Stripped

by Edie Harris

  wanna go make out in my trailer?

  Yes. Yes, she did. More twirling, more kissing, more Declan. Yes, please.

  A minute later, she was setting her bag on the kitchenette’s counter, taking in the simple gray décor of the typical actor trailer as Declan closed the door firmly behind them. “How is it I’ve not been in your trailer before now?”

  “Dunno.” He turned her to face him, booted feet planted wide as his hands on her hips pulled her close. A sultry smile played across his lips, the scar on his forehead making his expression almost menacing. “Maybe you don’t like me.”

  “Maybe.” She more than liked him. “Or maybe you’re worried this place is too swanky for me.” Her chin tilted up as she met his warm gaze with a little grin of her own. “I mean, you have a couch in here.”

  “Exactly.” He took advantage of her vulnerability, bending to press hot, open-mouthed kisses along her exposed throat. “Now how ’bout you lie down on it for me, and we’ll get to work.”

  “W-work?” Her voice trembled as his lips found her pulse, and she clung to the lapels of his coat. He hadn’t quite managed to shrug off Count Vargas’s darkness, and she found she liked it. Liked the glint in his eyes when he pushed her back onto the couch in question. Liked the growl in his throat when she set her glasses on the table next to the couch and lifted her arms over her head.

  She definitely liked the weight of his body aligning with hers, his lean hips in those fitted wool trousers finding a home between her thighs.

  “Yes, work,” he purred, teeth nipping the line of her jaw. “Gonna get my makeup all fussed, just so you can fix me up again.” He reached for her hands.

  Found them, linked their fingers, and took her mouth with his own.

  He was aggressive, demanding she open to him, and she did immediately, not wanting to miss a single second of the attention he lavished on her. Every time they came together made her fall a little faster—because never in her life had a man shown her, with each kiss and caress, just how necessary she was.

  That was the thing about Declan. With him, she felt necessary.

  “Take off your shirt,” he mumbled into her mouth, his teeth finding her bottom lip and biting down a tad harder than usual.

  Wanting spiked, and she squirmed against him. “You’re…you’re holding my hands.”

  His fingers clenched around hers convulsively, before letting go to slip down her arms. He briefly cupped her face in both hands, gentling his kiss for a split second—as though Vargas had fallen away, and oh-so-necessary Declan could remind her that it was just the two of them locked together on this couch as though filming breaks and movie sets and home loans and scarred bellies didn’t exist.

  But when he found the first button of her purple, polka-dotted blouse, the tone between them changed yet again. With one foot planted on the floor, his other knee wedged into the couch cushions, his fingers flew down the buttons, until he could push aside the panels of her shirt to reveal her lace-covered breasts and naked stomach.

  After ten nights under his hands, she didn’t care one bit about her scarred stomach. He knew it, knew her, and she—

  “Christ, you’re so fuckin’ sexy.” He pressed his erection into her mound, but with the layers of his trousers and her jeans, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  Tugging at the cups of her bra until he revealed one nipple, then the other, he closed his lips over one and sucked. She arched her back, a soreness as her scars stretched that could quickly give way to a full-blown twinge if she weren’t careful, and tangled her hands in his soft, perfect curls. His tongue and teeth toyed with her, tasting her with a harsh thoroughness that had a whimper catching in her throat.

  He growled against her breast, minute vibrations shivering through her as his palms skated over her rib cage. “Know what I’m gonna do to you when we get home tonight?”

  Home. Holy crap. “Tell me.”

  “You really wanna know?” Teasing her neglected nipple with a flick of his tongue, he slid the fingers of one hand under the waistband of her jeans, not bothering with the button or zipper.

  She writhed. “Yes. Yes.”

  He found her, wet through her panties, and stroked. Hard.

  And, God, that aggressive touch worked for her. Crying out, she used her hold on his hair to drag his mouth back to hers, letting her tongue search past his lips until he danced with her. Their bodies rocked together, locked and needy despite all their clothing, and she demanded, “Tell me.”

