Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) Page 4

  “Then she is the only one.” Taj snorted, tossing his book aside and shifting to lift his legs onto the sofa. Ashraf automatically moved to help him, gently placing his feet on the cushions and helping him straighten his knees. His bhaiya had been strong once. The strongest man in the world. Now his body betrayed him. In that, and only that, they were too alike.

  “Arré, Bhaiya. Be friendly.” He gave Taj’s foot a soft shove. “She has done nothing to you. Why must you torture her?”

  “Because looking at her face tortures me.” Instead of mockery there was anguish—and anger—in his brother’s tone. Rare honesty from someone who preferred to growl and bite instead of talking kindly.

  “Are you that offended by a pretty girl?” Ashraf tried to keep his tone gentle, lest Taj’s mood shifted again, into something far less confiding.

  “Offense? She has committed no offense. I offend,” Taj scoffed. “My very life is an offense. Perfect people do not belong in this house, Ashu. Beautiful people do not belong in this house. This is a tomb. Fit only for the dead.”

  Then it was fitting that he’d come home to it. Because he’d rotted inside, and he was so completely removed from perfection. “Let us suffer our tomb, then. Oos ko chohro. Leave her alone.”

  “No.” It was the same stubborn defiance Taj had displayed after his first skin graft surgeries. That exact mulish refusal to give up. “I don’t think I will leave her alone.” He kicked at Ashraf’s thigh, an insult and a dare all at once. But his expression…it was still honest. Giving away perhaps more than even he realized. “I don’t think I can.”

  “Don’t be so sure. You can do anything, Bhaiya.” Anything except leave. And Ashu envied him that. Because the only thing in his life he could remember wanting was to stay.

  Chapter Eight

  Rocky rose early, with the sun, washing up in the semi-modern bath and making a quick call to her parents as she breakfasted on the biscuits and chai that Usha brought up to her room on an antique silver tray. She didn’t yet know how to tell the woman, “It’s okay, I can come downstairs.” Saying “neeche” a couple of times just made Usha laugh and shake her head.

  Cell phone service was spotty but manageable, and five minutes of catch-up and assuring Mom and Dad that she was fine were more than enough. Filming didn’t start until tomorrow, so she had the whole day to familiarize herself with the layout of the haveli and the grounds. She needed the whole day to familiarize herself. Hidden nooks and crannies abounded. Hallways led to nowhere. Stairs led to the roof. At one point, she ran smack into a tall, bearded man with sad, serious eyes. He pointed her, quite politely, out the back veranda to the gardens.

  True to Nani’s word, they were breathtaking. Surrounded by roses and jasmine, Rocky could almost believe she hadn’t walked into the middle of a gothic murder mystery and written her name on the victim list. Bush after bush was heavy with deep red blooms as wide as her palm. There were pink roses, too. As delicate as a newborn baby’s cheek. Whoever was ignoring the house was clearly turning all their attention to the flowers.

  She couldn’t resist touching one gigantic blossom, gently brushing the edge of her thumb along a satin-soft petal.

  “Don’t you know the story?” The lofty, arrogant words stopped her hand just as she was pulling it back. Like she was a cobra and the mere act of Taj speaking had charmed her. “Pluck the Beast’s roses and stay here forever?”

  “Beauty’s father picked the flowers, not her.” Rocky tried to figure out where his voice was coming from. Everywhere and nowhere at once. “The story doesn’t apply…even if you are a beast.”

  She finally found an arbor, tucked away, its arch camouflaged in the hedges. Taj lounged on a bench, again playing lord of the haunted manor. His face was obscured, not by shadows this time but by hair…long strands swept over his cheeks like creeper vines. As though his garden had grown around him, trapping him in the foliage. And he didn’t seem to mind. He was comfortable being a prisoner, his sprawl so easy that it instantly drew her eyes to the wide vee of his long legs. To the flowing poet’s shirt that was buttoned halfway, revealing slick, shiny burns and scar tissue set against regular skin. If he’d meant to be off-putting, he’d failed. One glimpse of his body was like looking at a vast stretch of sand accentuated by irregular dunes. He was everything hot and mysterious. A tropical jungle, an arid desert. It was a little obscene how wholly sexual his staging was. A little obscene…and a lot intriguing.

