Star Crossed Read online

  Colton stared back at Daniel for several seconds while Daniel calculated what his own next move would be. He didn’t have a friend in the place, and his dizziness was progressing into vertigo. The only tool he had, really, was the illusion of control, which was somewhat difficult to sustain with a black eye developing.

  Colton turned to his bodyguard, whose foot was resting on the photographer’s head. “We’ve got to talk shop. Can you take care of this?”

  “Sure thing,” the bodyguard grunted.

  Daniel spoke to security. “Even if you don’t see the picture, get the camera. And tell the casino to ban the photographer and the prostitute, or Mr. Farr is checking out.” The Bellagio had asked Colton to vacate after the fountain-pissing incident last night. But some casinos were pickier than others. This one was happy to be associated with any star, even a tasteless and mentally unstable one.

  Impressed with Daniel’s confidence, but not sure whether they were supposed to be taking orders from him, the bodyguard and security guards nodded at him.

  Daniel wasn’t satisfied. He would have preferred a “yes, sir.” He wasn’t satisfied with his own handling of the situation, either. The other tourist, the one who resembled a battle-hardened Colton, might have been involved in the conspiracy to snap Colton’s photo, too. But he’d disappeared. Daniel had lost track of him. And there was only so much Daniel could ask of himself under the circumstances, with his eye throbbing and threatening to fall out of his face. He turned to usher Colton toward the elevator.

  Colton stayed planted to the spot. Daniel thought he knew why. Colton’s ex-girlfriend, Lorelei Vogel, was also a guest at this hotel. Colton had been furiously feuding with her online since their all-too-public breakup a few weeks ago, but that only gave away how invested he was in the failed relationship. As long as she was staying here, he wouldn’t want to leave.

  Daniel put his hand on Colton’s shoulder—trying not to flare his nostrils in distaste as he did so—and assured him quietly, “The casino will take care of this, and you’ll still be here tomorrow.”

  As if in answer, from behind them came the sounds of a scuffle, several chairs turning over, and a shrieking call girl.

  “Don’t look,” Daniel advised Colton, afraid that his client’s image could still get snapped by a curious passerby, and the headline on the cover of the tabloid would be COLTON FARR INVOLVED IN CASINO BRAWL WITH PROSTITUTE. The article inside would explain that Colton was involved only tangentially, but nobody would read the article. They would only glance at the headline and photo in the grocery store checkout line and reach a verdict about Colton.

  And turn the channel when the Hot Choice Awards aired Friday night.

  Daniel managed to prevent that catastrophe, at least. He steered Colton all the way into the elevator, growling, “Don’t turn around,” as the doors slid shut behind them.

  2

  Feigning her usual confidence, Wendy strode out of the conference room and stopped to talk with one of her assistants. “I’m on the Lorelei Vogel case, so I need access to all those files on the server, please. And tell the travel office I’m flying to Vegas this afternoon. Have them text me the deets.”

  “Vegas!” the young woman exclaimed. “You are so lucky!”

  “I feel lucky.” Wendy walked through the wide room of cubicles, toward her own office. She consciously quieted her high-heeled footsteps as she approached the open door of Tom’s office. She loved Tom like a younger brother, but if he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her close in the hallway to comfort her, she would lose what little composure she had left. She hoped he wouldn’t call out to her as she sneaked past.

  “Hey, Wendy.” He had senses like a Navy SEAL.

  Reluctantly she peeked into his office. He sat with his elbows on his desk and his chin in his hands. As she appeared, he turned his head slightly to shift his mischievous blue eyes from his computer screen to her. Tom had been hired a couple of summers before, fresh out of college and four years younger than Wendy and Sarah. At the time, her overall opinion of him had been twofold: that his still-in-college girlfriend was very, very fortunate, and that he was a complete mess.

