VINCENT (Dragon Security Book 2)

by Glenna Sinclair

  I laughed. I was so glad when Susie agreed to move to Houston with me. She was the only makeup artist I would allow to touch me. I had a dozen different allergies that I wasn’t aware of when I first got into the business and spent many nights in horrible pain because of the places the makeup managed to get into. But Susie knew about my allergies and she went out of her way to use makeup that wouldn’t cause a reaction or she treated especially sensitive areas with creams that blocked the allergens.

  Dicky walked back onto the set, looking like a king in his heavy, red robe. His skin was unnaturally tan, and his face was so full of Botox that he couldn’t more than the corners of his mouth. I watched him strut across the set, barking orders at the poor girls who were rushing to keep up with him, including the makeup artist who worked for my production label, who was only working on him because his artist quit twenty minutes before we were due to film the first take.

  “Your fucking warm-up girls are useless, do you know that, Milly?”

  I was a little surprised he even knew my professional name—Milly LeBouche.

  “What’s the problem, Dicky?”

  “This girl doesn’t know how to give a blow job. She fucking bit me!”

  I glanced at the girl. She was on the verge of tears, the side of her mouth bleeding from a small cut.

  “Did you hit her?”

  “She bit me!”

  “You don’t hit women on my set, Dicky. I don’t care who the fuck you think you are. My girls are to be treated with respect.” I stood, pressing a hand to the center of his chest. “We had this discussion the last time you were on my set.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Go home and read your contract. I’m done with this bullshit.”

  I turned, dismissing him with a dirty look. But he wasn’t done with me. He grabbed my arm and jerked me up against his chest.

  “Some little girl like you isn’t about to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

  “This is my set, Dicky. This is my movie, my production. I invited you to participate because I heard you weren’t getting much work these days. Now I guess I know why.”

  “You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “Just did.”

  He raised his hand, and I could feel the tension rush through the room. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Coleman come around the camera. I raised my hand to warn him off.

  “Hit me and you’ll never work in this industry again.”

  “So full of yourself all of a sudden, Milly. But I remember when you first started in this industry, doing anal films with the Johnson brothers. You were nothing more than a desperate little girl then, and you are now.”

  “We’ll see who’s desperate when it gets around that you couldn’t control yourself on the set of a foot fetish video.”

  He stared at me, his hand still raised high above my head. I thought I saw fear flash through his eyes at my words, but then it disappeared, replaced by the same ego-driven anger that had been there before.

  “Fuck you,” he said so close to my face that his spit splattered over my cheek. And then he released me and walked off. “Didn’t want this job anyway,” he muttered.

  Coleman walked him out five minutes later while I called my contacts, looking for someone who could take his place as quickly as possible. We had actors scheduled for the rest of the week. We couldn’t make up this day until next week, but it was supposed to go to the editors on Sunday.

  I knew I shouldn’t have hired Dicky. But I let a friend convince me. I was so bad at remembering to separate friends from business.

  “Call Raymond,” Susie said. “He’s taken some time off, but he’d do it for you, Quinn.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try him.”

  Sure enough, Raymond, aka John Cockman, not only was willing to come in, but he was only a fifteen-minute drive from the studio. We were back in business less than an hour later. We had to start over, re-shooting some of the scenes we’d shot that morning, but we were able to salvage enough, and Raymond was professional enough that we were back on track by midafternoon.

  For the final take, I was laying on my back, my legs elevated by pillows. I was naked, my thighs slightly spread. There was a tiny tattoo on my inner thigh that Susie usually tried to cover with makeup, but now we simply used computer software to make it disappear. The distributors liked their actors unmarked. The women, anyway. Raymond, on the other hand, had a massive tattoo on his right shoulder, but they loved that stuff. It made him look like an ancient warrior or something.

  Coleman, his camera on a track, was moving around the bed, trying to get all the best angles without accidentally getting a clear shot of my face. I learned a long time ago that anonymity went a long way toward protecting my daughter and me from the sort of fanatical behavior that sometimes came from hard-core fans. I’d been in this business for nine years, and the last seven had all been as a faceless fetish star. Foot fetishes were big, but I also did breast fucking and BDSM style, touchless videos.

  Raymond was on his knees, leaning back against the headboard of the big, king-sized bed, his hands down at his sides, handcuffs around his wrists. He moaned loudly as Coleman moved in for a close-up of his cock, caught between my feet as I carefully moved them against the length of his shaft. He was impossibly hard, as I pressed my instep against him, then rotated my feet a little so that the straight line of my outer foot offered a little more pressure. He groaned again, and this time Coleman caught it with his camera.

  Some actresses found this sort of thing kind of boring. There wasn’t a lot of pleasure in this for the woman. But I liked the power I had over Raymond. I could make him come quickly, or I could drag it out and make him suffer a little. I knew that if I moved my big toe just right along the underside of his head, it would make him cry out with more energy than any of the moans we’d gotten out of him so far. But I also knew that if I pressed one foot against his balls while I stroked his cock with the other, Raymond would begin to lose his erection.

