Command Performance Read online

“I know it’s late. I had a hard day.”

  “Oh, did you?” Her voice dripped derision. He and Satya were longtime friends, childhood friends, and their dynamic was...unique. Two years ago he couldn’t have imagined any romance between them. Well, there was no romance between them, but in the dark days after Jessamine left him, and after Satya had been dumped by a long time love, they’d started hooking up in secret. Extreme secret. Even Kai, Mason’s best friend and Satya’s protective older brother, didn’t know what was going on.

  It had been by mutual agreement, the subterfuge. Mason and Satya knew they had no future together. Mason had confessed his kinky proclivities to her, which she didn’t share, and she was too focused on her human rights work to get caught up in the tabloid storm that was his life. But as long as he was vanilla with her—and discreet—he was welcome in her bed when things got rough.

  “What was so hard about your day?” Satya asked. “Was your martini lunch shaken rather than stirred? They run out of jelly doughnuts on the catering cart?”

  “Why are you so mean to me?”

  “Oh, I got it. The makeup grunt poked you in the eye while applying your mascara.”

  “I had to pretend to rape this girl today. Over and over.”

  Satya tsked. “What girl? Is this more of your perverted shit?”

  “It was for a movie I’m working on.”

  “Oh, yeah. Who was the lucky victim of this exploitation?”

  “Mireille Durand.”

  Satya made a squicked sound. “You had to rape her? She’s what, fifteen years old?”

  “She’s in her twenties now. But it was still horrible.”

  “When is Hollywood going to get tired of rape-as-entertainment? And I suppose you’re too traumatized to spend the night alone?”

  “Please, Sats.” Mason wasn’t above begging. He’d done it before.

  “You know,” she sighed, “when I get a boyfriend, all this ends. It has to.”

  “I know.”

  “You won’t be able to call me at eleven at night with your sob stories. Satya, I’m so horny!”

  Her impression was dead on, but he didn’t feel like laughing. “Please let me come over.” Mason lowered his voice to a seductive whisper. “You know I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Okay,” she finally said. “But no sleeping over. I don’t want to wake up next to your ugly mug. I have to work in the morning.”

  “Fine, no sleeping over. I’ll be there in five minutes.” Mason hung up and relaxed, watching for the turnoff to her little bungalow in the hills. He did a quick sweep for hiding paparazzi before he parked and hurried to her door. She’d already unlocked it, so he let himself in and took the stairs to her bedroom two at a time.

  “Stop.” She held up a hand as he came toward her bed. “You leave all the rape and whatnot at the doorstep. Understand?”

  “I love when you scold me,” Mason murmured, stripping off his clothes. “When you make me feel like a bad little boy.”

  He launched himself at her, and she fought him, shrieking. “You are a bad little boy!”

  “Not a boy anymore,” he grunted. “Want me to show you?”

  “Oh, Mason,” she sighed as he slid his pelvis across her mound. “Not little either…”

  Satya was fun to have sex with. They played in bed together more than made love. Mason knew she was right, that they had no future together as a couple, but he treasured what she allowed him to share. He took his time winding her up, stroking her, teasing her to a frenzy of horniness before he rolled on a condom and slid between her legs.

  “Do you want me?” His hands played over her hips, her waist, her lovely dark-tipped breasts. “Do you want me deep inside you?”

  She didn’t answer, only grabbed his ass and drew him into her. They moved together, enjoying one another with leisurely caresses and whispers. Mason urged her on until she came and then he made her come again. His staying power was legendary, which he believed made him an especially good lover. It gave him more time to focus on his partner. He rarely heard women complain.

  Well, Satya complained. As soon as they finished, she pushed him off so she could lie solitary and replete in the afterglow. When he tried to kiss her, she swatted him and told him to go away.

  So Mason went away. On the way to his car he turned his phone back on and found seven messages from his publicist. Make that eight.

  Crisis. You need to call me ASAP. Re: your depraved sex life.

  With a sinking heart, Mason dialed Shane Greenberg’s number. “Hi, Shane. Did you mean that message as a proposition?”

