Star Crossed (Stargazer) (11 page)

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 understood 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.

But the next morning, Daniel got lucky.

D
aniel had finished his free weight reps and was pounding out his fourth mile on the treadmill when Wendy jerked open the door of the hotel fitness center. The entire gym was one long room overlooking the Strip from a high floor. Except for the attendant behind the desk, they were the only occupants in the dead calm of late morning. Wendy’s eyes went straight to him.

He saw all of it flash across her face: recognition. An instinct to back out the door before he saw her. A realization that it was too late. An attempt to act like she’d never even thought about leaving just because he was there. Who, her?