Jesus. She was going to start crying in a minute. It would be the worst possible thing, to break down in front of him now. So unprofessional. So weak. He would feel he had to let up in the scene, when Gareth clearly wanted him to go harder. She steeled herself against the impulse, taking deep, centering breaths.
Her tension caused him to pull away. He rubbed the back of his neck and then raked his hands forward through his tousled dark hair. She stared at his bare torso, at the gorgeous, defined muscles that were still a marvel to her, even after hours of him holding her down on the bed. “Hey, listen,” he said in a lower voice. “I’m sorry about my, uh, excitement in the last take. I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable. I can’t always control it.”
Miri felt herself go profoundly red. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t know why it happened. Not that you aren’t attractive! You are. It’s just...this isn’t the most romantic scene. Well, I guess that might depend on what you’re into.”
She cringed and held up a hand. “Listening to you try to explain it is actually a lot more uncomfortable than experiencing it.”
“Okay then.” Mason clamped his mouth shut and touched his lips, a personal tic that made him look sexy, thoughtful, and authoritative all at once. “Still, I have a hard time with this. Going through all this with someone I barely know. Hurting you. Slapping you.”
“So if you knew me better, it would be easier?”
Her quip threw him off balance, and he laughed. “Yes, maybe. But...no. Probably not. I just hope you won’t remember me like this. Brutalizing you and everything. Maybe we should go out and have a drink or something, so you have better memories of me.”
Miri laughed. He couldn’t have been serious about the drinks, but he did look awfully guilty. This was no easier for him than her, she realized—and he’d been in a lot more movies than she had. “Don’t worry.” She looked into those eyes women swooned over and saw, for a moment, a very vulnerable man. “I’ll remember you as a nice guy.”
“I hope so. And I’ll remember you as a very talented actress. Maybe we’ll work together again soon. If you’re moving into adult films.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I didn’t mean
adult
films.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“You know, films for grownups. Not that you weren’t making good films before.”
Miri stared at him. Mason Cooke, blushing and socially awkward? “I’m just thankful I had this opportunity to work with you,” she said. Ugh, she was sucking up again. It was an unconscious thing, because he was
so
famous. An awkward silence stretched out and then Gareth set things in motion again. The costume assistant came to take away her robe and get her into her tear-away clothes. The makeup people took a quick swipe at them both. One nice thing about scenes like this—perfect makeup wasn’t the primary concern.
Mason left her to wait by his mark, his easy, affable demeanor instantaneously replaced by the stark visage of the character he played. Wow, he was really good at this. Miri thought she should take a few seconds to draw herself back into her character, but she was already mostly there. Fear, check. Anxiety, check. Vulnerability, check.
Rapetastic leer from Mason Cooke. Check.
*** *** ***
It was after ten by the time they wrapped for the day. Mason was aching for a shower and keyed up from filming the rape scene. The worst part was that he was keyed up in a horny way, not a horrified way. He should have been horrified. Well, he was...but only by how turned on he was from pretending to rape another human being. An attractive human being, but still. What kind of sick fuck was he?
And getting hard over Mireille Durand? He used to watch her and her twin in
Two Wonderful
on TV. Somehow that made the rapey goodness even more delicious. And sick. Who would have imagined she’d grow into such a hot woman? She was all woman now. That made all this inappropriate lusting okay, didn’t it?
Mason climbed into the studio car, a luxury he took for granted after ten years headlining movies. He wished he could tell the driver to head to LoveSlave, the elite underground dungeon his friends frequented. He wished he could pick up some horny, slutty subbie and fuck her senseless through a night of hedonistic play, but that was impossible. The tabloids paid too much for kiss-and-tell stories these days, and after a night with him, the woman would have way too much to tell. He didn’t dare hire a professional for the same reason.
If it wasn’t for one very special friend, he would have lost his mind by now. After the chauffeur shuttled him to his home in Malibu, Mason hopped into his own car and dialed her number.
After a few rings, a familiar voice answered. “Damn it, Mace. Do you have any idea how late it is?” Satya’s clipped tones sounded like music in his ear.
“I know it’s late. I had a hard day.”
