Star Crossed

by Jennifer Echols

  Unfortunately.

  “What kind of favor?” she asked.

  Daniel smiled. He could feel that the smile didn’t quite make it to his eyes—which was good, because the bruise on his cheekbone had begun to ache all over again when Wendy got his blood pumping with that kiss. He said stiffly, “I have a proposition for you.”

  Wendy raised her golden brows. “Do you, now.”

  He let his eyes dart briefly to the inebriated dancers crowding their table. Colton wasn’t watching anymore—he and the Lakers player had followed the famous mistress of a shamed governor across the bar—but Daniel let Wendy think he was surveying his client as he covered her hand with his. “It’s great that we’ve gotten together like this. We’ll keep playing it up and serve as a good example. As you know, the public loves it when star couples reconcile. All we have to do to fix Colton and Lorelei’s PR is get them back together before the awards show on Friday.”

  “No!” Wendy exclaimed, jerking her hand out from under his.

  Momentarily stunned by her quick refusal, he gathered himself and said, “You haven’t even let me explain what I had in m—”

  “Absolutely not,” Wendy said. “He’s violent. He hit you.”

  “He hit me by accident.”

  “That’s what battered women say, too. Every bruise on their bodies was an accident.” Her voice rose. He was very thankful that he was the only one who could hear her over the loud music as she said, “I’m not letting Lorelei near him, and if you were any kind of man, you wouldn’t, either.”

  That blow stunned him more than Colton’s had. “Colton swung at the paparazzi,” Daniel said. “I got in the way. You think I would let him hit me on purpose?”

  “No,” she admitted. She watched the crowd for a few moments, reconsidering. “You want them to get back together for real? Or should we just release it to the public that they hooked up?”

  Daniel shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it matters,” Wendy said. “Lorelei is in a fragile state right now.”

  “Not too fragile to sniff coke off her dead mother’s Stratocaster,” Daniel pointed out.

  “That was three years ago, and it was a rumor,” Wendy said sternly. “I don’t want to tell Lorelei what to do. She’s free to make her own choices.”

  Daniel was astounded. “What planet are you from?”

  Wendy lifted her chin. “Lorelei has loved and lost. The last thing she needs right now is to get involved again with your client, who publicly demeans her.”

  “Wendy,” Daniel said reprovingly. “You got kicked off the Darkness Fallz case this morning. You must be in hot water at Stargazer. If Lorelei loses her concert tour because she won’t stop tweeting photos of her underwear, you’re done in this business. How are you going to repair her reputation so quickly without my help? You need me.”

  Wendy frowned. She was still beautiful when she frowned—but she doubted him. He wasn’t concerned about Lorelei’s bodily safety in a relationship with Colton, but Wendy truly was. She was playing Daniel straight, at least on that point.

  He needed her to agree to this plan. Getting Colton and Lorelei back together, or simply putting out the word that they’d made up and forcing them to play along, would assuage the awards ceremony and do wonders for this pivotal week of their careers. But he knew that even if Wendy did say yes, and even if they did continue to play at this game of being lovers, Vegas would be no fun for either of them. They wouldn’t be riding the roller coaster at the New York casino, or hiking the Red Rock Canyon, or falling into bed together. All their fun was over.

  “I just got here,” she murmured. “I haven’t even introduced myself to Lorelei yet. I haven’t had time to assess the situation with her. I don’t think it’s a good idea, and this is definitely not the place to discuss it.”

  He leaned forward with his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand. “Then let’s discuss it tomorrow.”

  She sank back exactly as far as he’d moved toward her, shaking her head no. “Avoiding each other, and having Lorelei and Colton avoid each other, would be a better course of action.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you’re going to avoid me? Don’t expect me to make out with you anymore, then.”

  “We weren’t exactly making out,” she grumbled.

  “Don’t expect me to pretend we’re together, either,” he said lightly. “Your choice. I’m not the one with the problems at work.”

