These Damn Suspicions (Denial #2.5) Read online

  THESE DAMN SUSPICIONS

  Amy Valenti

  Copyright 2014 Amy Valenti

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  THESE DAMN SUSPICIONS

  THESE DAMN SUSPICIONS

  by Amy Valenti

  “Are you okay?”

  Something in Alex’s tone wasn’t quite right. It was too careful, too casual. I frowned and leaned against the wall as someone wheeled a rack of costumes down the soundstage hallway. “I’m fine. Are you okay?”

  She sighed. “I take it you haven’t seen the front page of Celebrity News Now! today?”

  I shook my head, then realised she couldn’t see it. “Not really my magazine of choice. Why do you read that stuff? Doesn’t it destroy your soul every time they run a picture of you with an accidental hair out of place?”

  “I’m starting to ask myself the same question,” Alex muttered. “But this isn’t about me—it’s Callum.”

  At the name of my Dom, my focus on the conversation intensified. “What are the paparazzi saying about him now?”

  Alex paused, then said, “They’re reporting that he might be having an affair with Elena Sanders. And they sort of mention you.”

  I laughed; I couldn’t help it. “Oh, God. Is this another one of those stories where they’ve taken a picture of us walking down the street without smiling, and cited that as proof that we’re having relationship problems?” That had happened earlier this year. Callum and I had both found it pretty funny, since the photo had been snapped right before we’d gotten home and done a mind-blowing scene that had made us closer than ever before.

  Instead of laughing with me, Alex said, “Actually, they have a picture of him kissing her forehead. It does look pretty intimate.”

  Despite myself, I flinched. Callum often kissed my forehead just to connect with me, to focus my attention on him. It stung to think of him doing the same to the co-star of the movie he was working on at the moment. I’d met Elena Sanders once, a couple of weeks ago—I’d been allowed onto the lot where he was filming to wait in his trailer for him after a day of filming, and Elena had come in with him for some reason. She hadn’t said anything terrible to me, but she hadn’t been overly friendly, either. And why had she come into Callum’s trailer with him in the first place…?

  “Are you freaking out?” Alex’s concerned voice interrupted my thoughts.

  “No,” I said, shaking myself out of my suspicious thoughts. “God, it’s just tabloid speculation. Callum and I are doing fine.”

  “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have told you over the phone. But I was scared the paparazzi might try to question you about the rumours without you even knowing what was going on. Nothing worse than being blindsided by the press.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I appreciate the heads-up, really.” If the paparazzi were going to be following me home en masse, I wanted to know about it beforehand. It had only happened once before, but it had been intimidating.

  “If it makes you feel any better, there’s also an article about the patch of leg hair I missed when I was shaving at some point last week…”

  I could imagine Alex’s exaggeratedly tragic expression, and I grinned. “Your career is over.”

  “I may never recover from the scandal,” she agreed wryly. “Text me if you need me, okay? I have to get going; I’m filming my Letterman segment later and I still haven’t decided what to wear.”

  “Nothing that shows your legs,” I teased. “You might offend someone.”

  After we said our goodbyes, I headed back down the hallway to the art department, which was pretty small for this production. My resume wasn’t yet impressive enough that I had underlings scurrying around doing my bidding—just one assistant, who looked halfway to dreamland.

  “If you fall asleep and get drool on my sketches, I’m not gonna be impressed.”

  Tony blinked lethargically up at me. “Sorry. I’m really not on form today. You probably noticed.”

  He’d made a couple of minor screw-ups, but we’d been working on this project together for almost a week and this was the first day he’d been anything but efficient and eager to help.

  “We’ll be clocking off in about an hour. Think you can hold it together until then?”

  He straightened in his chair, taking it as a challenge. I’d worried that because I was fifteen years younger than him yet higher up the production ladder, he’d be difficult to work with. So far, he hadn’t been. He didn’t even seem to aspire to work on his own set design projects one day, but was perfectly happy to help with mine.

  While I was working, it was easy to put my worries about Alex’s phone call aside. I loved my job in general—some projects more than others, and this one was a little difficult in terms of the producer’s vision versus the budget I had to play with. Still, things were coming together—just about.

  I left at around four in the afternoon. I’d been there since six in the morning, and filming hadn’t actually started yet so they didn’t need me to stick around. It was only as I stepped out into the warm, humid afternoon that I remembered the tabloid stuff.

  A quick check of my phone revealed no new messages. Callum was on a pretty heavy filming schedule right now, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. Still, I wondered if Alex had told him about the tabloid story. I wanted to see it for myself before talking to him about it.

  There didn’t seem to be a congregation of paparazzi waiting at the studio gate, for which I was thankful. Maybe nobody knew which studio I was currently working at. I wasn’t about to complain about that.

  I had to stop for gas on the way home—it seemed like as good a place as any to pick up a copy of Celebrity Lies Now! or whatever the gossip rag was called. I filled up the car’s tank, then headed into the small store to find the magazine.

