Chapter 4
"You can let go now," Phutphitchaya said through her teeth once the three of them were alone.
"Paan's not dressed." Phantakan's voice was as flat as his expression. He glanced at Wikrant, who was still hovering uncertainly near the door, unsure of the correct sequence of events.
"Don't worry about it. I've seen Chanya without clothes plenty of times," Wikrant offered — and watched the sharp gaze that swung toward him intensify considerably. He raised both hands to his chest. "I mean — we're practically the same gender."
"Turn around."
"You turn around first. Let go of me."
"He's still a man."
"I trust him a hundred times more than I trust you." Phutphitchaya's jaw was tight, her skin feverishly warm — which she was attributing entirely to anger. "You too, Wanhom. Turn around."
"Okay." Wikrant complied, genuinely regretful, and faced the door. His ears, however, opened wide.
The moment the strong arms released her, she crossed her own over her chest immediately, face burning. She nearly made a sound when he reached down to help pull the dress — currently bunched around her hips and waist — back into place, his eyes unhurried and unrepentant as he smoothed the fabric upward with the patience of a man doing something he found pleasant.
"Stop." She grabbed his hand the moment the hem cleared the deep pink of what was underneath. Because this particular person was going to take advantage until the very last possible second.
"Just helping you get dressed, baby." His expression was innocent. His eyes were not.
"I didn't ask."
"Accepting a small kindness doesn't cost you anything, you know."
"I don't want it." Phutphitchaya pushed herself upright — and had to grimace at the pull of discomfort along her hip.
"What's wrong?"
"You knocked me off a sofa into a coffee table. What do you think."
She had been thrashing so violently that he'd had to grab her and pull her on top of him to keep her from hurting herself further — and she'd repaid him by treating him as a target. Phantakan rolled one shoulder with the air of a man resigning himself to an unfair universe.
"If Paan likes foreplay that involves acrobatics, next time we can do this on the carpet or a proper bed. Much safer."
"You're calling what you just did foreplay?"
Phutphitchaya stared at him.
The young man who had never once come close to forcing himself on anyone — until tonight — looked back at her in silence. The pull was still there, even now. He was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that without Wikrant walking in when he did, he would have crossed a line he couldn't come back from.
Because even now, with a third person in the room, her scent still reached him, and the taste of her was still on his tongue, and his body was reacting to it the way it had no business reacting to anything.
The alcohol in his bloodstream might have lowered his inhibitions.
But Phantakan had stopped letting hormones make decisions his brain should be making sometime around the age of seventeen. He didn't think that was the real explanation.
"How do you want me to make this right?"
"An apology would be a start. Can you manage that?"
Phantakan made a face. Rolled his shoulder. Let his body language answer for him.
"Unbelievable." Phutphitchaya's voice shook with indignation. "You did something wrong and you can't even admit it."
He was insufferable. And clearly unacquainted with the concept of shame, given the way he was still watching her.
"I admit it." He wasn't just saying it — he was already reaching across to the wallet that had fallen from the table, flipping it open, pulling out a card and holding it out to her with an expression that managed to be both guilty and amused at once. The look of someone who knows he's being watched, and finds it entertaining. "Tell me what you want."
"I don't want anything from you." She slapped the card out of his hand, watched it fall, then turned away to retrieve her bra from somewhere on the floor and retreated behind the bookshelf to finish dressing.
"Is Chanya's schedule full this month?"
The question was addressed to her manager, and Phutphitchaya's ears went sharp immediately.
"More or less, I think — but she probably won't take anything new right now, she just wrapped a production and she'll want some downtime—"
"I have an advertisement." He named a European luxury automotive brand — one of the latest models, distributed by his company — "We're launching a campaign."
"I'm not taking it," came the voice from behind the bookshelf.
"The fee is what the country's top actress would be paid."
Wikrant's eyes went very round. "How many shooting days?"
"Until the work is finished. Details to be confirmed with the marketing team."
"I said I'm not taking it." Phutphitchaya stepped out from behind the bookshelf, crossed the room, and pressed the card back against the broad chest — which barely moved — with all the ceremony of someone returning something contaminated. "Don't offer me anything."
Phantakan let the card fall.
"You don't want the work?"
"I want all kinds of work. Just not from someone like you."
"Even if there's no other work left?"
"Don't threaten me. How important do you think you are."
"Important enough to make sure there isn't." Wikrant cut in quickly, grabbing his artist's slender arm and turning to the tall man behind them. "Sorry again."
"Why are you apologizing? He hasn't said a single sorry to me."
"We'll talk in the car, Paan."
"What about Wanatchon? Have you found her?"
She hadn't forgotten — the whole reason she'd walked into this disaster in the first place.
"Khun Wat sent someone to get her."
With that confirmed, the villain of the channel fixed the tall man with one last look of concentrated venom, allowed herself to be pulled toward the door, and left — still feeling, as the heavy wooden door swung shut behind her, the heat of the gaze that followed her all the way out. It settled along her spine like something unpleasant and electric, and her body betrayed her by shuddering with it once they were clear.
"You okay, Paan?"
Her manager slipped his jacket from his own shoulders and draped it around hers.
"Why were you being nice to him? Didn't you see he was about to assault me?"
"His name is Phantakan. He's the only grandnephew of Jao Sua Anan Damrongkrittaphat. You've heard of him."
There was no one in the country who hadn't heard of the patriarch behind one of Thailand's largest conglomerates. Phutphitchaya pressed her lips together.
