Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  He stepped forward, halving the distance between us. Something in the air unraveled. I hoped it was his self-control and his commitment to refusing to pay his debt to my body.

  “I’m taking this thing with both hands,” he said, “and breaking it. No more sex. No more anything. All there is now is the part where we part ways before I hurt you.”

  I was breathless with everything—his speech and the aching freeze of his gaze on my skin and the overwhelming nearness of him, the way his body was still hot and almost close enough to touch.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “This is your stupid way of protecting me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? That’s the first unsure statement I’ve heard you make, and let me tell you, Mr. Maybe, Mr. Dealbreaker… if I get hurt, that’s my problem. Logan can—”

  “I’m not afraid of Logan,” he growled with impatience.

  “Then what?”

  He tried to punctuate the end of the discussion by slamming the tailgate closed, but the car’s hydraulics eased it back into place, and he was left frowning at its noncompliance while I wondered what exactly I wanted out of him.

  “I’m not going to beg you to fuck me when you already agreed to it. And whatever, I’ll find someone else to do your job.” The thought of anyone else touching me seemed wrong, but I said it anyway just to soothe myself. I wasn’t trying to make him jealous. That wouldn’t have even been a plan B. Or a plan X. You can’t impose jealousy on a man like Dante.

  So, when he took me by the arms, gritting his teeth with eyes big as doorknobs, I was shocked at being grabbed, but more than that, I’d made him jealous. It wasn’t like him, and it wasn’t like me to play that card. We weren’t ourselves.

  We’d left the Cambria house and become two people who never would have liked each other in the first place.

  “I’m—” I started.

  “Don’t—” He stopped himself, tightening his lips into a line.

  I lost track of which of us was moving, who had taken which step; all I knew was that we were separated by no more than an arm’s length and he could have pulled me close and kissed me. All I knew was that I would not resist.

  My brain formed the words let me go, but my mouth wouldn’t say them. I didn’t want him to let me go. Ever.

  “You care,” I said.

  He neither confirmed nor denied. Not with words. Not with his expression and not with the suddenness of his next move.

  He pulled me into him, planting a hard kiss as if he were trying to get it to seed and grow. I clasped his lapel, softened my jaw against his, and let him rule my mouth with his. He released my arms but not my mouth, moving his cold palms up to my face as he pushed me against the car.

  We kissed for a month, through spring into summer’s heat and winter’s damp chill, unwilling to let go of each other and deal with the inevitable, until he pulled away a few inches to yank us back into the moment again.

  “I care.” His lips moved so close to mine I felt the words. “I don’t know who I am with you. I make decisions without thinking. I break my promises to myself. You make me weak, Amanda.”

  Breathing in his scent, rich with the smell of ground coffee mixing with the ozone of more rain, I let him brush my cheek with his soft lips and unshaven sandpaper skin.

  “My name is Mandy,” I whispered.

  The ice started in his eyes and spread through his entire body. He stood up straight and backed up a step, letting the mouth that had just kissed me curl into a smirk.

  “Thank you for your help this weekend,” he said.

  Wow, he was really cutting this off. In the interest of protecting our hearts, he was breaking the deal. I didn’t know whether I admired him or despised him, but I knew it didn’t really matter what I thought. It only mattered that he chose.

  “My pleasure.”

  “The pleasure’s all mine.” He spun his keyring on a finger, and when it landed, he hit the fob button that started the truck.

  This wasn’t supposed to hurt, but it did, and I had to hide it from him and myself.

  He needed to get the hell out of here before he got an eyeful of me losing my composure.

  “Yeah,” I said, stepping away. “Bye.”

  I walked away and got five steps before I had to turn back, just to check.

  He was at the open door, getting into the car, then closing it with a slap. The white lights in the back flashed when he changed gears, then went red, and he drove away without looking back.

  And that was that.

  The truck was nearly silent. I watched helplessly as he drove away, turned a corner out the back way. I heard the clack of the rear gate sliding closed.

  At last, I was alone at the Crownes’ Cambria estate the way I’d planned—back when I was a different woman and so much the same.

  Chapter 25

  MANDY

  I’d been right about Dante when all I’d wanted was to be wrong.

  He’d done the correct, mature thing that I hadn’t been able to do myself.

  Though I could have gotten myself inside and finished the week away alone, in a leaky house, I didn’t want to. My bags were packed, and I was ready to go. All signs pointed to home, where at least I knew the rules.

  The drive home was dry, with spots of sun through the clouds. I cranked the music as I headed south.

  About ten miles south of Cambria, my phone sprang to life, and my first thought—the one I wanted to pry out of my head with a grapefruit spoon—was that maybe he was calling me.

  I pulled over.

  No. It wasn’t him. It was Ella from days ago, sending a picture of a gown she was working on for the WearHaus event, which took all of her time in the months leading up to it—yet she’d spent a day she couldn’t spare coming up to Cambria to find me.

  “You’re a good friend,” I said to the phone, swiping one picture too far, to the spider in the crawlspace, the hornet’s nest, the creepy things in the shadows.

