by Lee Winter
“He looks like a male model.” Joshua sighed. “Maybe he does underwear? I’ve always wanted to date an underwear model.”
“You’re drooling,” Lauren grumbled. “And over someone who has already proven he has really lousy taste in dates.”
Suddenly a young woman scampered up to Ayers, uttered a brief statement out of earshot, and then waited with wide, fearful eyes. Ayers, face like thunder, said something sharply, and the girl clopped away again.
Ayers’s gaze swung darkly back to Lauren. She smirked, guessing exactly what had just transpired.
“Care to share?” Joshua asked. “Have you been stewing up schemes again?”
“Just a little one,” Lauren admitted with a grin. “Tiny bit of payback for the Estella video.”
“What’d you do?”
“It was harmless fun,” Lauren said and grinned. “After all, I did promise Mari no arrests at her event.”
“Oh spill,” Joshua said, but his gaze still lingered on Ayers’s date.
“Will you stop panting over the boy candy for five seconds?” Lauren sighed and nudged him in the ribs. “You look like a lion on the Serengeti with some poor, straight zebra in your sights.”
“Straight? Please. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that gorgeous zebra’s stripes are at least a little bi-curvy.”
Lauren rolled her eyes. Josh always was an optimist. Another movement caught her attention.
A young man was headed toward Ayers, but he seemed to lack the courage of his predecessor. He inched forward, and Lauren studied his tortoise-like approach with fascination.
“Do you think she’ll eviscerate this one on the spot? String his innards up for all to see?” Joshua whispered, intrigued, as he, too, watched the creeping prey.
“Wouldn’t put it past her. She might not even bother to spit out the skin and bones.” She grabbed his arm. “Let’s find out.”
They edged to just within earshot.
When the young man reached Ayers’s side, he sucked in a deep breath, stood ramrod straight, and reeled off who had won the last three Oscars for art direction. Then he swallowed and looked up at her expectantly.
Ayers stared at him. “Are you an imbecile?”
He blinked at her then shook his head vigorously.
“Excellent. So you should be able to find the exit unassisted then.”
Joshua clutched a hand over his heart and sighed. “She’s like the perfect gay man with really great boobs.”
“Oh stop it,” Lauren slapped his arm. “She’s evil, remember.”
Ayers’s head snapped around, and she pinned Lauren with another glare. It was even frostier than the last, and Lauren almost felt the icicles forming in her veins. In four long strides, she was right up inside Lauren’s space.
“You!” she snapped. “They’ve been doing this all day. Stopping me in the street with ridiculous trivia. They were actually lying in wait in the parking lot tonight! They’re like the creeping plague. Everywhere I turn, squeaky-voiced idiots bombard me with trivia. So? Tell me. What. Did. You. Do?”
Lauren smoothed down her electric-blue cocktail dress. She smiled serenely. “Apparently someone spread the word on craigslist that you are in need of an assistant able to demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of entertainment and fashion facts. This was essential if they were to accompany you in your ‘exciting world of high glamour.’”
“An assistant?”
“Oh, and you weren’t to be bothered with résumés or work experience, and they should simply appear and offer you a random piece of trivia to demonstrate their applied working knowledge. Uhhh, then I may have mentioned where you’d be tonight and posted a photo of you to make it easier to find you. And I bribed the side-door security guard to let them in without a ticket.”
Ayers’s eyes glittered now. Lauren was actually pretty impressed. The reaction far exceeded expectations. She’d been aiming lower—maybe a sneer and a side of insults.
Ayers hissed in a breath. “This is for the Estella video I presume? Are you still in high school?”
“I’m no one’s chew toy,” Lauren said flatly, but she glowered at the insult.
Ayers glared back, but some of the fury had gone out of her eyes. She exhaled heavily. “Why would anyone think an entertainment columnist needs an assistant? It’s unheard of. Absurd.”
“This is Hollywood,” Lauren shrugged. “No one cares why anyone does anything. Like why do you have a boyfriend who looks young enough to still be living in his parents’ basement?”
Ayers’s voice dropped to a tight whisper. “Tad is none of your business,” she snapped and glanced at her date. She paused when she saw him engaged in enthusiastic conversation with Joshua. Curiosity flickered across her face.
“Tad?” Lauren laughed. “His name is Tad? Is that even a real name or just the one the escort agency came up with?”
Ayers’s eyes became slits, and Lauren wondered if she’d finally gone too far.
“My neighbor runs a wheel boot business. Imagine that? An entire career dedicated to the clamping of vehicles.”
“Wheel boots?” Lauren grasped the implied threat. “Hey, my car is a classic! Clamps can do real damage to the chassis!”
“I wasn’t aware we were discussing your vehicle,” Ayers said with a cold smile. “Just unusual career choices. Now then, to the topic at hand—will you call off your craigslist dogs?”
Lauren studied her. “Will you pay my tickets? Shit, if you just parked between the lines at work, I wouldn’t owe $378.”
“My parking is not at fault. The size of your vehicle is.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“And you’re testing my patience,” Ayers snapped.
“Now there’s a coincidence. Will you pay my fines or not? That’s my price for removing the listing.”