  “This isn’t funny, my friend. My phone’s lighting up, messages from all the tabs and the online gossip sites too. Someone sold a story, not just about you, but about all your kinky Hollywood buddies. Tales about partner swapping, dungeons, bondage, orgies, all kinds of craziness. There are photos.”

  “Orgy photos?” Mason’s heart hammered.

  “What the— Really? There are orgy photos out there somewhere?”

  “Uh, no. Well, probably not.”

  A long sigh sounded over the line. “The ones I saw were party-type photos. Provocative but not damning. Several producers and movie execs were named too, but you and Jeremy Gray are the celebrities, so you’re the ones everyone will talk about. And Jeremy is married, a family man. With a kid.”

  “So he’ll look worse than me?”

  “No, better, because it will look like he’s settled down from all that nonsense. You, on the other hand, got divorced last year.”

  “From Jessamine Jackson! She’s the sexual deviant, not me.” A bit of a lie. “I mean, she was ten times more promiscuous than I was. I hope she’s being dragged down in all this too.”

  “This person claims Jess divorced you because you were into sado-masochism and she wasn’t. The source paints Jess as the victim to your sick sex demands.”

  Jesus Christ. That was so untrue. Yes, he’d been into BDSM and Jess hadn’t been, but they’d broken up over a whole hell of a lot more than that.

  “Is this legit?” Shane’s strident voice interrupted the hurtful memories. “Talk to me, Mason. Orgies, kinky sex, partner swapping parties with twenty or more people?”

  “Twenty is kind of an exaggeration.”

  “Is it true?” Shane barked.

  “It’s...possibly true.”

  “Come on!”

  “Okay, yes, that stuff goes on. But we’ve been discreet. I don’t know who would be out there talking about this. Not Jessamine?”

  “If it was Jessamine, they would have revealed her as the source to make it an even bigger story. But it’s a killer as it is. You’re the all-American movie star. The hunky, relatable guy. Now everyone’s going to be picturing you in a black leather mask presiding over orgies.”

  “Jessamine always ran the orgies.”

  His publicist made a sound like his brain was exploding. “Mason, goddamn it.”

  “Okay! Okay. What do you suggest I do?”

  “Don’t open your door. Don’t talk to any reporters. Lay low for a while and hope it disappears quickly, that people are too embarrassed to talk about it. Don’t leave your house.”

  “I’m working on a movie!”

  “Oh yeah.” Shane sighed again, heavy and long. “A movie about a sick, sexually deranged individual, if I remember correctly.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Jesus Christ. You don’t pay me enough for this shit.”

  Mason turned onto his street, cursed for a full fifteen seconds, and turned a corner to go the other way. The front of his house was crawling with media trucks and paparazzi. The gate was blocked by photographers in a line, waiting for the money shot. He wouldn’t be safe at a hotel. As soon as he checked in, someone would call whatever pap was in their pocket. He couldn’t go to Jeremy’s house, or Kai’s, or any of his friends who had probably been named in the scandal, because they would be blanketed with paparazzi too. Anything sex related became a media feed
ing frenzy. This was bad, really bad.

  He’d have to sleep in his trailer on the movie set, if he could even get on the lot at this hour.

  He was fucked.

  Chapter Two: Despair

  Miri sank down in the salon waiting room chair, guiltily devouring the article.

  HOLLYWEIRD’S DIRTY DOZEN

  Front and center on the cover of the weekly entertainment magazine was none other than Mason Cooke. She’d been following the story with a mixture of pity and fascination. She pitied Mason because she knew how difficult it was to deal with press like this, and she was fascinated because...

  Because if the story held any truth whatsoever, Mason Cooke was a very, very naughty man.

  Miri looked up from time to time to make sure her grandmother was staying put in the stylist’s chair. Debbie was excellent with Grammy, putting up with her increasingly strange rambling and abrupt behavior as well as any of the attendants back at her care facility. Miri’s tips reflected that. Still...

