The Companion Contract

by Solace Ames

  The Companion Contract

  By Solace Ames

  Control. Submission. Power.

  Amy Mendoza knew she’d never have a Cinderella story. She walked away from the ashes of her childhood on her own, and signed her first porn contract the day after she turned eighteen. The money’s been good, but it’s time to walk away again before the life drags her down. When a mysterious stranger offers her an unusual contract—sexual companion to a recently relapsed rock star—she accepts.

  Amy quickly and gratefully falls into an easy rhythm of control and submission—but it’s not her client who keeps her up at night. Emanuel, lead guitarist and the man who hired her, occupies her thoughts—and soon, her bed. Their connection is intense, and although Amy knows sleeping with Emanuel isn’t what she’s there for—isn’t what she’s being paid for—what’s between them is too strong to ignore. But there’s more to Emanuel than Amy knows, and submitting to him might come at too high a price…

  89,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  Hi, my name is Angela and I am an unapologetic reader of romance. I love a happy ending and I’m happy to ignore the people who say that requiring a happy ending makes my reading predictable, boring, silly, embarrassing or whatever other adjective they use. The people who think that are the people who’ve never actually read all of the amazing romances available. This month, we have eight diverse, non-boring, fantastic romances to offer all of you who are unapologetically #TeamRomance along with me!

  For those who are extra unapologetically happy to have their romances on the erotic side, Game Play is the exciting first book in Lynda Aicher’s new erotic romance series. When hockey golden child Samantha Yates is called in to help Minnesota Glaciers defenseman Dylan Rylie get his game back on track, it doesn’t take long before their on-ice competitiveness turns into rough, aggressive off-ice sex. The kind Sam likes but Dylan wants to change.

  Also delivering a sexy erotic romance this month is Solace Ames’s The Companion Contract. When Amy’s offered an unusual contract—sexual companion to an eccentric legendary rock star—she accepts. She falls into an easy rhythm of control and submission—but it’s not her client who keeps her up at night and soon the price of submission might be too high…

  Eleri Stone offers up an erotic romance in the fantasy genre. In The Shape of Temptation, an artistically gifted mage forced to play the pawn in her mentor’s bid for power comes to crave the sensual, hard-bodied—but lowborn—soldier she spends her days sculpting. Revisit this world in Threads of Desire.

  Also in fantasy comes this alternate history mystery from April Taylor. Luke Ballard, now Henry IX’s Privy Inquirer and a Dominus Elemancer, falls victim to the seductive charms of a darkly mysterious beauty in Mantle of Malice.

  You might like All for You by Christi Barth if contemporary romance is what you crave. When a straight-laced park ranger falls in love with a sexy professor hell-bent on exposing her darkest secret, she’s torn between a future with him or a past that must stay hidden.

  This month, we welcome Alyssa Cole to Carina Press with her new adult post-apocalyptic romance Radio Silence. Arden Highmore doesn’t know if the world is really ending, but one thing’s certain: she’s falling for her best friend’s brother as they struggle to survive.

  On behalf of the Carina Press team, I’m pleased to introduce two debut authors who have their first releases in February. First, in contemporary romance is Elizabeth Harmon’s Pairing Off. A scandal-plagued American figure skater’s last chance at gold means pairing up with Russia’s sexiest male skater…who happens to be the first man she ever loved.

  Caitlin Sinead debuts with a new adult mystery romance, Heartsick, in which a terrifying plague sweeps across a small liberal arts school and the surrounding community, bringing town/gown relations to a head and forcing an artsy undergrad to team up with an older, secretive detective.

  Coming in March 2015: HelenKay Dimon returns to Carina Press with a dirty-talking ex–Special Ops Marine, a prostitute and a street fighter find love in Victorian London, and we begin our love affair with a new space opera male/male series.

  Here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend. And a lifetime of enjoying romance without apology.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  Dedication

  To the women who send their love through the wires.

  Acknowledgments

  To those who have offered me valuable help and advice along the way: Suleikha, Lilith, Rebekah, Corinne, Kristina, and Deborah Nemeth, my amazing editor.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter One

  I’m a star, bitches.

  The guards at the gate didn’t recognize me. Not that I was surprised, because I’m not really a Hollywood star. It’s just a self-affirmation. I usually stick with fake it till you make it and you are enough, but tonight I needed something a little more heavy-duty. I put my hand on my hip, smiled patiently and tried it again.

  I’m a star, bitches.

  “Wait a second, I recognize you,” said the thick-necked guard with the ponytail. “I saw you in, uh, uh...”

  “You’re blushing. That’s adorable.” I reached into my purse. “Here’s a card with a promo pass to the private section of my website.”

  “Wow. Thanks.” He took it with both hands and actually stroked the embossed lettering.

  The guard to his left didn’t look as impressed, but he didn’t block my way when I walked right through the gate. I followed the winding trail of tiki lamps blazing dark perfumed smoke into a sky so polluted that the real stars were only a nostalgic memory.

