Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) Read online

  But she got to know the area beyond the Beast’s castle, too. At least a little. The nearest village, a tiny off-the-map enclave called Rangpur, was three kilometers away. Easily a hike for someone who only really walked on a treadmill at the gym, but nothing at all to the two weathered, loincloth-clad men who brought fresh milk and eggs every morning. There had been water bearers, too, Ashraf told Rocky, before their great-grandfather arranged for indoor plumbing and fed pipes from the small river that supplied the village.

  Though the haveli seemed, and felt, isolated, the Khans weren’t the only landowners in the area. A far more prosperous family—featuring a few local politicians and the magistrate—lived on the other side of Rangpur in a newly refurbished mansion that nearly dwarfed the tree line as they drove past to Delhi. “The Saxenas,” Ashraf confided during one drive. “They have enough money and influence to line pockets and buy the pockets also.”

  He was surprisingly forthcoming about all kinds of things and happily answered her questions about the area, the customs and even dialect quirks. He was game as long as she didn’t stray too far into the personal. But there was one thing she couldn’t resist asking. One thing she could only broach when she had a captive audience, and Ashraf’s only means of escape would be tossing himself out onto the open road.

  Because his brother had planted the seed, and it had grown and grown in the back of her mind, twisting around like a vine. Like a penis-shaped vine. “How much mobility does Taj actually have? Can he walk?” On some level, Rocky knew what she was actually asking—“Perhaps I am half a man in more ways than one”—but she didn’t dare say any of that aloud. It was too embarrassing. Too intimate.

  Ashraf’s suddenly thunderous expression made her think he wasn’t going to answer. Or, worse, that he was going to tell her off for being so nosy. But, after a few seconds of what must’ve been one hell of an internal debate, he just sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “There was no spinal cord injury. Only very broken legs. Kamal came to help him with medicine and also physical therapy. Can he walk? Yes. Will he? I don’t know. Bhaiya’s secrets are his own. His cage is different from mine.”

  The description was a cue she couldn’t ignore. Like the way his mouth tightened and his dark eyes grew even more shuttered. “You have a cage, Ashu? What do you mean?”

  Then he did opt for silence, instead making a show of glancing out the window. After a few moments, he made some inane comment about the lack of a cavalcade of stalkers trailing them.

  But the paparazzi and peril she was supposed to take so much care in avoiding didn’t seem to be an issue at all. No cars followed them to the set. Their locations only had the standard circles of gawkers and assorted photogs. Everything felt…normal.

  Until the phone started ringing.

  It was the house’s landline, connected to ancient rotary phones set up all over the house, and the harsh brrrrrrr-ringing was enough to scare anyone used to a mobile on vibrate right out of their skin. Whenever anyone picked up, all they got was a dial tone. Taj swore like a trucker the few times it happened to him. Kamal, who Rocky caught with the phone once, simply sighed deeply, set the heavy receiver back in its cradle and walked away.

  After her third hang-up call in a row, Rocky stopped frowning at the phone like it was an offending object and went in search of Usha. The older woman wore what Rocky was beginning to think of as her standard uniform—a plain, pastel sari with a solid border—as she bustled around between the two stove burners and the island heaped with diced vegetables and cookware.

  “Kya hain, Rocky Mem?” Usha spoke slowly, already used to her lack of Hindi proficiency.

  Rocky sighed, trying to figure out how to phrase the question with her limited vocabulary. It took a combination of gestures, hilarious mispronunciation and a good deal of encouragement on Usha’s part to get the job done. “Haan, Mem,” the housekeeper confirmed, telling her that strange calls had been coming in ever since the “Chote Saab”, Ashraf, had returned home with her in tow.

  “Weird. Something’s definitely going on, and I don’t like it.” She wrinkled her nose, leaning against the edge of the island. “Thanks, Usha Auntie.”

  “Welcome, Rocky Mem.” And, after a pause, the housekeeper smiled—with both her mouth and her eyes. A rarity around the Khan estate, at least when it came to the men. “Welcome home.”