  Her grandma was getting worse. Miri tried not to think about it because this slow decline only ended one way, with the very worst thing of all. Grammy wasn’t going to get better, not ever, and Miri didn’t know what she’d do when she was gone. They’d always been so close. Grammy had been like a mother to her, especially after her mom died. Now, day by day, week by week, she was losing Grammy to the ravages of the dementia taking over her brain. When she was gone, Miri would lose her closest confidant—what little of her she had left.

  She looked back at the article, forgetting her troubles in the shameful squalor of Mason’s sex life. “This group of rich, sexually voracious men and women meet for regular ‘sextravaganzas’ at their sprawling, secluded Malibu mansions. Rather than hiring strippers or escorts, they pass around their own partners and have weekend-long orgies where nothing’s out of bounds. When they aren’t swapping and partying behind closed doors, they’re congregating at a super secret BDSM club where whips, chains—and worse!—come out in abundance, claims a source close to the group.”

  Miri wondered who this “source” was. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend? A competing actor? An angry partner of one of the participants?

  And what the heck did the source mean by “and worse!” Miri didn’t want to contemplate it in public but she’d been thinking it over the last few days while she lay in bed trying to fall asleep. She pictured Mason shirtless, leather gear clinging to his ripped muscles, a riding crop dangling from his hand. Oh my God.

  The article continued in a scandalized and condemning tone, but Miri was far from scandalized. To tell the truth, Mason seemed unbearably sexy to her now—and she’d actually had the opportunity to get naked with him. Well, almost naked. He’d squeezed her breasts and ripped off her panties, and even though she’d had a privacy patch taped over her lady parts, she’d felt him during that one take.

  What must it be like to have all that money and throw bacchanalian sex romps whenever you felt like it? It was so far removed from her world.

  “Miri, Grammy’s done. What do you think? Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

  Debbie turned the chair and at first Grammy’s eyes didn’t even fix on her. She looked, as usual, confused. Miri stood and walked closer to get her attention.

  “Oh, my! Look at you. It does look nice, Debbie. Thank you.” She reached to touch one of her grandmother’s platinum curls but the elderly woman frowned and pushed her hand away. She tired easily, and when she tired she got much more difficult to manage. “Well, I’d better get her back.”

  She paid Debbie, and the kind stylist offered to help her take Grammy to the car. There was a time Miri would have waved her off, but now she was grateful for any assistance. Before the dementia, Miri would have told Grammy about meeting Mason Cooke. She would have confessed how attractive she found him, and her grandma would have teased her about it. Miri might even have told her about the sex scandal. Grammy was cool like that, accepting and open minded. Now, instead, Miri tried to follow the unmanageable strings of her conversation as they drove back to Willow Oaks Manor, her nursing home.

  “The red hearts were sideways. And it... And I... Four of those please.”

  “Four of what, Grammy?”

  Her grandmother looked over at her from the passenger seat like she didn’t know who she was with. Miri smiled to put her at ease, but Grammy turned her head away and didn’t talk any more.

  Back at Willow Oaks, Grammy tried to walk away from the home, which she often did when she got agitated, and Miri had to run for help. That’s why they’d moved her grandma to a locked floor, which was almost twice as expensive as a regular one.

  The facility director urged Miri to let the staff handle the situation. She watched them corral her grandma carefully. She looked so frail and confused. Miri’s throat felt tight but she wouldn’t cry. She’d already cried over this so many times.

  “Miss Durand?” The salt-and-pepper haired director, Mr. Schimmel, cornered her near the facility’s offices. “Do you have a moment?”

  Miri followed him with a sense of foreboding. She knew the bill was paid up, thanks to the work she’d done on Revelation. When they’d chosen this place, they’d still had a lot of savings from her early career work, and no reason to believe it would ever dry up. But it was drying up at an alarming rate as the costs of Grammy’s care grew steeper. Willow Oaks Manor wasn’t the most luxurious nursing home in the area, but it was among the best.

  Miri tried not to think about money as they passed plump, velvet-upholstered antique settees and ornate vases as tall as her head. Mr. Schimmel seated her in his office and offered her coffee, which she refused. He sighed and leaned forward, rearranging some papers on his desk before looking back at her.