  I didn’t like these kinds of parties. I wasn’t happy here. But then, I wasn’t happy most of the time, not anymore.

  Selling yourself is hard work. It’s not like in the stories where you sign a contract in blood with the devil, and then you can kick back and enjoy the ride to hell. I have to sell myself over and over again. Market myself. Establish a personal brand. I wasn’t scared of hard work, but I was scared that I was beginning to hate my job, and by extension, hate myself.

  I passed a group of women so pale and ethereal they had to be models—the kind they draped clothes over, not my kind of model. They turned to see who was coming down the path, stared right over my head and wrinkled their long, delicate noses. Maybe if I were taller they would have paid more attention, but I was wearing flats tonight under a purple microdress—a stripper dress but without stripper heels—because once I got my friend Chiho out of here, I might need to run.

  Chiho made my life a lot messier than it needed to be. I still love her. I’m sensitive about my ancestry, and I always thought that people like her—real live born-in-Japan Japanese—looked down on me just as much as those gazelle-ghost models were looking down on me now. Chiho proved me wrong. Once she found out my grandparent
s came from Okinawa, she clapped her hands and said that we had to be the best of friends, and just like that, we were.

  Chiho had locked herself in one of the bathrooms of the Bel Air mansion that loomed at the end of the path. She wasn’t sure which bathroom, according to her panicked phone call, but she was sure that they were out to get her. “They” being her agent, her ex-boyfriend, her ex-girlfriend, her coke dealer, or some combination thereof.

  The mansion had four stories and God knew how many bathrooms. Electro Swing music filled the air outside, the rhythm so bouncy that my hips matched the beat as I walked, even though I didn’t feel like dancing. The crowd on the front lawn was mostly tatted-up music-industry types plus a few girls I recognized from porn. I walked right through the crowd like I belonged. And I did belong, in a way. At the lowest rung of the ladder, but still hanging on.

  I didn’t want to climb higher anymore.

  But if I let go, I’d fall...

  I pasted a blank smile on my face, closed my hands into fists and walked through the archway.

  Stars popped into view. A pop-punk trio and their entourage sprawled over a bank of couches. A guy I’d seen play ten world-weary cops brandished a champagne glass and winked at me, but a woman in a designer suit grabbed his elbow and drew him away. And down a hallway where the marble tiles reflected a rich and confusing pattern of light, I spotted Jacinth, the legendarily temperamental Austrian techno-diva.

  I took the opposite direction and began the search. At every closed door, I knocked three times and said, “Chiho, it’s Amy,” waited a minute, then moved on.

  A guy wearing a security guard sash, linebacker size like all the others, blocked me on the second floor. “Looking for someone, miss?”

  “Yes!” I said in a breathy voice, and pressed my hands into a pleading gesture. His look of cold suspicion melted. “My friend needs a ride home and she says she isn’t feeling well. I’m so sorry. Can you help me find her?”

  “If she’s the crazy Asian with the nosebleed, yeah, second door to the right. Get her out of here, okay? Nobody wants the cops involved.”

  I nodded.

  “Chiho, it’s—”

  She yanked open the door, hooked me in, then slammed the door shut and flattened her back to it. Chiho was in a bad way. Her upper lip was smeared pink with traces of blood, her chin stained with purple lipstick. One of her circle lenses had fallen out, leaving one eye human and the other dilated and doll-like. “They’re waiting for me in the trees,” she choked out between rasping breaths.

  “I talked to your agent. She’s not mad at you for taking all the coke. She just wants to make sure you’re okay.” I didn’t reach out to touch her. We aren’t very touchy-feely with each other. We both like our personal space.

  “I don’t care about agent. Agent can go to the hell.” When she was this high, her English articles went haywire. “Snipers in trees. I’m on list.”

  “We could walk out of here together. You’ll be safe and I can drive you home. Everything’s going to be all right, Chiho. You just did too much, that’s all. You’ve gotten through this before.”

  “Oh, Amy. It’s okay if I die. I live too long, anyway. You’re so young.”

  “And you’re such a drama queen. No one’s dying tonight. Too many famous people here. We’ll spot some on the way out, okay? I saw Sung Kang on the front porch.”

  “Ha-ha, you lie.” She moaned like she was in pain, then hiccup-laughed, then started to hyperventilate.

  “Come on and find out.” I reached out my hand, slowly, open palm. She grabbed my wrist, still breathing fast and shallow, and her hand was feverish-hot. God, she must be scared. I’ve never been deep into drugs, but I did a line of coke once just to see what all the fuss was about, and it made me feel like a hummingbird with a broken wing. I fucking hated it.

  I circled her around, got the door open and gently guided her out into the hallway. She wobbled beside me in her stiletto heels, shouldered the wall like a badly shot pinball, snapped back and leaned against my own shoulder.

  “My heart hurts,” she said plaintively.

  “I know the feeling. Keep breathing, Chiho. Keep walking, keep breathing.” I pulled out a Japanese word from rusty memory. “Ganbatte.”