  Chapter Ten

  As always, the panic struck easily. Like a match catching on the side of the box.

  Fire raced up his legs, dancing up to his shoulder and licking his face with phantom tongues. The pain reduced him to blind flailing and fumbling as he reached for his pills on the night table. Then the bottle cap rebelled against him for minutes, making his fingers thick and unwieldy. “Shit. Goddammit.” When he finally tapped out two tablets and swallowed them dry, the worst of the shakes were already fading, leaving him with only the black-and-white memory of being trapped in the cramped Ferrari.

  The memory he lived with daily. Hourly. Reflected in every mirror he’d had torn from the walls, every window glass that he didn’t look into. And her eyes. Of course, he saw it in her eyes.

  You’re disgusting.

  Have you even kissed anyone in ten years without having to pay for it?

  Rocky Varma, so used to her handsome heroes, her many boyfriends back in the U.S.A. Where were they…and where was he? Reduced to a cowering heap in his bed with the afternoon sun still high, reliving terrors he’d experienced when she was still a child.

  Taj clutched fistfuls of sheets, willing his lungs to ease and the ghost echoes of his own screams to silence. Kamal was just down the hall, after all. It would do no good to have him come running—or bowing and scraping—and filling Taj’s head with a thousand passive-aggressive sirs. But his efforts were too little too late. His bedroom doors were pushed inward, and those quiet footsteps made their way across the floor.

  “Hat jao, Kamal. I don’t need you,” he snarled.

  “Um, it’s not Kamal. It’s me.” Rocky. Her voice softer than he’d ever heard it. More tentative than even her steps. Oh, haan. Of course, his torment couldn’t be at an end. It was only beginning.

  “I don’t need you either.” He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t. Kept his head bowed to hide the weakness in his eye. “Get out.”

  “No. Are you okay?” Ah, there was her volume, her annoying insistence on staying where she wasn’t wanted. But before he could tell her he obviously was never going to be okay, she barreled on. “And I don’t mean in general. Ashraf already gave me that lecture. I mean right now. What can I do for you right now?”

  “You? What can you do?” Finally, he looked at her, relieved to let his shoulders shake with mirth instead of fear. “Are you a nurse now, little Rocky?”

  She wore white, a simple summer frock more suited to a day at the beach than this tomb of a house. Set a matching cap atop her loosely bound hair, and the illusion would be complete: his beautiful, naughty nurse, come to save him from himself.

  “You’re such an asshole.” She closed the few meters to his bed, sweeping the dark brown medicine bottle up from the mattress and putting wayward pills back into it before capping it and setting it on the table. “Are you nice to anyone? Ever?”

  “You don’t need me to be nice. You don’t need me to be good. You have Ashu for that. What does he give you alongside the lectures, Rakhee? Candles? Flowers?”

  “The flowers are all yours, Taj, remember?” Her voice was tart, but it couldn’t hide her sweetness. She had a long way to go before she could ever play a villainess. “No one’s allowed to pick the Beast’s roses.”

  He pretended he hadn’t heard her. “Does he ‘make love’ to you?” he asked, struggling to turn his unruly emotions into cool mockery. “Does my little brother at least succeed at that where I cannot?”

  It was an image almost as nauseating as the ones that had just played in his subconscious. Nowhere near as appealing as her eyebrows arching in challenge, her hands clenc
hing at her hips.

  “Is that your way of saying you want to make love to me, Taj?” She cocked her head, her hair spilling to the side like a fall of dark brown silk. “Does your mouth ‘beg for my kiss’? Is that why your heart’s racing?”

  She threw his words back at him like sharp punches. At any other moment, perhaps he could have hit back. Now, with gooseflesh still raised on his arms and flames still dancing on his eyelid, all he could do was say… “Yes.”

  “What?” Her pale eyes widened. And when he reached out this time, it wasn’t blindly. He closed his fingers around her slim wrist and tugged, yanking her down to the edge of the bed. “Taj…what are you doing? Stop it.”

