Her mother prodded her back and pushed up onto her toes to speak into her ear. “Go on, girl. He’s waiting on you.”
When Shea hesitated, she could feel her mother’s annoyance, as if she were speaking to a toddler who had no clue what it took to make it in the real world.
Shea wasn’t sure she did.
“Achieving your dreams will require sacrifices, Shea.”
In that moment, Shea had never hated her mother more. She’d sold her off so easily, using her for little more than personal gain. Shea had spent years striving harder and higher and faster, thinking if she managed to touch the sky her mother would finally see her as the star she wanted her to be. She’d spent so many years being tailored into this thing, stitched and patched and sewn into something that had become unrecognizable.
But the outside was completely mismatched with the fabric of who she wanted to be.
“Besides,” her mother said with a perverse grin, “the two of you make a gorgeous couple. It’s what the world wants to see. A beautiful young girl on the arm of a successful, handsome man. He’s put himself on the line for you, and it’s time you showed some gratitude for it.”
Gratitude?
The simmering bile in her stomach worked into a frenzy, and Shea thought she would be sick.
She knew Martin Jennings was attractive. She wasn’t blind. But in the year she’d known him, she also felt something dark lurking around him, something ugly that radiated from his pores like an omen.
Every cell in her body implored she stay away.
Instead, she made her feet move in his direction where he held back like a phantom along the far wall.
She ducked her head timidly when she came to a stop in front of him.
“Magnificent,” he said in his smooth, slick voice. He touched her cheek, and she held her breath, trying not to flinch. “Do you have any idea the effect you had on the crowd, Delaney Rhoads? Every single person out there was putty in your hands. You are magic.”
Her thoughts went back to her grandmother, a picture of a frail woman lying in the confines of her bed.
Would she have thought the show magic?
What would she think now?
The pads of Martin’s fingers slid down the outside of her arm and threaded through her fingers. Chills of unease lifted her skin, but she didn’t fight it, just like she hadn’t fought it two days before when he’d pushed her against the wall in his office and kissed her mouth and her neck.
But tonight when he guided her down a winding maze of backstage corridors and led her into a vacant office hidden in the bowels of the theater, the lights cast low, he didn’t stop. He set her on the desk and lifted the skirt of her dress as he went.
Tears soaked her face, and Martin wiped the wetness away. “You’re far too beautiful to cry, Delaney Rhoads.” He brushed his mouth at the corner of hers and she whimpered.
“Shh…you’re mine now.”
She shook violently, no poised on her tongue, but she didn’t know how to release it. Just like she didn’t know how to say it with every path her mother had led her down.
Say it, Shea. Say no. Please, say it, she silently begged herself, before she turned to silently begging him. No. No. No.
Metal clanked as he fumbled through his belt, and his slacks dropped to his thighs. Shea panicked, her hands shoving and slapping at his chest as her breaths turned ragged with fear.
“Shh,” he whispered again, as he shackled both her wrists in one of his hands and forced her closer to the edge of the desk. He wedged himself between her legs.
She cried out in pain when he ripped through her.
She sobbed. Her breaths choked and panted as he moved in her.
Music filtered from above, another act on stage, and she tried with everything she had to focus on those beautiful sounds and not the grunts raking from Martin’s mouth. But there was nothing beautiful in this moment.