?”

  “You will.”

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself.” I’d do whatever he suggested. I knew that for sure, but there was no reason to make it easy for him.

  “Do you want to hear it before you agree to it?”

  My fingers were pruning, and I was getting thirsty, but I didn’t want to leave the bath, so I turned around and curled into him, resting my head on the front of his shoulder at the waterline.

  “Sure,” I said, laying my hand on his chest. “Tell me.”

  “We’ll do whatever we want for as long as we want. Fuck everybody. They’ll handle it, or they won’t. Not our problem.”

  I pressed my mouth tight so he wouldn’t feel my uncontrollable smile, because he was right. I was going to risk getting hurt again and stupidly, recklessly, wholeheartedly agree to this change. “And Logan?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s not going to like it,” I singsonged.

  “He can fuck off,” Dante sang back.

  I laughed and settled into the bath, leaning against his solid form with his arms wrapped around me, protecting me from whatever might come.

  Even a Sunday brunch with Caleb Hawkins.

  Chapter 34

  DANTE

  My father hadn’t sent the box back to Thoze. It was still at his house. I could pick it up and send it when I was satisfied Caleb had kept his end of the deal.

  My parents lived in a modern palace in the Bel Air hills. There wasn’t a house in Los Angeles harder to fill, but they’d managed it by using a corner of it and leaving the rest for parties and get-togethers.

  I parked in the underground garage and came up the elevator to the second level, which looked over one of the pools. My mother waved to me from a lounger.

  When I walked in her direction, she removed her bug-eye sunglasses and ran to meet me inside, her arms out for an embrace. “Dante!”

  We hugged, and she kissed my cheek. Her hands shook when she slid them in mine—not from nerves or hunger, but from a form of Parkinson’s that would eventually take her life.

  “You look fantastic, Ma.”

  “Tell me more.” She pulled me outside, where one of her staff set cookies and coffee on the table under the eaves.

  “Radiant,” I said. “Stunning.”

  “Is that all you have?” she asked as she sat.

  “Are you working out, or is walking across this absurd house burning three thousand calories a day?”

  “There’s my acerbic boy.” She laughed as I sat. “We ate lunch before my appointment, but if you want something…?”

  “I’m good.” I p
oured coffee for both of us. “Is Dad in?”

  “Stay anyway.”

  I wasn’t staying. I was meeting Mandy at Brandywine for a pre-fuck meal.

  “What did the doctor say?” I asked.

  She sighed and looked over the pool, pausing before telling the hard truth. “I just need to make it until I know all of you are settled with families of your own.”

  “Then you’ll live a long, long time.”

  “Every pot has a lid.” She waved dismissively. “Even you.”

  “Am I the pot or the lid?”

  “You’re not both, I’ll tell you that much.” She took a crunchy cookie and brought it slowly to her lips. Once, when she was having particularly bad tremors, she’d missed her mouth. Since then, she ate alone, or medicated, and even then she required measured intention. “I heard there was an incident in Cambria.” She brushed a crumb off her chin.

  “What did you hear?”

  “So, there was an incident?”

  “Incidentally.”

  With her cup suspended above the saucer by two shaky hands, she smiled at the familiarity of my avoidance.

  “I was going to ask you to bring my typewriter home,” she said before sipping her coffee, “but you were back before I had a chance.”

  “Next time.”

  “Hm.”

  “Hm? Is there a direct question you want to ask?”

  She put down her cup and settled back in her chair. “You left the house with holes in it.”

  My parents had always insisted I hire out the work that needed to be done on the Cambria house, and sometimes—when the repair required expertise I didn’t have—I did. So, I knew she wasn’t annoyed that I’d walked away from two holes in the ceiling and a leaky roof. She was trying to open the box marked “Incident in Cambria” from the other side.

  “Mom, you’re much more fun when you just ask what you want to know.”

  “You always go up there alone, and this time, someone was with you. Your father says it was the other Bettencourt girl.”

  The “other” Bettencourt girl would be Mandy, Samantha’s sister. The one who hadn’t committed suicide. My mother was compassionate but had only witnessed the hurt Samantha’s fiancé—my brother—suffered.

  “She’s nice,” I said. “Does that kind of fashion you like. One or two things for too much money.”

  “You’re pretending you don’t know the word couture?”

  “That. You should meet her. See her stuff.”

  Mom’s eyebrow twitched, and that in particular meant I should stop bullshitting her. I’d read her hobbies and tastes correctly, but I’d fallen short in trying to play casual.

  “Ella told Logan,” I predicted. “And Logan told you.”

  “Logan told your father, and your father told me. Then you came here acting like it’s about dresses. So… everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said, though Mandy was more than fine. She was perfect.

  “Since I’m your mother, I get to ask how serious it is.”

  If I was ever going to admit anything about Mandy to my mother, this was the time. But she’d worry about how her perpetually single son would handle a breakup, then she’d worry that I’d picked an incompatible woman, because nothing about Amanda Bettencourt and I made sense. My mother didn’t deserve to spend a moment of her life in emotional discomfort over any of her children.

  “It is what it is,” I said unhelpfully. “And the truth is…”

  The truth was Mom’s emotional discomfort caused by knowing I’d lied to her would last more than a moment.

