“So, if you could try to do that, I’d be very grateful.”
I glanced at my notes. “We’ve also had problems with the expense reports. Please make sure you have all your receipts. If you don’t have a receipt, don’t bother asking for a reimbursement.”
There were a few groans, especially from Marcus.
“Finally, you’re all getting a pay raise.”
That created a stir. Even Dominic pulled away from the wall and lowered his sunglasses to look at me. I waved my hands to get their attention.
“It wasn’t me. You should thank Sam. She’s the one who found the funds.”
“Thanks, Sam!”
“Yeah, Sam!”
She began to blush so hard that I thought the little veins in her head might explode. And then Hayden got up and wrapped his arms around her waist, lifting her high into the air and kissing her cheek.
I was pretty sure she was going to pass out.
“Okay, guys! Get to work. Go earn that raise.”
I watched them file out, Hayden laughing as he slipped out the front door with Dominic. He was headed out to do a little more digging into a case we’d been working together on the side for a little less than a year. Things went cold six months ago when a couple of key witnesses were arrested for their part in some sort of terrorist plot. But we were still looking, still trying to figure out how my brother, Peter, managed to get himself killed almost two years ago. It was a car accident, but it wasn’t just an accident. I needed to know what happened, and Hayden was doing his best to help. He’d gotten some sort of lead from a friend of a friend that he was going to check out today. I could only hope something panned out.
“Vincent?”
The tall, quiet man I’d hired less than two weeks ago slowly unfolded himself from his chair and sauntered over to where I was. I gestured for him to follow and led the way to my office.
I was a little weary of new hires. Not all qualified applicants always fit in with this kind of work. I needed guys who could be tough and who weren’t afraid to use a gun when necessary, but also guys who knew when to be diplomatic. I could usually read a guy the moment I walked into a room with him, but Vincent was a little different. He was quiet all the time, almost detached. Not a bad thing when acting as a highly trained, highly efficient bodyguard. But it could be a bad thing when dealing with the clients themselves. But he had all the right qualifications. And he was a buddy of my brother, Cole. So…I hired him and put him on a couple of larger jobs, ones he worked with Hayden, then Dominic. He seemed competent, but that sort of work was different than working a case that was more intimate, more one-on-one with the client.
It was time to test Vincent out in a real situation.
“I’ve got a new case for you.”
He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even grunt.
I sat behind my desk and opened the file folder Sam had handed me this morning, the client’s information typed out neatly in front of me. I really didn’t need this though. I’d met with this client myself. Normally, we had all potential clients go through a screening process, but this case was…well, sensitive. Sam brought it straight to my attention in order to treat it with some delicacy.
“We have a client, a woman who owns her own business, with a small child. She’s being harassed by an unknown person.” I pulled a letter paper clipped to the file and handed it to Vincent. He took it, his warm, chocolate-colored eyes moving quickly over the typed words. “She believes that this person knows where she lives, where her child goes to school, and where they do the majority of their shopping. For this reason, she thinks they might be in danger of a physical attack.”
Vincent set the letter on my desk.
“I need you to go stay with her for a couple of days, take her kid to school, take her to work. Keep an eye out for anyone in her life who might be acting oddly.”
Vincent stood in front of my desk, towering over it and me in a way that might be intimidating if I wasn’t used to being surrounded by big, tough men. Or if I hadn’t been in the military myself, fighting alongside men like Vincent in Afghanistan. He didn’t intimidate me. He aroused my curiosity.
What made a man like him—tall, strong, Hollywood hunk gorgeous—so quiet? Not even Sam, who could make the Pope open up on all his dark secrets, could get Vincent to say more than two or three polite words to her. I read through his military records. He’d distinguished himself in Afghanistan, earned the bronze star twice and had three purple hearts. And everything Cole told me about him was pretty impressive.
He simply didn’t talk.
“This is likely just a run of the mill stalker case, but we need to be especially vigilant because there’s a child involved. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I nodded, my eyes moving slowly over him. He had dark hair that he still kept military style, but he’d relaxed a little on the whole facial hair thing. He had a five-o’clock-shadow thing going on that made his rugged jawline seem even more rugged. And those dark eyes…they seemed to look right through you. In a way, he reminded me of Sylvester Stallone, back in the day when he was doing those Rambo movies. Only less Philadelphia and more Los Angeles.
Tall, dark, and silent. What a cliché.
I closed the file and handed it over to him. “She’s expecting you at the address on the folder.”
Vincent inclined his head and turned toward the door.
“There’s one other thing, Vincent.”
He paused, his shoulders doing this little flex before he turned to regard me with those dark eyes again.
“This client…she’s a porn star.”
If that idea offended him—or excited him, which was the very reason I wasn’t giving this case to Dominic—it didn’t show. He bowed his head just slightly and left.
I really hoped I wasn’t making a mistake with this one.
Quinn Smith seemed like a really nice lady. And her daughter, Olivia, attended the same private school I went to at her age. I really didn’t want anything to happen to either of them.
Chapter 2
Quinn
I tugged the bathrobe closer to my chest, as I watched the last scene unfold on the tiny camera screen.
“We need more close-ups. You remember what they said about the last one.”
“Yeah,” Coleman, my cameraman said. “But it’s hard to get close-ups when our male lead had a big ass pimple on his upper thigh.”
I shuddered a little. I was the one who had to get up close and personal with that pimple, so I knew better than Coleman did. But I wasn’t about to bad mouth one of the biggest names in foot fetish videos when he was within earshot.
“Just do the best you can. Maybe Rita can do something about it.”
“She tried. Short of popping it…and he won’t let her do it. Says it’ll leave a scar.”
“God forbid.”
I went back to the set, sitting on the edge of the bed. This was better than some of the videos I did at the beginning of my career, but having creative control didn’t mean I didn’t still have to get very intimate with guys I barely knew or, like this video, a man I couldn’t stand. Dicky Hump—whose real name was a boring Rufus Green—thought he was God’s gift to the porn industry and all women and that he’d invented the whole foot fetish genre. No one could possibly convince him otherwise, although many tried. But, as long as he had a long, thick cock and he was willing to stick it places other actors balked at, he usually got what he wanted.
Susie, my makeup artist, came over and touched up the body makeup that’d gotten smeared with the last take.
“You’ll want to wash this stuff off as soon as you get home. Wouldn’t want you to get pimples, too.”
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?”
<
br /> 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 cellphone without question.
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