“Of course she does.” I threw a glare back at her. “You know I always make sure a woman knows that first.”
“Well, yeah, but I also know you usually separate work and play, and I also know this was Olivia freaking Taylor. Last I checked, she’s not one to go cavorting around with porn stars.”
“Neither are any other women who date porn stars until they date their first one.”
“So she’s dating you now?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Are you dating her?”
“No! I mean, I don’t know. We…” Sighing, I dropped my head back onto the doughnut pillow. “I don’t know.”
“Well, are you going to see her again?”
I shrugged. “Hopefully. She’ll probably be touring and promoting the album soon, so I don’t imagine she’ll be around much.”
“Mm-hmm.” She was silent for a moment. “Mind if I ask something personal?”
“Would it stop you if I did?”
“No.”
“Go ahead, then.”
She laughed, but then her tone shifted to a more serious one. “You’ve always made a point of keeping personal and professional separate.” Her hands slid across my stinging flesh. “What exactly happened to strictly business?”
Rachel. Rachel is what happened to strictly business.
I blew out a breath and pressed my forehead into the pillow, offering up my stiff neck to Marta’s magic hands. “I don’t know, to be honest.”
“You sure about that?”
I turned my head as much as I could, but she nudged me so I’d rest my forehead on the pillow again. “You know something I don’t?”
“Well, I do know you.”
“Am I telling you anything I’m apparently not telling myself?”
“Not that I know of,” she said, “but knowing what I do about you, there must be something about this girl that’s making you abandon every bit of common sense you possess.” Her hands pressed hard into the muscles above my ribs. “I’m just curious what that is.”
I didn’t respond right away. Partly, I was getting lost in the massage, as well as trying not to brace myself for when she really started to dig in and work the knots apart. But also because I wasn’t sure what to say.
Finally, I said, “Honestly? I’m not sure why I asked her out last night or why…” Why I fucked her until I couldn’t see straight. “I’m not sure. Just…in the moment, it seemed like a good idea.”
“Does it still seem like one?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea…” I didn’t have to look to know Marta was giving me that head-tilt that said she saw right through me. “Okay, it might be a bad idea. But, I don’t know. You ever had one of those conversations that you know you have to cut short, but you feel like there’s more to say?”
She mulled it over for a moment, but then nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
“That’s kind of what it felt like we were having yesterday. I wanted to continue it later, so I asked if she wanted to have coffee. Maybe it was just because I’d spent all day dancing with—” I paused, catching myself before I said Rachel’s real name. “Dancing with Olivia Taylor, who I have always thought was smoking hot, and I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity for coffee and a conversation.”
Marta’s eyebrow rose. “Or more than coffee and a conversation.”
“Or more than coffee and a conversation,” I said more to myself.
Neither of us spoke while she finished my massage. When she was done, I sat up. I gingerly rolled my shoulders and tilted my neck; I was always sore immediately after a massage, but once that wore off, I’d feel spectacular. Marta was worth easily twice what I paid her.
I got up off the table and pulled on my shirt. “Water?”
“Please.”
When she wasn’t in a hurry, we always hung out for a few minutes over some cold water, so while she folded up her table, I dug a couple of water bottles out of the fridge. When she came into the kitchen, I tossed her one before opening my own.
She rolled a sip of water around in her mouth for a moment, but didn’t look at me. That was unusual for her.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
Marta eyed the bottle in her hand, probably just to give herself something to focus on. “Can I offer some unsolicited advice? As your friend, not your massage therapist?”
“I’m all ears.”
“Don’t get your hopes up about this girl.” Marta looked at me and paused, probably waiting to see if I’d get defensive. When I didn’t, she went on, “She’s clawed her way back up from the very bottom of the barrel. No offense, babe, but she’s not going to throw that away for you.”
I glared at her. “Gee, thanks.”
“You know what I mean.” She took a long drink. “Besides, Olivia’s a pop star. Even if she did want to be with someone in your line of work, there’s no way in hell her handlers will stand for it.” Shaking her head, she added, “Nobody’s going to buy—or accept—America’s pop princess hooking up with a porn star.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. Couldn’t really argue, could I? “I’ll keep that in mind,” I finally said.
Her lips pulled tight. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt again, hon.”
“I know.” I took a drink, then set the water bottle aside. “But we just met, and I don’t imagine I’ll see her much again anyway.” No matter how much I wanted to.
“Probably not.” The words were more apologetic than snide. “And on that note, I need to get out of here.”
“Right. Yeah.” I paid her for the massage, then showed her out.
She stopped halfway out the door and turned around. “Oh, I meant to ask. Is next week’s appointment here or at the other house?”
“The other house.”
Marta nodded. “All right. See you then.”
After she’d left, I locked up the condo, put the top down on my car and headed out myself.
I only lived in town when I was filming. After a day on the set, all I wanted to do was get a massage and then sleep, so as soon as I could afford it, I’d bought the condo. My crash pad, as my last girlfriend had always called it.