  The leaks and damage were there, but somehow, I’d gotten my fears into every frame.

  I sent them to Dante, captioned, and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. As I pulled out, the gas gauge caught my attention. It had read low when I left, and the tank wasn’t getting any fuller. I needed to go electric. Off the grid. Like Dante.

  “Like me,” I said, hitting the blinker. “Not like anyone else.”

  I got off at the Harmony exit and pulled into the gas station. A pubescent girl eating a granola bar while her dad pumped gas stared at me. Had she seen the gossip pages? Did she recognize me?

  I caught my reflection in the pump’s chrome… wearing Dante’s sweats and his mother’s blue Wellies. I looked like a kid in her father’s clothes, and I laughed. I would have stared at me too.

  Once the tank was full, I decided I was hungry and parked in the little strip mall with the grocery and hardware stores. I picked out a bottle of water and a bag of cashews, standing in line and staring into space as I mentally replayed everything Dante and I had ever said to each other.

  Stop.

  Why did I keep asking myself how he felt about me? That wasn’t knowable, and telling myself I could figure it out was a bad habit I had to shake.

  How did I feel about him?

  The guy behind the counter rang up my cashews and water with a series of boops and beeps.

  I liked Dante.

  I cared about him.

  I wanted him to be happy.

  Getting out my card, I huffed a laugh at myself. Liking, caring, wanting his happiness made him a friend, and though I’d confused friendship and romance before, I wasn’t now.

  Whatever he and I had was more than friendship, but somehow, the loss wasn’t anxious and desperate the way breakups were with me. I didn’t feel alone or rejected. I wasn’t mentally beating myself up over things I’d said or done with him.

  Losing him hurt, but it was less frantic. It was a testing tug of a rope around a lassoed heart. A seamstress gently ripping open
a seam that was sewn too loosely.

  Gathering my stuff, I was caught short at the magazine rack.

  BRAD SINCLAIR SEEN SPINNING IN TEACUPS WITH BABY NANNY

  SHE REALLY LET LOOSE!

  The ever-handsome actor was blurred inside the Disneyland teacup ride. To his right, a little girl gripped the center circle, and to his left, a woman bent over at the waist, possibly letting loose by puking out her guts. The surrounding headlines included Michael Greydon with his paparazzi girlfriend, Fiona Drazen with a cup of coffee, and Justin Beckett generally being a douchebag.

  No Renaldo.

  No me.

  I opened a copy and scanned the inside pages.

  Nothing. Not even Tatiana made it.

  Like that, it was over.

  I hadn’t realized how much my infamy had been weighing on me. Ripping it away had been like a giant leaf blower in the sky, pushing the clouds from the sunlight. I could see. Finally, even as my eyes fogged, what was right in front of me got very clear, and it wasn’t celebrity gossip.

  It was Dante. How he’d made me feel safe in the crawlspace. How I’d trusted him to do things in bed that I’d never trusted another man to do. How he’d felt against me when he taught me to chop a log. How—all those years ago—I never forgot the emotional release of control in those minutes in a dark closet.

  “Hey there.” A man’s voice came from my left. “You all right, miss?”

  I rubbed the tears away enough to see the guy who spoke. He was built like a truck and covered in a plaid flannel tarp, had a thick, reddish beard and a matching head of hair that was starting an early retreat.

  “Yeah.” I closed the paper and put it back in the rack. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Harmless, I swear.” He held up his hand to reveal a wedding ring. “My wife likes knowing I’m a gentleman when I’m on the road.”

  “She seems like a nice person.”

  “Been eleven years.”

  “And you’re on the road a lot?” I asked, eager for the pleasant distraction of a decent man.

  “Trucker. We broke up over it a dozen times, but it don’t stick.”

  “That sounds painful.”

  “Nah. I mean, yeah, but I always figure we’ll straighten it out. Takes the edge off.”

  Was that what I was feeling? Or not feeling with Dante? Hurt without the edge of a permanent separation? Where would I get that idea from though?

  “When did you know?” I asked, trying not to cry all over again. Maybe chatting with Plaid Man was a bad idea. “That you’d always straighten it out, I mean?”

  It was too familiar a question, but he had a soft approachability found in the most expensive therapists. And when he smiled with the memory, I knew it would be okay.

  “First time she told me I was full of shit. Pardon her French.”

  “First date?” I joked.

  “Second. She was a truth bomb. That made her maybe”—he tilted his flat hand this way and that—“seventy-five percent prettier, which I woulda said was near impossible.”

  I laughed and punched his arm. “Yeah, you—”

  The rest of my sentence was lost in the clatter of the magazine rack as the kind, burly man in the plaid shirt found himself pushed against the counter by none other than Dante Crowne.

  Chapter 26

  DANTE

  By the time I got to the Harmony exit, the power lines cast afternoon shadows along the two-lane Cabrillo Highway, and the endorphin rush of making a decision about Amanda had worn off enough for me to doubt myself.

  I thought I’d made the right choice, even if it was the hard one, but as I parked outside the convenience store in Harmony, I considered that I’d made the wrong choice because it was the easy one.