  By the time we made it down to the ground floor, I was having second thoughts about my instructions—about our entire plan, really. Maybe Chiho shouldn’t be walking. A cocaine overdose could make your blood beat fast enough to punch a hole through your heart. My mom used to be a nurse at a detox center, and she was always blunt with me about her work.

  I asked Chiho about the pain again.

  She couldn’t speak anymore. She couldn’t even look me in the eye. Her knees buckled. Stilettos rat-tat-tatted, then went sideways.

  You’re not allowed to die on my watch.

  I dragged her convulsing body to the nearest couch while yelling “Move! Move!” over my shoulder. Someone cleared a space, and I dumped her into it. “We need an ambulance!”

  Another security guard had his hand on my shoulder a second later. I shrugged it off. “Call 911 or get the fuck out my way,” I snarled at him.

  “We’ve got a private ambulance on call. They’re coming with a stretcher.”

  I was surprised the host would care so much, but I guess it paid to keep scandals to a minimum. “Then go get me a towel wet with cold water. She’s got hyperthermia.”

  I was about to beg for space too, so that poor Chiho could breathe better, but then she looked over my shoulder and gasped a word in Japanese, and then again, and again—

  Onryō. Onryō. Onryō.

  “I’m human,” said the voice over my shoulder.

  I turned to face the man, but until I looked up, all I saw was a broad chest—he was as big as the guards but wearing a white linen suit instead of a sash. And when I did look up, I still wasn’t sure he was human. He was white. Pure white. Like marble, like snow, and the lines of his face were as harsh and strange as a Noh mask.

  I flinched.

  And then I felt terribly ashamed. He was an albino. Of course he was human. And I didn’t have the excuse of cocaine psychosis for believing—even for a second—that he wasn’t.

  “An understandable mistake,” he said, looking down on me with blue-gray eyes the eerie color of moonstone. His voice went right to my bones, deep and rumbling with an accent I couldn’t place. He spread his hands to either side, making a peace offering of his looming body. “Reassure your friend.”

  I turned to Chiho. “It’s all right. Just focus on breathing, okay? Nice and slow, in and out.” I’d done what he told me without a second’s hesitation, and something in me bristled at that obedience...but then, I’d never seen anyone like this man before. I was off balance. Not to mention watching my only friend in the industry dying in front of my eyes. She was right—I was too young for this. And she was the only one who cared I was too young.

  Chiho closed her eyes, shook her head and shuddered. At least she stopped moaning.

  The guard came back with a wet towel, and I spread it over Chiho’s neck and shoulders. I half expected a hissing sound as the water touched her skin and turned to steam, she was that hot.

  Once I’d finished, I couldn’t help it—I turned around. I had to see him again.

  He stood a little farther away now, giving us space, so I could see all of him. Guilty for my flinch, I tried not to stare.

  Wait. I had seen this man before. A name floated into my mind, and my heart kicked into overdrive as if I’d somehow soaked up cocaine through Chiho’s fevered flesh.

  “Excuse me,” I said, remembering manners this time, even through the giddy rush that had me rising to my full height, rising so high I could feel the strain in my toes. “Are you Emanuel? From Avert?”

  He was still a lot taller than me, and still a
little terrifying. Even standing there like a statue, he challenged me. I couldn’t figure out any other way to put it. I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to look away.

  “That was me,” he said. Oh, he definitely saw me. “Avert was before your time, I think.”

  I’m used to people calling me young, usually right before they talk about how hard they want to fuck me. I signed my first porn contract the day after I turned eighteen—I knew what I was in for. But the way he said it, I felt resentful, as if he was dismissing me. Excluding me from something that mattered.

  “I’m a fan,” I said, keeping my voice neutral, not angry, and thinking, I don’t have to prove shit.

  There was a sudden burst of light.

  After staggering through so many dim hallways, the light hit hard. It hurt my eyes and made me want to strike out and hurt someone back, because this wasn’t fair. Too much coming at me, for too little reason, and I couldn’t handle all of it at once.

  “Stop taking pictures,” I shouted. What kind of sick fuck took flash photos of an overdosing woman? I was half-blind but I could still see dim outlines of furniture and bodies. So I stepped back and spread my arms, making sure to stand between Chiho’s face and the source of the light. I had to protect her.

  The light exploded again.

  “Stop. Stop. You could set off a seizure for her,” I begged, desperately angry and close to crying. “Jesus, please stop.”

  The only answer was a harsh choking noise.

  I blinked ferociously until blurry fields of color bled back into the monochrome world.

  The sick fuck with the camera was red-faced and fish-mouthed, hands flailing, and Emanuel gripped him by the back of the neck.

  “The camera.” Emanuel held out his left hand. So he was pinning the photographer with only his right hand? Impressive.

  I looked down at the carpet, scooped up the little silver box with the vicious flash and slapped it into his hand.

  Emanuel made a fist. There was a cracking noise.