Crowne Rules Read online

  Crowne Rules

  CD Reiss

  Crowne Rules by CD Reiss

  Copyright © 2020 Flip City Media Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art designed by the author from a photograph of Christian Balic as taken by Raf Garcia.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This came out of the author’s head. Any similarities to persons living or dead makes you a lucky dog—no more, and no less.

  Dear Jana Aston—You make me a better writer.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  TAKE ME

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  ALSO FREE IN KINDLE UNLIMITED

  Chapter 1

  MANDY

  “You’re letting them tell you who you are, Mandy.” My best friend, Ella, shook her fists in frustration.

  “I’m a homewrecker.” I yanked my suitcase from the closet, repeating the paparazzi’s accusations through a mouth dehydrated from hours of crying, and threw it on the bed. “I came between Renaldo the perfect and his perfect wife, then he dumped me, which makes me look even worse. Somehow.”

  A photo of the love of my life, Renaldo DeWitt, almost kissing Gertrude Evans lit up my phone’s screen. A crack in the glass split his face in two, and as much as I wished he was the one who was broken, I was the one who was broken.

  “It makes no sense,” my mother said as she unzipped the case. “They file for divorce, then you two go public.” She flopped open the top. “Then he’s seen with Gertrude, and they’re calling you names?”

  When Ella and I arrived at my house, Mom’s Mercedes had already been parked in my driveway. The minute she heard my life was being spread all over the internet, she’d driven over and waited, rushing out in her Uniqulo sweatshirt and NYDJ jeans to chase away the paparazzi, admonishing them to get a real job while I ducked my head and Ella led me inside.

  “It makes perfect sense,” I said, slapping a drawer open and throwing clothes on the bed. “I was just there to wreck his marriage, and now it’s no fun because I’m just a homewrecking slut.”

  But that wasn’t what everyone hated me for. They hated me because they didn’t know the truth about Renaldo’s marriage.

  Renaldo’s wife, an A-list actress with a string of blockbuster romantic comedies and an image so sparklingly all-American I wanted to put on sunglasses just to look at her, was a lesbian, and Renaldo was her handsome, devoted beard.

  “There’s a silver lining here,” my mother said as she folded a shirt. “When the clouds break, you’ll see it.”

  “There’s no silver lining, Ma. This is my life.” I mimicked a woman who’d taunted me on the street. “Bitch can steal a man, but bitch can’t keep him.”

  I had to get out of Los Angeles. I was already being threatened by a hive of fans who’d ruin me before they knew the truth.

  “It’ll die down in a week.” Ella put her hands on my arms and tilted her gaze up to meet mine. “Don’t let what people think of you change what you think of yourself, okay?”

  And what did I think of myself? The fashion designer whose signature color was a sunny-bright shade of yellow wasn’t that sunny or bright.

  “I let men use me,” I said, saying things that were going to make me cry again. “I let them manipulate me. It’s not even about Renaldo. It’s about me. Why am I this way?”

  “It’s your father’s fault,” my mother said because everything was my father’s fault, apparently. “Let me get you some water.”

  She left for the kitchen.

  Ella waited until Mom was gone to whisper sternly, “Go to Town & Country and tell the truth.” She was the only person I’d told the secret about Renaldo’s wife.

  “What would that make me?” I said, wrapping the cord for my toothbrush charger around the handle, each twist ending in the same humiliating fact. “I’d been enough to fuck, but not enough to leave his sham marriage for?”

  “It’d make you not a homewrecker?” Ella answered, peering into the backyard again as if she’d heard something.

  “You don’t just drag a person out of the closet.”

  She knew that. I stuffed the toothbrush apparatus into the side pocket, where my now-useless birth control pills were packed, and the cord unraveled as soon as I let go. I was furious with him, but some part of me still thought that maybe there was an explanation, or at least an apology, coming my way.

  “They wouldn’t believe it anyway,” I continued. “Everybody loves Tatiana and Renaldo together, and it’s my fault because I’m some kind of”—I slapped a handful of underwear into the suitcase as if I could break cotton and silk—“some kind of sex goblin.”

  “No one thinks that.”

  “I’ve been dumped again,” I whined. “I can’t take it here, and I miss him already. I miss his laugh. The way he called me sweetheart. The little crooked incisor I could see when he smiled. I even miss the constant gum-chewing.”

  “You do?”

  “No. It’s gross, and I hate it.” I stuffed a yellow bouquet of clothes in the bag. “But it’s like I forgot what I ever wanted and just did what he wanted.”

  “A week at a Crowne estate and you’ll forget all about forgetting.”

