Heartless Hero (Crowne Point 1)

I focused on not making a scene.

If I moved, Theo would win. If I moved, Mom would know.

“My what?” I breathed as the cube spread me wider, frigid cold. His fingers hadn’t touched me, but I was too aware we were separated only by slowly melting water. Theo Hound, who’d once made dirty promises and now promised to ruin me, was millimeters away from my most private of places.

“Your fan.” My mother’s perfectly plucked brows caved in disappointment.

Theo started to press the cube inside me.

I jumped forward, breaking contact. I could breathe again. I waved my black-feathered fan in Mom’s face, forcing her to step back, needing a distraction myself.

Theo Hound’s fingers had almost been inside me.

“Honestly!” she said, fixing unseen flyaways in her updo. “Have you spoken with your grandfather?”

“My… my grandfather?”

It was a perfectly innocent question. Everyone knew Dad and I had the swan tradition, and with him gone, Grandpa had continued it. But I couldn’t answer the question.

After everything with Theo, I’d forgotten about earlier. My grandpa. The rose. For over a year I’d been relentlessly harassed. First it was social media. After blocking him, it was emails. I could only block so many of those. Then it was letters. Then it was strange coincidences. A single gilded rose waiting on the hood of my car. Another rose waiting for me at my favorite boutique.

People like me can’t go to the police because “a Crowne doesn’t call 911, they call their lawyer.” The first time I heard that was on my fifth birthday—or, rather, remember hearing it.

This was the closest I’d been to the person who left the rose; usually it’d been there for hours. An icky feeling lurked in my gut. What had he planned? What if Theo hadn’t been there?

My gaze collided with Theo just as he dropped the nearly melted ice cube in his mouth.

His tongue swirled around the ice, and heat seized my stomach. Theo was tasting me. I didn’t give him permission to learn that secret part of me, but like every other torment, he’d taken it anyway.

Now he forced me to wonder what his lips would feel like, his tongue doing to me what they did to the cube. He fucking knew it, too, as a wicked grin curved his beautiful lips.

“Abigail.” My mother’s cold, irritated voice drew me back. “Did you hear a word I said?”

“No,” I admitted. “Sorry.”

She clicked her tongue, eyes narrowing.

“Your fiancé’s mother has joined us tonight.” She gestured to a plump woman wearing a flowing, feathery white dress, her light-brown hair piled high with more feathers.

“Be on your best behavior, and do make an effort to introduce yourself. Eleanora will want to know who exactly she’s getting as a daughter.”

For a moment I’d allowed myself to forget I was engaged to a man I didn’t know.

I swallowed. “Of course.”

With a deep exhale through her nostrils, my mother walked away.

Mom wasn’t gone a minute before Theo’s hot breath was on my ear. “I always wondered what you tasted like.”

He slowly moved back into position, staring straight ahead, a cocksure tease to his lips.

“My imagination was better,” he said like it was an afterthought.

My heart bottomed out, still locked on his lips.

Theo had kissed me. It could hardly be called a kiss, bruising and punishing, but that’s what it was. Five years since I’d felt his lips, and now they were used to torture me.

I was a lot of things—hated, reviled—but I was never pathetic.