Bound To Him: Three Dates with a Billionaire (4 page)

“I see.” Steve looked at me doubtfully. “Well it was a pleasure seeing you, Troy. Any time you want a guided tour, let me know.”

“Sure.” Troy urged me to turn. When I stumbled, he righted me, seemingly effortlessly. “We were going for a late supper. Care to join us?”

“Ah, erm—”

I’d have thought Steve would have jumped at the chance. But perhaps he had more tact than I thought. Troy led me away, the pool of speculation widening as we passed through the crowd and to the exit.

The air outside was cool, scented with the aroma of damp sidewalks. Oh great, it had showered again. More to slip on. A limo stood waiting at the bottom of the steps, as if summoned by magic. Troy winked at me. “The power of speed dial. Come on.”

I kept my arm tucked in his until we had reached the bottom of the flight of stone steps. He didn’t hurry me down. The driver had opened the car door. Troy turned and faced me.

“Th-thank you,” I stammered. “I really appreciate your help.” I moved away, ready to turn and leave.

“Wait.”

I stopped and turned back to face him.

“Get in. If your boss is watching he’ll think it’s a bit strange if you don’t get into the car.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “Thanks.” I got in and settled myself on the lush leather seat that stretched the width of the car. Troy got in beside me.

“You can drop me at the nearest taxi rank,” I said.

“I have a better idea.” He turned in his seat, so he was looking at me. “Have supper with me. Then you won’t have to lie to Steve.”

I swallowed. “You mean it?” I sounded like a star struck schoolgirl. What had gotten into me? My panic was subsiding now and I was taking stock.

“Sure. You intrigue me, Cassie. I can call you Cassie, can’t I?” I nodded dumbly. “Why would you dress like this at night and the way you do during the daytime? Are you into Cinderella?”

“Something like that.” How could I begin to explain?
I moonlight as a paid escort
wouldn’t have gone down well. If Witley didn’t tell Steve. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t. There’d been an implicit threat in the comment about his father, one I was sure I hadn’t invented. “I—I have a room mate, and she said I couldn’t go out like I was.”

“Hence the hair rinse?”

Of course, he was an actor. He’d know all about those. “Yes.” I fingered my hair, which had come loose from its style sometime between leaving the gallery and arriving in the car.

“I like your original color best.”

“This is only temporary. It should wash out in a few shampoos.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Good.”

Why would he care? Unless he was planning — I swallowed.

The car came to a halt. “Here we are,” he said.

Now this hotel I knew. One of the most prestigious in the city, this place was home to a thousand stars, when they were in town.

He climbed out of the limo and offered me a hand up. I needed it. My feet were throbbing by now, and my arches were killing me. I managed to stand upright, and let him take me inside, and into an elevator. When we went into the lobby people held up their phones. Even in this place Troy Cooper turned heads.

In the elevator, he passed a card in front of the sensor. Of course he’d have a penthouse. Wait — were we going to his room? What was I doing here? I gasped and clutched the rail.

“Hey. Whatever freaked you out with Witley, you don’t have to worry with me. I won’t maul you. I saw him, so don’t deny it. I’m not even going to ask what you were doing there with him. I just want your promise that you’ll never date him again.” His flat mouth told me he wasn’t happy.

I winced at the word. I wouldn’t have called it a “Date.” I nodded. “I promise.”

“See? That was easy.”

He took me out of the elevator and into a suite that made my apartment look like a closet. Two seating areas, one with TV, a fully equipped desk area and a kitchen, separated from the rest of the space by a counter. Not a kitchenette, either. “I could live here,” I sighed, turning around. A door at the end presumably led to the bedroom, but I wasn’t about to try my theory.

A table was set with several covered dishes. Troy lifted the lid on the first one. “We have sandwiches and a few snacks. There’s ice cream in the freezer, and wine in the refrigerator.”

“Oh, water is fine for me,” I said hastily. The last thing I wanted was more alcohol. Old man Witley had tried to ply me with wine and then something he called a snifter, but I called half a tumbler of Scotch. Which I hadn’t drunk.

“Fine.” He went behind the counter and grabbed two bottles of water. “I was drinking too much anyway.” He shrugged out of his tux jacket and tossed it carelessly over a chair.

