Free Bound To Him: Three Dates with a Billionaire by Emma Lyn Wild Page A

you know?”
    “It sounds like a great evening,” Sonya said. She leaned back and crossed her legs, the picture of classic elegance.
    “It was, until I came out of the shower. Then I found her card. She was a fucking escort. I swear I had no idea. But now she’ll sell my story and I’ll be all over the place.”
    With an alarmed glance at me, Sonya dragged her phone from her pants’ pocket and started swiping the screen. I hunted through the Internet, and checked my emails.
    I looked up with a relieved sigh. “Nothing,” I said.
    “Nope, I can’t find anything.” Sonya replaced her phone. “Like we British say, keep calm and carry on.”
    I tried, I really did. That night I went to the apartment my PA had found for me. All my stuff was already there, because I have a kickass assistant who’d had it all packed up and moved from the hotel while I was working. I spent the evening channel-hopping and checking my laptop. No news. Absolutely nothing.
    Cassie had said she needed money, so I didn’t doubt she’d earn it the easiest way she could. In a way I didn’t blame her. People had to look out for themselves, after all.
    But I wanted to see her again. I tried to forget her but that image of her asleep in my bed, arm across her breasts, haunted me. I might as well have taken a picture of her, the vision remained so vividly in my mind. It never left me, not all that night and well into the next day.
    *****
    I was no nearer getting sleep. I thought I’d cracked that particular problem when I stopped overindulging in drugs. I’d never been attracted by drinking, but drugs I could do. At one time I’d started along the route of uppers and downers, controlling my moods, and then my Dad had pointed out to me that Judy Garland had done the same. Then I got caught, and although I’d gotten away with a caution, since they’d only got me with weed, I’d stopped most of the shit.
    That had been my first wake-up call. I’d been high on a sweet cocktail of ecstasy and some other stuff when I’d nearly killed somebody crossing the road. That shocked me so much that I stopped the naughty stuff. Some of my colleagues gave up because they realized they were fucking themselves up, but I did it because I’d nearly destroyed a person. Why should I drag somebody else into this mess? So I’d stopped, become a party pooper and stuck to what I could handle. Take it or leave it, that was my motto, and I tried to live by it.
    But tonight, I paced my apartment and eyed the bottles of sleeping tablets in the cabinet. My fucking assistant had arranged them for me, thinking to be useful. I had a pharmacy’s worth. In a fit of temper, I emptied the bottles down the toilet and flushed them away. There were going to be some happy fish tonight. Or alligators, if the rumors were true about the drains in New York. I couldn’t get with the part and now I couldn’t sleep. We had dress rehearsals tomorrow, and I knew I was a barely adequate Antony. The only reason they hadn’t fired me was my box office draw, and that wouldn’t last long once the critics got hold of me.
    I recalled the legend of Peter O’Toole. He’d played Macbeth once in London, so badly that the critics had torn him to shreds. The story was notorious in the biz, held up as an example to us poor slobs that even the best actors could blow it. Mind you, after the savaging, seat sales had gone up so much they had to continue the run.
    I was no Peter O’Toole. We had the same eye color, but that was about it. I wouldn’t go the same way as him. Fuck knew I had enough examples of what not to do. My Dad made sure I saw them. And success stories, people who had turned their lives around after getting into trouble, just to nudge me the other way.
    None of it helped. Memories of people I’d once known who’d died from overindulgence, of people my Dad had known who’d gone the same way didn’t haunt me as much as they once had. Because I was me, and I was going to make my