  It wasn’t easy to miss. Callum was on the front cover—one of his promo shots from the final season of One Last Look, the cancelled crime show I’d been hooked on long before we’d met—and the headline screamed out in neon pink capitals. ‘SHOCKER! CALLUM AND ELENA GET INTIMATE ON THE SET OF INTIMACY!’

  Not the most original headline in the world…

  Resisting the urge to find the article right there in the store, I paid for my gas and the magazine and headed back to the car, thanking God that I wasn’t a celebrity myself. People rarely recognised me as Callum’s girlfriend unless I was seen in public with him, so I didn’t have to worry about getting pitying looks from the store clerk or passers-by who thought they knew what was going on in my life. I didn’t know how Callum stood the constant attention.

  There were a few paparazzi clustered outside our home, on the opposite side of the street, as though that would make them less obtrusive. Thankfully, I could pull the car straight into the double garage and wait for the door to close again before getting out of the car. Not that it stopped them from taking pictures of my little red Mini as I turned into the driveway.

  Callum had recently been looking at properties accessed by private roads, to keep the snooping press at bay now that he was a household name. Even though thi
s place was far more luxurious than anywhere I’d ever lived, I had to admit that I’d feel better if a glance out of the window didn’t give me a fifty-fifty chance of seeing a reporter with a camera.

  Once I got into the kitchen, I dropped the magazine on the counter and stared at it while I waited for the coffee to brew. Callum’s frozen image looked back at me, his half-smile doing nothing to calm my nerves, for once.

  Just open it.

  I leafed through the first couple of pages. The ‘story’ was just after the contents page—gotta hold the attention of the attention-deficit masses—and I stopped breathing, hurt radiating through my chest as though he’d punched me.

  Alex hadn’t been exaggerating. These pictures were damning.

  There were two of them—one where he was kissing her forehead wasn’t even the worst one, even though a territorial part of me wanted to throw myself at Elena and scratch her eyes out. The other one was worse, though. He really was giving her the same focus and affection he’d usually save for me, holding her head with both hands as he encouraged her to look into his eyes.

  I forced myself to look away, reading the simply worded paragraphs that accompanied the pictures instead. Apparently the photographs had been taken outside a restaurant the cast had gone to for dinner a couple of days ago. He’d come home pretty late that night.

  Remembering how Callum had pressed me up against a wall on the way back to his car after I’d taken him to my brother-in-law’s restaurant in New York, I suppressed an outraged cry and flipped the magazine shut. Callum’s picture on the cover just tore my heart a little more, so I turned the gossip rag facedown. Perfume ad—at least Elena Sanders wasn’t the one endorsing it.

  I grabbed a bar of chocolate from the cupboard, finished fixing my coffee, and went upstairs, not wanting to be too close to Callum when he came home. I dropped the magazine on the hall table on the way past, face up. He’d see it when he came in.

  * * * *

  I’d managed to catch a couple of hours of miserable sleep in the guest bedroom, but I was awake when Callum came home. It was passive aggressive of me to wait for him to come to me, I knew that—but I didn’t know what to say. I’d never had anyone cheat on me before, and I’d been too busy trying to block out my imagination to really come up with a way to start the conversation.

  The sound of him placing his keys on the table like usual made me flinch. Suddenly, the last thing I wanted was to talk to him. I should have gone to Alex’s place or something. Too late now.

  “Little miss?” he called up the stairs, after a few torturous seconds of silence.

  I ground my teeth, wishing I could cry or scream or something. But my emotions were a fiery ball burning in my stomach, and I couldn’t move or speak.

  His footsteps on the stairs made my heart stutter. I had no choice but to face him now.

  Once he was upstairs, it took him less than a minute to find me. The closed door was probably a pretty good indication of my mindset, but he didn’t knock before opening it. Typical Dom.

  “There you are.” He didn’t ask if I was awake. No one sleeping could have been as tense as I was.

  He sat down on the edge of the mattress.

  “Go away, Callum. I don’t want to talk to you yet.”

  “Too bad. We need to talk about this.” His words were quiet, almost gentle. What did that mean?

  I sat up and defensively hugged my knees. Even though we’d been together a year now, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. “Explain yourself, then.”

  “Elena has some…anxiety issues. She was on the verge of a panic attack when we came out of the restaurant. I had to calm her down.”

  “With your lips? With your hands?” With your cock? I left it unspoken.

  “It was nothing like that, Little Miss Badass,” he said sharply.

  Now I could look at him. Molten rage thawed my frozen body. He’d come up with that pet name the first day we’d met, but though he used it when I opposed him, it was always borderline affectionate and teasing. That was not appropriate today. “Call me that again, and I’ll make you eat that damn magazine.”

  He nodded. “Sorry. Habit.”

  I didn’t accept the apology, but I didn’t reject it either. He sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I thought you trusted me more than this, Kat.”