  “Phir ‘stop’. Always ‘stop’. You asked what you can do for me…you can do this.” And with that, he lowered his mouth to hers. This was the water to wash down his medicine. Cool and soothing, dousing the burn, even with her lips stubbornly closed against the tip of his tongue. He tangled his free hand in her hair, drinking her in. Sweet Rocky…so sweet indeed.

  Taj had tasted fear. Now, he feasted on need.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been kissed. Worse, it wasn’t even the first time she’d been kissed without her expressed permission. Rocky had, on the whole, enough experience with kissing to know that doing it with Taj, like this, was wrong. But she didn’t pull away. And when her hand should have come up to shove him, it instead curled into the open vee of his shirt.

  Her body hadn’t gotten her brain’s memo. Her body, damn its curiosity, wanted to know just how far he would take this. The soft pressure of his lips. At odds with the desperate grip on her hair. The cautious stroke of his tongue across her bottom lip. So much kinder than when he used it to talk. It all made heat spiral out from the ball of sparks that had settled in the pit of her stomach the first time he’d propositioned her.

  There was no denying he turned her on. Every light in her house was ablaze, the current crackling even as she tried to pretend otherwise.

  His name escaped her lips in a breathy moan, destroying the last vestiges of the act. With her lips parted in that one white flag, he captured her tongue. And the rest of her. He pulled her atop him, until she was straddling him and the bunched up bedcovers he’d tossed aside in his panic, and slanted his mouth across hers in the kind of lewd, wet assault that would demand a dozen retakes on camera.

  This was still wrong, still a mistake. They didn’t even like each other. But, for just this precious handful of moments, the Beast’s spell was broken. He’d made himself just as vulnerable to her as she was to him. She wasn’t going to waste it. So she kissed him back. And she touched him, wresting loose the hand he’d pressed against the mattress so she could finally feel this gorgeous monster who’d battered down her defenses. One side of his face was as smooth as polished marble, the other like the quarry it came from: all jagged furrows and caverns. He shuddered as she traced every scar, every gouge, his trembling only stilling when she wrapped her palm around the back of his neck and waged her own attack on his lips.

  It could’ve been minutes; it could’ve been hours. He was deliciously hard. All over. All Rocky knew was the strength of him, and it robbed her of breath to the point where she had to wrench away just to gasp for air.

  “Enough?” he asked softly, his knuckles stroking her cheek, his lips warm and sexy as they tugged on her earlobe.

  No. Never. She would never have enough of this.

  It took a second for her to register that the question wasn’t an erotic one, whispered teasingly with the intent for more. “Have you had enough, sweet Rocky?” The murmur was vicious and low, devoid of the tenderness he’d just shown her. “Or will you actually fuck the freak to prove how brave you are?”

  He could’ve slapped her and been less cruel.

  The sparks in her belly died, doused by cold anguish. A pain so sudden, so fierce, that she suddenly understood what it must’ve been like for him: trapped, cut to ribbons, bleeding out. She scrambled back, off his knees, tugging her dress down as she nearly fell to the floor in her hurry to put distance between them.

  The look in his eye was so remote, so blank, that it, too, might as well have been an empty socket.

  She wanted to cry. She was going to cry. “I…I’m not the one with something to prove, Taj,” she forced herself to say, nails digging into her palms to keep the tears at bay. “That’s you. And congratulations…you did it.”

  It was only after she’d left his room far behind that she let herself break. She let his gardens swallow her up…and pretended it was the thorns that hurt.

  Chapter Eleven

  With Ashu and Rocky going to and fro for the shoot in Delhi’s old city, days went by with the haveli as empty as a ghost town. Taj wheeled and crutched about in fits of pique, bellowing at Kamal and the servants like the creature everyone assumed him to be. It was only with his roses that he found a moment’s peace…but even that peace was torture. Rose petals, soft and velvety against the pad of his thumb, felt like Rakhee’s cheek, her mouth, her tongue.

  She’d kissed him like she desired him. As if that could possibly be true. The critics were wrong: She was a splendid actress. Fooling the both of them with the crush of her body and the press of her lips.