  “Have you been?” I asked, hoping Ella’s husband, Logan Crowne, had shown her a good time there. “Is it nice?”

  “No clue. But it’s a Crowne place so… probably?”

  “Logan said it’s off the grid.”

  “He also said it’s so updated and modern you won’t even notice.”

  I sighed, looking at my pile of clothes and wondering if I was missing anything.

  “You know,” Mom said, blowing in with a glass of water I didn’t want, “we have that place in Lake Tahoe. We haven’t sold it yet. You just have to have the electricity turned back on.”

  “Cambria’s closer.” I sipped the water and ended up drinking the whole thing. “Thank you.”

  The little beach community of Cambria was closer than Lake Tahoe, halfway between LA and San Francisco—the exact distance between an efficient commercial flight and an easy drive—and though the Bettencourt name implied private jets and luxury vacations, we hadn’t been private-jet rich in a decade.

  “Plenty of fish in the sea,” Mom chirped, zipping up a side pocket. “You have your pick of Hawkins’s boys now, though there’s always the one that got away.”

  Mom was tight with Will Hawkins’s new wife, and
she tried to sell me Caleb Hawkins like a fabric salesman with too many loose bolts, even knowing he’d broken my heart in eleventh grade. And twelfth. And repeatedly in college until ghosting me completely.

  “I’d rather be alone,” I said. The suitcase yawned like a big, open mouth full of dandelions. The cheerful yellows annoyed the hell out of me, so I didn’t fold a thing. Every garment was going to look as wrinkled and wretched as I felt.

  “You will be,” Ella said, peeking out at the calm of the backyard again. “Logan says it’s pretty secluded. Just you and the house.”

  I flopped the suitcase closed, revealing my phone. The tabloid photo had darkened and was replaced with the home screen. My sister, Samantha, and I hugged, smiling at present-day me from eight years ago. The crack in the glass cut across the last picture of us together before she took her life into her own hands and committed suicide, leaving me really and truly alone. After that, I never chose to be alone if I could avoid it.

  “I keep thinking about when I went to Greece with Renaldo last summer.”

  I was supposed to go to Monaco with my girlfriends Aileen and Millie. We’d planned it for months. Then Renaldo yanked the rug out from under the entire thing with a surprise birthday trip to Greece. His birthday. Just the two of us cruising from remote island to remote island, staying in resorts where the staff knew it wasn’t worth their jobs to photograph an adulterous couple skinny-dipping in the infinity pool. The whole week had shimmered—aquamarine water, yellow sun, cold glasses of white wine. Renaldo’s body gleamed as he swam out of the ocean and came to kiss me where I lay in the sand. Every bite of fruit and sun-touched glance was jewel bright.

  “He said he wanted me to belong to him.” I sighed.

  “Only true thing he ever said.” Ella snorted, stepping away from the window. “You want to get control over your life? You’re not going to find it in Cambria, but you’re preparing for it. You’re getting ready to become the best Mandy. Couture Mandy.”

  I scoffed. Only Ella could come up with “Couture Mandy” as the top of the line. “And what am I now? Irregulars Mandy? Chargebacks Mandy?”

  “Well,” Mom said, “obviously it’s Discount Mandy.”

  “Obviously,” I grumbled.

  “You have to fortify yourself to own your power,” Ella added. “Don’t give it to them just because you’re sleeping with them.”

  Ella was my best friend, and this wasn’t an empty you go, girl speech.

  “You’re saying I should use them the way they always use me?”

  “She’s saying,” Mom cut in, “it’s not always about love. Sometimes it’s just about sex, which—if you ask me—you’re not going to solve in a house alone.”

  “She can stand to be single for half a minute,” Ella said, snapping her head around to look out the glass door.

  The movement in the backyard distracted me as well, and I froze in a dead panic as two figures—female, from the looks of them—crested the top of the wall. Before I could think, my back patio door shattered.

  Ella and I screamed. Mom rushed out, shaking her fist, but the vandals were gone.

  On the carpet, a red brick was lying in a spray of broken glass with a note wrapped around it. I didn’t have to pull it out of the rubber band to read the one-word message written in all-capped Sharpie.

  WHORE.

  “We’ll get security,” Ella whispered, staring at the brick with wide eyes. “Logan has people.”

  I couldn’t find a word to say.

  “You should go,” Mom said, pulling my suitcase off the bed. “It’s better than Lake Tahoe. No one will know you’re there.”

  Suddenly grateful to have someplace to go, I took it from her, and we headed out.

