Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) Page 9

  She didn’t blink, only followed his mockery with her own. “Aren’t you? I have the beard burn to prove it.”

  He shifted in the chair—the chair he’d thought he’d never go back to after bringing Ashraf down from the ledge. But he’d returned all the same, hadn’t he? Clinging to it when all he truly wanted to do was cling to her. “Your mouth is too bold.”

  “And yours is too dirty,” she instantly volleyed, hands set smartly on her hips. “No wonder they fit together so well.”

  He couldn’t disagree. Not when the sense memory of kissing her was so fresh, so immediate. The taste of her, the feel…how she never backed down from his challenges, only met them and pushed him further. No one had matched him like Rocky. Not even Archana, who was now but a flimsy recollection in the darkest corners of his mental vault.

  “Oh my God. Don’t tell me I’ve struck you silent.” Rocky stepped back, theatrically clutching at her chest. “The Great Taj Ali Khan…bested at last? By me? A mere American-born, confused desi?”

  “Never.” He rolled the chair forward, catching her by the elbow and tugging her off-balance, tumbling her into his lap. The smile she gave him was pure feminine triumph. And the kiss? Deliciously, achingly tender. Now she’d bested him.

  For Taj couldn’t keep her at a distance when she was so close. He could not worry about the consequences when all he wanted to do was take action. He couldn’t give thought to tomorrow when they had this moment between them. Her mouth demanded. Her hands took. Sliding down his chest and below his kurta…exploring the ruined terrain of his chest. She called him “beautiful” when she undid the fastenings of his trousers and dove into the gap.

  “Rakhee…Rakhee, tehro,” he gasped, trying to stop her fingers, only to be batted away like an annoyance.

  “You’re sexy,” she whispered, shifting so her legs were draped over the arms of his chair. So they were lewdly, intimately, entwined. “You’re sexy and you’re infuriating and you’re mine. For as long as you’ll let me be.”

  “What if I…I can’t?” It was a baseless argument, because already his cock was rising to the occasion, swelling against her palm.

  “Then you use your mouth. Isn’t that what you suggested when we first met?” Draped across him, over him, her hair spilling over him like a silk dupatta, she was an erotic vision almost too vibrant for his one pathetic eye. The tease of her kiss-damp pink lips, the anger in her gaze replaced by lust…Rocky was too much. Rocky was everything. “I’m not a virgin, Taj,” she said, as always utterly brazen. “This isn’t my first ride.”

  “It feels like mine,” he admitted softly. He looped an arm around her waist and gingerly rose from the wheelchair, steadying her with one hand curled into her hair and gripping almost tight enough to be vengeful. Almost. For he didn’t want to punish anyone but himself. After this was long over…when it was just another hazy memory to add to his trove. “You’re my first, Rakhee. My only. In this new life, I’ve only ever had you.”

  He spoke in Hindi, but she had learned enough to understand. Perhaps she’d understood him all along.

  They stumbled together to the bench seat in the arbor. An awkward tangle of mouths and limbs, of scars and smoothness. He’d once cloaked himself in shadows here, but now he stripped bare for her.

  She wasn’t a virgin. That much was true. But this was hardly in the same category as anything she’d experienced after the prom or a set-striking party. Impulsive, wild, frantic groping under the shelter of exotic trees and hanging vines. Seducing a man over ten years older than her. Whispering “I love you” and meaning it. Taj made the impossible seem possible. He turned the unthinkable into the spoken and the done.

  Rocky straddled his lap, her skirt hiked above her knees and the sun-warmed wooden bench marking patterns into her skin. Taj shucked his shirt and tossed it aside with defiance, as if even now he was daring her to cringe, to pull away, to run. Not a chance. She kissed the jagged scars down the side of his throat and every pale burn that ran down his chest. It was just like his face…the combination of pain and perfection. As if the hand of fate had chosen to strike only one side, leaving the other as a reminder of what he used to be. And it didn’t matter. Because she cherished both equally, touched both equally.

  “You can’t scare me, Taj. Don’t even try.”

  He rubbed his jaw against her cheek and then turned to catch her earlobe between his teeth and tug. “How can I, sweet Rakhee, when you are scaring me?”