  He tortured himself with such thoughts, turning that perfect memory of being in her arms into something hideous. Just as he had when he pushed her away. Taj was no fool. He knew what he’d done: taking a knife to her passion, gutting her as she stood there, lips swollen from his kisses.

  Why should she be spared the agony that was his life? He’d wanted to show her what it was to crawl under his ruined skin, to not just caress it but feel it from the inside. She knew it now. And she’d run, just like he’d known she would.

  Was that not the story, too? Beauty running away from the Beast? Promising to return? But Rocky had made no promises. Nahin. She’d said nothing, and that silence said everything.

  “Sir?”

  “Leave me, Kamal.”

  “Nahin, sir.” There was an edge in the older man’s voice. Perhaps even a threat. But his words were serene, the Urdu beautiful and fluid, like the flow of the tide. “It does not matter what you say. You need me here, and so I will stay.”

  “You mean you are cursed to stay.” The fairy story had all its players in place. Even the true hero—his golden little brother, who never faced the consequences of any action, who could touch fire and never, ever be burned. But there were no happily ever afters. There was only reality.

  “Your brother’s an idiot, and so are you.” Rocky glared at Ashraf even as her lips froze in a perfect, simpering smile for the closing shots of the love montage.

  “Me? What did I do?” Calf-eyed devotion suffused his handsome face as they held hands and continued to gaze meaningfully into each other’s eyes.

  “You took me home!” It was a challenge to mutter the accusation through a smile, but somehow she managed. “I could’ve stayed with the rest of the cast and crew.”

  It was only when the assistant director yelled, “Cut!” that Ashraf responded, pulling her into the long shadow of the Qutb Minar. “Your father was concerned, na? It was a question of honor. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Keep me away from Taj?” she suggested, nodding at the PA who brought them each a bottle of water and then scurried back into the hubbub off-set. She uncapped the water and took a long drink, resisting the urge to splash it all over herself like she was doing a Flashdance homage. Try as she might, she still wasn’t used to the dry Delhi heat. Or to Taj. “He’s…he’s broken, Ashraf, and it’s too many pieces for anybody to glue together. Not without cutting themselves in the process.”

  Plastic crumpled in Ashraf’s clenched fist, spraying water everywhere. “But you want to try. You think you can ‘fix’ him. Some people…some people cannot be fixed. Some are broken forever.” He shook his head, his anger finally matching hers. “Who’s the real idiot, Rakhee? Perhaps you are also the one with a problem.”


  “Seriously?” He was sure one to talk, going all Hulksmash on some bottled water. Rocky scrubbed at her wet face and chest with the back of her hand before grabbing the edge of her trendy scarf and starting in on drying Ashu. “If that’s the way you want to play it; better an idiot than a coward, right? What are you doing here, Ashraf?” she demanded, following him even as he tried to bat her away. “You don’t want to be on this movie. You don’t want to be anywhere near your brother. As far as I can tell, you’d rather be anywhere else but here. Is there anything you do want?”

  “No.” He laughed, the sound so hysterical that the guys putting equipment away a few yards off actually looked alarmed. Ashraf gestured at them sharply, rudely, before twisting back to her with a feral snarl. “I don’t want anything, Rocky. I’m just skin and bone, moving at his maarzi, at his will. I have nothing that’s mine.”

  It made no sense to her at all. “Like Taj’s holding you hostage? Making you live out his life? Bullshit. You have free will.”

  Ashu laughed again, not so hysterical anymore. No, now he sounded entirely too serious and cynical. “Do I? Do you? You’ve met my brother, Rocky. You’re already half in love with him. You tell me, truly, if your will is still free.”

  Chapter Twelve

  For four straight days, they were so busy they could barely breathe, turning the week before at the haveli into an almost idyllic vacation. Ashraf concentrated on nailing his expressions and his dialogues—later dubbing be damned—and on pretending he was absolutely mad for Rocky’s peppy heroine when the idea of being infatuated with anyone just made him sick to his stomach. It was a National Award-worthy performance. At least in his own mind.