“Oh, did you?” Her voice dripped derision. He and Satya were longtime friends, childhood friends, and their dynamic was...unique. Two years ago he couldn’t have imagined any romance between them. Well, there was no romance between them, but in the dark days after Jessamine left him, and after Satya had been dumped by a long time love, they’d started hooking up in secret. Extreme secret. Even Kai, Mason’s best friend and Satya’s protective older brother, didn’t know what was going on.
It had been by mutual agreement, the subterfuge. Mason and Satya knew they had no future together. Mason had confessed his kinky proclivities to her, which she didn’t share, and she was too focused on her human rights work to get caught up in the tabloid storm that was his life. But as long as he was vanilla with her—and discreet—he was welcome in her bed when things got rough.
“What was so hard about your day?” Satya asked. “Was your martini lunch shaken rather than stirred? They run out of jelly doughnuts on the catering cart?”
“Why are you so mean to me?”
“Oh, I got it. The makeup grunt poked you in the eye while applying your mascara.”
“I had to pretend to rape this girl today. Over and over.”
Satya tsked. “What girl? Is this more of your perverted shit?”
“It was for a movie I’m working on.”
“Oh, yeah. Who was the lucky victim of this exploitation?”
“Mireille Durand.”
Satya made a squicked sound. “You had to rape her? She’s what, fifteen years old?”
“She’s in her twenties now. But it was still horrible.”
“When is Hollywood going to get tired of rape-as-entertainment? And I suppose you’re too traumatized to spend the night alone?”
“Please, Sats.” Mason wasn’t above begging. He’d done it before.
“You know,” she sighed, “when I get a boyfriend, all this ends. It has to.”
“I know.”
“You won’t be able to call me at eleven at night with your sob stories.
Satya, I’m so horny!
”
Her impression was dead on, but he didn’t feel like laughing. “Please let me come over.” Mason lowered his voice to a seductive whisper. “You know I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Okay,” she finally said. “But no sleeping over. I don’t want to wake up next to your ugly mug. I have to work in the morning.”
“Fine, no sleeping over. I’ll be there in five minutes.” Mason hung up and relaxed, watching for the turnoff to her little bungalow in the hills. He did a quick sweep for hiding paparazzi before he parked and hurried to her door. She’d already unlocked it, so he let himself in and took the stairs to her bedroom two at a time.
“Stop.” She held up a hand as he came toward her bed. “You leave all the rape and whatnot at the doorstep. Understand?”
“I love when you scold me,” Mason murmured, stripping off his clothes. “When you make me feel like a bad little boy.”
He launched himself at her, and she fought him, shrieking. “You are a bad little boy!”
“Not a boy anymore,” he grunted. “Want me to show you?”
“Oh, Mason,” she sighed as he slid his pelvis across her mound. “Not little either…”
Satya was fun to have sex with. They played in bed together more than made love. Mason knew she was right, that they had no future together as a couple, but he treasured what she allowed him to share. He took his time winding her up, stroking her, teasing her to a frenzy of horniness before he rolled on a condom and slid between her legs.
“Do you want me?” His hands played over her hips, her waist, her lovely dark-tipped breasts. “Do you want me deep inside you?”
She didn’t answer, only grabbed his ass and drew him into her. They moved together, enjoying one another with leisurely caresses and whispers. Mason urged her on until she came and then he made her come again. His staying power was legendary, which he believed made him an especially good lover. It gave him more time to focus on his partner. He rarely heard women complain.
Well, Satya complained. As soon as they finished, she pushed him off so she could lie solitary and replete in the afterglow. When he tried to kiss her, she swatted him and told him to go away.
So Mason went away. On the way to his car he turned his phone back on and found seven messages from his publicist. Make that eight.
Crisis. You need to call me ASAP. Re: your depraved sex life.
With a sinking heart, Mason dialed Shane Greenberg’s number. “Hi, Shane. Did you mean that message as a proposition?”
“This isn’t funny, my friend. My phone’s lighting up, messages from all the tabs and the online gossip sites too. Someone sold a story, not just about you, but about all your kinky Hollywood buddies. Tales about partner swapping, dungeons, bondage, orgies, all kinds of craziness. There are photos.”
