Fake Crowne, page 14
part #1 of The Crowne Brothers Series
Chapter 20
SKYE
I’ve kissed Colton Crowne before. Four times, exactly, and I was tipsy for two of them. Now I’m sober, and I know what I was missing. His kiss is lightning—pure electricity, reaching down from the sky like a hand made of light and grabbing me between the legs to pull me up to heaven. I’m levitating, then I’m really off my feet with my legs wrapped around him and my back to the wall. When he separates his lips from mine to speak, I still feel his connection.
“Just once,” he says.
Tightening my legs, I pull him against me. “One time. Today.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Are you flattering yourself or me?” My hands can’t touch enough of him. His shirt is infuriating.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” I try not to sound impatient and fail. “I used to fuck Fátima. We’re best friends now. Roommates. I can handle it if you can.”
His answer is a kiss and a jolt against me. Pinning me to the wall with his hips, he reaches under my shirt and pushes his hands under my bra.
“Jesus, Skye.” He cups and squeezes my breasts, finding my hard nipples.
I push his head down to them, and he takes the hint, mouthing the pebbled tip before sucking so hard I groan and arch, forcing him to step back. I almost drop off the wall, but he catches me and pulls me back against him. I put my arms around his shoulders. He puts his hands under my ass and carried me out the garage, into the kitchen.
“How long before the pizza comes?” I ask.
“They can leave it out front.” He kicks open a door and sets me on my feet.
We’re so busy kissing and stripping, I have no idea if I’m in the bedroom or laundry room or on the fucking moon. Peeling off his shirt, I can finally feel his tight muscles and scratch at the hair on his chest. I barely feel it when he unhooks my bra because I’m tugging his belt open, reaching for the bolt-button of his Levis while he bends to suck a nipple again.
Geometry isn’t working for us and he knows it, so he throws me back. I land on a mattress. Bedroom. Got it. I’d look around, but I can’t take my eyes off Colton, standing over me as he opens his button and zipper in what seems like one move.
“Please say you have condoms because—”
“I have, I have,” he interrupts, stepping out of his jeans and exposing the shape of a baseball bat under his shorts. Bending down, he peels off my jeans and underwear all at once, throwing them aside like a useless shell and crawling over me for a kiss.
“You still have your underwear on,” I say.
“You in some kind of rush?” He kisses down my neck and chest.
“The pizza’s coming.”
“I’ll hurry.” His lips run inside my thighs. “I can make you come four times before the cheese gets cold.”
“Four?” When his mouth makes contact with my pussy, I stretch my arms over my head. “Oh, God.”
“Put him on speed dial.”
With a suck and a flick of his tongue, an electrical storm lands across my whole body and passes with a final jolt. Colton gets up on his knees and wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“That was…” Words fail me. I reach for his waistband.
“One.” Arching his body over mine, he opens a night table drawer and roots around. “That was one.”
Pulling his briefs down as far as I can reach, I scoot down to get them off. He’s still digging around in the drawer and sits at the head of the bed to get a good look at what he’s doing.
“If you don’t have protection, I swear to God, Colton.”
“Got it.”
I snap the condom out of his hands and check the expiration. “It’s fine.” Putting it to the side, I keep my eyes on his while I strip his briefs. “Lucky for you or I would have eaten all the pizza while you went to get a new box. Now I can eat something else.”
“Come here.” Before I can get my mouth on his dick, he pulls me in to straddle him. “I want to feel how wet you are first.” He pushes my hips down over his erection, lining it up in the space at my very center, and pulls toward him, sliding us together laterally so there’s direct contact on my clit.
“That’s good,” I groan.
“You’re so fucking wet.” He increases the pace, then shifts his hands to my chest. “Make yourself come on my cock.”
I put my hands on the headboard behind him, sliding back and forth. It’s not long before I’m close, but it’s not quite enough.
“I don’t know if I can because I just did.”
“Come on, Skye.” He pushes up hard against me and the sensation breaks through. “Do what feels good. Use me.”
“Okay. Yes.” I go faster and harder, with a ferocity I’ve never felt before, rubbing my clit on his shaft with shorter and shorter strokes until I throw my head back and come with a cry.
“Very nice.” He pulls me down for a kiss, then rolls me onto my back, kneeling between my spread legs. “That’s two.”
He rips the side off the packet with his teeth.
I grab it. “You’re not going to do all the work here.”
I slide the condom over him while he lifts my leg and kisses the inside of my ankle. When it’s on, he lays that leg over his shoulder.
“You ready?”
“Been ready.”
He lines himself up and enters me. I stiffen so he can thrust harder. The position allows him to go down to the root and push up against pain.
“That’s okay?” he asks.
“Deeper.”
He shifts and hits deeper than I thought possible. He closes his eyes and stretches his neck, sucking in a breath.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Too good.” He looks as if he might let go, which is fine. A guy sometimes can’t help it, but I stay still in case he can manage to keep it together. Then he looks at me and smiles. “Thank fuck for the condom.”
“They’re multipurpose.”
I let my leg fall off his shoulder so he can be fully on top as he slowly fucks me.