  He was shivering under her hands. But not from fear.

  “We should not,” he said, even as his body told her differently.

  She answered it by stroking the hard length of his cock, by rocking into him, already slick and needy and desperate to be rid of her panties. “We can.” Her voice was thick, almost foreign. Like she’d learned one more new language in the time between waking up this morning and bending close to whisper, “I have an IUD. Mom took me to get it two years ago and didn’t tell Dad.”

  “Speaking of your father is not…” He gasped as her fingers tightened, but it quickly turned into a scowl and his own grip digging into her hips. “It is not incentive, sweet Rocky. And it is not sexy.”

  She had to laugh at having her words thrown back at her. Taj was learning to play. Learning to love playing. And she would teach him every game she knew, if only he’d give her the chance to. “You want incentive? Help me take off my clothes.”

  Retired or not, he still took direction like a pro. He pushed her dress up, making the slide slow and torturous. “Like this, Rakhee?” His hands, so large and capable, nearly spanned her ribcage, and his thumbs stroked up to the border of her bra and pushed beneath. “And this?” They unhooked it together, and she leaned back so he could pull both her bra and her dress over her head and fling them aside. Maybe they landed in a tree. Or on a hedge. She didn’t care. All that mattered was how he looked at her. How he leaned in to taste and to lick.

  Rocky threaded her fingers through his hair, trying, like he had, not to pull too hard. But when he set his lips to her nipple and his teeth joined in, it was too much. Her blood roared in her veins, slammed against her eardrums. Just like that, she was hotter and wetter than Mumbai in the rainy season, wrapped in smoke and dust and wanting nothing more than to be drenched to the bone. And Taj, the beautiful beast, didn’t let up. His fingers joined in on the storm, diving down the front of her panties and moving in counterpoint to his wicked mouth.

  She came quickly, too quickly, clawing at him and keening and forgetting speech altogether. She felt his smile against her skin, smug and satisfied, and tasted his victory when he raised his wet fingers for her to suck clean.

  “Rakhee.” Her name rumbled like thunder as he kissed his way from the slope of her breast to her throat to her jaw and then her lips. “Mere Rakhee. Mine.”

  Yes. His. His first. His only. She wanted it all to be true.

  His cock was impossibly hard and already primed for her. She rose up just enough to shimmy out of her underwear and kick it down to her ankles. And then they were fitting together, locking into place, slick and needy and wild. The angle was a little off, their rhythm not quite right, and the bench rocked in discordant bangs and thumps. Taj kissed her like he was starving for it, and she kissed him back like her passion could sustain him for a year. Rocky had never, ever felt so goddamn good, so complete…and so much like she was home. With him. Only with him.

  It wasn’t a curse at all.

  It was a blessing.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Enjoying a few hours of uncomplicated bliss was too much to ask for. No sooner did Rocky climb from Taj’s arms and wander shyly back to the house—hoping no one would care about how thoroughly, deliriously fucked she looked—than did the phone calls start anew.

  Ashraf had been gone a week. But the phone rang on and on, the same as before, with only silence or the dial tone on the other end. Knowing whom the hang-ups were from didn’t demystify anything. No, for Rocky, the confusion and
frustration only grew. She tried to scrub them away in the bath, but only seemed to grind the feelings in deeper. What was this Nina Manjrekar woman hoping to gain by pranking the haveli with such regularity? Why did she have to ruin everything? First, Ashu’s life. Then, the fragile peace of Ashu’s home and his loved ones just trying to go about their day? Why?

  “Satisfaction?” suggested Taj grimly when they reconvened in his library. She tucked into his side, wanting the heat of him, the breadth of him, for comfort now more than sex. He dropped a soft kiss atop her head and sighed. “I know her kind, Rakhee. She won’t be happy until she’s dragged Ashu and everyone he cares for into the gutter with her.”

  “I hate it. It’s awful, and she’s awful.” It was a petulant, childish reply but all she could muster that didn’t involve four-letter words.

  He seemed to sense that and laughed in accordance, before changing the subject to one far more palatable. “Will you stay with me tonight, sweet Rocky? All night?”

  It was a tempting thought, but… “No. Usha will know if my bed isn’t slept in.”

