Dirty Little Secrets(9)

I was scared, shocked, and not thinking clearly. “What the he—” I started, before realizing what he was talking about.

He could see it in my eyes, too. “Yes, those photos. You didn’t think I’d just deleted them when you got pissed off at me, did you?”

Nearly a year prior, about two months after Sydney and I started dating, he had approached me about doing some private photos, supposedly just for him. Like I said, Sydney is the master of pushing the line between sexy and raunchy in some of his shoots, and he was also a master of verbal manipulation. Add to that at the time I thought I was in love with him, and by the end of it, not only was I naked in a lot of photographs, something I’ve never done professionally, but also some of them included more. He’d introduced sex toys, and even a couple of me with his cock in my mouth before it was all said and done.

Now I was scared. “You wouldn’t,” I whispered, even as I tried to push away from him. “Back off, Syd, before I scream.”

“So what?” he taunted me. “I get women screaming on my sets all the time, usually because my cock is buried all the way inside them. Oh, you thought the girl at the party was the first? You really are a naive little slut, weren’t you? Alix, I rarely go to a good shoot without emptying my balls into at least one of the models there. So welcome to the real world.”

“What do you want?” I whispered, nearly in tears. I was trying so hard to hold them back to not give him the satisfaction. The threat, the further admission of betrayal, all of it was too damn much. “What more do you want, you asshole?”

“Actually, that’s not too bad an idea,” he said contemplatively. “I talked you into a lot of stuff, and you went along with all of it, except I never did get to try taking your ass cherry. As tight as it must be, I’d love to tear it up at least once. Then again, I’ve got plenty of ass to satisfy me, that’s for sure. So here’s the deal. You give me fifty thousand dollars, or else I post it all on the internet. I can think of at least a dozen porn sites that would love to have that video of you on there, especially as I have a signed release from you for all of the photos I took.”

“I never signed a release for those,” I whimpered, thinking of what those photos and videos would do to my career, and what it would do to my family, as dysfunctional as it was. “I never signed that.”

“No? I have evidence otherwise. A signed photo release for a set of bedroom photos and videos, dated a day before our video was shot. You remember, don’t you? The artsy set that I sold later at the gallery down in Beverly Hills? That made me a pretty penny, by the way.”

My skin went pale as I did remember. In fact, that was how Sydney had talked me into the second, more sexual shoot, claiming at first he wanted more photos from the first set before talking me into so much more. “You bastard.”

“That’s what they keep telling me,” he said with a grin. “You’ve got a week, Alix. Fifty thousand, cash. You can bring it by my apartment, you remember where it is. Or else the first person I send the photos to is your stepfather. I’m sure the man who’s angling for Humanitarian of the Year would love to see his lovely stepdaughter with my cock in her mouth. Hell, if he doesn’t have a heart attack, he may just start jacking off over them.”

I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I spat in his face. Syd jerked his head back before smiling, wiping the mess off his cheek. “For that, the price is sixty thousand,” he said before backhanded slapping me. My head rocked to the side and bounced off the wall, and my control totally broke, tears falling down my face in shame. “A week, Alix. Now get the fuck outta here before my price goes up even more.”

I fled the studio, running to my car and firing it up, for the first time in a long time cursing that I’d just bought a new BMW less than a month prior. It was just a sign of my predicament. You see, while modeling paid me good money, I lived in California, which meant that even a low six-figure salary can disappear like morning fog in the sun. I wasn’t in the category of the Victoria’s Secret Angels yet, but I was making more than most doctors, and in the past year had cleared about a quarter million dollars after taxes. Knowing that my modeling career wouldn’t last forever, I had taken most of it and sunk it into investment vehicles, including real estate and long term Treasury bills. So while I could get between five and twenty thousand dollars for an appearance, I lived a much humbler lifestyle. It was only after the UFC contract had come in, with its one-time huge bump of fifty thousand dollars, that I’d traded in my old Honda for the BMW.