“You’re attempting to blackmail me?”
“You say ‘me’ like you’re some sort of protected species,” Lauren mocked. “Like you don’t pull your pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us. Need I remind you that, whoever you once were, you’re still just a lowly celebrity reporter cursed to the party circuit like me. Reality check—you’re not better than me. You’re the paper’s gossip columnist. Truth hurts.”
It probably wasn’t the nicest or smartest thing to say to a woman like Catherine Ayers, and the moment the words were out of her mouth, she felt the temperature shift.
Her gray eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared, and Ayers leaned toward her ear with the suppressed power of a deadly snake about to strike. Lauren could smell her perfume—something woody and spicy—as her body radiated fury inches from her.
Ayers whispered against the shell of her ear, “I may be just a celebrity reporter, King, but I am nothing like you. What are you even? Some fraud from Iowa with crass charms and ugly tractor hats who has aspirations that outstrip her meager abilities? Thank god I’m nothing like you.”
Lauren was rooted to the spot as the insult pierced her. Ayers stalked away, anger radiating from her. Lauren’s cheeks flamed. She stared after Ayers, heart thumping, trembling slightly, and trying not to look as stung as she felt. She glanced around for Joshua. He was nowhere to be seen.
Maybe Mariella had been onto something when she’d warned her about putting her head into the mouths of dragons.
Lauren’s gaze roamed the room without really seeing it. All she could focus on were Ayers’s mocking words. What was she doing here? She couldn’t even get a story published under her own steam, for god’s sake. She must look like an easy mark to people like Frank and Doug who rolled right over the top of her.
Maybe Ayers was right. Maybe Lauren was the definition of a fraud.
She looked down at her dress. It was a blue, silky sheath. It wasn’t worth much—she’d nabbed it at a second-hand designer boutique. She thought it
looked fine on her, even if it wasn’t some Gaultier or a Valentino. Joshua had declared she looked “beautiful.”
She scanned the huddle of rich, powerful, and stunning people at the center of the room. Smooth politicians schmoozed around the edges, and the famous industry brokers flitted between the groups.
She would never be like them. She remembered back to that first, hellish week in her new job with Ayers ridiculing her every flaw, pointing out it wasn’t too late to scurry back to Iowa where she belonged.
Lauren had become good at ditching her at events to hang out with the fringe dwellers. Spending time with the outsiders had been a lot less disturbing than her mentor’s idea of training.
She moved toward the familiar comfort of the shadows, far from sharp eyes, and a sharper tongue, drawn to the bangs and clangs and chaos of the catering area.
As she neared a discreet side door at the rear of the room, watching it fly open regularly with trays of sizzling food carried out, she started to realize something was very different.
She tried to put her finger on it. Not wrong so much as off. She stopped and turned, slowly, examining the humming room, glancing from face to face.
Josh had been right. There was a disproportionate number of women with real tans and real breasts threaded throughout the A-list gaggles.
The women were busty, but not artificially so, and were poured into outfits so sparkling they looked like garish Christmas tree ornaments. And yet, for all their bling, their dresses weren’t Rodeo Drive. These women had undoubtedly all worn their best party frocks—and their best party frocks were all well worn.
Then there was the make-up. What the women lacked in ridiculous LA orange spray tans, they made up for with garish face paint. Their raccoon eyes and enormous fake lashes would give drag queens a run for their money.
But what was most odd was that there were far too many of these women to be a natural consequence of attendees bringing them as dates for the evening.
She knew the regulars who were escorts, and many were literally just that—dial-a-dates—and nothing more. Some were doing it for the money, others for the contacts—wanting to break into acting or modeling and using their well-connected dates to get into the best parties.
Such LA escorts all had a practised professionalism Lauren could easily spot. They knew how to work a room and seem as though they were just someone’s girlfriend. After a year of hitting VIP parties, Lauren had begun to know many of them by sight. Some even by name.
The women here, though, were not like that. There was nothing easy or slick about them. She watched them work the room for a while, getting into backgrounds of photos and enthusiastically inhaling Mariella’s top-of-the-line caviar, champagne, and appetizers.
Lauren decided to get to the bottom of the mystery and stopped the nearest out-of-place woman for a chat. She was leggy, and her heavily sprayed tower of hair added almost a foot. She’d squeezed into a golden, shiny scrap of a frock that barely held her cleavage in check.
Lauren made small talk, noted the out-of-town-accent, and then introduced herself.
“By the way, I’m Lauren.”
“Cherry,” the woman replied with a broad grin. “My friends call me Cherry Pie.”
Uh. Okay. Stripper name much? She followed up with the question she’d asked a thousand times before.
“So, who are you with tonight?”
“Why? You worried I’m lonely?” she laughed loudly, all big teeth and bright pink lips. “You know, sugar, I don’t get lonely much in my line of work. How about you? Feeling a little lonesome? That it?”
Her eyes sparkled, and her lips gave a knowing curl. Lauren almost took a step back at her directness. The professional LA escorts always pretended they were anything but for hire on their big nights out. It was all part of the fantasy.
“Ah, no, I’m fine,” she said. “But I’m wondering who’s picking up the tab for you and your friends tonight?”
