Star Crossed

by Jennifer Echols

  As she was contemplating this, Elvis turned to Daniel. She thought Elvis would have to remind Daniel that he was being asked to say a few words at his own wedding. She hoped not, because if Daniel seemed too bored, Lorelei and Colton might suspect the whole wedding was a publicity ploy.

  To her surprise, Daniel said, “Wendy,” looking straight at her. “When you make me laugh, I feel like I’m finally alive again.”

  His expression could have been anything. Anger? Fear? Love? This last thought made tears form at the corners of her eyes. To keep herself from crying, she stuck out her bottom lip in fake sympathy for him.

  He laughed. There in the middle of their cheeseball wedding, he genuinely laughed with the corners of his dark eyes crinkling. He stepped forward and took her hand.

  Elvis moved forward through the ceremony. Wendy watched Daniel grinning at her. Her hand tingled where her palm met his. The tingle spread warmly up her arm and across her chest.

  “Do you have any vows?” Elvis asked next.

  Daniel cut his eyes toward Elvis, then back toward Wendy, and his lips parted. He was about to make up an excuse. Or, worse, a vow he didn’t mean.

  Wendy cut him off. “Better not,” she said. “After all, it’s Vegas.”

  This time everyone laughed, but Daniel’s eyes looked worried. He squeezed her hand as if to give them both the strength to get through the rest of this.

  Elvis said, “Then, by the power vested in me by the state of Nevada, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

  Wendy went cold. She actually felt all the blood draining out of her brain, and she thought she might faint. She was calculating how that rumor would spread through the tabloids, and whether it would get warped into good publicity or bad publicity for Lorelei, when Daniel stepped forward and reached one stable hand around the small of her back.

  “You may—” Elvis said.

  Daniel pushed his other hand into her hair.

  “—kiss the—”

  Daniel eased her backward. His dark eyes met her eyes for a moment before his lips found hers.

  He kissed her deeply, but she felt more than the kiss. She felt her whole body melting into his.

  It was going to be really bad when they got divorced.

  Lorelei and Colton burst into applause and wolf whistles. High-class. But it made Wendy happy, and when Daniel finally broke the kiss and stood her up straight, he was laughing again.

  Mission accomplished.

  * * *

  In the wee hours of the morning, when most of the party guests had stumbled down to the casino to lose some money before finally making it back to their hotel rooms, and the pounding music had shut down, Lorelei swayed her way across the club to bring Wendy a flute of champagne. “To you,” she said, tapping Wendy’s glass with her own.

  Wendy took a long sip. She needed it.

  But then she said, “No, to you. I didn’t expect the press to ask you about my wedding. I didn’t prep you, but you handled it exactly right. You denied you got married, but you never said you’d been to your PR rep’s wedding, so you didn’t throw me to the wolves. I’m proud of you!”

  “You told me not to admit I was friends with anybody who wasn’t famous,” Lorelei said.

  “I did tell you that, but I didn’t expect you to remember it when you were under pressure.” Wendy leaned back against the wall, satisfied. “My little chickadee has flown away. You don’t need me anymore.”

  Lorelei gasped. “No! You’re quitting?”

  “Of course not! I couldn’t quit anyway. Your contract is with Stargazer. I could quit the company, but I couldn’t quit you. They’d just send someone else. I’m saying your crisis is over.”

  “Well, I might let you go back home now. But I still want you to handle stuff for me when it comes up.” Lorelei pointed her flute at Wendy. “And when there’s an event like this, I want you to come party with me.”

  “Even if I’m the downer?”

  “Especially if you’re the downer. I had a lot of fun with you this week. I know you said I’m not supposed to be friends with bodyguards and hairdressers and people like that, but I feel like you and I are friends, and not just because I’m paying you.”

  “I feel like that, too,” Wendy said honestly. “I’ve felt like that ever since the first morning when I heard you sing. I knew you were special. And I already thought you had killer taste in shoes. Come here, pretty girl.”