When I didn’t have anywhere to be, and I was alert enough to drive for an hour and a half, I left town for the place that was truly home. Tonight? I needed some time behind the wheel just to clear my head, so with the top down and my MP3 player blasting through the speakers, I drummed my fingers on the shifter and let my mind wander.
Naturally, it went right back to the past couple of days.
One thing I’d learned in my line of work was to expect the unexpected. No two shoots were ever the same, and they never went exactly like anyone thought they would. Roll with it, run with it, go with it; improv was the name of the game.
When I’d initially agreed to shoot a video with Olivia Taylor, I hadn’t seen any of this coming. Getting tongue-tied when I first saw her, yes. Figured that would happen. But a just-a-cup-of-coffee date? And barely restraining myself while we were on-camera? And, holy shit, fucking Rachel on the counter in my dressing room until I came so hard I blacked out? Expect the unexpected indeed.
I released a long breath. It had been a long, long time since any woman left me reeling like this. Even the ninety-minute drive from here to my neighborhood on the coast didn’t hold a lot of promise for clearing this fog out of my brain.
But it was the best I could do for now.
So I put one hand on the shifter, one on top of the wheel, and just drove.
An hour and a half after I left my condo, I pulled in through the gate at the entrance to the neighborhood. Four driveways later, I keyed in the code to open the gate at the bottom of my own driveway. It opened, and I pulled up the driveway to the house. Just following that long, cobbled curve worked some of the lingering tension out of my shoulders. That tension that was too deep even for Marta to cure. Coming here, getting away from the city and the smog and the stigma of a job I couldn’t
help loving, was enough to relax me.
I pulled into the garage and got out of the car. This time, I picked up the manila envelope I’d left on the passenger seat when I left the set this afternoon, and took it inside.
In the kitchen, I flipped on the light above the island. I carefully opened the envelope’s flap and then slid the picture free. She’d signed it Olivia Taylor, but the face looking back at me was Rachel. The woman whose kiss I swore I could still taste.
My sister would be beside herself when I gave her this. She’d have a million questions for me—what was Olivia like? Is she nice? Did you tell her I’m a huge fan?—but she didn’t need to know just how well I knew her idol now.
Knew? In the Biblical sense, maybe, and we’d had one long conversation. But I couldn’t say I knew her. I wanted to, even if the odds of that were somewhere between “not bloody likely” and “when pigs fly the cows home from visiting a snowball in hell”.
I was friends with a few musicians. I knew all too well how album releases went. As soon as the album dropped—and sometimes in the weeks leading up to it—the musician lived and breathed promotion.
So while I believed Rachel—or maybe it was just wishful thinking—when she said she wanted to see me again, I wasn’t holding my breath. The record label would have her promoting the album all over the known universe in very short order, and her concert tour would probably kick off soon too.
For that matter, she wasn’t the first celebrity I’d met. Hollywood was crawling with them, and even X-list “actors” like me sometimes wound up rubbing elbows with A-listers. Some weren’t quite so charismatic up close and personal. Plenty were surprisingly normal—which translated to plain and blah according to people in LA’s weird little universe—when they weren’t filtered through a camera. Interesting and flawed the way only real people could be.
Rachel had been no exception. She was a lot smaller in person than I’d expected, but so much larger than life. If I’d thought she was hot on a stage or a red carpet, I hadn’t even begun to prepare myself for how attractive she was with a baseball hat and a gamer handle.
And no, she wasn’t the first woman above my pay grade who I’d hooked up with. There was that one-night stand with an Oscar winner. The backstage fling with the hip hop star. That scorching hot weekend with a recently divorced Hollywood starlet who had a kinky streak that no one would believe if I’d told them. Not that I would. Every last one of them swore me to secrecy because they had to guard their reputations. They could get away with a lot, but sleeping with a porn star? Not so much.
And I’d kept my mouth shut. If we crossed paths again, I pretended I’d never seen any more of them than they’d bared in their films. I was perfectly happy with that. I took the experiences, kept them in that secret compartment in the back of my brain where those nights could be mine and mine alone and left it at that.
Rachel wasn’t so quick to let me go. Okay, maybe she’d let me go and already moved on and forgotten about me, but she sure had a hold on my mind. She intrigued me like few women did. It had started out physical and somehow wove its way to this gamer with a beautiful smile and an evening of geeking out over Gears of War and Call of Duty at a coffee shop, and when it had come right back to physical—skin, leather, sweat—the girl with the shy smile and an Xbox handle was even hotter.
She said we’d do this again, but I’d heard that before. She had a reputation to maintain, an image to protect in the name of keeping her career alive, even if there was some kind of undeniably hot chemistry between us. Something that needed more than a clandestine quickie as an outlet. Just one night. One long night. That was all we needed.
Keep dreaming, Peyton.
I blew out a breath and rubbed my tired eyes with the heels of my hands. A few days ago, I was like a kid on Christmas, looking forward to working with the woman I’d fantasized about since she exploded onto the scene a few years ago. Tonight, I knew PrincessBadass’s handle and I knew what her kiss tasted like. She’d been even more amazing in person than she’d been in my mind, and that was well before I’d fucked her in that skintight leather dress.