Was that his problem? Was he a drinker? But he hadn’t drunk too much with dinner. Not that I’d noticed, of course. Not that my attention hadn’t kept going to him, whatever I tried to tell myself. “Were you?”

“No, but I hate to drink alone.” He opened the bottles, and placed one in front of me. “Besides, don’t you know you shouldn’t accept a bottle you haven’t opened yourself from a stranger?” He motioned to one of the sofas. I sat gingerly at one corner and he took the other. It was a big sofa and I shouldn’t have felt claustrophobic. But I did. “Are you hungry?” he said.

I shook my head no. “I had enough to eat.”

“I noticed.” Unlike me, he didn’t mind saying he’d been watching me. Why would he do that? “I like a woman with a good appetite. Where I come from, that’s so rare it’s abnormal.”

“Sometimes abnormal is good.” Especially when it concerned eating. Maybe I should have tried to lose weight, eaten like a bird, but I shared an apartment with a curvaceous African-American woman who wasn’t afraid of her food. “Gotta keep the booty in shape,” she’d tell me with a wink. So I did, too.

“I was hungry. I didn’t have time to eat after work.”

He took a swig from his bottle and put it on the shiny black coffee table. The furniture in here was perfectly arranged, and beautifully coordinated in shades of gray and black, with pops of red. The windows showed a view over Central Park, with the lights of the city that never sleeps farther off. I couldn’t see the stars, the lights were too bright. I hadn’t spent much time looking at them since I got to New York. “You intrigue me. I don’t meet genuine people very often, and hell, you’re all of that, aren’t you?”

“I—” What could I say to that? I tried again. “I don’t have any reason to be anything else.” Except for tonight, I recalled guiltily. And twice more, unless I could persuade Madame X to tear up the contract I’d signed.

He laughed, and the sound was utterly bewitching, totally seductive. “How wonderful. If only I had that outlook on life! People have secrets, and half my life is spent working them out. That’s how I get into my characters, you know.”

That small insight fascinated me. “You do?”

“I need one fact that nobody else in the play knows. Just one. It might not come out in the movie at all, but if I have that, I can make sense of the whole thing.”

I got it at once. “And add mystery to the character?”

He bowed his head, smiling. “Exactly. You’re wasted in that museum.” He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “Talk to me. Tell me about Roman times.”

I laughed incredulously. “All of it?” I wriggled my foot, trying to get it more comfortable. That was impossible in these shoes.

He glanced at my feet, and frowned. “Ah,” he said, as if that explained everything. The next minute, to my shock, he went down on his knees in front of me, on the incredibly expensive silk rug, and lifted my foot on to his beautifully tailored pants.

“Oh!”

I could only watch as he tenderly unfastened the tiny buckle that fastened the ankle strap to my shoe, and eased it off my foot. I couldn’t resist letting out a sigh of relief. He put my foot on the floor and lifted the other one, doing the same thing to it. He didn’t put that one down, though. He pressed his thumb into the arch and made me groan. “Oh that feels so good!”

Nobody had ever given me a foot massage before, but if anybody was to do it, Troy Cooper was the one. He eased my aching muscles, pressed into the fleshy bits, forcing the tension out of my body. “I have no idea why you women wear shoes like that.”

“Because they look good?”

“Or maybe you like to torture yourself?” His expression was innocently curious, but he didn’t fool me.

“No, we don’t. It’s fashion.”

“Fuck fashion,” he said succinctly. “You shouldn’t do this to yourself.” He eased the red strap marks across my instep, rubbed them with his thumb, then, to my utter shock, bent and placed a kiss on the place where the buckle had been. He shot a glance at me, his eyes dancing. “Did I make it better?”

So much.” Kissing it better worked for me. This was a dream, it had to be. Things like this didn’t happen to me. In the penthouse suite in the best hotel in New York, a movie star at my feet? Nuh-uh.

“You have p.retty feet,” he mused, stroking the one he had on his lap. Then he lifted the other to join it. “Those shoes are too tight for you.”

“They belong to my roomie,” I explained. “I don’t have heels like this.” Because I couldn’t afford them, but I didn’t say that. True, Cindy was half a size smaller than me, but that shouldn’t have made much of a difference in heels.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He looked up at me, perfectly comfortable and leaned back, resting on his heels. “What shall we do now?”

