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Tingles rushed up and down her arms, through her chest, down to her thighs, making her legs weak. She felt herself sliding closer to him on the velvet bench, placing one shoe between both of his so that her thigh grazed his and his knee brushed her crotch.
His lips left hers, but his face hovered near. He looked into her eyes and brushed his lips against hers once more. Then he lifted his middle finger to stroke a long blond lock away from her face. “Good enough?” he murmured. “Colton was watching.”
Oh. Of course. He hadn’t kissed her because he’d wanted to. He’d done it because she’d asked him to, for the sake of her job. Oh.
WITTY COMEBACK. She should make a WITTY COMEBACK now, but her mind was empty of words again. It was full of pleasure, an insane lust for him, and disappointment that he didn’t feel the same.
Then, thankfully, she produced the comeback after all. She hadn’t held this job for six years for nothing. She grinned at him and quipped, “Now that is how you do PR.”
“Good.” With one hand he stroked her bare back. With the other he twisted a lock of her hair into a rope and wound it around his finger, reminding her that she’d allowed herself to be caught. “Because now I need a favor from you.”
5
Wendy gazed up at Daniel, her blue eyes dark with the kiss they’d just shared, her jaw set against the favor he was calling in.
He had no idea what he must look like to her, but he felt like he’d gotten high and lost his mind.
Reluctantly he let go of her silky hair and slipped his hand out from under her blouse. He wished he could have explored her mouth with his until they were both wild with want. Without exchanging a word, they would escape from this crowd and make their way up to his room or hers, where he would zip her out of that sexy skirt. But she wouldn’t have allowed it. She’d been clear from the beginning that she was only using him. He might protest for show, but he was very, very happy for Wendy Mann to use him all she wanted. However, he kept in mind that in the end, they were both here for one thing, and it wasn’t a lay.
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 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.
