Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  “How’s the work coming?” he asked without looking at me, so I got to stare at the way his objective good looks were elevated by competence as he slipped a knife from the block, spun the handle around his finger, and let it land in his palm.

  “Slow.” I sat on the opposite side of the bar and watched him slice the meat with sexy precision. “Harder than I expected. My fingers keep slipping off the sides of the keys.”

  “Hm,” was all he said.

  I couldn’t determine if that was good or bad. Probably indifferent. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself. I wanted to fuck him, not love him.

  “Do you have, like, a deadline for all this to be done?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He lifted the slices, then the bigger piece of meat, onto an oval plate and brought it to the table. “But I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

  “Why not?”

  “Doing it fast is the enemy of doing it right.”

  His hand rested on the back of a chair as if he was going to pull it out, but he stopped himself, and—with his hand flat—he indicated I should sit in it.

  “True.” I sat. “Shortcuts are a great way to piss off your client.”

  “Hm.”

  Again with the hm. It wasn’t even a word, but he managed to tell me everything with it. The first hm of the conversation had been confirmation that he’d heard me. This one was agreement and—oddly, even uncomfortably—admiration.

  He lifted the lid of a serving bowl to reveal little potatoes dusted with herbs.

  People with one-tenth of Dante Crowne’s money stopped doing their own cooking unless they invested in a restaurant. My parents were dead broke compared to what they had been born with, but God forbid Dad would pick up a pot. Sometimes Mom would make one dish for a dinner party to impress the guest but have the rest catered because—really?

  I glanced over the countertops. They were clean. He didn’t have staff hiding somewhere. The guest room, where I’d typed and obsessed over commas, faced out into the driveway. I would have heard someone pull up. There were no servants’ quarters.

  He lifted two slices of steak onto my plate. The burgundy glaze spread evenly into a spice-dotted puddle as if he had personally ordered it to go no farther than two centimeters from the meat. He hadn’t left it super-rare, the way purist macho grill guys sometimes did, the way Renaldo ordered it. He pretended to like steak but never finished it—until he cooked for me one time, and it was gray throughout.

  I could assume Dante had made the entire meal, or I could ask. We needed something to talk about over dinner anyway.

  “So, you cook?” Since he didn’t offer to scoop my potatoes, I did it myself.

  “Obviously.”

  I waited the length of time it took for me to cut off an end of steak and spear it with a potato, but he didn’t elaborate.

  Well, then. That wasn’t tonight’s conversation starter.

  I ate, and layers of flavor exploded like fireworks that burned different colors in the sky. Sweet and tangy and a rich smoke I had to savor before swallowing.

  “Hm,” I said, lifting the wine he’d poured for us. “And that’s a direct quote.”

  He gave a quiet laugh. Better… because a loose Dante was a Dante who’d give me what I wanted. I was learning to appreciate what men went through to get women into bed—analyzing every breath and movement not as a reflection of my own worth, but to gauge how much closer I was to my goal.

  “So,” I started. “Why do you need these conversations typed?”

  He took a long time to answer, but I didn’t press him because either he was thinking about answering or not answering while I was thinking about the strength of his hands, the way his fingers angled around the handle of the fork, his jaw tensing and releasing as he chewed.

  I ate. He ate. I thought he forgot the question until he answered it.

  “Typing it out makes it easier for lawyers to digest.”

  “So, there’s a court case or something?”

  My question wasn’t judgmental. Guys like the Crownes—rich guys with deep pockets and multilayered business interests—sued and got sued all the time. That was what retainers were for.

  “Or something,” he said.

  After a gulp of wine, I said, “There’s one thing I have to know. When we all played hoodat…was that you in the closet?”

  He smiled like a man caught with a pleasing secret he’d waited a long time to be uncovered. “You know the answer.”

  “You never said anything.” I shrugged as if it had meant nothing at all, but I wasn’t fooling either of us.

  “We were two kids in a closet.” He paused to drink his own wine. “What did you want me to say?”

  “What I asked. Did you know it was me or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, you lost the game on purpose?”

  “Did I lose?”

  “Kind of.”

  He leaned his back in his chair and crossed his arms. It was hard to not look at his hands. They weren’t the narrow, soft hands of a businessman, but the wide, strong hands of a man who worked with them. “Getting a promotion in the social pecking order isn’t a win. I got to spend seven minutes in a closet with Amanda Bettencourt. I felt the curves of her body. She tasted me, and I tasted her. Winning’s fine, but that’s a landslide.”

  Nerves dampened my palms, and the fork slipped, clattering to the plate. I picked it up and looked away. I’d gone years thinking it was Dante and sure his dominance in the dark was a meaningless game he’d played just for the sake of it.

  Yet, I couldn’t be sure he was talking about me and not just one of the girls in the other room. Did he feel like a winner because he’d wanted me or because I’d let him put his finger in my mouth? If Ella or Millie had been in the closet, exchanging spit without kissing, would it have been equally successful?

  I couldn’t put the question together in a way that didn’t make me sound needy and insecure. He saved me the trouble.