  “You’re giving her your Dom look! The one you give me! This isn’t some friendly hug that they’re interpreting wrong. It’s…intimate.”

  “It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t mean it that way. She was panicking and I did the first thing I could think of to help her.”

  Because he’s so used to talking me down from stupid panic attacks. If I believed his explanation, that just left me with a new problem. I was a high maintenance submissive. Of every five scenes we did, at least one would make me freak out a little and use my safeword or slow word. Most of my triggers were invisible even to me, left over from my traumatic first experience of BDSM years ago.

  Callum took my hand. His warm skin was too comforting for me to pull away. “I haven’t been unfaithful to you. I will never be unfaithful to you. I love you, Kat.”

  I nodded reluctantly. It was impossible to doubt his love when he was here, so obviously hurt by my reaction, so worried about me. He was a world-class actor, but I’d been able to tell his truth from his performances for a long time now.

  “I need to hold my little miss. Come here.”

  Was I making a stupid mistake, deluding myself that he wasn’t cheating on me? God, I hoped not. But I needed the comfort as much as he did.

  I slid across the bed and into his arms, and he all but crushed me to his chest, exhaling hard. “Thank you for trusting me.”

  I might have cried a little bit, there in his embrace, but neither of us acknowledged my silent tears. He rocked me gently, stroking my hair, and I soaked up his warmth, his reassurance, his love.

  “You’re the only one I need, little miss. I promise.”

  I pulled away to look up at him, rubbing away the remnants of tears. “Even if I’m broken, Sir?”

  Callum placed a finger on my lips, his deep blue eyes compassionate. “You’re not broken. You pulled yourself back together from shattered pieces years ago, long before we met. Every time I think of what you went through back then, I’m in awe of how well you pulled your life back together. By the time I found you, you just needed…a little extra glue.”

  Warmth spread through my chest. One of the reasons I loved this man so much was that he saw me for what I was and stuck by me anyway. He could have taken a large measure of the credit for putting me back together, and I wouldn’t have argued. His assessment of my strength surprised and pleased me.

  “I could always use more glue.”

  He kissed my lips gently. “Tomorrow night we can see about that. But we have some trust issues we need to work out tonight.”

  We hadn’t scened properly in a couple of weeks. Callum’s filming schedule had been too full for him to dedicate enough time to my aftercare needs, which were always pretty heavy. I’d missed our sessions as Dom and sub; maybe that was one of the reasons why I’d taken the story so personally without waiting for his explanation first.

  “I guess you’re right,” I murmured.

  He stretched out on the bed and pulled me with him, so that we lay face to face, watching each other. I knew his features so well I could have drawn him without a reference, down to tiny imperfections in his skin that the makeup department usually hid. He was considered one of the sexiest men alive, evidenced by countless polls in magazines and blogs, and somehow I was the one he wanted.

  His irresistible attractiveness was probably another reason I was insecure.

  “You could have anyone. You could have…Elena Sanders. Why would you settle for me?”

  “I didn’t settle. I love you. Remember?” He stroked my hair. “If you don’t believe that—“

  “I do. It’s just… I don’t think you get how weird it is for me. Your fanbase i
s filled with legions of drooling women. Only your die-hard fans can even remember my name, and half of them probably are wishing for us to break up so they can have their chance to seduce you.”

  The tiny frown between Callum’s eyebrows deepened. “Kat…I can’t even find the words to tell you how much I don’t care about them.”

  “And celebrity women? Tell me you can’t name someone famous you’d sleep with in a heartbeat if she came on to you.”

  Callum laughed softly. “Tell me you can’t.”

  I rolled onto my back, pressing my hands over my face. “You were that person for me. You were the only one I fantasised about. You were my go-to guy whenever I needed to get off. Or at least, pictures of you were. And DVDs.”

  He nuzzled my neck, sending a tingle to my pussy. “Now you have me. And that’s not changing, little miss.”

  “But I wasn’t your unattainable celebrity crush. And now your crushes are attainable, because you’re a celebrity too.”

  Callum sighed, rising up on an elbow so he could see me better. “Not all celebrities are attainable. Even if I were single, I couldn’t just walk up to Angelina Jolie, sling her over my shoulder and manhandle her into my lair. I think Brad Pitt and their kids would have something to say about that.”

  “You’re missing the point on purpose,” I accused.

  “A little,” he said. “But not because I don’t want to address what you’re saying. My point is…people can objectify me all they want. They can write fan fiction about me and draw pictures of what they think my cock looks like and put it all on the Internet. Celebrity women can tell interviewers they’d love to spend a night with me. The paparazzi can come up with stories to explain pictures they’ve taken without my knowledge or consent. Nothing I can do to change that, if that’s what they wanna do.”

  He laid his hand gently over my throat, then applied the slightest pressure when I tilted back my head. “Meanwhile, I’ll be here with you because that’s where I wanna be. You’re my girl. My submissive. I sure as hell am not letting you go, not unless you say you’ve had enough and walk away.”