  Chapter 2

  DANTE

  The clouds that covered the moon and stars had reflected Los Angeles’s lights in an orange-gray, but now—coming out of Malibu—they draped an opaque hood over the sky, leaving me to navigate by the headlights’ reflections on drops of rain.

  The route to Cambria was etched in my mind after so many trips. The beachfront would turn to truck stops, outlet malls, and billboards before it straddled the sea, then opened into desert and found the ocean again.

  The Lordstown didn’t handle as well as the Bugatti, which took turns without a hint of drift. but lately, the Cambria house always needed work, so I’d brought the truck and took the turns nice and easy to keep an accident from spraying the contents of the truck all over the freeway.

  When my phone rang, I jumped a little. My cell signal had often dropped along the route until I invested in a better service provider.

  The upside was no dead spots when I needed to make a call.

  The downside was incoming calls.

  Logan’s name flashed on the screen. Unlike my brothers, I’d never worked in the family business, but like them, I used its resources and answered to its needs.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to Cambria.”

  I never told anyone where I was going. He knew that.

  “Because I don’t answer to you.”

  “Actually, you do.”

  I snorted my contempt loudly enough for him to hear. “You loaned me your fixer, and I paid him. We’re even.”

  “What’s in the box?” he asked.

  “I didn’t hang around long enough to read it all. But there are some untranscribed dictation cassettes that look promising.”

  “There might be a player in the garage.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to help you,” he said. “You know that, right? You didn’t have to take off like that.”

  He did only want to help, and I did know that, but I didn’t have to like the fact that I’d needed it, and I didn’t have to stick around with that box in my hands, unpacking my adolescence one piece at a time. I needed to be alone to do that, and not just alone, but isolated like a contagion.

  “Thank you.” I was grateful, but that didn’t change anything.

  “I gave Mandy Bettencourt the keys,” Logan said. “She’s already on her way.”

  A flash of lightning lit up the road just before the pound of rain doubled.

  “Who?”

  “Mandy. My friend. You know her.”

  “Amanda Bettencourt?” I sought clarity as if the Bettencourts had an extra daughter lying around and the one headed to Cambria wasn’t the one I remembered from a dark closet ages ago. “She’s on her way to the Cambria house?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew Amanda Bettencourt as well as anyone knew their brother’s best friend. She swam like a swan, honked like a swan, and looked as beautiful as one, but she was a porcelain likeness—lighter than the real thing, hollow and breakable.

  “With who?” I asked. That house wasn’t big enough for three people, and Amanda wasn’t the type to do anything without a girlfriend at each elbow.

  “Just her.” His exasperation was as audible as my contempt had been.

  “It’s a small house.”

  No one knew that house better than I did. Even our parents, who’d bought it, updated it, and lived in it long enough to decide going off-grid was too much trouble, didn’t know that house the way I did.

  “Tell her not to come,” I added.

  “She left. Her phone’s not getting a signal. You’ll have to tell her when you see her.”

  I let my silence communicate how I felt about that, and his silence let me know he wasn’t making any more effort in the matter.

  “For what possible reason would you send a woman like her to a house with no connection to the outside world?”

  “What’s ‘like her’ supposed to mean?”

  “There isn’t a nail salon in a forty-mile radius.”

  “Can you just not be an asshole? She’s having a bad breakup.”

  “I’m thrilled to be managing your friends for you.”

  “If anyone knows how to get rid of a woman, it’s you,” Logan sniped. “Ju
st deal with it.”

  “Oh, I’m going to deal with it, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “Do. Not. Touch. Her,” he growled as if I cared how angry he’d get. “Don’t even shake her hand. She’s not a fuck-and-dump.”

  “You think too little of me.”

  “I mean it. If she comes home crying—”

  I laughed and hung up without saying goodbye. Logan knew how I felt about being ordered around—not to mention having a woman in my space.

  Especially Amanda Bettencourt—everything I hated about LA women in one vain, lazy, incompetent, gossipy little package.

  Her sister had been engaged to my brother until she committed suicide, so I’d seen Amanda at functions both happy and sad, but I’d only been alone with her once, and that was what stuck with me. I’d never forget the curves of her body under my hands or the softness of her lips against my fingers. We’d been teenagers then—kids playing a kids’ game, groping around in a dark closet. She’d shown me one of my first glimpses of the kind of man I wanted to be, and though I didn’t like the woman she’d grown into, it was hard to deny the power of what had passed between us.

  She’s not a fuck-and-dump.

  No woman I fucked was what Logan had said, but I knew what he meant, and I knew he was right.

  Chapter 3

  MANDY