  She opened her mouth to respond—and he was really looking forward to what she would say—when a commotion distracted them both. All the dancers had stopped and faced the center of the room as if a dance-off were going down for cash. The disturbance was so intriguing that someone notified the DJ, who lowered the volume on the electro-garbage until they could hear the beat of different music in the outer room, and above it all, very close by, Colton bellowing.

  Daniel and Wendy recognized his voice and jumped up at the same time. While Wendy pushed through the dancers and disappeared in the direction of the disturbance, Daniel walked around the edge of the crowd, toward the bar, until he spotted Colton’s bodyguard in the shadows against the far wall, deep in conversation with Colton’s driver. Daniel waved to get the bodyguard’s attention, then opened his hands toward the crowd. The bodyguard looked surprised and hustled his big body in that direction. Either he’d been the only person in the bar not to realize that Colton was involved in an altercation, or he’d thought Colton getting in an argument in public didn’t break the threshold of occasions when he should intervene. Daniel mentally added lecturing the bodyguard to his long to-do list for tomorrow.

  He didn’t stick around to watch the bodyguard pull Colton from the crowd. Instead, he rounded to the other side of the room, where he’d seen Wendy disappear into the fray. His pulse quickened as he heard a woman’s shrieks. Pushing through the bodies, he could see when he was still several rows from the center that Lorelei, a tall, slender blonde in a designer top and six-hundred-dollar jeans, was screaming at Colton with her finger in his face and an empty martini glass in her other hand. The bodyguard had reached Colton and pinned his arms behind his back and was attempting to tug him away. Colton’s eyes blazed fire at Lorelei, and his face dripped what appeared to be a pink girly drink. A plastic monkey hung in his hair.

  Camera phones flashed.

  Daniel suppressed the urge to snatch all the phones away from their owners. There were too many. And that would be bordering on illegal, since these people weren’t paparazzi. The last thing Colton needed, on top of the barroom-brawl/drink-in-the-face headline, was an assault on a fan by a member of his public relations team.

  No, Daniel’s best bet now was to work Lorelei’s side of the equation. Rather, Wendy’s side. He snuck up behind her at the edge of the circle around Colton and Lorelei. Over Lorelei’s screeching, Wendy was talking to Lorelei’s enormous bodyguard.

  “Do something,” Wendy said.

  Eyes never leaving Lorelei, the bodyguard shook his head. “She’s told me not to, unless somebody’s about to get shot. She likes to be free to express her emotions.”

  “Oh, is that what she calls it? Get her and follow me. Otherwise, she’s going to scream her way out of a concert tour. Whoops, there goes your salary and your raison d’être.”

  Daniel would not have used the term raison d’être when issuing orders to a bodyguard, but Wendy obviously knew best. The bodyguard stepped forward, looped Lorelei around the waist with one arm, and dragged her out of the center of attention. Lorelei hardly seemed to notice, still hollering at Colton even as the spectators melted away and the music cranked up.

  Wendy hurried back to the table she and Daniel had just vacated. She nodded to the plush seat she and Daniel had shared before. The bodyguard plopped Lorelei down on the bench and eased his huge frame around the table to sit next to her. Wendy pulled up a seat and crossed her legs. Daniel grabbed a seat, too.

  She stared at him. Her face was a blank, but he understo
od her meaning: What are you doing? Why are you here? Go away. He grinned back at her. She couldn’t send him away if she also wanted to keep up the facade that they were lovers. While that nonsense was going on, any business she chose to discuss with Lorelei was his business, too. That was his price.

  Seeming to understand his message, she leaned across the table and told Lorelei, “I’m Wendy Mann. Your new PR specialist?”

  Lorelei’s eyes widened at her. “No. Not you!” She jumped up too fast and put one hand on the bodyguard’s shoulder to steady her drunken sway. At her full height on heels, she pointed down at Wendy. “Chicks let their people take advantage of them all the time, but I am not having a ‘helper’ ”—she made finger quotes—“who tries to steal my boyfriend. See ya!” She stepped around the table. Daniel and Wendy both watched her over their shoulders as she bounded away on her long legs, disappearing into the silk and sequins of the other party guests.

