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That’s why Wendy was laughing as she put out her hand to touch the king.
* * *
If Daniel had meant the morning’s Kentucky bourbon to call Wendy Mann to Vegas—and he still wasn’t sure about that—it had worked. His mind spun with the implications. Now that Wendy was directing Lorelei, the plan he’d been cooking up to get Colton out of trouble would be harder to implement.
But the fact that he and Wendy were enemies didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the sight of her. Her long blond locks blew back over her shoulders with her own speed as she climbed the stairs to his table, and her slim h*ps swayed in a tight black skirt.
He stood and put his hand out to meet hers, keeping his face a blank.
“Daniel!” she called over the throbbing music in that throaty voice he remembered. “Wendy Mann.” Her hand slipped farther into his.
He squeezed her hand and hesitated. Not long enough to be rude. Just long enough to make her doubt whether he remembered her.
“We were in Dr. Abbott’s speech-writing class together? And Dr. Benson’s image management class. Several others.” Her blond brow furrowed in annoyance that he couldn’t quite place her.
Good. Now that he’d knocked her off balance, he turned on the charm, as if he were doing a favor for someone underneath him in the business. “Of course. Wendy. Please.” He gestured to the velvet bench beside him.
As they both sat, he signaled the waitress—who was wearing a teddy—and ordered the silliest thing he could think of. “Two glasses of champagne.” He named a good label but didn’t go the last step of ordering the bottle. He needed his head clear, for one thing. And though it would probably help him in his job if Wendy’s head weren’t clear, he didn’t want to attract the attention of having a bottle popped open for them. They weren’t getting married, after all. Ordering ridiculous drinks was enough.
After the waitress had left so it was too late to say no, he turned back to Wendy and asked, “Is champagne okay?” He expected her to have settled far away from him on the long bench, embarrassed and browbeaten by his superior air.
Instead he found her as close as she could sit without touching him. Her elbow was on the table, her arm bare below a white puff of sleeve. Her chin was propped on her fist. She looked utterly comfortable, which made him very uncomfortable—the same way she’d always made him feel. The way he’d been trying to make her feel, damn it! They’d exchanged only a few words in college, but he’d always known she was poking a little fun at him. He wished she would stop. He’d lost his sense of humor years ago. He would sound like a robot if she made him laugh.
She brought her other hand up from her lap. He watched it coming, feeling slightly dazed. He caught a whiff of her expensive perfume as she placed her hand over his on the table.
“Champagne is perfect,” she said. “In celebration of seeing an old friend. Thank you.”
He knew she was making fun of him then, because they’d never been friends. She’d intrigued him in college. But he was competing with her for top honors in their major. His father wouldn’t have thought much of her as competition—a little girl from Appalachia—but Daniel had read her papers and seen her projects, and he’d witnessed her funny and fearless delivery. He couldn’t let her beat him, because he couldn’t explain that defeat to his father. So he’d done everything he could to win. He’d studied harder and worked longer. And he’d stayed away from her.
Now he almost would have thought she was coming on to him, but she was way too good at her job for that. Her hand disappeared into her lap again. She wasn’t scooting any closer.
He leaned toward her so she could hear him over the music. “Or in celebration of the end of your six-hour flight.”
She grinned. “You’re not kidding! I have a crick in my neck that would kill a horse.”
“You should get a massage while you’re here.” His eyes flitted to the creamy skin of her neck before he forced them back to her face. “You’re in town just for pleasure, right?” he deadpanned.
“Right!” she said enthusiastically. “And I see you’re in town for the recreational opportunities.”
He raised his brows, waiting for her to explain so he wouldn’t look stupid by telling her he had no idea what she was talking about.
She took her hand away from her chin and gestured to his eye. “I’ve heard it’s the latest craze in high-end fitness. Boxing!”