  “The second we get inside, I’m pushin’ you up against the wall and—”

  A rapping knock sounded, but before they could break apart, the door to the trailer swung open—and in walked Fiona’s father.

  With a strangled gasp, she shoved Declan off of her and leapt from the couch, clutching her shirt closed over her bare torso as she whirled away. Her back to both men, she yanked her bra into place and began doing up the shirt buttons, not daring a glance over her shoulder.

  She heard Rick clear his throat, heard the shuffle of two pairs of feet as they shifted in what she assumed must be awkward horror. “Wes needs you on set, Declan.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  A step toward her. “Fiona?”

  Fully dressed, she turned, snagging her glasses from the table and settling them into place across her nose. “Go, Declan.” She couldn’t meet his gaze, or her father’s. “It’s okay.”

  He waited a moment, as though he thought she might change her mind and say she needed him, say she wanted him to stay so she didn’t have to be alone with her dad and listen to a lecture on responsible behavior that she may or may not deserve, given the circumstances. Then, stroking a hand down her arm, he brushed past Rick with a quick nod and was out the door.

  Silence fell for several torturous moments before her father spoke.

  “I shouldn’t have to warn you about this, Fi. You’ve been on film sets all your life. You know the dangers.”

  She scowled at him, tugging at the hem of her shirt and feeling more like an errant child than she had in years. “It’s none of your business.”

  “I didn’t think you’d threaten a promising career over a fling with a guy who’s only going to be around for a couple months.”

  “Nothing’s threatened here.”

  “Really? What if it’d been one of the executive producers who walked in on you two, instead of me?”

  “I assume they’d have the decency to walk back on out again. We’re consenting adults, Dad. Adults meet on the job all the time.”

  “Yes, but you’re not simply a consenting adult here, Fiona. When it comes down to it, you’re the help. You’re entirely replaceable, and it would take less than an hour for news to spread across town that our star stud was caught in a compromising position with a makeup artist. Then TMZ and other paps would haunt the studio, waiting for a glimpse of you, and I can tell you right now that Wes won’t tolerate it, no matter how much he cares about you. Not when he finds out that the compromising position happened during a union-mandated break in the workday, and not when he remembers exactly how new to the business you really are.” Rick sighed. “You’ll be done in Hollywood before you can even start, and I don’t want that for you. I don’t want you to be done.”

  “Dad—”

  “Two months from now, Declan will be moving on to whatever his next project is, and where will that be—Hungary? New Zealand? Florida?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, but I bet he does. Have you asked what his plans are, as soon as we finish the second block of shooting?”

  “No.” Asking Declan what was next for them had the potential to ruin everything, and so long as Fiona still wanted, well, everything, she wasn’t willing to risk it, or Declan. Not with words, not with actions.

  “Maybe you should.”

  Her father’s bitter expression poked at her, sharp and painful. “Why are you so angry at me? This can’t be news to you. You mus
t know he and I have been seeing each other.”

  A frustrated hand shoveled through already-mussed gray hair. “Because until this moment, I thought you were handling things like a mature adult. You were smart and kept your relationship away from the studio.” He crossed his arms over his chest, producing the best, worst fatherly glare she’d seen from him in years. That glare made her stomach hurt. “But this? This is reckless, and I can’t help but feel like we’re about to get a repeat of what happened during your last year of college.”

  Killing blow achieved. “Dad.”

  “Alexei Wolkov.”

  She shook her head, vehemently. “No. Just no.” Eyes watering—because it was fucking Pavlovian to her by now, every single time her father brought up Alexei and dancing and college—she backed away from her father, arms outstretched as if to ward him off, though all she wanted was to cling to him and sob. “Declan is nothing like Alexei.”

  “It doesn’t matter if he’s another Alexei or not. What matters is how you’re going to deal with the fallout.”