  Daniel had seen what Lorelei posted online from the club, but he hadn’t put it together with Colton coming on to Wendy until now. No wonder Wendy had been so desperate to make it look like she was with Daniel instead.

  He was careful to make his face a blank, with no hint of triumph, as he turned back to Wendy and said, “That went well.”

  She glared at him. But he detected the hint of a smile on her lips, as if to say, Watch this.

  She leaned across the cocktail table to the bodyguard. “Franklin, I’ll give Lorelei a talking-to tomorrow morning, when she’s sober. Right now we need to keep her out of trouble. Tell her to grab some of her girlfriends. Take them to the fifties beauty shop bar on Fremont where they can get an appletini and a pedicure.”

  Franklin grumbled, “I ain’t getting no pedicure.”

  She allowed him a few seconds to think it through.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Wendy was turning Daniel on.

  “She can even take pictures and post them,” Wendy said. “But not of her boobs. I’ll call the owner of the bar and ask him to send their VIP limo for you. I’ll follow you and stay out of her sight, but I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong. Or more wrong. I’m going out of the bar to the casino floor now, where I can hear and call for the limo. Give me a couple of minutes and then collect Lorelei and her chicas and bring them out, okay?”

  As she stood, Daniel expected her to give him an extra-special good-bye—some acknowledgment of what had passed between them in the last hour, and what they’d pretended. But she only crossed her eyes at him before walking away.

  Franklin chuckled. “You look like a man who’s been had.”

  “Yeah.” Daniel turned to watch Wendy maneuver around the drunks on the dance floor and finally swing through the doorway to the outer club. He felt disoriented. He was the one who was supposed to decide when the major players came and went, and he was the one with the contacts.

  He stood. “I’m sure I’ll see you around,” he told Franklin. Ideally, sooner rather than later. Franklin nodded. Daniel dodged dancers and a waitress wearing little more than pasties to step through the doorway to the outer bar.

  There in front of him, near the glass wall onto the casino where he’d originally sat with Wendy, women were screaming and falling into each other. Wendy would have been walking through there at just that moment. He dashed forward to pull her out of danger.

  He couldn’t get past the security guards running in from the casino floor. They spread their arms in front of the crowd to hold them off. At least this gave Daniel a clear view of the young women in sequined clubwear and the bouncers piled on top of them. Wendy was nowhere in sight.

  “What happened?” Daniel yelled to the man next to him.

  “These crazy ladies were screaming that they’d found Colton Farr,” the man said. “You know, the washed-up actor in the online war with his girlfriend? They were trying to tear his clothes off. Probably wanted to sell them online. The Internet has made us all into animals.”

  “But . . . ” Daniel silenced himself. It hadn’t really been Colton. Daniel would have seen him leave the inner room and stopped him.

  The man verified what Daniel had been thinking. “It wasn’t even him. I got a good look at the guy. Strong resemblance, though. This guy could impersonate Colton Farr and make a killing.”

  The bouncers stood the women up and cuffed them. The security guards lowered their arms, and the crowd flowed in to fill the empty space. Daniel looked around for the Colton Farr lookalike. It might be the same guy he’d seen at the blackjack table with Colton earlier, the one who’d disappeared so quickly when the guards arrived. Even if it was, Daniel had no real reason to think the guy was paparazzi.

  He made his way through the club and stepped from the crowded, noisy bar into the quiet of the casino. After a slow survey, he spotted Wendy leaning against an enormous Roman column, laughing into her phone, where a drunken Lorelei wouldn’t notice her when she exited the club.

  He stopped. Standing in the middle of the passageway was awkward, but interrupting her phone conversation would be rude. The ringing in his ears from the dance music began to fade, and the happy noise of the slot machines grew. The casino hadn’t been quiet after all. Everything was relative.

  Finally she slipped her phone into her handbag, looked up, and spotted him. “Hey, lovah,” she called.

  He walked over. “All set with your limo?”

  “Yep.”

  “Maybe Colton and I will come with you.”