  Fearing for his job safety, Wendy had tried to impress on him the importance of looking professional at work. He’d responded to her suggestion with as much alacrity as Sarah had, which was none. Today he wore a wrinkled blazer over a rock band T-shirt, and he hadn’t shaved. In fact, he never seemed to shave, which was impossible. He must have shaved sometime or he would have looked like a member of ZZ Top. Wendy called him Scruffy. Sarah argued that Scruffy sounded like a border collie, but Tom was more of a German shepherd. He looked friendly, he acted playful, but he had a dangerous air about him. When Wendy talked about him like he was a little brother, Sarah pointed out that he was like a little brother who had been to prison.

  “What happened at your meeting with the bosses?” he asked Wendy. His eyes widened as he saw her expression. “Wendy, I—”

  She shook her head. She shouldn’t need to be comforted by him, when she was supposed to be his mentor. She just needed to get to Vegas and perform a miracle. She fled past Sarah’s office to her own and quietly closed her door.

  She stood in the small space beside her desk with her hands pressed to her eyes, trying to remember whether there was anything hidden in her office that would incriminate her or any of her clients if the bosses fired her while she was in Vegas. Looking around the office would do no good because on the surface it was clean and pristine, with her huge bulletin board sectioned into the clients she was responsible for and their current whereabouts—though she hadn’t yet updated Brad’s column to read six feet under. Disentangling the nightmarishly junky drawers of her desk and filing cabinet would take years. Even she didn’t know what was in there. But she didn’t think she was in possession of anything that would get anyone in trouble, now that Brad McCain was dead.

  A knock sounded in the hall—on Sarah’s door, not Wendy’s. “Come in,” Sarah called. Then, through the thin wall, Wendy could make out only the murmur of Sarah’s and Tom’s hushed voices. But she knew Tom was telling Sarah that Wendy had had a bad meeting. Sarah would knock on Wendy’s door any second.

  Wendy didn’t want to recount the meeting to Sarah. Then she really would cry. She sat down at her desk, hoping she could give Sarah the impression that she was busy with work. She opened the top drawer and quickly closed it again. The mess was depressing. She truly was a neat person, but the appearance of neatness was more important than neatness itself. And maintaining that appearance sometimes meant she raked everything on the desk into the drawer. Repeatedly. And then she got sent to Nashville or Paris and never got a day for spring cleaning. Usually the disorder didn’t bother her, but at the moment it seemed overwhelming.

  The inevitable knock sounded at her door.

  She covered her face with both hands, willing that despair away, that feeling of being forever lost down a mine shaft. “I didn’t cry until now,” she called softly.

  “Of course you didn’t cry,” Sarah whispered, closing the door behind her. Wendy heard the swish of Sarah’s too-casual-for-work, thinly disguised gym pants against the guest chair as she sat down.

  Wendy suppressed a sob. “Don’t hug me or I’ll lose it. I have to get out of here and go home and pack and catch a flight.”

  “I won’t hug you,” Sarah said in the soothing Alabama drawl she hadn’t quite shaken after ten years in New York. “So you’re not fired? Tom thought you got fired.”

  Wendy explained the clause in the Darkness Fallz contract. Then she burst out, “You and I should break off and form our own PR firm. Take Tom with us.” Even as she said this, her stomach knotted in dread. Going out on her own might mean failure, and she couldn’t fail. If she failed, she would lose her savings, her apartment . . . that was all she had.

  “I’m not cut out for it,” Sarah said, waving the idea away with one hand. “I love my job, but I want to do it only so many hours a week, y
ou know? I want to be off when I’m off. I want to train for marathons. I want to hang out with Harold on the weekends.”

  Wendy tried not to grimace at the mention of Sarah’s husband, Harold. Wendy hated that guy. Sarah was beautiful—or she could be, with a little makeup and any hair care at all and a proper brassiere to replace her sports bra—but Harold treated her like he was in college and she was the high school girl back home that he’d grown tired of but didn’t have the guts to break up with.

  “You still have a job, though?” Sarah asked. “How’d you pull that off?”

  “Lorelei Vogel asked for me,” Wendy grumbled.

  “But that’s great!” Sarah said. “I mean, that’s a deep hole to dig out of, but if you were going to have to represent Lorelei anyway, you’re not significantly worse off than you were earlier this morning. Yet.”