“I want to fuck you in every position, Skye. I want to see you on top. I want your knees over your ears.” He rolls us over until he’s sitting with his back to the wall and I’m facing him. “I want to fuck your sweet cunt from behind, against the wall, bent over the couch. I want to taste myself on your tongue.” He reaches between us and presses my center toward him so that my clit rubs against his shaft as he enters me over and over. “I want make you come on my cock until you cry.”
“Colton.” By Colton, I mean we can’t do all that today. The pizza will get cold, and the sun will set and rise and set again. But that’s the only word I have. The slide of his shaft on my clit is reaching the breaking point. “Colton.”
He speeds up and I follow, but he’s holding on by a thread, just like me. “Come, Skye. Please.”
I don’t need to be told twice. He fucks me while I stiffen, frozen in place as I’m engulfed by the most powerful orgasm yet.
“Yes,” he whispers, eyes on me. “Skye.”
I push his hand away and shift myself to give him friction so he can come while inside me. He takes me by the hair, gripping tight, as if holding our faces together for dear life. His lips part and his mouth falls open, and after an overture of ahhs, he lets out a long groan. This—what he’s feeling—is mine.
Finally, he pulls me close and strokes the hair he just pulled. “You’re fucking beautiful.”
In a post-coital haze, people say all kinds of goopy things. Sometimes they say it because they think as a woman, I’m supposed to feel bad, or dirty, or guilty, and the goopy words are like a salve I don’t need. Sometimes they do it for their own wounds. Mostly, of course, intentionally or otherwise, it’s bullshit.
Colton believes it. He believes I’m not just beautiful, which may be true in a strictly physical sense, but fucking beautiful, which is a completely different thing without boundaries, disclaimers, or a door the fuck out.
Knowing all this, my immediate reaction is goopier than it should be. It’s an inner expansion of feeling that’s kind of a cross between the warmth of seeing a kitten yawn, the awe of the vastness of the universe, and the same awe turned to something as small and intimate as the connection with another human being. Not just another human being, but him. I want to take care of him. Smooth down the lick of hair that’s sticking up. Care for his body. Take responsibility for his happiness. Invest in his life.
It’s a forbidden feeling and I don’t like it. I’m not supposed to have it. It ruins the afterglow of the best sex I’ve ever had.
“I have to get off you,” I say.
“Cool, yeah.”
We manage the condom, and I stand naked in the middle of his bedroom while he sits on the edge of the bed.
Talk about fucking beautiful.
“Thank you, Colton.” Turning away, I get dressed before I can give in to the desire to crawl back into bed with him. “That was fun. A good valve. Right? Now it won’t be so tense, you know?”
He doesn’t reply. When I’m buttoning my jeans, I finally turn back to him. He’s got his back to the headboard and one leg straight on the sheets while the other foot is crooked on the floor. Half a room away, the feeling doesn’t seem any less impossible. It’s bigger. It pulls me tighter. I should be terrified of what’s happening to me, but this is the exact opposite of fear.
“I still owe you one,” he says, holding up a finger tattooed with an E.
“One what?”
“I promised you four.” He holds up four lazy, languid fingers.
I don’t need him to keep his promise. I don’t need a fourth orgasm. I need everything that leads up to it.
We can’t do this again. We’ve already smashed the no-fucking rule into a million pieces. I can’t claim that matters at all anymore, and I assured him I’m perfectly capable of having a good time with a friend without getting attached.
But his hair is still a little mussed, and the soreness between my legs doesn’t hurt as much as it makes me think of how close I feel to him.
He doesn’t feel anything. I’m breaking this rule on my own. Shit. I have to get out of here.
“I’ll check on that pizza.”
Chapter 21
COLTON
I can’t do this.
I can’t live on some fucking razor’s edge, waiting to fall on either side. I can’t walk this line between being with her and being without her based on no more than the whims of Eugene fucking Testarossa. I can’t let myself want her this badly if I fall on one side and let myself say goodbye if I fall over the other.
Not that it’s my choice to make. I’ll never mean anything to her. Clearly she’s capable of keeping her emotions where they’re supposed to be. She might have an anxiety attack when she has to sing in front of strangers, but when it comes to people she’s comfortable around—like me, I guess—she’s cool as shit.
What am I supposed to do with my own mess? I had all my emotions fenced in. Not locked tight or anything—because that’s the Crowne way, and I’m not doing shit the Crowne way—but just milling around the pen, bumping against the railing once in a while.
It got too easy. The shepherd was busy while a fox reached inside the gate and unlocked it. The sheep are getting out, and yeah, I’m lying in my bed, watching her go get the pizza and thinking this metaphor’s getting stretched a little thin. But it’s not a stampede. It’s just a wooly mess and I don’t know where to start because the fox never wanted the sheep at all.
“Fuck this.” I jump out of bed, put on a pair of pants, and grab my phone.
When I peek out into the living room, the kitchen door’s just been shut. I need to go outside, but she’s there and she’ll be back in thirty seconds. Dialing Liam, I go out the back door to a narrow space between the back of the house and the back gate. Logan’s groundspeople roll the garbage cans through here on Thursdays.