  “Do you do this all the time?” she wondered, forcing her gaze back to his. To that one, dark, daring eye. “Sit around spying on girls in the dark?”

  “You are the one intruding,” he pointed out, with that rumbling mockery wrapping around his voice like a glove…and wrapping around her like one, too. “Generally, there is no one here to watch.”

  “Oh, so what you actually do is switch between sitting around in the dark inside and sitting around in the dark outside,” she concluded. “Wow, your life must be so exciting. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “I’ve had more than enough excitement in my life.”

  He spoke in a mix of English and Hindi, but she understood “kafi” and “excitement” and his dangerous growl. God, only a day and she could already interpret his growls. Most of them were simple: variations on “Go away, little girl”. Others…others seemed to say “Come closer”. Those were the ones that really put her off-balance. Rocky wasn’t cold, but she rubbed her arms, trying to will away the sudden goose bumps.

  The movement didn’t go unnoticed. “Are you scared?” Taj wondered, sounding entirely too pleased by the prospect. “So soon?”

  No way. It took a lot more to freak Rocky out than a few guttural noises and a bad Lon Chaney impression. “You have a really high opinion of your own creep factor, don’t you? You’re not that terrifying, buddy,” she assured him.

  Taj laughed. That, too, was something she was learning to translate. It meant he was about to up the ante. “You don’t know real fear, sweet Rocky. Not until you’re trapped inside a burning car, glass from the windshield cutting at your face, puncturing your eye like a grape. Do you know I felt my flesh melt? And the warmth of my own blood?”

  He could’ve been reciting a grocery list instead of recounting his accident. He sounded bored by the gruesome details. Like he was talking about someone else. That made it all the more difficult to listen to. And he probably knew it. “Stop it.” Her stomach lurched, and the words came out book-ended by gagging. “Shut up.”

  Her choking noises didn’t seem to wound him. No, if anything, they just made him look more arrogant, more sure that he was so completely above her. “Kyu? I had to live it. Why should you not hear it?”

  “Because you’re telling me to hurt me, to play some kind of game, not to let me in.” Did she even want in? Before Rocky could analyze what she’d blurted out, he echoed that exact query aloud.

  “Do you want to come inside? You? Sach?” Every soft note of the words telegraphed his disbelief, his contempt. “Bullshit.”

  She knew what people thought of her. What they saw. The silly, shallow American desi who read her Hindi dialogue phonetically off a teleprompter and couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. Taj had dismissed her the minute she walked in the door, and he was doing it again now. Like not being born in India, not speaking the languages, meant she didn’t have a brain. Or any compassion. “Fuck you,” she whispered. “You have no idea who I am.”

  “Fuck me,” he corrected, “and I will learn.”

  She’d heard worse offers on the El. Hell, on the streets of Mumbai, too. But still, her cheeks went hot and she gasped. Taj’s eyes glittered with a fevered triumph, like he’d beaten her with one dirty come-on. Rocky slowly shook her head. “No. You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “What if I cannot?” He gestured toward his crotch, smiling coldly when her gaze followed and landed on the tented vee of his loose pyjama-style pants. “Perhaps I am half a man in more ways than one. Perhaps my tongue
is all I have.”

  He left no doubt as to what he could, what he would do, with his tongue if given the chance. Rocky’s breath caught again. Her knees jellied. And, God help her, she couldn’t stop herself from imagining his dark, demonic head between her thighs. You need so many lessons. But she refused to cave. Taj was a chauvinistic pig. Like any other chauvinistic pig out there in the street. No better than someone who catcalled her or undressed her with his eyes. “You know what? It’s not your face that makes you a monster. It’s everything else. You’re disgusting.”

  He seemed to relish the idea, to revel in being deemed totally gross…or maybe in being something else entirely. “I am? Then why is your heart racing? Why does your mouth beg for a kiss?”

  Had he written all of this dialogue ahead of time? Expecting to offend her or turn her on or both? Even if her pulse was zooming, even if she did wonder what it would be like to kiss him, she was damned if she would give him any indication of success. “Have you even kissed anyone in ten years without having to pay for it?” she demanded. “Because, believe me, my price is way too high for you.”