  They hugged each other, careful not to spill their champagne. Wendy rubbed Lorelei’s bare arm and was surprised to feel chill bumps. She was a real person, of course—Wendy’s job was all about helping the stars when they turned up human—but it still came as a little shock when Lorelei looked so flawless.

  Wendy let her go. “Let’s talk about tomorrow, because we’ll both be so busy that we might lose track of each other. Daniel and I have arranged for you and your whole posse to ride back to Los Angeles with Colton in his limo. You’ll hop in and be off the instant the show is over.”

  “Really?” Lorelei complained. “What a bummer!”

  Wendy shook her head firmly. “Sorry. Right now, during the week with the city kind of dead, it’s reasonably safe for you to go out. After the show on Friday night, when so many extra people have been pumped into town for the awards show and the weekend, and when they’ve seen your awesome act onstage, you won’t be able to go anywhere. You had a great party tonight. Know beforehand that you’ll spend tomorrow night in the limo, sipping more champagne. When you get to L.A., they’ll drop you at home, and you’ll sleep until Tuesday.”

  “The paparazzi will be camped outside my house when I get there,” Lorelei griped. “They’ll see me getting out of Colton’s limo, and they’ll think we really did get married. You know, some tabloids don’t like him and think he’s overconfident. They call him Colton Fart.”

  “That,” Wendy said, “is my husband’s problem.”

  “I don’t know,” Lorelei said. “Until they figure out we really didn’t get married, do you think they’ll call me Lorelei Fart?”

  “Maybe,” Wendy acknowledged, “but it’s cute. Colton Fart is not cute. Colton sounds as big as mountains, and his fart would be powerful. Lorelei Fart sounds like a baby passing gas, or a little fairy.”

  Lorelei laughed. “Why do I ask you stuff?”

  Wendy yawned. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, I’ll ride with Colton back to L.A.,” Lorelei said, tilting a little on her high heels. Wendy could tell she would need to have this whole conversation again with the wardrobe mistress.

  “Now you’re going to bed, right?” Wendy checked. She didn’t have to add that she wanted Lorelei to go to bed alone, without Colton. He’d left a few minutes before with his bodyguard and driver. Wendy thought again that something had gone wrong between him and Lorelei. But after all, this was what Wendy had wanted for Lorelei: to pretend to fall in love, not actually do it. Actually doing it was Wendy’s mistake alone.

  “Promise me you won’t get up until you need to go to the theater tomorrow for the show,” Wendy said. “I’ll come wake you.”

  “Okay,” Lorelei said. “What are you doing now? You’re going to bed, too, finally, right? With Daniel.” She gave Wendy an exaggerated wink.

  “Ha,” Wendy said, unable to call up enough mirth. “Not like you mean. Daniel told me he has to get up in three hours for a breakfast appointment. I am like, screw that. I’m sleeping for four hours before I go back to work.”

  It was just as well. She wasn’t sure whether they were supposed to have a wedding night or not. The inevitable awkward scene was more than she could handle, dead as she felt.

  Still, she found herself touching the strangely heavy ring on her finger and searching the shadows of the club for Daniel. He’d sent Colton to bed with other members of his entourage so he could wait for her . . . and there he was at the long, dark bar, sipping from a tumbler and watching her over the rim.

  “But after the awards show tomorrow night”�
�Lorelei grinned—“you and Daniel are going to bed.”

  16

  Rumors are running rampant that last night, embattled exes Colton Farr and Lorelei Vogel took a break from her twenty-first-and-a-half birthday party at posh club Wet Dream to get hitched at a Las Vegas chapel. Farr acknowledges he and Vogel are back together but has vehemently denied they are married.

  We caught up with Vogel after she returned to her party. She elaborated when we asked whether the wedding was genuine or a stunt. “Two dear friends of ours did get married,” she told us. “The wedding wasn’t staged for publicity. If you’d been there, you would have known this was true. It was only a Vegas quickie marriage, but it was the most romantic wedding I’ve ever been to. I have never seen two people more in love.”

  Fond words about that mystery couple—or perhaps coy words about herself and Farr?