“You know a lady never tells,” Cherry said, winked, and then jiggled her bust. “But we all got paid mighty well for nothing more than strapping on our dancing shoes and trying those nice meatballs. What were they, anyway? Chicken?”
“Duck. With lime I think,” Lauren said.
“Well now, they were really something. Wish I had the recipe.” She flicked a glance at Lauren’s watch and clucked. “Shoot. Almost eleven. Well, gotta run, sugar.”
She darted from her side and headed for the back of the room. And Lauren, with a new eye as to what to look for, immediately began to count.
At thirty-four Cherry clones, she stopped counting and exhaled. So, two state governors were partying in a room stuffed to the rafters with out-of-town prostitutes who all knew each other.
It’d sounded like a punch line.
Lauren began to take frantic notes. Who the women seemed to know—each other—who they flirted and mingled with—everyone—whether they were trying to be discreet—no way—and whether the many political advisors and lackeys seemed to know them—uncertain.
Suddenly, they began to fade into the background and disappear. Lauren quickly followed. At the rear of the hotel she spotted a large chartered bus and watched as a driver stood by the door marking a clipboard as escort after escort boarded. She moved closer to the front and saw the word Nevada in fat white letters above the window and snapped a photo with her phone’s camera.
The driver, a reed-thin man in a green uniform wearing black cowboy boots, finished a head count. He leaned back against the bus and sucked deeply on the remains of a cigarette, one boot up on a low concrete post.
“Leaving in ten,” he called to his passengers through the open doors without turning around. “So do yer pit stops now, ladies.”
“Hey,” Lauren said, plastering on a smile as she approached him.
He nodded, running an appreciative glance over her outfit.
“Well, ’lo there, ma’am. You’re not with this bunch.”
“No,” Lauren agreed. “How’d you guess?”
He eyed her. “Just a feelin’.”
“Where are you and a busload of ladies off to tonight?” she asked.
“Like the sign says, back to Nevada.” He threw his cigarette down and ground it under his boot. He pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds and rummaged for another.
Nevada.
“Why would you bring a bus full of women from Nevada when there are plenty of ladies locally who can play party fillers?”
He shrugged. “Hell if I know. I just drive the bus. Ain’t much about this job that makes sense, but I don’t question it.”
“Really?” She leaned forward and smiled brightly. “What else doesn’t make sense?”
He inhaled heavily on his cigarette and peered at her suspiciously. “Why do you want t’know?”
“I’m just a curious girl. And maybe I have a boss who likes the look of one of these ladies and who might be interested in meeting her again, one-on-one. Would you know which establishment he should contact?”
“Look, honey, none of this crazy shit is my business. And if people want to pay me to pick up a pallet of cheap pink champagne and the entire stock of working gals from a brothel, I do that. I do not ask sticky questions. And I ’specially don’t collect their business cards to pass around to horny bosses. Tell him to hire local.”
Lauren mentally reviewed the drinks floating around the party. “I didn’t see any pink champagne tonight.”
“I didn’t say I delivered it here. I just do what my itinerary says. Like I’m gonna argue with the boss or Uncle Sam.”
The government? Lauren sucked in a breath.
“You had me going there,” she said lightly. “No way the government knows anything about this.”
“Oh really,” he drawled. He reached into his chest pocket and wrenched out a wad of stapled paperwork. He turned over the fro
nt page and flattened out an invoice underneath. “Does that or does that not look like the Nevada state seal to you? Right next to Payment Received.”
At Lauren’s stunned expression, he laughed in her face, a faint rasp, and followed it with a cough. He refolded the paperwork and crammed it back into his pocket. He flicked his gaze to his watch. “It’s time.”
“Mind if I get a copy of that before you go? I could snap a pic on my phone.”
He froze. “I don’t think so. I suspect that would wind up being a mess of trouble for someone. Most likely me. So no. And I’m starting to think you ain’t some bored lil’ party girl. So whoever you are, we did not just have this little chat.”
He coughed again, filling the night air with a nasty throat rattle, and spat a globule of saliva onto the ground. “Hear me?” he added and tossed away his half-smoked cigarette.
He turned and climbed onto the bus.
She watched through the windows as he stalked up and back the aisle doing a final head count and then closed the doors. The engine started.
Lauren headed back inside, her mind bursting with questions. Why would Nevada’s government be involved in any of this? Paying for it? What a story. And this time, there was no way she was giving it up to Doug or anyone else without a knock-down, drag-out fight.
Her fingers tingled as she began to figure out who she should call tomorrow. She was sure Mari would give her the Nevada team’s guest list, and she could work her way back from there.
Josh scampered up to her, glowing with his I-have-a- secret face.
“Where have you been?” he demanded. “Never mind. I have the juiciest gossip for you. Juicier than anything else, I promise.”
“Actually, I find that hard to believe given what I’ve just seen.” Lauren grabbed a passing flute of bubbly and evaluated it closely. Nope, definitely not pink. She took a swig. Her taste buds danced. Definitely not cheap, either.
“Huh?” Joshua said. “Never mind, me first. Hon, I was totally right about the bi-curvy zebra.”