“Orgy photos?” Mason’s heart hammered.
“What the— Really? There are orgy photos out there somewhere?”
“Uh, no. Well, probably not.”
A long sigh sounded over the line. “The ones I saw were party-type photos. Provocative but not damning. Several producers and movie execs were named too, but you and Jeremy Gray are the celebrities, so you’re the ones everyone will talk about. And Jeremy is married, a family man. With a kid.”
“So he’ll look worse than me?”
“No, better, because it will look like he’s settled down from all that nonsense. You, on the other hand, got divorced last year.”
“From Jessamine Jackson! She’s the sexual deviant, not me.” A bit of a lie. “I mean, she was ten times more promiscuous than I was. I hope she’s being dragged down in all this too.”
“This person claims Jess divorced you because you were into sado-masochism and she wasn’t. The source paints Jess as the victim to your sick sex demands.”
Jesus Christ. That was so untrue. Yes, he’d been into BDSM and Jess hadn’t been, but they’d broken up over a whole hell of a lot more than that.
“Is this legit?” Shane’s strident voice interrupted the hurtful memories. “Talk to me, Mason. Orgies, kinky sex, partner swapping parties with twenty or more people?”
“Twenty is kind of an exaggeration.”
“Is it true?” Shane barked.
“It’s...possibly true.”
“Come on!”
“Okay, yes, that stuff goes on. But we’ve been discreet. I don’t know who would be out there talking about this. Not Jessamine?”
“If it was Jessamine, they would have revealed her as the source to make it an even bigger story. But it’s a killer as it is. You’re the all-American movie star. The hunky, relatable guy. Now everyone’s going to be picturing you in a black leather mask presiding over orgies.”
“Jessamine always ran the orgies.”
His publicist made a sound like his brain was exploding. “Mason, goddamn it.”
“Okay! Okay. What do you suggest I do?”
“Don’t open your door. Don’t talk to any reporters. Lay low for a while and hope it disappears quickly, that people are too embarrassed to talk about it. Don’t leave your house.”
“I’m working on a movie!”
“Oh yeah.” Shane sighed again, heavy and long. “A movie about a sick, sexually deranged individual, if I remember correctly.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Jesus Christ. You don’t pay me enough for this shit.”
Mason turned onto his street, cursed for a full fifteen seconds, and turned a corner to go the other way. The front of his house was crawling with media trucks and paparazzi. The gate was blocked by photographers in a line, waiting for the money shot. He wouldn’t be safe at a hotel. As soon as he checked in, someone would call whatever pap was in their pocket. He couldn’t go to Jeremy’s house, or Kai’s, or any of his friends who had probably been named in the scandal, because they would be blanketed with paparazzi too. Anything sex related became a media feeding frenzy. This was bad, really bad.
He’d have to sleep in his trailer on the movie set, if he could even get on the lot at this hour.
He was fucked.
Miri sank down in the salon waiting room chair, guiltily devouring the article.
HOLLYWEIRD’S DIRTY DOZEN
Front and center on the cover of the weekly entertainment magazine was none other than Mason Cooke. She’d been following the story with a mixture of pity and fascination. She pitied Mason because she knew how difficult it was to deal with press like this, and she was fascinated because...
Because if the story held any truth whatsoever, Mason Cooke was a very, very naughty man.
Miri looked up from time to time to make sure her grandmother was staying put in the stylist’s chair. Debbie was excellent with Grammy, putting up with her increasingly strange rambling and abrupt behavior as well as any of the attendants back at her care facility. Miri’s tips reflected that. Still...
Her grandma was getting worse. Miri tried not to think about it because this slow decline only ended one way, with the very worst thing of all. Grammy wasn’t going to get better, not ever, and Miri didn’t know what she’d do when she was gone. They’d always been so close. Grammy had been like a mother to her, especially after her mom died. Now, day by day, week by week, she was losing Grammy to the ravages of the dementia taking over her brain. When she was gone, Miri would lose her closest confidant—what little of her she had left.