Bound to Love (3 page)

As if in obedience, my channel rippled down his length, and then pulsed, contracting around him in spasms that tore me apart. Crying his name, I arched up, the only way I could touch him, the only way he allowed me to, yanking the cuffs until my wrists and ankles hurt. Roaring, he quickened his pace, until he collapsed over me with a groan, and his shaft throbbed as he emptied himself into the condom.

He was off me immediately. Of course he did that to ensure the protection worked, but I didn’t think it was just that. He couldn’t stand even an accidental touch. Even as I yearned to curl my arms around him, to hold him tight, he swung away and headed for the bathroom. The toilet flushed, and then the shower. I couldn’t share it with him. I would shower later, or even in the morning, on my own. All the things lovers did together, we couldn’t do. It had to stop. If he wanted to carry on seeing me, even for the next six months, he had to do something about his affliction.

My body was still throbbing when he came out. He’d showered and dressed in navy silk pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt. That way, I could sleep here. To be fair he’d bought me some nightdresses, but I rarely wore them, longing for the day when I could touch him, when we could sleep together, skin to skin, wrapped up in each other.

That day might never come.

I hadn’t even bothered to unfasten the cuffs. I could reach the black button that released me with my thumb, and usually I took care of that part for myself, but not tonight. I wanted to remind him, because I was determined to make him talk to me.

Gently he unclipped me from the bed, arms first, then my feet. I longed for him to take me into his arms, to hold me, but he only did that when I had my back to him, so I couldn’t reciprocate. I pulled up the sheet and covered myself, tucking it over my breasts, and went up on one elbow, leaning my cheek on my hand. “Talk to me,” I said. “It’s time.”

T
roy lay on his back and folded his arms behind his head. He met my gaze. His eyes were anguished, even though the remnants of orgasm lingered there. “You know my parents divorced when I was a kid,” he said.

“I’ve read about you,” I replied. “Your life is public.”

“Tell me what you know.” His lips tightened. “All of it. And I’ll tell you what’s behind the headlines.”

“Okay.” I brought to mind the reports I’d read and the articles I’d downloaded. Even what Wikipedia said about him. “You are the only child of your parents, although your father has had more children with other women. He was a serial monogamist until recently.”

He nodded. “Five wives. Four of them great women.”

I wondered which was the odd one out. “Your mother took you in the custody settlement and moved back to New York.”

“My father was crazy about me,” he said. “She knew she could get more out of him if she kept me.”

That was terrible. But I carried on. “You went to some of the best schools in the city, but you never settled in one. When you were eleven you left New York and went to Los Angeles, and went to school there.”

“Go on.”

“You went to drama classes as well as becoming a jock.”

He grinned. “Yeah. I was a late developer with the acting, though. And my Dad said my looks were too good to waste on football. So I carried on with the drama.”

“You went into the movies, acting in your father’s productions and then, four years ago, you took the part of Foxman.”

“Now go back. Talk about the gossip.”

I swallowed. When I’d downloaded the more salacious stories, I hadn’t believed them. Now I did. “People seem to make a point of talking about your sexual history. Like they used to talk about Robert Downey Junior’s drug addictions, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s diets, or Tom Cruise’s religion.”

“Some of them are fucking strange, and they deserve to have them talked about.” He shook his head. “I’ll let you decide which ones. Except for mine. Did you see ‘My sexy bondage week with Foxman’?”

“Yes.” I could hardly have missed that one. “That was the one that got you killed as Foxman, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “One scandal too many, the producer said. Actually he said, “I don’t care who your fucking father is, I don’t want you on my set anymore. You’re a fucking liability.””

I swallowed. How could he smile and say that?

“He probably did me a solid, since he pushed me toward New York. I wouldn’t have met you if I hadn’t done that,” he reminded me.

“But—”

“Shut up,” he said gently. “You’ve been the best thing to happen to me for years.” He touched my lips gently. “I was getting into a rut with Foxman. Any more movies and I’d have been typecast. Some superhero actors take other gigs on the side to make sure they’re not associated with the character and nothing else, but they kept me busy on the franchise.” He’d had two movies of his own, called, imaginatively,
Foxman One
and
Foxman Two.
“And I didn’t have the nerve to break out. Let me start at the beginning.”

