Star Crossed (Stargazer) (6 page)

“I don’t care about the awards show so much,” Colton admitted, “but my agent’s got me on the short list for some big flicks, okay? Action movies that would make my career. My agent thinks if the awards show replaces me, the movies won’t want me, either, because I’ll look like a liability.”

“Your agent is a smart man,” Daniel said.

Colton grimaced and gulped his bourbon. “I’m working with you to make my agent happy, but he’s overreacting. No way is the awards show going to replace me this late in the game.”

“Really?” Daniel asked. “How much rehearsal have you done so far?”

“None. Rehearsal starts tomorrow, but—”

“So,” Daniel broke in, “if you’re pissing in a fountain that’s somehow become one of America’s most beloved landmarks in the past decade and a half, and you’re posting tasteless insults online about your beautiful ex-girlfriend, why
would
anybody tune in to watch this unpleasant guy? Why
can’t
the show replace you at the last minute with another actor, one who’s on TV
now
, one who’s not struggling to make the transition from teen shows to the adult market and failing miserably?”

Colton swallowed. “I guess it could happen.”

“Which is why you promptly went down to an open
section of the casino and nearly got photographed losing a hundred thousand dollars while sitting next to a prostitute.”

Colton frowned. “I didn’t know she was a prostitute.”

Daniel watched Colton levelly over the rim of his glass while taking a sip. “I might believe you if I were my father, or if I were twelve. What’s with the girl, Colton?”

Colton shrank several more inches. “Okay. I let her pull up a chair. I also noticed the photographer pretty quickly. I was hoping a picture of me with the prostitute might get picked up by the tabloids and make Lorelei go nuts. I wasn’t trying to lose the hundred grand, though.”

At that admission, Daniel took another, bigger sip of bourbon. He might not be much of a drinker, but for once he wanted to chug the contents of the glass and pour himself another. He couldn’t, though. He had too much work to do today. He asked Colton, “What’s the deal with Lorelei?”

Colton’s jaw tightened. “We were great for the past three years. Then, as soon as we left the TV show and she started her own band, the whore cheated on me with her drummer.”

Daniel winced internally at Colton’s brutal language for his ex-lover. “Maybe we’re having trouble with definitions here,” he said. “A whore is what was sitting next to you downstairs at the blackjack table,
where everybody in America could take pictures of you together. Lorelei is your costar from a children’s TV show—”

“It wasn’t a children’s show,” Colton said testily. “It was for teenagers, and a lot of adults watched it, too.”

Daniel waited for Colton to hear how immature that statement sounded. After a few seconds of silence, he realized that was not going to happen. He cleared his throat and went on, “—and Lorelei is also your ex-girlfriend. You shared your life with her for three years. The public expects you to have sore feelings about your breakup. Anybody would. But they don’t expect you to call her names on the web. You can’t say things like that about a young lady. She’s twenty-one years old, Colton.”

“She’s plenty old enough to know exactly what she’s doing.”

“She’s not much older than my sister.” Daniel said this with more vehemence than he’d intended. He could tell, because Colton raised his eyebrows in surprise.

Daniel was surprised, too. He wasn’t sure where that outburst had come from. Since when was he human? He cleared his throat. “When you insult a young lady, you’re trying to make her look bad, but
you’re
the one who ends up looking bad. And things are about to get worse for you. I heard that Lorelei has hired Stargazer, which is one of the best PR firms she could have brought on board, besides my own.”

Colton frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Stargazer’s very good. If they send certain people, I won’t know quite what to expect. But if they send Sarah Seville, I’ll know we’re in trouble. Sarah is a smooth talker, very friendly, and she’ll become Lorelei’s new best friend and persuade her to use a soft touch with the press. If they send Wendy Mann, we’re in
more
trouble. Wendy is a drill sergeant. She has a reputation for whipping people into shape and getting them to do things they never dreamed they could do themselves. Before you know it, she’ll have Lorelei dressing in lace and pearls and hosting tea parties for charity.”

“If she’s so good, why don’t I fire you and hire her?” Colton asked in the tone of a petulant child. “Maybe
she
wouldn’t have dragged me away from the tables when my luck was turning.”

“Your luck wasn’t turning,” Daniel said. “There’s no such thing as luck. The probability that you’ll get a good hand is exactly the same every time you play.” He could tell by Colton’s wandering gaze that Colton was losing interest, so Daniel stepped back from the lecture on applied math and returned to the subject that Colton seemed most interested in: Wendy Mann. “And if you hired Wendy, you wouldn’t like her. I guarantee you wouldn’t lay eyes on a blackjack table the rest of the time you spent in Vegas.”

“But with you, I can? I don’t think it would be good for publicity if I stayed in my room until Friday. That
would make it look like my handlers had shut me down because there was something seriously wrong with me. It would be an admission of guilt.”

“That’s very insightful, Colton. If you’d been that smart for the past month, you wouldn’t need me.”

“It’s Lorelei. I wouldn’t have gotten so plastered last night if my driver hadn’t gotten me talking about her. She makes me crazy, man.” Colton took off his trucker hat, rubbed his hair, and put his hat back on, a gesture Daniel had seen many times before. Other actors got this agitated about women. So did rock stars, celebrity chefs, and professional football players. Daniel himself did not, so he couldn’t empathize.

“You’ve got to help me get her back,” Colton pleaded.

“After she cheated on you and you called her names all over the Internet?”

“Yes!”

People in love were foreign and strange. “I’m not a high-priced relationship counselor,” Daniel pointed out. “I can’t help you get her back. I’m a public relations specialist. The best I could do is make it
look
like you’ve gotten her back.”

“Then do that,” Colton said, “and maybe the rest will follow.”