  “So what?” Taj scoffed, trailing his fingertips up and down her arm. “She is in my employ. Who will she tell?”

  It was the sort of logic she would’ve used while sneaking in and out of her freshman dorm. Was it a sign of maturity that Rocky didn’t want to use it now? “I’ll know, Taj…and that’s plenty. This household is going through enough already. We can’t control Nina, but I can control me.”

  “As you wish,” he murmured in Hindi, before kissing her a chaste goodnight.

  Neither of them realized just how tight Nina’s grip on Ashraf’s ankle was until Usha brought in the mail the next morning. Along with assorted bills and correspondence was a plain brown envelope addressed to Rocky. It contained only two things: a note written in Hindi—which was a deliberate insult, since everyone in India seemed to know she couldn’t speak it or read it—and an eight-by-ten color photo of Ashraf. All of Ashraf, framed against a backdrop of black silk sheets.

  The picture slipped from her fingers as if it were on fire, and heat flamed her face as well. She’d seen a lot of Ashraf during various parts of their shoot, but never the full monty. Oh, God. Even before she took the note to Taj, she knew naked pictures weren’t just another annoying prank. In this industry, in this country, to have them go public was a scandal few could survive.

  “Let me see it,” he demanded, of course.

  She’d almost ripped it into pieces and flushed it, ultimately deciding to lock it up in her suitcase. “No way,” she told him now. “This isn’t exactly a cute little snapshot of your baby brother in the tub. It’s nothing anybody’s sibling should ever see. Trust me.”

  Taj’s jaw was tight, sharp enough to cut glass, as he read Nina’s missive. Six lines of intricate scribble. So neat, so damning. “She thinks you and Ashu are having an affair. That is why she sent the packet to you and not to me.”

  Thanks to their temporary living arrangements, more than a few gossip websites had run with the speculation that she and Ashraf were more than costars—even claiming that their wedding was scheduled for fall. That sort of rumormongering was so common she didn’t think anyone actually believed it.

  “But what could she possibly want from me?” Rocky couldn’t imagine it would be money. The bulk of her assets were managed by her dad, and the Khans, while comfortable, weren’t exactly rolling in dough. Besides which, Nina probably had a ton in her bank account from her divorce settlement and her shares of Anandaloka Pictures. Extorting them for cash was pointless.

  “She is not demanding anything concrete in this letter. Only warning you that her requests are yet to come. Nina wants her industry respect returned to her…and she is willing to trade Ashraf’s to get it.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to restore her reputation? Didn’t she wreck that herself?” She’d never really learned the details—something about Rahul Anand, Priya Roy and Priya’s family—because it was one of the few Bollywood dramas that had been shut down and buried before it could spread. “Holding Ashraf’s career hostage is completely insane. How do we fix something we had nothing to do with?”

  “That, sweet Rocky, is precisely why she has us in a trap, nahin? I won’t let her destroy my brother. He’s suffered enough.”

  Taj had experienced pain. He had experienced fire also. But neither so exquisitely as what he felt in Rocky’s arms. She loved like she did everything else: boldly, without shame or fear. Save for the propriety she observed out of respect for his family. They met in the garden. They secluded themselves in his library. They drove the demons from the roof. And each time, the agony made him stronger, as if she were the forge and he the steel of a sword. She tempered him. Re-made him. Fashioned him for her hand.

  He could nearly believe it would last. Nearly. For the angry cynic still lived inside him, not yet free of ten years of cursed enchantment.

  “Sir?”

  It was laughable that Kamal continued to call him that as they sat together like equals. But if Taj knew himself, Kamal remained a complete enigma. The only clear piece of his puzzle was his devotion to Ashraf. The significance of it—familial affection, romantic attachment—was of no matter to Taj. It was enough that someone else cared for his brother. That someone else would kill for him, too. “What is it?”

  “Rahul Anand sent everything he has collected about the Manjrekar woman. Most of it was known to us already.”

  “And the rest?” He leaned forward, struggling to conceal a wince. Not from any lingering injury but from the scratches Rocky had left on his back.

  “She resides in a flat in East Delhi. She has mobile and Internet service. A driver. But very little ready cash. No club in Delhi allows her entrance. No fine restaurant will serve her. She has not attended a launch or a party since leaving Mumbai.”