  “If I hadn’t been fired,” Wendy said, “I would have done anything to avoid this case. Lorelei’s ex, Colton Farr, reminds me of Rick.” Wendy had thought she would feel better getting this off her chest. Instead the memories of Rick threatening her loomed over her.

  No wonder she’d had a visceral reaction to Zane standing so close to her an hour ago. She’d heard around the office that Lorelei wanted representation. Wendy had subconsciously made the connection to Colton, then to Rick, and then she’d started seeing Rick in everybody. The way her day was going, it had been inevitable that she would land in the one assignment that would scare the hell out of her.

  “Rick?” Sarah exclaimed. “No. I see the physical resemblance to Colton, but no. You can’t let yourself go there.”

  Sarah had met Rick only once, when he’d appeared in their dorm before classes started freshman year and demanded that Wendy come with him to talk alone. Sarah had rushed to call campus security, but not before Rick had backed Wendy against the wall with his thick arm across her throat.

  “They both say their girlfriends are beautiful angels until they misbehave,” Wendy grumbled, “at which point their girlfriends become stupid bitches.”

  “Hey!” Sarah exclaimed. “Snap out of it.”

  That’s when Wendy realized she’d huddled into a ball in her desk chair, hugging herself, just as she had whenever Rick called her names.

  “Colton isn’t Rick,” Sarah pointed out.

  “Right.” Wendy straightened in her chair and lifted her chin.

  “And if they do have anything in common,” Sarah said, “you’ll be doing Lorelei a service by helping her distance herself from Colton.”

  “I would have preferred running away.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “Do you want the rundown of what Lorelei and Colton have been up to?”

  “I need to get home and pack. I don’t have time for the rundown. But . . . ” Wendy cringed. “I can tell from your face it’s bad.”

  Sarah nodded. “And as of today, Colton is repped by—”

  “The Blackstone Firm?” Wendy exclaimed. “I have to rep Lorelei Vogel, I have to make her like me while I do it, and I have to extricate her from an Internet brouhaha with my ex-boyfriend’s doppelganger, who’s now a Blackstone Firm client? The only way that could get any worse is if Daniel Blackstone is the rep.”

  Sarah opened her hands. “I heard his dad is retiring and Daniel is taking over the firm soon. I doubt that’s happened yet or we would have heard. It’s feasible that Daniel is in Vegas right now, notching his belt with one last triumph.”

  “Notching his belt,” Wendy muttered. “Better than his bedpost, I guess.” She dabbed her fingertips under her eyes, checking for smeared mascara, feeling completely dead.

  “I know this sounds unlikely,” Sarah said, scooting to the edge of her chair, “but I actually came in here to make you feel better.”

  “It’s okay,” Wendy croaked. “I’m glad you warned me.”

  “Don’t sit here thinking about it,” Sarah said. “Thinking helps most people, but you tend to do better with no thought whatsoever.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sarah rose. Wendy did too, and they embraced after all, just as they had when Sarah got married, and when Wendy got Sarah the job at Stargazer, and when all Wendy’s college boyfriends broke up with her with final salvos of bitch!—every single one of them—and when Daniel Blackstone beat out Wendy for the Clarkson Prize.

  Rubbing Wendy’s back, Sarah pulled away and looked her in the eye. “If you get in trouble, Tom and I will come help you on Stargazer’s tab. Now go. You can do it.” She turned and disappeared into the hallway.

  Wendy went after her. “Sarah,” she called.

  Sarah paused at her own door.

  “If I do get fired while I’m gone,” Wendy said, “and you’re sent to clean out my office and you happen to come across some crack, just flush it down the toilet.”

  Sarah arched one eyebrow. Tom must have been standing near the door of his office, listening, because he slowly leaned into the hall to peek at Wendy, and slowly disappeared again.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, as the doors of the elevator in Wendy’s apartment building slid shut in front of her, she grinned at her reflection in the polished brass. She couldn’t afford to dwell on the very real possibility that she was about to lose her job. She had to capitalize on her small chance to save the job she’d worked her ass off to snag in the first place. A positive attitude could do just that if she managed to couple it with whipping Lorelei Vogel into shape.