  Every actor was different. Raymond and I had worked together so many times that I knew his cock like I knew the back of my hand. And that familiarity only added to the power because I knew where, how, and when.

  The shoot seemed to take a long time because Coleman kept pausing to reposition us. But it was really one of the easiest shoots I’d done in a long time. When everything was perfect, I pressed my feet together and Raymond pressed his cock between them and began to thrust against them, fucking my feet all on his own. His eyes were closed, and he was letting loose with some pretty intense moans. Men don’t really make noise in porn movies because they were designed for men and men didn’t want anything to drown out the noise the woman was making. But foot fetish videos were a little different. That was something else I liked about them. I liked the more genuine pleasure in my male partners during the making of these movies.

  Raymond leaned forward a little, leaning hard against my feet. That was my cue to begin stroking him again. I moved my feet up and down the length of him, massaging the length of his cock with the balls of my feet. He offered one last, long moan, and then his mouth fell open and no sound came out. His cock swelled just a little more against my feet and he came, one spurt after another, his cum splattering against my chest and my lower belly, Coleman’s camera drinking it all up.

  I pulled my feet back and caught the last few streams on my toes as Coleman zoomed in. This was the money shot, the one that our fans wanted. I lay back and closed my eyes, waiting until it was over. Susie came over when it was and helped Coleman position my feet on the mattress. He took a few seconds more of film, getting close-ups and then backing up and taking wide-angle shots. When they had everything, Susie draped a warm, moist towel over my feet and began to clean them off for me while one of the production assistants came over to release Raymond from the handcuffs.

  “Good?” Raymond asked.

  “Perfect.”

  He leaned over and kissed my cheek lightly. “It
was fun, as always, Quinn.”

  He wandered off, shrugging into his bathrobe as his bare feet slapped the cold concrete floor of the studio.

  I watched him, but then my attention was drawn to a tall, impressive looking man by the side doors.

  “Who’s that?”

  Susie looked up, becoming a little starry eyed as she caught sight of him.

  “Said he’s from Dragon Security. He arrived just as you were starting that last scene, so I told him to just stay out of the way.”

  We both stared at him for a moment, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He watched us, too, his eyes staying on my face rather than moving down over my nudity. For a second, I almost forgot I was naked.

  Susie helped me off the bed once she’d cleaned me up. A production assistant appeared with my bathrobe and a pair of flip-flops I wore on set. I slipped them on, lifting my hair up to pull it out of the soft material of the robe, tying the robe as I headed toward him.

  “Quinn Smith,” I said, holding out a hand to him. “You’re the guy from Dragon Security?”

  He inclined his head. “Vincent Caplin.”

  “We’re just wrapping things up here. If you could give me another twenty minutes or so.”

  He gave me another of those half nods, moving back into a casual lean against the wall. I studied him for a second, thinking how beautiful his eyes were. Dark, but fringed with such long lashes that they were almost too pretty to belong to a man. Very handsome.

  “Who’s that?” Coleman asked when I joined him behind the camera.

  “Bodyguard.”

  “What do you need a bodyguard for?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  I pushed the button that caused the playback on the camera. We watched together as the scene we’d just filmed played on the tiny screen. When it finished, I nodded.

  “Good work.”

  “Yeah? I could have gotten a tighter shot of his face right there when he started to cum.”

  “No. I think you caught it perfectly.” I patted Coleman’s shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I stood up and sauntered off toward the dressing rooms.

  “That’s a day, guys. Thank you.”

  A collective applause went up around the room, all the productive staff, the makeup artists, and warmup girls. I just waved my hand over my head and disappeared into my personal dressing room. Susie was there, and she handed me my cell phone without question.

  “Hey, Livie,” I said into the phone. “Your homework done yet?”

  “Not yet, but almost.”

  “Your teacher called me this morning. You did really well on your English test.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That deserves ice cream. What flavor do you want?”

  “Chocolate?”

  “Are you asking or telling.”

  “Telling. I want ice cream.”

  “That’s better.” I settled down on the edge of the couch in the corner of the room. “Is Beth there?”

  “Yeah. She’s downstairs watching TV. Do you want me to go get her?”

  “No. We’re about done here, so I’m headed home in a bit. Anything else you want from the store.”

  “Nope.”

  “Get back to the homework, okay?”

  I disconnected the call and lay back against the couch.

  “Do you think I’m a terrible mother?”

  “I think a mother who kicks her sixteen-year-old daughter out of the house because she is pregnant is a bad mom.”

  “But not a porn star?”

  “Just because you make these kinds of films doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Hell, you’re the boss. I think that says a lot about who you are.”

  “Yeah, well, can you imagine what all those PTA women would say if they knew what I did? Always walking around with their noses up in the air, while their husbands are ordering my videos late at night on their fancy televisions and computer systems.”

  Susie laughed. “They should give you medals. You’re probably making their sex lives a hell of a lot better than they’d be otherwise.”

  “You think?”

  “It probably takes one of your videos to get those men hot enough to want to fuck their stuck-up wives.”