  Farr will emcee the Hot Choice Awards televised live tonight at 8 p.m. (EDT), and Vogel’s newly formed band will be the featured musical guest.

  * * *

  Daniel didn’t have time for his morning routine of room service breakfast and online perusal of what he was missing in politics. But as he carefully unlocked the door so he wouldn’t wake Wendy and stepped into the hall, the national newspaper was waiting. He quietly closed the door behind him and turned to the entertainment section. The little article about Colton and Lorelei was one of the front-page blurbs.

  Daniel wanted to burst back into the room, shake Wendy awake, and give her a huge hug with the news. She would likely kill him, though, if she felt like he’d felt when his alarm went off.

  He plastered the paper against the wall and pulled his pen from his coat. Outlining the blurb with a heart, he scribbled in the margin, “Job saved! Great work!” He snuck back into the room and set the paper next to her laptop, where she would see it first thing. With a final long look back at her, just the golden mess of her hair visible above the covers, he shut the door.

  He was already in the elevator when he began to have second thoughts. A heart? He’d encircled the blurb with a heart? He hadn’t done something that dorky since his punk band dedicated a song to a girl he liked who promptly walked out of the club in response. And Job saved! Great work! was something he would say to one of his employees, not his wife.

  He entertained the thought of going back to the room and retrieving the paper before she could see it, like a total loser. Glancing at his watch, he saw that would make him late for breakfast with a second movie producer interested in having Colton audition. He tried to get his head back into work and let Wendy go.

  Only he couldn’t. All through his meal with the producer, he thought about the way her hair had spun golden across the pillows. When their meeting ended, he found she’d texted him in response to the newspaper article—Yay!!!!—and he stared at one word and four exclamation points for a long time, trying and failing to come up with something clever to text back. For the next few hours, as he met with reporters gathered at the theater to cover the awards show, he remembered his night with her, how he’d spent his scant three hours of sleep spooning her with his hands underneath her T-shirt, on her breasts, and she had folded her hands possessively over his. Finally, when he got a free moment an hour before the awards show began, he called her.

  “Hey, lovah,” she answered.

  “Where are you?”

  “In Lorelei’s dressing room, getting our hair done. Where are you?”

  “In Colton’s dressing room, making sure he doesn’t produce a flask.” He grinned at Wendy’s musical laughter.

  Colton scowled across the room at him, and not because he’d heard Daniel’s low words. More likely, he was confused that Daniel was laughing. Daniel was confused, too. Confused and happy. He stepped into the bustling corridor.

  “When’s your flight to L.A.?” Wendy asked.

  “Tomorrow afternoon. How about your flight to New York?” He didn’t cross his fingers, but he wanted to.

  “Same time,” she said. “So, what’s on your schedule after this show?”

  The loaded tone of her voice made his groin tighten. He said, “A honeymoon.”

  “I can’t wait,” she whispered.

  After they hung up, he called for reservations at the nicest restaurant he could think of. It was a huge struggle, possibly the single hardest thing he’d done on this trip, to wipe the smile off his face before he reentered Colton’s dressing room.

  Hours later, as the awards show drew to a close, he stood at the back of the packed theater, watching Colton announce the last number from Lorelei and her band. As soon as the most anticipated award was announced and the credits rolled, Colton and Lorelei would be hustled by security into the waiting limo and hurried out of town. With only five minutes of air time left for the stars to screw up, Daniel started to relax. His job here was done.

  A movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Wendy had the same idea he’d had. On the other side of the theater, she came in through another back door and leaned against the wall, watching Lorelei’s band start playing in a cloud of dry-ice fog. Then Wendy saw Daniel and smiled. They walked toward each other and met in the middle.

  For the rest of the song, they stood next to each other. He didn’t want her to catch him staring at her, but he took surreptitious glances. She wore a stylish gray suit with a deep blue blouse that made her eyes stand out, as blue as the Vegas sky. She’d caught her hair back in a long, loose ponytail.