  When she smiled like this, with her long blond hair cascading around her shoulders, a stranger might mistake her for a model, or even a starlet like the ones she shoveled out of trouble. She’d been told her features came from the mother she’d hardly known—though Wendy gave those natural looks a generous helping of maintenance and grooming and product. She took very good care of herself. She’d overheard boys in high school saying she was the most beautiful girl at the party until she opened her mouth. Ever since, she’d worked hard at staying the most beautiful girl, because her mouth was going to open sooner or later, and she couldn’t seem to control what came out of it. Facials were so much easier than staying silent.

  That had to change. For the entirety of this trip to Vegas, she would need to pretend she was a benevolent, motherly person. As the second floor, the third floor, the fourth floor slid past, signaled by dark spaces through the crack between the doors, she winked at her reflection good-naturedly. Now she looked like a stranger. Which might be a good thing at this point.

  At her own floor, she opened her apartment door carefully in case her turtle was behind it. He wasn’t there, but an unopened package was, piled with a scarf and a coat she hadn’t worn since March. When she wasn’t on a difficult case, she was very neat. When she was on a difficult case, which was most of the time, she lived at the office or on location with her client and used her apartment as a dump. Sarah said Wendy’s apartment looked like the inside of Wendy’s mind, which was probably true. She tried to straighten up between jobs, but this time she’d missed her chance. She had a plane to catch.

  She could clean for the turtle, though. She scrubbed his terrarium and filled his reservoir with fresh water. Then she scanned her apartment for him. He wasn’t in the potted tree by the window, where he usually hung out. She looked around the ramp she’d propped there so he could get out of the pot if he wanted. After a cursory search of her living room, she realized she was going to need to conduct more than a cursory search, because there were too many sweaters, sheaves of paper, files, and packages of books on the floor. He could be behind or inside any of them.

  Oh God, she was going to miss her flight because her turtle was lost. She’d nearly been fired today, and now her turtle was going to starve to death in her absence. She resisted the urge to call to him. She didn’t know whether he would come or not. She’d never had the patience to test this. Even if he did come when called, it would take him five years.

  On a hunch, she opened the closet door wider and peered into the dark corner behind mounds of her shoes.
There he was, exactly where she’d found him six years before when she moved in—the last owner’s cast-off pet and a kindred spirit for Wendy, who’d felt like her father’s afterthought.

  She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, relieved her turtle was safe.

  She picked him up, a small but solid mass, and gave him her usual stern warning: “Don’t pee on me.” She carefully placed him in the terrarium, secured the jar of turtle food under her arm, and picked up the tank with both hands. She negotiated the door of her apartment with some difficulty and gently kicked the next door, hoping she wasn’t waking Bob.

  She heard him move toward her from across his apartment. The footsteps paused as he looked through the peephole at her. Opening the door, he was already holding out his arms for the tank. She tried not to stare, but it was always shocking to see him without his wig and makeup and corset.

  “Thanks a million,” she said. “Sorry to do this to you again so soon. It’s almost like he’s your turtle instead of mine.”

  “Hi, Wendy,” a voice called from the depths of the apartment.

  She leaned around the doorframe and called back, “Hi, Marvin.” Bob’s boyfriend probably didn’t want to greet her in person because of what he was wearing. Or not.

  “It’s no problem,” Bob told her. “Turtles don’t bark.” He slid the terrarium onto a table near the door and took the jar of food from her. “Plus banana?”

  “Just a tiny bit of whatever fruit you’re eating, yeah.”

  “How long this time?”

  “Maybe a week. I’ll be in Vegas.” Wendy gave him her optimistic grin. The effort in front of a friend made her so tired that she sagged against his doorjamb. “Longer, I hope, because I’m probably going to get fired at the end of it.”

  “Oh, honey!” He stuck out his bottom lip sympathetically. “I can get you a job if you need one.”