  “I trust you enjoyed your outing today?”

  “Yes. I think she did.” Miri smiled wryly. “These days, it’s getting harder to tell if she enjoys something or not. But I want her to have a life.”

  “Of course. Quality of life is of utmost concern here. But your grandmother’s faculties are not what they once were, and quality of life takes on a new meaning as people age.”

  Miri looked down at her hands. “She’s getting worse. I know.”

  Mr. Schimmel sighed and rested his chin on steepled fingers. “Miss Durand, you are so dedicated to your grandmother. I admire you for your attention to her, but her doctor believes it would be best if you didn’t take her outside the facility anymore. With her advancing condition, it’s not safe. Not unless you take an assistant with you, but that’s not covered under your grandmother’s care plan.”

  She looked at the older man. He was faultlessly polite, but she hated him. “Grammy likes to have her hair done.”

  “We have a lady who comes and does the residents’ hair in the comfort of their rooms for a nominal charge.”

  “Grammy knows the stylist at this place. She trusts her. She likes to be pampered once in a while. Don’t we all?” Miri smiled, but he didn’t smile back. His point was clear. Any pampering that required outside trips was going to cost extra from now on.

  “She’s reaching the point where she won’t be aware of whether she’s out or in. Whether she’s at a premier spa or a barber shop,” Mr. Schimmel said. “She doesn’t remember from hour to hour what she did the hour before. You must understand, Miss Durand, that your grandmother’s safety is our primary concern.”

  “You just said quality of life was of utmost concern.”

  “Safety comes first, then quality of life. Of course, you are welcome to visit her here at any time. During any of the visiting hours. She enjoys spending time with you.”

  He said the lie without the least stutter or hesitation. The truth was, Miri’s grandmother didn’t recognize her half the time, and when she did, they could barely carry on a conversation.

  It was so depressing, all of it. The money, the unctuous look on Mr. Schimmel’s face. Grammy was definitely getting worse.

  *** *** ***

  Three weeks out from
the scandal breaking, the media still dogged Mason’s every movement. He managed to sneak over to Kai’s house for a New Year’s Eve dinner with his closest friends—or as the media called them, his “orgy partners.” It wasn’t as bad as the New Years two years earlier when he and Jessamine had had a screaming fight and decided to divorce in front of everyone. It wasn’t that bad, but almost.

  Shane had been right. Jeremy Gray had a very conservative, non-movie-star wife, Nell, and a sweet little daughter to redeem him in the eyes of the world. The “Indian digital tech magnate” mentioned in the stories was Kai Chandler, Satya’s brother, but he wasn’t a celebrity, so no one gave a fuck or bothered him and his wife Constance. Jessamine was out of the country, her lips firmly sealed, undoubtedly to damn Mason more.

  Somehow, they all got a pass, and the media vultures clustered on him.

  Mason was the first to admit it was a damn juicy story. Sordid parties, kinky fetishism, group sex. Jessamine as the vulnerable wife fleeing her marriage to a perverted sex addict masquerading as a good guy. The funny thing was, he hadn’t even given in to his BDSM impulses until recently, while Jeremy and Kai had been in the lifestyle for years.

  “It’s not fair,” Nell said over dinner. “Jessamine was the one who broke up your marriage, cheating on you with everyone she possibly could.”

  Mason shook his head. “No, I cheated. Remember?” He glanced at Constance. Water under the bridge. Before she was Kai’s wife, Constance had been his friend’s odalisque, or sexual servant, and Kai had shared her with Mason behind Jessamine’s back. “All Jess’s extra-marital activity was sanctioned by me, and I kept secrets from her, so...”

  “You’re an idiot.” Satya had to get in that dig.

  “The point is,” Mason said, ignoring Satya, “Jess has no reason to come to my defense. I wronged her.”

  “But she wronged you first,” signed Constance. “She treated you terribly.”

  Kai translated her sign language and agreed. “Still, I don’t think it was Jess who outed us.”