  “So she is powerless everywhere but here. In our house.”

  It was infuriating. Unbearable. But…useful. They only had to discover how to wield the weapon.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  There wasn’t too much more time left in his vacation, as he’d begun to humorously consider his time at the hospital, and Ashraf was almost sad to see it ending. His daily dosage of antidepression pills had lifted the oppressive fog from his mind, but it was Kamal’s visits that had lightened his soul. Speaking with him, sitting with him, was like sitting next to a river and simply delighting in its flow. He never had to talk in sound bites, strike a pose or fashion a smile for his weary mouth. He could simply listen to word of home, listen to the rhythm of Kamal’s rich voice and think of what lay beneath the water.

  “What did you do before you came to us, Kamal? Where were you posted?” he asked impulsively during a quiet tour of the sanitarium’s grounds. “I never knew. I never thought to ask.” The admission came with a shameful glance cast toward his sandal-clad feet. “Awful, hai na?”

  “Not awful, Chote Saab. You were young. Concerned with a young man’s things.” For a moment, it seemed as though that was all Kamal would say. But he stopped walking, turned to regard Ashraf with a serious—and searing—look. “I was a surgeon. Heart cases. Trauma cases. That day, when he was brought in, I was also there.”

  “Kya? You’re…a doctor?” He was stunned, and too poor of an actor to conceal the shock. His knees did an even poorer job, and he scrambled for a nearby bench, sinking into it with a kind of numbness. “But, Kamal…why? Why would you stay with us, at my brother’s constant call like a servant? You should be posted at a large hospital somewhere.”

  “No. Not any longer.” Kamal shook his head, clasping his hands behind his back. A gesture Ashu now knew wasn’t deference but defiance. “There are many ways to heal, Chote. Not only in a hospital.”

  “Then volunteer in a remote village, at a free clinic,” he suggested. “Kitne options hain. Why live in our house of horrors?” Why stay with them, when he could be free?

  As always, Kamal’s stern features were so impassive they nearl
y showed nothing. “Perhaps Taj Saab is not the only one who wishes to hide,” he offered. “Perhaps we all have our reasons.”

  But Ashraf did not want to ask after them. Not just now. The strength in Kamal’s hands, in his eyes, suddenly made sense. He was a healer through and through. A doctor not just of the body but of the soul. He’d looked after Taj, and then turned his talent, his caring, to him. In a way no one but Nina had ever claimed to care. Not because he was burned, not because he was scarred, but because he was Ashraf.

  “Kamal…”

  Whatever bits of this revelation Kamal gleaned from Ashu’s face seemed to stop Kamal cold. His dark, fathomless eyes froze over like a mountain lake. “Nahin, Chote,” he whispered. “Stop. It is forbidden. I cannot be all things to you.”

  “It’s too late. You already are.” Ashraf pushed away from the garden bench, pacing Kamal backward until his retreat stalled at a conveniently placed tree. “I’m your heart. Hai na, Kamal? You said it yourself. Don’t take it back now that the feeling might be returned.”

  Life flickered beneath the ice. Life and hope. But Kamal shook his head. “You mistake a father’s affection for his son for a sin, Chote Saab. And you grasp at me only because a woman’s touch has wounded you so deeply.”

  Kamal was no more his father than Ashraf was an elephant. It was such bakwas that he couldn’t even acknowledge the claim. As for Nina’s touch poisoning him… “Nahin, I grasp at you because you reached out for me. Because you would not let me fall.”

  “Then it is your chance now, Chote,” Kamal whispered as he slipped past him, as he slipped away. “Do not let me fall in return.”

  Production for the movie had shifted to nonessential scenes, the villain arc—anything that didn’t require Ashu’s involvement—and they’d begun to tick the days of Ashraf’s inpatient care from the calendar. To treasure them in a way, too, despite the threat of Nina’s extortion looming over their heads. In between being driven to the city for early-morning calls and waiting for more lurid photos to show up in the post, Rocky kept up her Hindi lessons, practicing on everyone in the household…managing to tell the laundry guy all by herself to put less starch on her head. Khopri, kapre, potayto, potahto.