He bristled at that comment before giving it right back to her. “Yes, I’m here for pleasure, too. I’m taking a short break because I just got assigned to a difficult case. Have you heard of Darkness Fallz?” He inclined his head toward the enormous speakers in the corner, which were blasting the latest Darkness Fallz abomination.
She was good. She hardly even winced when he mentioned the supergroup that had just ditched her. And then she said in a reasonable facsimile of an innocent tone, “No, I haven’t heard of them. Are they contemporary Christian?”
He nearly laughed and ended up only choking on the word no. Luckily his voice was drowned out by the Darkness Fallz chorus: “You’re moving on and it’s like a knife in my eye/I hope you get sick and DIEEEEEEEE.”
Blinking lights made him turn away from Wendy momentarily, toward the window onto the casino. A slot machine was going crazy, flashing as it spit out a river of tokens. The elderly couple in front of the machine embraced. The man picked up the woman, spun her around, and kissed her.
“How sweet!” Wendy exclaimed, beaming. “I hope they enjoy their loot. What a good omen, that this is the first thing I see after I step off the plane into Vegas.”
Besides me, Daniel wanted to point out. He rather liked being her bad omen. But they were pretending to have friendly small talk, so he kept the conversation light. “Are you a gambler?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “I like people to think I’m a successful gambler,” she said. “Actually I’m stacking the deck. How about you?”
“I’m with you. I gamble only if I can figure out a way to cheat.”
“You’re my kind of man.”
He wanted to stick to that line of questioning. They might only be toying with each other, assessing the enemy’s weapons before they struck, but he was enjoying it.
The waitress picked that moment to interrupt them. She placed one glass of champagne in front of Wendy and one in front of him. After she left, Daniel lifted his flute. “To pleasure,” he said.
“To pleasure.” Wendy tapped the rim of her glass against his. The bell-like sound rang through a rare quiet moment in the Darkness Fallz track.
Sipping his champagne, he watched her over the top of his flute as she drank a few long gulps with her eyes closed, then turned her head to one side and stretched her neck. She really did have a crick. Sitting with Daniel and having a drink was her only break—if one could call it that—before she searched out Lorelei. He knew how she felt.
The next second, she set the drink down, her eyes opened, and she was grinning again. “So who of note is here at the bar? Not that you’ve been paying attention. I know you’re on vacation.”
“You’re right,” he said drily. “I’ve just been sitting here relaxing and getting plastered.”
“You do seem three sheets over there. Totally out of control. You might want to cut yourself off.”
“Thanks for your concern. But I did happen to notice Lorelei Vogel pass by.”
“Really!” Wendy blinked her long eyelashes, feigning shock. “What a big star! Did you get her autograph?”
“No. And Colton Farr is here. Giuliana Jacobsen.”
“You don’t say!” Wendy gasped. “Did they go into the back room?”
“Yes.” He leaned closer again, catching another whiff of her perfume, and said conspiratorially, “I heard Giuliana is throwing a party.”
Wendy gaped at him. “Wow! A reality star of her stature is liable to bring all the A-listers over from the Bellagio!”
“I’ve seen them.” He gave her a litany of the D-list celebrities who had filed through. “But like I say, I haven’t been keeping track.”
She slapped her hand on the table as if coming to a spontaneous decision. “This may sound crazy to you, but I think I’ll slip back there to the private room and see if I can get in.” She laughed uproariously at her own joke, it seemed, without letting Daniel in on what was so funny. Then she eyed him knowingly and clarified, “They don’t let just any girl into the private room of the Big O club, you know.”
Daniel laughed. Then corralled his laughter into a polite, halfhearted chuckle. He didn’t want her to know how funny he thought she was. And he hoped she couldn’t see him blushing in the dim and shifting light of the bar.
He watched her very carefully, and he could have sworn she didn’t blush at all as she said, “I wonder if the interior of the club is red velvet. Or pink. Pink velvet.”
He bit his lip. He refused to let her make him laugh again.
“And they have fountains running over the velvet, to lubricate it, for effect.”
He cleared his throat.