  “The truth is I don’t know. I need to get away to figure it out.” The rest of the words tumbled out of me unrestrained. “And I know I always say that before I go to Cambria, but this time… it’s different. She’s different. She’s not who I expected, and now I’m not either because she’s infected me, and I can’t tell if I’m sick or if I’m cured.”

  My mother’s gaze was fixed downward, and I followed it to my hand, which was tightened into a fist so tight I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to let it go.

  “D-Tay!” Lyric’s toddler pronunciation of my name came from the house. She skipped out in a striped bikini and threw her arms around me.

  My fist came loose to hug her. “Lick,” I replied with what my very serious seven-year-old self had called her back out of a sense of spite and injustice.

  Lyric threw herself in a chair and stacked three cookies in her palm.

  “How about a plate, sweetheart?” Mom said.

  “I’m good.” She leaned back. Our mother handed her a plate, which Lyric took. “So, did you see the thing?” she asked me, taking half a cookie in one bite.

  “Yes?”

  “You look kind of badass.”

  “What thing?” Mom asked me.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted.

  “Oh my God, really?” Lyric clicked the rest of her cookie onto the plate and slid it onto the table. “‘I’m Dante,’” she mocked me in a comedic baritone while getting out her phone. “‘I won’t admit I don’t know something.’”

  “‘I’m Lyric,’” I shot a falsetto back, “‘and I think I know anything.’”

  “Fuck you, dude.” She scrolled through her phone.

  “You could have just answered her,” Mom said.

  “She could have asked a question with a proper noun.”

  As a reply, Lyric slid her phone to me, glass side up, and Mom came behind me to see the video of me making an ass of myself in the Harmony convenience store under the headline:

  BILLIONAIRE CROWNE IN JEALOUS RAGE

  OVER RENALDO DEWITT’S HONEY

  If a video like this had come across my sight with different players, I would have dismissed the enraged meathead making threats as a pathetic excuse for a man.

  But there I was, in full color, trying to beat up a man three inches shorter but twice my size while a woman wearing my clothes tried to bring me to my senses before I was thrown out.

  I shut the phone and slid it across the table.

  Caleb was not to be trusted. I should have known that before I met with him.

  “Is badass a proper noun?” Lyric asked.

  “No,” Mom and I said at the same time.

  “Well, all my friends think you’re one.”

  “All your friends haven’t had a coherent thought since the last Taylor Swift album,” I snapped, taking all the good-humored joking out of my tone.

  Lyric flipped me the bird, eyes still on the shiny glass.

  She didn’t care. It could have been her in that video, and she wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. The experience that almost broke Mandy would have rolled off my sister’s back.

  Mandy. She wasn’t fully over the last time she’d been the subject of a tabloid headline, and here she was again, viral for all the wrong reasons, because of me.

  “Dante”—Mom put her hand over mine—“this is what you mean by not knowing if you’re sick or cured?”

  I ignored her, still latching on to my baby sister. “You think you’re badass?” I said, half out of my seat. “You’re Teflon? You want to know why you don’t care what anyone else thinks?”

  “What’s your damage?”

  “So you don’t have to care about anything.” I was standing over her now. “That’s why. You don’t give a single shit, and that’s not a strength. That doesn’t make you a quality person. It doesn’t make you mature. It makes you detached and cold and dead, and I want better for you.”

  Lyric blinked, eyes big and blue, long, brown hair parted in the middle, looking soft and vulnerable without a comeback or a hand sign to protect her.

  Who else was I going to hurt today?

  I wanted to hurt Caleb Hawkins first, but it would be Mandy.

  “I have to go,” I said, coming behind my mother to kiss her on the cheek.

  I patted Lyric’s shoulder as I passed, hoping she had enough Teflon left to forgive me.

  * *
*

  I never found out where Dad had left the box, and I didn’t care. I had to get to Mandy before anyone else showed her the video. She had to hear my apology for dragging her out into the spotlight again. She’d be angry, and she’d be right.

  That’s not how this works, bro.

  I could blame Caleb for breaking a deal, but it was my loss of control in Harmony that would hurt Mandy. He’d told me clearly that he had all the cards before I’d playacted at having a say over the video. I didn’t because I cared too much, and the person who doesn’t give a shit holds the winning hand.

  I had a moral obligation to beat him anyway for being a liar and a weasel, for disappointing his mother, for avenging her over a relationship he didn’t understand.

  No one understood it.

  Forget the infidelity clause. Forget the whole prenup.

  Winding around the two-lane stretch of Sunset, I realized that maybe I didn’t understand it either. Even if I’d been emotionally old enough to be in a relationship with a married woman in her forties, I hadn’t been experienced enough to really know what was going on under the surface.

  Maybe she hadn’t told me everything.

  Maybe I’d been too green to be there. Too easily manipulated.

  Too young to fully relate to her.

  Maybe that was why she chose me.

  Because she died at the end of it all, I’d never ascribed any intention to the way things worked out. The clubs being in London. The structure of the silent partnership. My age.

  I’d been used.

  Caleb was truly devastated by his mother’s death. His bitterness was as real as mine, but the whole thing had been a massive manipulation.

  None of this excused releasing that video, but the blame was irrelevant. Culpability went back a few generations of feuding.

  As I approached Mandy’s block, I had a clarity over parts of my life I hadn’t realized were obscured.

  I texted her at a red light.

  —I’m near your place—

  —I’m at the Grove. I’ll be home

  in an hour. Door code is 9182

  if you want to go in and make

  yourself comfortable—