  It was a good line to leave on, and Rocky almost tossed herself through the arch and back into the garden. But she didn’t move fast enough to be out of earshot. To hear Taj’s promise.

  “I’ll pay it, Rakhee. And so will you.”

  He stayed in the garden long after she’d gone, unwilling to move, to do anything but lock the scent of her and the look of her away in a tower. Amid the leaves, he could breathe. Amid the flowers, he could bear a caress—if only from their fragile petals. Here was his only refuge outside the claustrophobic walls of the haveli, his only solace aside from the books and films that had filled his privileged youth. A solace he desperately needed.

  And Kamal shattered it, stepping soundlessly into the arbor, a white-clad ghost with reproach in his all-knowing eyes. “Was that truly necessary, Saab?” Of course he spoke in the lyrical tongue of his homeland, of parts of northern India as well. Had Taj not understood it, he would still understand the judgment. “How do you tend your roses with such a gentle hand but crush her blooms between your fingers?”

  “You have no idea who I am,” she’d said. But Taj did know. He’d seen her type so many times before he’d stopped looking at all. Rakhee Varma was young. Beautiful. Strong. So sure of her place in the world.

  “She’s not a damn plant, Kamal.” He levered himself up slowly and then accepted Kamal’s arm for balance. “And even if she were, she shouldn’t grow here. It’s not her earth, not her air. Delhi’s climate is too dry for one such as her.”

  He was too dry for one such as her. “You’re disgusting,” she’d told him, and about that, she was entirely correct. For he could not look at her without thinking a hundred disgusting thoughts, beginning and ending with her spread naked beneath him. With him taking and taking and taking, until all her softness and splendor was nothing but a shell, a husk, a dead thing left to be swept aside.

  “The sooner she and Ashu leave this place, the better,” he insisted as he settled into his chair. “They belong in the outside world. In Mumbai. On the movie screens. Running between the trees and tall grasses.”

  The damnable man only smiled faintly, taking the gardening metaphor further still as he pushed Taj forth from the confines of his safe haven. “Do you fear they will grow roots, Saab?”

  No. That was not his fear at all.

  “My price is way too high for you.”

  He was afraid that sweet Rocky was right…and afraid that his prophecy was spot-on as well. He would pay to make her his. Any cost. A thousand times over. Because she was the first lovely innocent to stumble into his lair in years. Because she challenged him and provoked him and made him want. And because he simply could not resist.

  Chapter Nine

  “You’re such a good boy, Ashraf,” she whispered, closing her red-tipped nails around his cock, stroking with scratches…scratching with strokes. “So strong, na? The perfect hero.”

  Nausea roiled in his gut, but he couldn’t push her away. He needed her. He needed her influence. He steeled himself, forced the smile, the fawning words she wanted to hear…

  Ashraf bolted upright in bed, barely untangling from the sheets and lurching into the attached bath before he was violently ill. He clung to the modern commode, heaving long after his stomach was emptied of its meager contents. Cold sweat dripped from his skin, and his throat was raw with bile. “Bahenchod.” He swore, trembling like a leaf in high winds. “Saala-harami…kyu? Why? Dammit, why?”

  Months had gone by, and the nightmares were as vivid as if Nina still held his chain. He couldn’t free himself from them, from her. And to turn to someone else? It was impossible. How could he ever bear anyone else’s touch when hers had burned him to the bone? Who would want him after what she had made him do?

  “You deserve it,” he could hear Taj saying. “Who told you to link up with that crazy bitch?” You did. You told me to do anything to climb to the top, to show them all that our Khan name is as worthy as the others’. “Win,” his big brother constantly whispered in his ear. “Don’t be weak, Ashu. Win at any cost.” Even the cost of his sleep, of his sanity.

  Ashraf hunched on the cool tiles of the floor for an age, until he finally forced himself to stand and wash the illness from his mouth. But he couldn’t scrub it from his eyes, from his bones. Nina’s touch was like a tattoo, burrowed deep beneath his skin. And it was a mark everyone could see. Boy toy. Whore. Idiot. He read the scorn in their eyes daily. It didn’t matter that Rahul Anand had forgiven him, had let him keep the lead role in Be-Izzati. Even that was a condemnation wrapped in pretty paper: be-izzat, one without honor.