  I wandered the aisles, searching for something that didn’t have sugar as its first ingredient. I’d never left the house in that state before—not just not closed down but actively half-broken. I would need to get things arranged with the contractor and have him coordinate with the house’s caretaker. None of which would fix the closed-down half-brokenness inside me.

  Amanda was probably driving, thumbing at her phone as she blasted down the Cabrillo, singing in the same voice that had drilled holes in my eardrums from the bathroom that first night, her sexy little car careening directly into a divider as she multitasked—at which point she’d become the second woman to walk out of my life and disappear right off the map.

  My phone vibrated with an incoming text, confirming my worst fears. Amanda was not paying attention and had sent me a flash-lit image of the crawlspace with an attached message.

  —Here, I thought you were

  honest and willing to be vulnerable—

  Another picture of a different corner with damp, mold-stained beams. It was worse than I thought.

  —Here, I thought you were

  powerful but also kind—

  Flattened insulation webbed with mold. A beam, soggy and near black, the boards near it half-rotted away. She’d fallen through them.

  —Here, I thought you were

  passionately guarded and that

  it would be worth someone’s time

  to get through that guard—

  She’d been wrong, obviously. The cost of breaking through a decade’s worth of solid emotional armor, built for my good and the good of everyone I cared about, was too high. I could tell her that in a text, but I needed to explain to her face, to see how her body reacted and how well she understood. I needed to confirm that she wasn’t hurt.

  —Where are you?—

  No answer.

  —I hope you’re not answering

  because you’re driving—

  As soon as the message sent, I heard her voice and looked up to find her standing behind a rack of brand-new tabloids, covers splashed with an actor I didn’t recognize. Her story was last week’s gossip. Without that, she didn’t need me. She was as free as she’d ever been; she didn’t owe herself to anyone anymore.

  Amanda’s living face was the only version of itself in the store, and she was looking upward slightly, face open and receptive as she listened to the man standing too close to her.

  I’m not going to beg you to fuck me when you already agreed to it.

  She smiled at him.

  I’ll find someone else to do your job.

  I was pulled to her as if she were made of iron and the urge to touch her was a magnet under my skin until she reached for the man, and I can tell you—no magnet was strong enough to describe the force that attracted me in her direction.

  She gently punched the man’s arm in a gesture that made my blood run hot. My fingertips went numb when they closed into a fist, and the beating of my heart and the breath in my lungs pulled me forward even as I recognized the cold truth.

  And whatever, I’ll find someone else to do your job.

  We weren’t in the house anymore.

  I didn’t own her.

  I’d walked away from her.

  She wasn’t mine.

  And I knew that every time Logan had looked at me looking at her and thought he’d seen something wild and hungry, he’d been right.

  I’ll find someone else.

  I came at the man, swiping the rack out of the way with a clatter and a rustle as the papers splashed across the floor, grabbing his collar as I pushed him against the counter. I was taller than him, but he was built like a truck. I was sure I could have broken him in two.

  “Stay away from her,” I growled.

  This strange man put up his hands and looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, and I had, but he didn’t reflect my rage back at me or react with violence, as if he’d kill me if he had to but wanted to make sure he had to first.

  “Dante!” She cried from behind me.

  “Dude,” he said, unafraid.

  But I wasn’t afraid either. “Don’t—” I hissed but couldn’t finish.

  Don’t what?

  Touch her?

  He hadn’t laid a finger on her
.

  She’d touched him.

  A quick, hard pressure against my arm shattered my will, and I loosened my grip. It was Amanda, pushing me off.

  “What is wrong with you?” she cried before shoving me hard enough to give me an excuse to let go and look around.

  We were encircled by people. The cashier held up a baseball bat.

  I felt ridiculous.

  “Sorry,” I grumbled to the man, holding my hands up in surrender. “I thought…”

  You’d found someone else to do it.

  Finishing that sentence was a great way to lose the opportunity to say more, so I got myself together in time to recover.

  “Are you all right?” I asked the guy.

  “I’m fine.” He turned to Mandy. “You want me to walk you to your car?”

  She looked from me to him, and I thought she might not accept his offer—but she should have. I wasn’t stable enough to keep her safe, and every face in the small crowd confirmed it.

  “Please,” I said, taking out my wallet, “I’d appreciate it if you did.”

  “Excuse me?” Mandy said, her beautiful brow screwed tight with irritation. “That’s my decision.”

  Her eyes were intent on me, and I couldn’t bear being in the skin of the man she saw.

  I slid out a hundred-dollar bill and laid it on the counter.

  “For the damage,” I said to the cashier lowering his baseball bat. “Apologies.”

  Head down, I left without saying another word. I paced to my truck, started it remotely, and got in as if it were on the far side of a tunnel with nothing existing outside it. Only when I drove out of the lot did I see another human. It was her, standing by her sunshine-colored car with her curls flicking in the breeze, waving goodbye to the strange man in a plaid shirt who had protected her when I should have. I almost caved in to my instinct and stopped, but I beat it back with a force of will that felt blinding and cold to turn onto the entrance of the Cabrillo.