He gazed at me, and reached for me, putting his hand over mine, where it lay on the mattress. He was touching me, not the other way about, but it felt good. His attention went to our hands, his incredibly long lashes swooping over his eyes so I only saw a glimmer of blue. “Tonight, my mother and her two best friends had front row seats in the stalls.”

I blinked. He’d got seats upstairs for Cindy and me because he’d said he didn’t want to have the distraction of looking at me. So why was his mother different?

“I didn’t know they were coming until just before curtain up. My mother called me. I told her to get lost, but she turned up anyway. I left instructions not to let her backstage, to tell her I’d already left, because I didn’t want to face her.”

So many questions crowded in my mind. I opened my mouth, but he touched my lips. “Just listen, because I don’t know if I can tell you what you need to know more than once.”

I bit my lip to stop the questions bursting out and let him carry on.

He didn’t look up at my face. “When I was a kid, I was my mother’s pet. She made me grow my hair long, dressed me in cute, expensive outfits, little kilts and shit like that. She handed me around to her friends, and they all cooed at me and told me how darling I was.” He grunted. “Enough to give a boy a complex. She punished me when I hurt myself. You know, stuff you pick up at school, ordinary things, scrapes and bruises. I went to school at five, and had nannies before that. My mother wasn’t concerned with the day to day stuff, only that I looked good when she brought me out. I was a good looking kid.”

I could believe that. He must have been gorgeous. A spoiled little rich boy, on a par with a lapdog or a cat.

“Yeah, well, I loved school because I could pretend I was normal. But a year after that, when I was six, she started to come into my room to read me bedtime stories.” He swallowed and pressed my hand.

A lump came to my throat as I imagined all the possibilities. He stayed quiet, staring at my hand. Was that all? But I had to ask the terrible possibilities that were creeping into my consciousness. “Did she abuse you?”

He flinched. “No.”

“Thank God.”

He lifted his head and stared at me. They say eyes are the windows of the soul. He hid nothing. All I saw was bleak nothingness and deep hurt.
What the fuck had that woman done?
“My mother never touched me inappropriately, as they say in the court cases. But her friends did.”

My heart beat once in my chest, hard. This wasn’t going to be easy to listen to, I knew it.

“It started with sleepovers at my friends’ houses. I was glad to get away, but I didn’t know what was going to happen. I’d always get a bedroom of my own, and when I was asleep, when it was dark, they’d come in and touch me.”

I shuddered, but stayed firm. I guessed he hadn’t told anybody else the full story. I kept his gaze as he told me. “It progressed. From what I can work out, it was a kind of game. Which kid they could get erect, who was the first to fuck them. Over and over they told us we were sweet, young, soft, gorgeous.”

“Oh my God.” Horror poured through me. How could anybody do this to their child? “I never read about any of this.”

“And you never will. They were training us.”

Horror made me catch my breath. I had to force myself to breathe normally. “The word is
grooming
. What they were doing was criminal.”

A faint smile curled his lips, sardonic and hard. “Some of the women were married to high ranking cops, or their husbands were on committees. There was no chance they’d ever be prosecuted. These days, they might have a chance, but if it ever came out—” He closed his eyes and breathed in heavily through his nose, letting it out in a long sigh.

That was unthinkable. With his public profile, a story like that would label him like nothing else would. He’d be a victim. I knew Troy well enough to know he’d hate that most of all. “How did you get out?” I asked him.

“I told my Dad. Just the outline. I didn’t tell him my mother was involved. If he’d guessed that, he’d have killed her. To this day he thinks she was just careless, that she let me sleepover at houses where these things happened to me. I didn’t do it to protect her, I did it to stop the story getting out. He would have taken her to court.” He glanced at our hands again. “I felt guilt about that for years. If I had spoken out, then they would have stopped their games, and more boys wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

Survivor’s guilt could be crippling. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yeah.” Slowly he lifted his hand away from mine and rolled on to his back, staring at the ceiling. “I guess that’s it, then. You deserved to know, Cassie. I’ve never met anyone like you before, someone I connected with so closely. I played my games with other women, but I never let them know it was anything more than kinky fun. You, though, you guessed almost at once. I had to tell you it was a phobia.”