"So what. Being a billionaire's grandnephew gives him the right to bully people?"
"Jao Sua handed the entire operation to Khun Phantakan years ago. He runs it alone."
"I didn't know that."
"Everyone in the industry knows. The media just keeps running photos of the old man because his name sells — he's the kind of rich that becomes legend. But the one actually running things is Khun Phantakan."
"Going to ruin it all in this generation, I'm sure," she said, with feeling.
"Who told you that." Wikrant clicked his tongue. "Word is he's every bit as good as his great-uncle — better, some say. He's just not always in Thailand because he's half-foreign. His mother's from the Weston family in New York, they're in the society pages all the time."
"Great."
"Same as the owner of this house, actually. Khun Wasawat's mother is old Thai aristocracy, father was American. Apparently they've been close since school abroad." Wikrant delivered this with the ease of someone who had grown up adjacent to wealth and knew most of the names. "Both of them, same story."
Just a pair of bad boys with excellent starting positions who'd never had to try, Phutphitchaya concluded privately — the kind who used money to buy their way into everything, including women. She had reached this verdict by the time they arrived at the ground floor, where Wasawat, Wanatchon, and the head housekeeper were waiting.
The last of these looked at Chanya with an expression that could only be described as judgment.
Because she was still furious, the off-screen villain looked straight back — same expression, double the voltage, with the full commitment of someone who had made a career of it. Ratjana's cheek twitched. She looked away first.
"Are you all right, Khun Chanya?"
Wasawat addressed her directly for the first time, voice unhurried and genuinely polite, and something in the quality of it took the edge off her anger by a fraction.
"I'm fine. I only went in to ask where Wanatchon was — I didn't know which room."
"Wes had a little too much to drink. I'm sorry, on his behalf."
"It wasn't your fault. You shouldn't have to apologize for someone else." She paused. "But thank you for coming."
"Sakol heard — some of it. He didn't feel he could go in, so he came to find Ratjana."
"Your housekeeper probably thinks I encouraged your friend." Chanya turned and looked at Ratjana directly, with the particular quality of attention she reserved for people who had already formed an opinion, and watched the confirmation arrive in the slow flush that crossed the older woman's cheekbones before she turned away.
"Some women's worst enemies are other women."
"I didn't—" Ratjana's mouth opened and closed.
Wasawat cleared his throat. "Khun Ratjana came to get me. Khun Wan arrived at the same time looking for both of you."
"Why were you looking for me."
Wanatchon spoke from where she sat a little apart, her expression closed.
"Phi Lek has been trying to reach you for two days about a new production she cast you in — she needs to submit the final lineup and you haven't been picking up."
"I auditioned before I knew he was involved. Now I know. I changed my mind."
The he Wanatchon meant was a leading actor from the same company — someone she had been close to back when she was still cast as a lead. When the scandal broke and the fallout began, he had been the one to leave rather than stay, unable to absorb the damage to his own image. The relationship that had been carefully growing between them withered at the root.
That would have been enough. But then he had grown close to Phutphitchaya — proximity of work, roles that called for chemistry — and the photographs of Wanatchon with the older man had surfaced at almost exactly the same time.
The bitterness had settled deeper after that. The distance between her and Phutphitchaya had grown in a way that no amount of explanation had been able to close.
"Let's go back to Wan's place and talk."
"Talk here. I'm working." Wanatchon didn't move.
Chanya held back a quiet exhale. "I just want you to think about the work. There aren't that many channels, Fon. There's nowhere to go that isn't the same industry."
She kept her voice soft, because she knew exactly what the numbers in Wanatchon's bank account looked like.
"Easy for you to say. Everyone wants you." Wanatchon's eyes were flat. "And don't pretend you didn't go to Phi Lek yourself to ask. I know you did."
"That was me," Wikrant said immediately, moving to sit beside Wanatchon and pulling her into a firm one-armed hug that was more comfort than pressure. "Paan and I were worried about you, Fon. What's the point of having friends if you can't lean on them."
"I want to stand on my own for once."
"You already do that—" Phutphitchaya said, quietly uncomfortable with the audience they still had, and came to sit on the sofa across from her. She reached out and touched Wanatchon's arm lightly. Her face fell when Wanatchon pulled away without looking at her.
"I'm working. It was rude of you to come here."
"Come outside, Fon." Wikrant tried again.
"Khun Wanatchon, you should go," Wasawat said, reading the room.
The actress pressed her mouth together, then nodded. She stood and pressed her palms together toward him.
"I'm sorry for the trouble."
"I'm the one who should be apologizing. Especially to Khun Chanya." Wasawat's voice was quiet but direct, and he turned to her as he said it.
Wanatchon turned her face away.
She had seen it many times — the way men who crossed paths with Phutphitchaya tended to look at her. The pull of it. Some of them tried very hard. Some of them had used methods that were worse than trying.
But the person who had paid the highest price for all of it was her — the one who had been Phutphitchaya's closest friend from the beginning, who had helped and advised and shared the small confidences that women share, who had known her well enough to walk freely through her home, to know her mother Prayong and her younger sisters by name.
What an absurd thing, fate.
The one who should have had everything — the career, the love, the future — had none of it.
Wanatchon didn't want to blame Chanya. She knew Chanya felt guilty. She knew Chanya had been trying to help.
But sometimes.
Just sometimes.
She thought it might have been better if she had never had a friend named Phutphitchaya at all.