“Great timing,” Liam says. “I just hung up with the stupidest record exec in LA.”
Liam isn’t the hardest logic puzzle I’ve ever solved. I don’t need a cross-referenced index to know who he’s talking about.
“He said no about Shooting Star?”
“It’s better for him to leave the slot empty than to risk it.”
“She’s fine. I’m fucking telling you!” I lower my voice. “We just recorded two songs that… I swear to God…” I hear Skye come in and duck under the window like a burglar outside my own house.
“That leads me to my next point. They want your plug-in.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a good sound, Colton. You can’t mistake it for anything else. They want it to be proprietary for one of their indie sublabels. My guess? They need an original sound for a band that sounds ten percent too generic.”
From the other side of frosted glass, the bathroom light goes on, illuminating the garbage cans. Skye came back with the pizza and didn’t see me. I won’t be able to hide out for long.
“I can’t think about that right now,” I whisper.
“It’s a chunk of money, but I think they’ll license, which in the long run—”
“Liam, please stop. Fuck.” I’m hunched against the wall, my butt six inches from the concrete. The garbage cans are taller than I am right now.
“What am I telling him?”
“Tell him to ask me during Skye’s set at Shooting Star.”
Behind the little window above my head, the shower goes on.
“I told you already. It’s a no.”
“Then he can wait until I’m ready.”
“He needs it now.”
I rub my eyes, which clears nothing. It’s still dark. I still don’t know what to do about Skye, which makes me want to obstruct everything else in my life until I’ve figured out how to have her.
“He can’t have it. It’s for shit I produce. If he wants it for a sublabel, he knows what he’s got to do.”
“Sharky. I like it. I’m not sure he’ll go for it, but—”
“Are you telling her?”
“Who? Skye?”
I lean the back of my head against the wall. He really expects me to answer that.
Fine. I’ll answer. “Yes, Skye. We have one song left to do, and if she hears about the stupidest executive in LA rejecting her, she’s skipping the performative breakup. She’s getting in her car and going home. So, are you telling her?”
Silence on the other end of the line. For almost a full minute, Liam just breathes.
“This isn’t about giving you another day to finish the EP,” he says finally. “Is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Look, even if I got him to change his mind, which I doubt I can do, I can’t make her stay the next time there’s a setback.”
“I know.”
He lets the silence hang for less than a minute before he shatters my illusion that I have this all buttoned up. “Does she know?”
His question is based on growing up with me, slapping me in the back of the head, teaching me how to dress with my waistband at my waist, how to talk to people without being too intense, how to stop being a nerd and just be a dude. It’s based on who I became after I threw away all his lessons. I’m not the hardest logic puzzle he’s ever solved.
“No. We’re fake. That’s the rule.”
“And you’re afraid to break the rules? Who the fuck are you?”
I know a rhetorical question when I hear one, but I can’t even answer it rhetorically. I am Colton Crowne. The lowest of a family high. The squanderer. The disappointment. The one they sigh over and shake their heads with pity. Their lamentations say more about them than about me. There are sons who cause far more suffering, but a family gets the black sheep they get, and they all tsk the same.
No. They don’t. I should know by now… all those voices belong to me.
“When I met Malin,” Liam says, “she was pretty shy. I know that’s hard to believe, but the ballsy, no-bullshit Malin you remember… she wasn’t that way at first. If I hadn’t told her how I felt, we wouldn’t have Matt.”
The shower stops, which is when I realize how loud it was.
“You wouldn’t know the difference either,” I whisper. “She’d just be a girl in your past you got over.”
He scoffs but doesn’t argue. He does much worse.
“Tell her, Colton. Just tell her you love her.”
I shoot to standing. This is not what I want to be talking about right now. These are not the words I want to be using.
“I’ll tell her,” I say. “About Gene. I’ll do it.”
“It’s my job.”
I cut the call before he can talk some professionalism into me.
Chapter 22
SKYE
The pizza was outside in the dark, on the little table just outside the gate—and not as cold as I’d feared.
Colton, however, was gone when I brought it in. So I got in the shower, and by the time I get to the kitchen, he’s as icy as the pizza. Though it’s a little off-putting at first, I get why standing on the other side of the kitchen island makes sense. Minimizing eye contact is the wise move. Cool courtesy—giving me the first slice, making sure I have a plate, getting me the ice water I ask for—is the way to go.
The urge to ask him if he’s all right creeps up on me, but I resist it. He’s sending me the loudest signals I’ve ever gotten, and I’m not pretending I can’t hear them just so I can be a clingy, needy girl with uncontrolled emotions.
Business. We need to talk business.
“You said I needed to do a cover,” I say. “I want to do ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and I don’t want a whole ensemble. Just me on piano.”
He looks at the clock. It’s late. Nighttime even. Anyone who isn’t already out is settled in for the night. “Tonight?”
“Tomorrow.” I don’t elaborate immediately, but though the silence that follows is short, it’s unbearably hollow. “I’ll call Fátima to cover the shift for me. She owes me.”