He had a point, actually. Daniel didn’t care whether Colton fixed his relationship with Lorelei, or whether that was even a good idea. But the two of them getting back together right before the awards ceremony that they both were starring in would be terrific PR. He
surveyed Colton coldly, like he was a penguin behind the glass in the Central Park Zoo, and began to plot how he could use the star’s heartbreak to repair his reputation.

“Let me think about it,” Daniel said vaguely, as if dismissing the idea. “In the meantime, we need a short-term game plan. I don’t want to institute martial law”—actually, he did, but instituting martial law only made stars more likely to go on a bender and land in jail—“but I do want to be notified of where you’re going and why.”

“Giuliana Jacobsen reserved the back room of the Big O club here in the hotel for tonight. I was planning to go to her party.”

Daniel kept himself from wincing or laughing out loud at the name of the club, so provocative it was ridiculous. He said only, “Giuliana Jacobsen, the reality star?”

“Yeah, I know. That’s kind of slumming. But it’s Monday night, so there aren’t a lot of parties to choose from.”

“You mean, Lorelei will be there.”

Colton grinned sheepishly. “I don’t know that for sure, but Lorelei’s staying here in the hotel. It would be easy for her to go. Lorelei likes stuff to be easy. And she doesn’t miss a party.” He gazed out on the Strip. His voice turned dreamy as he said, “I love that about her.”

The trucker hat cast a shadow across Colton’s eyes. Daniel studied him. He knew Colton was twenty-one,
but in his hat and sweatshirt and mauled jeans, sitting on the tailored sofa, he looked like a fourteen-year-old after a growth spurt. “What are you planning to wear?” Daniel asked.

Colton looked at him in confusion and gestured to the attire he had on.

Daniel frowned at him.

“What?” Colton demanded. “I’m Colton Farr. I wear what I want.”

“You’re a young actor with public relations problems,” Daniel corrected him, “and you look it. If you want to keep your emcee job for the Hot Choice Awards and land an A-list movie role, you need to look like
that
. Never dress for the job you already have. Dress for the job you’re trying to get. At this point, it wouldn’t hurt for you to act like you’re trying.”

Colton nodded shortly. “I get it.”

Daniel picked up his glass, drained it, and set it back down with a
bang
carefully calculated to startle Colton while not quite denting the table or shattering the heavy tumbler. “If you’re going to this party, we need to agree on three things.” He counted them on his fingers. “You will not get too drunk.”

“Agreed.”

“You will not piss anywhere except a urinal.”

Colton laughed until he saw the serious expression on Daniel’s face. Colton’s smile fell away as he repeated, “Agreed.”

“You will not call Lorelei names.”

“Of course not,” Colton said. “I told you I wanted her back, didn’t I?”

Daniel almost felt relieved at Colton’s genuine reaction, and sorry he’d brought it up again or ever mistrusted the actor. But that was just it—Colton was an actor.

Daniel stopped himself just before he reached for his empty glass on the table. The bar was here in the room with him. It was tempting to drown this job in alcohol. But he’d always been able to resist. He wouldn’t make an exception for Colton, Lorelei, and Stargazer PR.

Unless they truly sent Wendy Mann. That woman might drive him to drink after all.

W
endy sat up—she’d given herself one hell of a crick in her neck from bending over her computer so long, poring over the files on Lorelei—and pressed her forehead to the cool window as the plane circled Vegas. The Strip was gorgeous at night with every casino outlined in glowing color. The hotels looked so tiny from this altitude that she could hardly imagine how vast they really were, even though she’d lived in some of them for weeks at a time. Her heart beat faster in anticipation. After many missions to pull celebrity addicts out of poker rooms and bordellos, she should have been jaded. She
was
a little jaded, actually. But Vegas still held much of the charm for her that she’d felt on her first business trip here years ago, as excited at the idea as her assistant had been earlier that day.

She loved the luxury the casinos offered to everyone, not just the high-born. She loved that the seedy
part of town was around the corner from the luxe side, so she could lean over and peek into the sort of life she’d left in Morgantown without actually taking a step in that direction. She looked forward to the excitement and noise and music and fashion and lights, blinking like a beacon below her. New York got on her nerves sometimes, Chicago was cold, Los Angeles smelled, but Vegas was still magic.

She grinned again, no longer faking her positive attitude but really feeling optimistic that she would figure out Lorelei soon enough. Lorelei might not need money, but surely she cared enough about
something
to rein in her bad behavior. Her silver-screen heartthrob dad might have pressured her to hire the agent who had placed her on a teen TV show, which was where she’d met Colton. But six years of experience in this business told Wendy that Lorelei herself had formed her new band, secured a recording contract, and arranged for a tour. And she’d asked for Wendy’s help when ticket sales were so disappointing that the tour was threatened.

So Lorelei cared about her music, or her father’s approval, or living up to the legacy of her dead rock icon mom, or what Colton thought of her after all. Or possibly about the drummer from her band, with whom she was alleged to have had an affair. Everybody cared about something. All Wendy had to do was tease out what that thing was, and then yell at Lorelei until the sinking starlet realized she was throwing that thing away. Except this time Wendy was banned from yelling, damn it.

The plane touched down smoothly in the black night and taxied toward the terminal. It was midnight in New York—Wendy could vouch for this by the itching of her contacts—but only nine in Vegas, and Lorelei’s night of partying would just be getting started. Before the flight attendant had finished announcing that passengers were allowed to use their electronics, Wendy clicked her phone on and checked Lorelei’s various social media accounts. Most of the star’s messages that day had been innocent enough, complimenting the other artists scheduled to perform at the Hot Choice Awards, expressing her excitement. Wendy wasn’t ready to sigh with relief, but at least she knew Lorelei could act like a normal person when pressed.

However, Lorelei’s most recent message gave Wendy pause.