The not touching. She’d damaged him so badly. “Did you have therapy?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t talk to a therapist. I’m an actor, always have been, so when my Dad put me in a room with a shrink, I convinced him that the women had only touched me a few times, and I was over it. I didn’t tell him everything, how they––” He swallowed. “I forced myself to go through the motions, and when I did, I found out that I could act. I enjoyed being somebody else.”

So acting had been therapy, in a way. “Is that why you don’t do romantic movies?”

He nodded. “I can, though. I can fake it on a set. Have you ever been on a set when they’re filming a sex scene?” He glanced at me, and I shook my head slightly. “No, of course not. I could take you and let you watch. It’s so unlike anything in real life. You stop and start, and spend all day in a robe waiting for them to set up the next shot. Most of my costars have body doubles, so I’m acting with a complete stranger.”

“So you don’t have them? Body doubles, I mean?”

He shrugged. “That’s never been an issue with me. As you say, I haven’t done many.”

We hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. That guilt, that phobia—there was something else. There’d been a spate of child abuse cases in the media recently, and although I didn’t linger on them, I couldn’t help but read a few. One of the things I’d read stuck with me. “You got an erection. Did you enjoy it? I mean, orgasm is unbelievably good, however you reach it.”

He didn’t answer, but then, he didn’t have to. The expression on his face said it all.

The tears I’d fought back came now, but they were for him. He’d protected his father, probably because he felt guilty about the pleasure these women had given him. If they could be termed that. More like children taking their fun, heedless of what it meant for others. “Psychopaths,” I muttered.

“Probably.” He spoke tonelessly, as if all his emotion had gone.

That couldn’t be good for him. He needed to release this somehow. I didn’t kid myself that healing would be easy, or instant, but he needed this. “I’m glad you told me,” I said.

He looked at me, blue gaze cold. “Are you still here?”

“Yes.” I knew he could hurt me like no other man could, but I’d take that risk. No way could I leave him now. “And I’m staying.”

“You don’t have to do that. I won’t take pity from you or anybody else.”

Anger simmered in my veins. “Pity? Why not? I’m no better than you. No worse, either. I have hang-ups—nothing like this, but why should you be different to the rest of us? I got over mine.”

“What were yours?”

He no doubt wanted a distraction, but I wouldn’t allow that. However, I could tell him my childhood problem. It was nothing compared to his. “I can’t see far without my glasses or contacts. That meant I had to wear goggles for swimming, and cheap glasses for sports, because of the danger of them getting broken. I was awful at it, and I hated it. So they laughed at me.” I shrugged. “No big deal. I got over it. But you see, we all have problems. Some are worse than others. Bottling it up doesn’t help, Troy, it really doesn’t.”

“Are you going all crusader on me?” His mouth flattened.

“No.” That would mean exposing him to the press. I wouldn’t do that. That was why his staggering good looks meant nothing to him, apart from being a tool for him to use in his career. It was why he couldn’t let a lover touch him. I didn’t know if I could change that, but I could try. I hovered a hand over his T-shirt covered chest. He stiffened. “What would happen if I lowered my hand and touched you?”

“I could lose it. I might hurt you.”

I wouldn’t let him back off. He was sore and hurting, and I couldn’t bear that. “It’s me, Troy. You know me now. Watch me, keep looking at me.”

He jerked a terse nod, his muscles taut. I kept my hand on his chest, fighting to keep from trembling. We stayed there, exactly like that until slowly, he lifted his left hand and put it on top of mine. He pressed so hard I thought I’d lose all the feeling, but I held on. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath, his chest rising and falling. Then another. Then he opened his eyes once more.

A little warmth had returned. He no longer looked completely frozen. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “I can do this,” he said, his voice hoarse.