  The salad dressing was made with lemons from the tree. Meyers. Sweet and sour in a way that wasn’t forced or cloying. Complex as a series of adolescent questions nagging at me in my womanhood.

  “How far did you get in the tapes?” Dante asked.

  Of course. He would ask a girl to beg, spank her until she almost came, then talk business over dinner.

  “I finished the hello-how-do-you-dos,” I said. “Just a page. The typewriter, it’s slow.”

  Staring at him over the rim of my wine glass, I tried to transmit an unsubtle hint. Why don’t you ask me to do something I’m better at?

  “I appreciate you helping me, Amanda.” He nodded, his smile sliding dangerously close to a smirk, but there was something warm there, a single caviar egg of genuine emotion glistening in his otherwise distant façade.

  I was too distracted to protest his continued use of my full name.

  “So, we both know why I was run out of LA,” I said, trying to sound cavalier, “but what are you doing up here? Other than tormenting nice girls with boring projects.”

  “Why do you still think of yourself as a girl?”

  “It’s just an expression.”

  “So, you’re not a girl. Are you nice?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “That’s why the work’s boring?”

  “Sure, small talk between Veronica Hawkins and her lawyer’s riveting if you’re nice.” I rolled my eyes at the absurdity of the idea, but I still caught a flash of tension as it made its way through his body.

  “You’re scared,” he said sharply, one stiff finger tapping the tabletop.

  Whatever softness I had seen in Dante was quickly hidden. What happened here? I had been making progress, and now I was looking at him through a wall of anxiety.

  “I’m not scared of anything.” Cowering from the paparazzi in a secret location counted as fear, but fuck him. He didn’t have the right to pretend he knew me. “You’re the one too scared to even tell me why you can�
�t have your secretary or whatever type up a bunch of blah-blahing from 2005 about”—I waved my hand, reaching for some small detail from the tape—“prenups and infidelity clauses or…”

  Abruptly, he stood. “I have work to do. I clean as I go, but dishes need to be done. The leftovers need to get put away. Containers are under the sink. You can scrub the broiling pan with the green brush.”

  “Oh,” I said in confusion.

  “We don’t have staff here,” he said, dropping his arms. “I cook, you clean. If you make the meal, I clean.”

  “Right.” I agreed by reflex, not reflection. “No problem.”

  “Good. I’ll see you later.”

  I watched the way his jeans fit as he walked out, and I could say without reservation, from a strictly professional standpoint, they were perfect.

  I just couldn’t get a handle on him. Getting a guy into bed should have been easier, but I could barely keep from pissing him off.

  He was single, and so was I. He’d told me I was beautiful and had gotten hard when I was on my knees at his feet. I’d practically offered him my pussy on a platter. What was the disconnect? What was I missing that would get us from this kind of verbal sparring and hard spanking to the hard fucking I was really after?

  I collected the dishes and took them to the sink. That was when I realized there was no dishwasher. They had to be done by hand, 1950s style.

  “Worst. Vacation. Ever,” I muttered, running the water as hard and hot as it would go, daring him to come back in the kitchen to tell me I was wasting it.

  Chapter 13

  MANDY

  Dante may have washed as he cooked but not enough to make the job easy. By the time I finished the dishes, my hands were pruney, and I was more committed than ever to the idea that having a full-time cleaning person was not a luxury.

  Dante was in my room, playing the conversation I’d spent the day transcribing, tapping a red pen on the desk like a guy with more problems than time. When I walked in, he pulled the headphones off and held up the page I’d typed. It had so many red marks it looked like a creative three-year-old had gotten hold of it.

  Admittedly, I wanted another spanking and then some, but I wasn’t trying to screw up this badly. I snapped the paper from him. I couldn’t have made that many mistakes.

  He’d circled misspellings of “prenuptial,” “renegotiation,” and “anniversary,” as well as two instances where I didn’t capitalize the V in Veronica and one for the H in Hawkins.

  He’d crossed out a hyphen I’d added between “infidelity” and “clause” because it seemed like something a person who knew what they were doing would add.

  He’d removed a line break between “If William has an affair, you should be protected,” and her laughter.

  He’d crossed out commas—which I’d littered all over like cupcake sprinkles—dropped question marks where he didn’t know what I was thinking, and crossed out “benifishary” to correct the spelling.

  “Did your family even own a dictionary?”

  I had no idea but probably not. My mother had thrown a party for Umberto Lario when he won a Pulitzer, but otherwise, we weren’t bookish. If we had a decorative dictionary, it was probably on its side with a vase over it.

  “If you want to leave,” he said, leaning against the desk and crossing his arms, “you don’t have to fail. You can just leave.”

  I scoffed, resisting the urge to slap him right across his gorgeous face. Instead, I slapped open the top drawer and got out my nightgown.

  “I’m off the clock,” I said, whipping off my T-shirt, leaving my torso bare down to a plain, butter-colored cotton bra. “I sat here all day and typed your transcript.” I wiggled the nightgown over my head. “I went slow because I knew I’d make mistakes anyway.” I unhooked my bra and pulled the straps through the sleeves—a trick every girl learns in the first five minutes of womanhood. “I tried my best with a sore ass, no thanks to you, but thanks.”