“Like a vagina,” she said with gusto.
That was it. He burst into laughter. Several men passing turned to stare because his outburst was so loud, or because he looked so strange wearing a genuine smile. He reached for his champagne and polished it off.
“You okay there?” She pursed her lips, suppressing her own smile as he nodded. She didn’t press him further, though. She let him off the hook. Sighing, she said, “I probably won’t get in, but it’s fun to try. Maybe I’ll see you there later?”
He considered making a joke about her inviting him into a vagina. But that was a joke she would make, or some guy with a sense of humor. The kind of guy she was probably married to or—dating, he decided, glancing at her ringless hand supporting her chin.
He managed, “It does sound like fun, but I’m sure I won’t get in, either.” Of course he was on the list to be admitted. She was, too, or she would argue with the bouncers and make phone calls until they let her behind the velvet rope.
“Thank you for the champagne.” She stood—first bending so that he got a glimpse down her white shirt at her cl**vage and the lacy edge of her pale bra, then straightening.
He stood with her. Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought there was a moment when she looked up at him in the near darkness, her blue eyes big with something other than teasing. A spark passed between them.
And then she was sliding out of the booth and rounding it to make her way through the crowd to the back room where the action and the catastrophes were.
Sitting again, he watched her go. Then blinked. Slapped one hand to his jaw to make sure it hadn’t dropped. Her tight skirt had seemed like normal business attire from the front. Now he saw that an exaggerated zipper ran all the way down the back. It was a detail some crazy designer had added to make the standard offering a little different. It was also way too risqué for conservative New York offices, including his own. She was wearing it anyway.
And wearing it well.
He longed to watch that zipper sway all the way into the back room, but he couldn’t afford for her to catch him staring at her like she was a scantily clad celebrity and he was her starstruck fan. With supreme effort, he tore his eyes away and looked through the glass wall at the casino floor again, wondering what minor luminaries he’d missed while Wendy had his full attention. He put his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand and was just realizing he’d unconsciously imitated the position she’d taken sitting there when he heard a voice close by.
“Hey.”
Wendy was standing beside him. As he looked up at her, he couldn’t help wondering whether she’d engineered their positions on purpose, so that he would be gazing up at her instead of the other way around.
But she’d lost the mocking tone in her voice. “I just wanted to say . . . ” She frowned down at him. “Take care, Daniel. You don’t seem like yourself.” Her gaze focused on his battered eye.
And then the teasing came back. Before he could stop her—and how would he have stopped her?—she reached out and ruffled his hair.
She walked quickly through the writhing crowd, toward the Big O. The long golden zipper on the back of her black skirt wagged violently as her h*ps shifted. He felt his cheeks burn with anger that someone in the bar might have witnessed her overly familiar gesture. Yet he still felt the soft touch of her fingertips brushing along his scalp. And he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her ass.
She was so tiny that she disappeared behind the dancers. He glimpsed her white blouse again, glowing among all the black. She vanished again. And then he saw her talking to the bouncer at the entrance to the inner room. He hoped against hope that the bouncer would refuse her entry, and Daniel could save face after that hair ruffling by interceding for her, coming to her rescue.
The bouncer held the door open for her, and she slipped inside.
Daniel pushed away his champagne flute and stood, eyes never leaving the door of the inner room. He’d heard stories about Wendy’s exploits his whole professional life. Now that he thought about it, he was amazed their paths hadn’t crossed before. But he was finally feeling something he hadn’t felt since he’d gone head-to-head with her for the Clarkson Prize.
Challenged.
4
As Wendy walked away from Daniel’s table, she started to get that sinking feeling, with mountains looming over her. She knew she had no filter. She had very good instincts about what made other people tick, and very bad ones about what made herself tick, or how far she could take her natural inclination to tease, like stopping on her walk to elementary school and poking an ant bed with a stick. It was only afterward, as she was retreating from an encounter, that she realized she’d made a mistake.