W
hat could I say to that? I blinked and looked round, wild for something. Watch TV? Oh yeah, I could see us watching a late night chat show. He could have been on one of them if he wasn’t here with me. My attention caught on the dishes standing on the counter. “Are you hungry?”

“Didn’t we just cover that? No, I’m not hungry.” He paused, and met my gaze. “If I wasn’t so classy, I’d say that I was hungry for you.”

Shock arced through me. He couldn’t be saying...? No, he had to be joking. “But you don’t do clichés,” I said.

“I’m not joking when I say I’d like to do you.” He stroked my feet again. He’d reduced me to jelly when he’d massaged them.

“Seriously? But you’ve seen me—”

“Hunched over a Roman pavement, utterly engrossed in your work. I saw you without makeup, with your glasses and I wanted you then. Are they for effect, by the way, or do you wear contacts? Because they are a complete turn-on.”

“My glasses?” They were the best I could afford, but that wasn’t much. The contacts were well out of date, but I’d had no choice tonight. An — escort with glasses? The more I repeated the word “Escort,” the more it sounded like “Whore” to me.

He raised a dark brow. “Yep. They add something to your face. Without them you’re perfectly beautiful, but I’ve never been an admirer of perfection. I prefer something quirky and unusual.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he was beautiful, but I managed to keep the sentiment to myself. Barely. “I thought women strove for perfection.”

“Some do. Some achieve it, then spend the rest of their lives maintaining it. Do you know how many hours Willow Moncrieff spends being pampered and primped?”

“No.” Willow’s name had been linked with Troy’s in the press. Most still expected her to turn up here in New York. She was the love interest in the superhero franchise, and the media loved a sappy story.

“Most of the day. Before a red carpet event she can spend two days solid in the spa. Then she emerges a perfect butterfly, shows up at the event, parades her borrowed clothes and sponsored jewelry and spends the rest of the next day taking it all off.” He grinned. “Yes, we dated, but not for long. I don’t blame her. She’s not a vain woman, but she was born beautiful and she’s using it while she can, before people get sick of her. That’s the price of fame. In a couple of years she’ll be able to pull back, maybe take some real acting parts that don’t require her to look like a runway model.”

“What do you do?” I asked. My curiosity had gotten the better of me.

“I work out. But I’m blessed with a healthy body. I did my best to ruin it for a few years, but not nearly as much as the media makes out.” He frowned, and stroked a red line on my foot with the tip of one finger. “I guess I did it in different ways.” Gently he put my feet on the soft floor and went over to the desk with its laptop and printing machine. He opened a slim folder and pulled out a piece of paper, frowning. “This is stupid, but I promised my old man I’d do it.” He picked up a pen and brought it over to me. “Before we go any further, can you read and sign this?”

I looked at him, then the paper, then him again. No trace of humor showed in his expression. “This is a joke, right?”

He shook his head. “Read it.”

This was eerily like a movie I’d seen last year. Troy hadn’t been in that one, it was some up and coming star whose name I couldn’t remember. Hell, I was lucky to remember my own name with Troy in the room. He’d made the heroine sign something, a contract, that she’d eat properly and let him control her life. The jerk. Maybe the movie had set a fashion in LA. How did I know?

I was tempted to tear up the paper and throw it in his face, but curiosity overcame me again and I glanced down.

A few lines met my gaze, maybe half a page. I read it through.

It just said that anything that happened between Troy and — there was a blank space, presumably for my name — was private, and could not be revealed by either party to the media or made public in any way without the permission of the other. The penalty was five million dollars. “What...?”

“That’s how much some outlets are willing to pay for the down and dirty secrets about me,” he said. He handed me the pen. “With this, women who invent shit can be prosecuted, too. Feel free to tell anyone who asks that we shared supper and then you went home. What happens between supper and the time you go home, and what we said in that time is nobody’s business but ours.”

“You have to do this?”

“No, I fucking don’t, and it’s a complete downer.” He grimaced. “But my lawyers went down on their knees to me. Although they didn’t kiss my foot.” His voice lowered, reminding me of what he’d just done. “I’m flavor of the month with the scandal-mongers and the hounds are out to get me. My father’s nearly at the never darken my doors again point. So this is easier.”