  When he looked at his reflection in the glass, black rings of fatigue beneath his eyes and blood cracks within them, he saw it, too: Ashraf had no honor. Worse, he had no future.

  It didn’t matter that he showed up on set and hit all his marks. It did not matter that he and Rocky made a beautiful young jodi, perfectly selling their budding modern love story. He wore his nightmares like a second skin. Ashraf couldn’t scrub them away under the hot spray of the shower. He could barely cover them in clothing. And he could not outrun them as he stumbled downstairs to meet Rocky and wait for the car to the city.

  “God, Ashraf! You look terrible!” she didn’t hesitate to tell him, when other heroines might coo niceties and pretend ignorance. “Are you okay?”

  Nahin. He most certainly was not. But all he gave her was a bleary grunt and a promise that he would be better after a few strong cups of tea from the catering service. They were shooting outside the India Gate today, a magnet for political unrest and public outcry. Somehow, the bigwigs had secured the rights to film for a few hours. Why they could not use stock footage, he did not know.

  Once they reached the trailers, he submitted to Wardrobe and Makeup’s ministrations, careful to school his flinches when Maria brushed too close or Aliya’s fingers lingered too long in his hair. They were no threat, their laughter innocently flirtatious and their caresses mostly accidental. If they thought him loose and available, they did not voice it.

  It was only when he focused his gaze on yet another mirror that he noticed his misery reflected in Rocky’s eyes. She sat silent as her hair was tugged and tied into a sexy updo befitting a rich Delhi bombshell. It matched the stylish dress and cropped jeans jacket of her costume. Everything coordinated but the flat line of her glossed pink lips.

  It was his turn to ask, “Are you okay?”

  She waited ’til Aliya and her stylist, Varun, walked away. Her normally bubbly tone was popped. “Chatterjee sent his assistant in while I was changing. They think I sound terrible on the dailies. ‘Too Amrikan.’ Bullshit.” Her voice quavered, and she was struggling not to blink her mascara-heavy eyes. “I have been working on my diction for weeks. I might not know what I’m saying, but I know how I’m saying it.”

  It all came so easy for her. The dancing, the blocking, the dialogues. Sh
e’d walked in off the street and picked up everything in less than two years. “Weeks” she said of her language retention. Ashu couldn’t fathom it. No one could. They blamed her father’s money for her heroine status. They credited her pretty face. He’d done the same, for sure. It was only after he’d met her that he understood how hard she worked. That her path to the cinema hall was different from his but no less difficult. The only true gulf between them was that she wanted to be here and he…he loathed every bit of it.

  “Bas. Chohro.” He reached over and squeezed her arm. A far easier action now that they’d filmed together for a few days. “If you gave hundred percent before, you will just give hundred-ten today. I’ll help you. Copy me, born-and-bred Delhi boy. Right?”

  She favored him with a smile. Her genuine smile. And when she said to him, “You’re such a good guy, Ashraf,” he choked back his instantly rising gorge and told her, “Thank you.”

  He was not a good guy. Good guys were not cursed to be alone.

  Almost two full weeks went by without incident. She even fell into a rhythm of sorts. Early breakfasts of banana and chai—down in the open dining room, now that Usha had stopped bringing her trays—a full day in the city proper for shooting, and then dinner with Ashu, Kamal and, sometimes, a grudging Taj. Usha whipped up all sorts of delights in her old-fashioned kitchen, hunkered over a coal stove or tending the two gas ranges. Rocky experienced everything from Pakistani dishes meant to remind Kamal of Lahore, traditional Punjabi food and the lighter chapati-and-veggies fare Usha made to cater to her shy American palate. As far as funny-looking vegetables went, thumbs-up on the parwal, thumbs-down on the karela.

  It was all becoming familiar. Sometimes too familiar. As she passed Taj in the hallway and he slowed the wheels of his chair. As he turned to skewer her with that cocky single eye or flashed her a sharp smile. She grew to interpret more than just his growls and sneers. She learned his wicked suggestions, his lewd flirtations and his I dare yous. She sifted his condemnation from his healthy admiration…because the way his gaze lingered on her legs or her ass or her—God forbid—face couldn’t be anything but the latter.