  It was my turn to laugh. Imagining the woman who pulled me aside and explained that my daughter couldn’t wear blue socks with her school uniform because it clashed with the green in the skirt finding her husband watching one of my videos in the dark of his home office…it was almost too much. I giggled until my stomach began to ache.

  Susie draped my jeans and t-shirt over the arm of the couch and then sat down beside me.

  “You did the best you could, Quinn. You should never second guess yourself.”

  “Yeah, well, this stalker thing…I thought I’d put all that in the past when I changed my professional name and went faceless. No one is supposed to know who I am.”

  “Maybe it’s just someone in the business, trying to spook you?”

  “Whoever it is took pictures of my kid, Susie. I don’t care who it is…you don’t do that sort of thing.”

  “I know.”

  She took my hand and squeezed it gently. “I’ve heard good things about Dragon Security. These people will keep you safe.”

  “Did you see that guy?”

  Susie blushed a little, even as a huge smile burst over her face. “He’s…”

  “Gorgeous.”

  “Yeah.”

  We both kind of sighed, sitting there thinking about the hunk of a man who’d be following me around for the next few days at least. I’d never seen eyes quite like that on a man. And that rugged jaw? He was like something out of a romance novel. The last time I’d seen a man that good looking, I’d gone with Olivia to see an adaptation of one of her dystopian novels at the movie theater.

  I could make so much money with a man like that in my videos.

  “Do you think he’d consider doing porn?”

  “If he did, I’d volunteer to do his body makeup.”

  I dissolved into giggles again, laying my head on her shoulder as she laughed, too.

  Susie kissed my cheek and left, promising to see me early the next day for the following day’s shoot.

  I got dressed and smoothed my long, blond hair into a ponytail. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, stared at the simple concert tee and the jeans, thinking I almost looked like any other twenty-six-year-old girl. Except I wasn’t your average twenty-six-year-old girl. I owned my own house, free and clear. I was raising a ten-year-old daughter on my own. And I owned my own business. Most twenty-six-year-old girls were just beginning their lives, just beginning their careers and their families. But I didn’t have the cushion of time and schooling as they did.

  I sighed, turning from the image to grab my bag. He was standing in the same place when I came out of the dressing room, leaning back against the wall, his ankles crossed and his hands caught behind his back, like he was bored. But the second he spotted me, he straightened, catching the door for me as I approached.

  I headed toward my car, but he came around me and gestured toward an SUV parked at the curb.

  “I’ll drive.”

  His voice was so deep that it practically vibrated in my chest. And he was so tall that he more than towered over me. If he bent just right, he could probably fold his body completely around me. I was used to big men, some beautiful men. The producers I’d worked with in the past loved to pair me up with men who were much larger than I was, too. Something about the appearance of dominance. I learned a long time ago not to take too much notice of their size and to focus on the parts of them that I had power over. But there was something about this man—maybe because this wasn’t work—that made something deep in my belly turn to jelly. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t security. It was both and neither.

  Vincent helped me into the SUV and waited while I hooked the seatbelt over my body before he secured the door and walked around. I watched him in the rearvie
w mirror. He seemed casual about his movement, but I thought I caught him surveying the parking lot around us with a glance that was less than casual.

  I pressed my hands into my lap and tried not to stare at him as he drove me home.

  I didn’t like this. I’d not felt threatened quite like this in a long time. I needed to control my life, and I’d had it pretty much in hand for years. When I was young, when Olivia was an infant, I was out of control. I never had enough money, never had the things I needed to provide for her. When a guy came into the fast food restaurant where I worked and told me he’d pay me five thousand dollars for a day’s work, I thought it was a joke. I nearly turned him down. But I needed the money more than I needed to hold on to my dignity. When I arrived and realized exactly what it was he wanted from me, I again turned to leave. But then I thought of all the things five thousand dollars could buy Olivia. Clothes. Diapers. A decent daycare. Money for a proper doctor to give her her shots. I did it. I closed my eyes and told myself that it was for Olivia. That I would never do it again.

  But a month later, the money was gone and Olivia had an ear infection. The month after that, she needed another round of shots and clothes that fit better. After a while, I quit pretending that this was the only way. I took control. I refused to take roles that required me to do anything that made me uncomfortable. And then I refused to take roles that showed my face on film. I accepted that I had to make my living as a porn star, but I didn’t accept that it required me to give up my privacy and my shattered dignity. I was very careful from that time on, making up a professional name and keeping my business and my personal life separate. The last thing I wanted was for Olivia to be confronted by some punk kid on the playground who knew what I did, or to bring the dangers of that world into hers through the hands of some crazed fan. I’d seen it happen to actresses I’d worked with early in my career. I wasn’t going to let it happen to me.

  Yet it had. Someone figured it out.

  It started with a letter that came to the post office box I rented about a month after we moved to Houston. A fan letter that gushed about a movie I’d done three years ago. Then another, writing in the same block lettering, talking about certain aspects of my body that made it clear this person watched several of my films over and again. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t a big deal, that someone had simply made a lucky guess, but they were harmless as long as I checked the mail before Olivia got to it. But then the pictures came.