  “Who says there’s going to be fallout?” But her voice was hoarse with the certain knowledge that of course there would be fallout. Backlash, consequences, broken hearts, awkward meetings, strained work environments—all of it, lurking right around the corner.

  Or just beneath her feet. Her leap from the tower had finally caught up with her, and she could hear the phantom echo of a dancer’s worst nightmare—the snap of an ankle—as she plummeted from her high. “I was…I was a kid when I got involved with Alexei,” she whispered, wrapping her arms protectively around her middle, this time having nothing to do with the scars hiding beneath her shirt. She closed her eyes, unable to look at her father as her memories battered her. “I was twenty-one.” Twenty-two by the time things fell apart.

  Her father’s tone was as harsh as his words. “You weren’t a kid. You were—”

  “I know what I was.” Young. Infatuated. Starstruck by Alexei Wolkov, the blond god of modern ballet, who had come to Arizona State her senior year to direct—and dance the principal male role—in the school’s autumn production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Alexei cast her as Juliet, and two weeks later she was handing over her virginity to him on a pointe-shoe-laden platter. A man nearly a decade older than her. A man who wasn’t in love with her.

  A man who, it turned out, considered her ambitions pitiable.

  “You’re a good dancer, Fiona, but you’re no prima ballerina. You’re too quiet, too old. If you’d really wanted it, you ought to have skipped college and gone straight to New York, or Paris. Now look at you.”

  “What…what do you mean, ‘look at me’?”

  “Come now, Fiona. You know.”

  And she had known, though Alexei’s words had devastated her nonetheless. At five-seven, with C-cup breasts and hips fluctuating between a size four and six, Fiona was a lumbering cow among waifish gazelles. She’d always recognized her differences, but Fiona had believed herself good enough—talented enough—to overcome the softness of her figure with the strength of her body.

  Emotion had gotten the better of her in the aftermath of her affair with Alexei, when he’d flown away from campus without so much as a good-bye. A freaking tornado of feelings had found all the bits and pieces of self-doubt and external criticism she’d been hiding away for so long and blew them around inside her, until she was blinded by her failures, her flaws.

  It had been so easy to run away from it all and lose herself in Vegas when the curtain fell on Romeo and Juliet. In Vegas, people loved her softness, so it didn’t matter that she was big—too big to be a ballerina. In Vegas, her nudity was louder than her voice, so it didn’t matter that she was quiet—too quiet to be noticed by choreographers. And the only old person in Vegas those days was Wayne Newton, so that point also went to Fiona.

  Standing there in Declan’s trailer, her body ached like a giant bruise when she opened her eyes again. Her father might be angry as hell right now, and disappointed to boot, but she knew those dark emotions came from a place of deep, abiding care and concern for his only child. She could forgive him for expecting the worst, for blinking away the past three years during which Fiona had scrabbled together a brand-new identity, one that didn’t require her to constantly, literally, stay on her toes.

  He was her dad, and she loved him.

  Which is why his words had the power to cut her so deeply. “When your mother and I arrived at the hospital in Vegas, my first thought—beyond ‘thank God my baby girl’s alive’—was, ‘If only she’d never met Alexei Wolkov.’”

  “Alexei didn’t force me to make bad choices.” She crossed to where Rick stood by the trailer door. “I did that all on my own.”

  “Fi—” His arms lifted, as though he meant to lay his hands on her shoulders, but he paused, and she realized he was unsure whether she would accept his touch.

  So she stepped into him, forehead to his chest, arms locked around his waist, and she held on. Her glasses smooshed uncomfortably against the bridge of her nose, but she didn’t care, because he was hugging her back, their mutual embarrassment from minutes earlier forgotten. “We probably should’ve talked about this before now,” she mumbled, voice muffled by his sweater. Three years was a long time to tiptoe around one another—especially if they didn’t even know they were tiptoeing in the first place.

  “I suppose I didn’t think we needed to talk about this until now.”