Even if I never saw her again except on screens and billboards, at least I had last night in the coffee shop and this afternoon in my dressing room.
And if I tried really, really hard, maybe I could convince myself that was enough.
Chapter Seven
Rachel
I meant it when I told Lee I would see him soon. I certainly wanted to sleep with him, maybe even in an actual bed, and for longer than it took to break two days’ worth of sexual tension before I had to run off to the damned airport. I wanted to badly.
But “soon” is a relative term in the entertainment industry.
I’d barely changed out of my skintight dress and hit the road for the airport when the label broke the news of my new album. Overnight—literally—I went from keeping my mouth shut to jetting all over the country for talk-show appearances and a handful of exclusive sneak preview live performances. I suspected they’d booked all the appearances well in advance, but kept it under wraps who’d be showing up and why. They had enough debut artists and new albums releasing around the same time, it would have been easy to put someone else in my place if the album wasn’t finished or I’d committed some sort of label-embarrassing sin.
Like, say, having sex with the porn-star dance partner that the rest of the world still didn’t know about.
Interview after interview. Performance after performance. Rehearsals for the upcoming tour. More interviews. And no matter what, I couldn’t get Lee out of my mind. The sex had been awesome but felt unfinished. Not because I hadn’t gotten off—I usually didn’t if it was just a quickie, and besides, I’d more than made up for that on my own a few dozen times since—but because whatever was crackling between us needed more than a rushed, feverish knee-trembler. After an entire day of grinding against each other, a quick fuck against a counter was, in hindsight, just another moment of foreplay.
I needed more. I needed him on his back. I needed to taste him, to find out what he could do with a mouth that kissed like that. I needed to know how hard, how deep, how fast he could fuck me when we weren’t constrained by clothes or an awkward position.
But besides via Xbox—and mine was at home while I was very much not—I had no way to contact him. We hadn’t exchanged numbers, and I didn’t dare ask anyone who might know how to contact him. If I did, then someone would know, and before long, the press probably would too. Best not to take the risk, no matter how tempting it was.
And besides, I was scheduled within an inch of my life until the end of time. Getting in touch with him was only half the battle; I’d still need to slice out enough time for us to have more than another hurried quickie. Unless he wanted to meet me at an airport and join the Mile High Club while I was on my way from one appearance to another. Tempting. Very tempting.
But without his number or e-mail, that wasn’t happening. Though some hotels did offer Xbox…
No way. Not worth the risk of someone on the hotel staff figuring out I’m PrincessBadass.
Oh well. Such was life, I supposed.
Three weeks after we finished shooting, I was back in LA. The album dropped tonight, and the finished video would go live tomorrow. To celebrate, the record company had booked the penthouse suite at one of the premier hotels in town for the exclusive black-tie launch party. Champagne, pomp and circumstance. Typical of Risen Star.
As Quinn tied his bowtie in my foyer, he winked. “You always did know how to rock the LBD, darling.”
I laughed and glanced down at my simple black dress. Skirt just above the knees, top low enough it offered only the faintest shadow of cleavage. “Well, it’s definitely more comfortable than what I wore for the video.”
He sniffed with amusement and scrutinized his flawless bowtie in the hallway mirror. “So you’re not going to wear the stripper heels with that, then?”
“Uh, no.” I picked up my clutch off the t
able beneath the mirror. “If you’re done primping, we should get going.”
He glared at me but then grinned. “You don’t want to be fashionably late?”
“Not when people with the power to fire me are probably already tapping their watches.”
“Very true, very true.” He turned serious. “Sweetie, the party’s in a VIP suite. And you know it’s going to have an open bar. Are you—”
“Relax,” I said. “I haven’t touched a drink in three years. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. But if you want to leave, just say the word.”
“I will. Now let’s go.”
We left Quinn’s car with the valet at the ritzy hotel and then went inside. When we got into the elevator, Darryl Madison, one of the higher-ups at Risen Star, stepped in after us.
“Rachel,” he said, extending his hand, “sounds like you’re ready to be back at the top of your game.”
“Thanks.”
“And who is this fine gentleman?” He extended his hand to Quinn.
“Quinn Doyle,” I said.
“Rachel’s assistant,” Quinn said.
“Oh.” The corner of Darryl’s mouth twitched with thinly veiled disgust.
Quinn just smiled and drew the handshake out a little longer than necessary. When he finally let go, Darryl smiled, then watched the numbers above the doors.
Quinn and I exchanged looks, both of us smirking. Some of the suits didn’t like him because he was obviously gay. Most of them, though, didn’t like the fact that I brought my assistant to parties like this. God forbid anyone have a drink with the help. But none of them dared do more than wrinkle their noses or make quiet noises of disgust, because while I made a point of not being a tyrannical diva, I’d dig my heels in and raise all kinds of hell if anyone tried to elbow Quinn out. This party was to celebrate the launch of the new video and the new album. Without Quinn, I never would have gotten back into the game or made it through the last few months of insanity, and the album and video wouldn’t exist. Any snob who didn’t think Quinn had earned every drop of every top-shelf martini he’d drink tonight could go fuck himself.
The Princess and the Porn Star Page 9