  Gorgeous as she was, though, the prettiest thing about her was her smile. Seeming to forget he stood beside her, she gazed at Lorelei onstage like a proud sister. He was glad this job had finally worked out for her. She deserved this moment.

  The song ended. The applause was thunderous. Lorelei bowed for the standing ovation long after the on-air lights had blinked off and the show had cut to the last commercial. When the crowd finally died down to the point that they could hear each other, Daniel leaned over and said in Wendy’s ear, “Wow.”

  Wendy beamed. “Isn’t she great?”

  “She is,” Daniel said. “Her concert tour is definitely saved.”

  “And Colton has been riveting and charming!” Wendy sounded exactly as astonished by this as Daniel felt.

  He laughed. “You told me a couple of days ago that everyone famous has some talent. I’m beginning to see your point. Colton has been totally unlike himself tonight. He’s a terrific actor.”

  “See?” Wendy’s smile faded as she asked, “Have you noticed he and Lorelei aren’t as into each other as they were when we caught them macking on the couch? I think they had a fight.”

  “He hasn’t mentioned it to me,” Daniel said, “but yeah, I think they’ve cooled off. I hope it won’t be a problem. I’ve been thinking a lot about something else you said, that we need to make sure our solutions for the stars are what’s good for them long-term. I’ve tried to impress on him that even if he and Lorelei break up for good, he can’t attack her again, publicly or otherwise. That’s not how adults operate, even famous ones.”

  “Unless he gets a reality show.”

  Daniel almost didn’t say it because he didn’t want to jinx it. But he was becoming accustomed to sharing everything with Wendy, and he couldn’t keep this in. “Talks are going well. I think we’ll get him a movie. A big one.”

  Wendy nodded and grinned. “After his performance tonight, I’d say it’s a sure thing.” She held out her arms.

  Daniel walked into her hug. His whole body woke up when she whispered in his ear, “Congratulations.” As the on-air lights blinked and the audience obediently applauded for Colton’s last stage entrance and the last award, Daniel and Wendy gave each other one last squeeze and backed away. He noticed she still wore the diamond ring.

  * * *

  “You really know how to take a girl to dinner,” Wendy said.

  They sat at a terrace table for two, with tourists strolling the Strip below them, palm trees and strings of lights above them, and a gentle breeze fingeri
ng Daniel’s hair. She hadn’t seen service like this since a stop at Commander’s Palace on a mission to New Orleans last year. The food was delicious, plentiful, and not too eccentric, just the way this West Virginia girl liked it. And after her half of a bottle of wine, she’d lost most of her worries over where the night was leading them.

  Maybe the wine was tricking her, but she thought he was enjoying himself as much as she was, even though he hadn’t said so. She teased him, “You’re being awfully quiet, even for a quiet person. What’s wrong? Having second thoughts?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  She kept smiling. There was no reason to be angry with him about this. He’d said from the outset that this wedding, though real, wasn’t serious. If she’d fallen for him in the meantime and was beginning to be sorry the marriage meant nothing, that was her own fault.

  He said, “I wanted us to get married because it solved a problem. That’s what I do.”

  “Right,” she said sharply, wishing her tone would cut him off.

  No such luck. “You told me you didn’t want to do it, and I bullied you into it.”

  “Oh.” This wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. “Well,” she began again in a softer tone, “you made a logical argument and I agreed with you. I wouldn’t say you bullied me.”

  “I know women take weddings very seriously,” he said. “There are so many reality shows about weddings and cakes and dresses. People have subscriptions to whole magazines about this, and they keep the subscriptions even when they’re not getting married. Women pick out their wedding dresses when they’re eight years old.”

  “You sound awfully familiar with this scenario, Mr. Blackstone. Do you have a collection of veils that you want to tell me about?”

  He winked at her. Then shushed her because she was laughing too loudly.

  “No,” he said, “but I’ve dated this scenario repeatedly, and my sister is the same way. I knew all that, Wendy, but I made you feel, if that was your personal position, that you should give it up for the sake of business. That’s what I’m sorry for. I was watching your face during the ceremony. There was one point when I was sure you were going to faint.”