Crowne Rules: Forced Proximity Standalone by CD Reiss

Author:CD Reiss [Reiss, CD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-28T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 23

DANTE

The big leak that had dropped the bathroom ceiling was caused by a ragged gash in the roofing, and by the time Amanda and I were over the bathroom, I no longer cared that it was too complex a job for me to finish myself.

I’d told Amanda too much, and she’d countered by telling me everything.

Shamelessly, completely, with a humility I never would have given her credit for, she’d crawled beneath me with only a few planks of wood and a sheet of roofing between us and opened herself up to derision and ridicule.

“He’s worthless,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“I know, but what does that say about me?”

It said she was trusting and whole and reckless with her needs because she only knew how to commit fully. She was so rare and beautiful in a world of charmingly armored emotions that I wanted to stand between her tender heart and the world’s betrayal. Her protector. Her safety.

The only thing that could have distracted me from telling her everything was the sound of a car coming down the drive. I would have assumed Lyric was finally convinced to come check on me, except the car—which I couldn’t see over the HVAC unit—rumbled in a way my sister’s Prius couldn’t have even if it had the horsepower.

“Who the—”

I stood up to see over the HVAC, but the car had come too close to see. “Who the fuck is that?”

In the middle of my sentence, I was drowned out by the sound of wood splintering and crumbling, then a crash, then her voice, distinct and plaintive, saying, “Ow!”

“Amanda!” I shouted into a wall of wet roofing. “Amanda!”

No answer.

I was moving before I knew where I was going, running to the edge of the roof and leaping onto the patio overhang by her room with the assumption it would hold—which it did. My rational brain knew it would have been safer to cross the roof back to the ladder, but I couldn’t wait. If she needed me, I needed to be there for her immediately. From the patio overhang, I shimmied down a concrete pillar that painlessly scraped the skin off my palms.

At last, my feet were on solid ground. As I threw open the huge glass doors of her room, I kicked past the debris at the threshold to the bathroom to find Amanda leveraging herself against the tub to try to sit up straight.

In the bathroom door that led to my bedroom, looking as if she was ready to kick the next pair of balls that got in her way, stood Ella Papillion-Crowne.

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