  She pulled away, frowning. “Because of Declan, you mean.”

  Brushing a gentle finger over the line that had formed between her brows, Rick sighed. “There are different degrees of selfishness, Fiona. There’s what you did when you ran away from school and didn’t tell us, so we had to find out on our own”—his words landed with painful precision, and she fought not to flinch—“and then there’s looking out for you, and your best interests.”

  “Dad—”

  “I think you should be selfish right now, hon.” His hand found her chin, lifted it, held it so that she couldn’t escape his gaze. “You don’t think I know you’ve spent the last few years trying so hard to be good? Working your butt off to, what, make up for your mistakes? Mistakes happen, and what matters is that you learn from them and move forward and don’t make those same mistakes again.”

  Her chest had gone tight again, tears threatening. “But I don’t want to be selfish.” Because she had been trying, every single day for three freaking years, to not be the girl who’d nearly thrown her life away over what was essentially lost virginity and hurt feelings. Alexei Wolkov had only been the catalyst on the ticking time bomb that was Fiona. Living and breathing ballet for so long, sublimating the natural urges of her body to eat more or sleep more, ignoring the comments that had been a part of her dance career since she had first developed hips and breasts—comments she’d been determined to never let her parents hear, because it was her fight and her issue and she was going to deal with it on her own, damn it—had all led to the pinnacle of her selfishness.

  She couldn’t be that person again, not even a little bit. The very idea made her want to scream and cry and hyperventilate and run as far away from the studio as she could get before her legs turned to rubber and she collapsed on the pavement.

  It made her scars ache like fresh wounds, open and bleeding.

  Rick studied her for a moment, and released her chin to grab her hand. “Come on, let’s get some air.” He led her out of Declan’s trailer and into the lot. “I have a reason for suggesting it, you know.”

  “Suggesting what?”

  “Selfishness.” He squeezed her hand. “I said I knew you’d been working hard. You have the chance of a lifetime here, Fi. This film, the wonderful character you’ve helped create—the world is going to notice, and they’re going to notice you.”

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  Scared.

  Humbled.

  Excited.

  Definitely excited.

  “Don’t thi
nk I don’t see that smile you’re trying to hide right now,” her father teased as he finally dropped her hand. “So when I say I think you should be a bit selfish, I mean it. You have an opportunity, this very minute, to put yourself first. No one will be hurt by that decision. Not your boyfriend, not your boss, not your parents.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she blurted out. Even though Declan sort of, kind of was. Maybe. “And I’m buying a house.” If buying a house on her own wasn’t putting herself first, she didn’t know what was.

  “That’s right,” Rick murmured thoughtfully. “You’re buying a house. Does he know?”

  She nodded, not needing to ask who “he” was. “I, uh, took him to see it.”

  “You did?” When she nodded again, an odd smile twisted her father’s mouth, not quite breaching the solemnness lurking in his gray eyes. “Well, then. Maybe I wasn’t seeing the whole picture.” Before she could question him on what he meant by that cryptic statement, he said, “I still think you should talk to him about what his plans are once Vendetta wraps.”

  “I…will.” They would need to have that conversation eventually. After all, he’d spent the last ten nights in her bed, and the mornings that followed.

  Rick turned to go, heading toward the soundstage.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.” The words rasped around the lump in her throat.

  A real smile this time, and, perhaps, the sheen of quickly blinked-away tears. “I love you, too, baby girl. I love you, too.”

  Then she was standing in the middle of the studio lot, alone as a silent pink dusk settled in around her.

  Scared. Humbled. Excited. Yes, she felt all of those things when she considered the trajectory her father had indicated she was heading along. She knew what she’d done with the Vargas character was exceptional, even though she was merely the tool executing Paulie’s concept. That was how this industry worked: Unless you were an actor, there was always someone more important than you making sure you were doing what that someone needed you to do. That didn’t mean, however, that no one noticed you were, in fact, doing it.