I dropped my shoulders, going to Grayson.
He had a lollipop between his lips, and his blue eyes were harder than granite.
“Is she your buy-in?” Gemma asked. “I could use a new maid. I just had to let one go. So unfocused.”
My head shot up, eyes wide on her. I must have misheard, because they wouldn’t bet with people.
So casually Gemma asked i
t, too, like I wasn’t a person. That maid she had to let go? The unfocused one? She was fifty with fucking cancer.
He shook his hand in the air, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
For a brief moment I thought the most I was going to be punished for my mistake was being made to feel like dirt.
How naïve.
When you look at a Crowne, they ruin your life.
When you cross a Crowne…they make sure you wish you’d never been born.
“You don’t want this one,” he said. “She’s defective. She’ll fatten your drinks and think about stabbing you in your sleep.”
My mouth dropped open. My secret. He’d shared it without any hesitation.
“Then why is she here?”
Gray seemed to consider that, rubbing his bottom lip. “Who wants a night with a virgin?”
Ten
STORY
* * *
“Ugh, really, Gray?” Gemma threw her head back, then stood up, grabbing a bottle of tequila. “It’s going to be that kind of night? I’m out.”
She poured the golden liquor into three shots before taking them all herself. I stepped back, but I was like glitter trying to disappear into dust. An antelope hiding among lions.
Grayson Crowne, the lying playboy betting the virginity of a lying virgin. It might’ve been funny if I wasn’t the lying virgin about to lose her fake virginity.
I don’t know when the first tug came, when the first hand grabbed me, but soon I couldn’t differentiate between all the paws.
“She’s dressed like a fuckin’ nun,” someone said. A grab on my wrist, another on my hip, shoved from one person to the next, down the line. I tried to cover myself, but too many people were grabbing at me.
“And not a hot one,” another said, and I was shoved forward, then sucked back into the grabbing hands.
Through it all Gray watched, blue eyes hazy in his smoke, icy and unfeeling.
“I don’t know…” A new voice, another hand. “It’s kind of hot.”
Gray exhaled a musky, twirling tendril of smoke.
“We should get to see the merch first.”
Some distant part of my brain told me to stand up for myself, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that. I wasn’t sure if I even remembered how.
I was drowning. My voice gone, my breath gone, sinking into hands and smoke…