  Her smile never faltered as she calmly said, “Nope.”

  “We’ll just happen to show up there.”

  “We’re getting away from you.” Wendy yawned. “I’m really just trying to get her to bed. The bar we’re headed to closes at two, so Franklin will have a good reason to make her call it a night. My God, it must be so late already, and I haven’t even begun to adjust to Pacific time. What time is it in New York?” She opened her purse to pull out her phone again, then thought better of it and waved the whole problem away as impossible. “I’m really not adjusted to Eastern, either, though. I just spent weeks in Seattle and then eight hours in New York. I’m so confused.”

  “Eighteen or nineteen o’clock,” he said.

  She pointed at him and grinned. “That is exactly how I feel.”

  “Or negative five,” he said. “I’ve been up since I got the call about Colton pissing in the fountain at the Bellagio at four a.m.”

  “Oh, you poor baby!” she exclaimed.

  Daniel eyed her dubiously. She sounded sincere, just as she had earlier when she told him to take care. His heart warmed strangely.

  He must be coming down with something. Funny—after so much world travel in the past six years, he thought he’d become immune to everything.

  The moment passed. Her gaze shifted over his shoulder. “Here come my peeps. Good night, Daniel.” She stuck out her hand.

  He looked down at her perfect pink nails. “A handshake?” he asked. “Really?”

  With a small smile, she leaned forward and wrapped her slender arms around him.

  He’d only been joking. Ribbing her about the fact that she needed him. Reminding her how intimately they’d explored the matter earlier. Now he wished he hadn’t teased her. As her body settled perfectly against him and his hands touched her hair, he wanted her—wanted to bury his face in her neck and sniff her perfume until he’d had enough, wanted to take her back to his room and unzip that goddamn skirt—but he would never have her.

  He didn’t like this game anymore.

  Suddenly, he drew back in surprise. “You’re missing a hunk of hair.” He turned her around to make sure he’d felt what he thought he’d felt under his hand. Sure enough, one long golden curl was missing, with a jagged edge in its place, as if the lock had been cut quickly. He took her hand and put it to the ends left over.

  Her lips parted in horror, and her blue eyes flashed toward the club. “I thought I felt a little pull.” With hair that long, she must be very attached to her crowning glory.
He watched with admiration as she switched gears and made light of the situation in the space of two seconds. “This is what happens when you come to Vegas, right? I was half expecting to cut something sticky out of my hair anyway while I’m here.”

  “But someone cutting your hair . . . well. I was going to say I’ve never seen anything that bizarre even in Vegas, but come to think of it, I have.”

  “Me, too.” She laughed, belying her uneasiness. She still pressed her hair with one hand. “I’d better tail Lorelei before she loses me.”

  Daniel glanced at Lorelei, Franklin, and two giggling women tottering through the archway that led to the hotel lobby. “We weren’t through talking about Lorelei and Colton,” he reminded Wendy.

  “Call me tomorrow,” she sang over her shoulder, already power walking across the casino floor. Daniel watched her until she disappeared through the archway after her star.

  Reluctantly he turned back to the club, where dancers thrashed like the damned in hell. He wished he’d been able to talk Wendy into letting him and Colton tag along. Now his night looked grim. He would find Colton inebriated and covered in Lorelei’s drink. He hoped not too many pictures of Colton’s humiliation had been snapped and posted online. It might take a couple of hours to talk Colton into calling it a night, but the faster Daniel could pull it off, the faster he could get to bed himself. Tomorrow was a new day. He would call Wendy, convince her to work with him, and solve the problem.

  The music in the bar was so loud that nobody heard him shout, “Damn!” as he realized he didn’t have Wendy’s number. She’d purposefully neglected to give it to him. And he had no way to get it, because her New York office would know better than to hand it over. If she’d wanted him to have it, he would have it. The night had given him a high he hadn’t felt in forever, but right now he was as low as he’d been in a while, feeling positively bereft of her. Muttering to himself, he gave the bouncer a surly wave and stepped back into the reality star’s party.