  His eyes wandered to the natural shape of my body under the thin nightgown, but his arms were still crossed.

  Let him look. I shouldn’t have bothered changing summer-camp style. I should have just pranced around naked and given him something to stare at.

  “I washed your dishes.” I wiggled out of my pants. “I let you call me the wrong name. I typed a bunch of garbage on that thing. So you”—I threw my dirty clothes into a pile in the corner—“can correct me all you want, and you can spank me for typing wrong because I like it, but you can back off with the insults.”

  I stormed into the bathroom, closing the door like a grown-up even though I wanted to slam it so hard this shitty house shook, and twisted the tub faucet all the way to hot. The sound of the water was the music of freedom.

  I laid my hands on the end of the vanity and breathed. My hair wasn’t half-bad for the humidity, and my braless tits were pretty hot in the gauzy yellow fabric. Good. I’d given him an eyeful.

  It would be a minute before the water was hot enough to plug the drain. Might as well spend the time not thinking about Dante.

  Standing straight, I snapped my toothbrush from the charger.

  My toothbrush was, unfortunately, a piece of Renaldo memorabilia. It had been in an Emmy Awards Show swag bag honoring Renaldo’s wife’s nomination for some boring historical miniseries she’d done. The sleek piece of rose gold housed a high-powered motor to keep your teeth movie-star clean. Renaldo had kept his in my bathroom for the days chewing gum didn’t get the taste of my pussy out of his mouth.

  Fuck this thing and every single object that man had ever touched.

  When I got home, I was throwing it away and getting a plain white one.

  The second beep had just alerted me to the end of the first minute of brushing when Dante came in from his side and shut off the faucet.

  “Hey!”

  “No baths. I told you.”

  The cold water gurgled down the drain, and I gave him a solo view of my middle finger.

  “Amanda.”

  “Name’s not Amanda,” I garbled. “Hang on, okay?”

  Dante watched impassively, silent and still for the next sixty seconds. When the brush beeped, I turned it off, spat white foam into the sink, and rinsed my mouth.

  “It tells you how long to brush?” he asked, picking up the brush to examine it.

  I nodded, hoping that my face conveyed, How does a rich motherfucker like you not know how an electric toothbrush works?

  “That’s impressive micromanagement.” His face was all angles, harsh and handsome and unpredictable. If he wasn’t so impossible, I would have been in real trouble, but I’d be fine. Totally fine.

  “Not as impressive as you coming in here without knocking.”

  “I don’t ask permission to perfect and correct what’s mine.”

  Perfecting and correcting were fine, but had he just insinuated that he owned me?

  He had.

  How was I supposed to feel about that?

  Was I supposed to feel the warm calm his words drew?

  Or the stiffened hackles that followed?

  Both.

  Yes. Both were valid, but only one needed to be expressed out loud.

  “You didn’t earn me,” I said.

  He pulled the hand towel from the ring and wiped the puddles of water from the marble counter, nodding as if he agreed and intended to rectify the problem.

  “Elbows on the counter.” He spoke with a calm command that indicated I’d obey him without question.

  So, I did.

  Chapter 14

  DANTE

  The typos weren’t the point. They had never been the point. Ernie or any decent secretary could get everything taken care of for both tapes. If I’d really needed the transcription of the generic tape, I would never have gone to this particular failed secretarial school candidate for them. She either couldn’t spell or didn’t want to, and her issues with commas went deeper than I could have imagined.

  And none of that change
d the fact that I wanted her so much it was turning me inside out until I was unrecognizable to myself. At dinner, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to order her to crawl under the table and sit at my feet. The vision of her curled up there, my obedient little secret, made me burn with desire. Or maybe I wanted to get down there myself and put my mouth on her and tell her she had to finish her dinner before she’d be allowed to come.

  The flowchart of plans for her body had run through my mind and landed at my cock until the moment she told me Veronica Hawkins was on the call, and I knew I was playing a game I couldn’t win. The generic, meaningless tape wasn’t meaningless at all.

  Veronica had been asking her lawyer about divorcing William. That was all I could put together from what Amanda had said, and I didn’t want her to tell me more. I wanted to hear it from my first love’s mouth.

  I hadn’t been able to keep my mind on dinner. I left her with the dishes and went to her desk. I put on her headphones, listened to the words Veronica had said, and was whipped back to a reality more terrible than I imagined.

  Forget the infidelity clause. Forget the whole prenup.

  Veronica had always told me her husband couldn’t find out about our affair. She’d been desperate for secrecy. Best-case scenario? He’d leave her destitute. Probable case? William was a bruiser of a man who’d beat her near to death.

  So, we hatched a plan to protect me and give us a way out. I’d own properties we bought together with her savings and my One Big Thing—the one nonrefusable request we got to ask our parents for. She’d cosign as an adult silent partner, hiding behind a Russian doll of shell companies. My parents didn’t know about Veronica—my silent partner—and since I was the first sibling to request their OTB and I asked them to keep it secret, they’d made the mistake of giving me the money without asking too many questions.

  I’d thought I was keeping Veronica safe.