The night was dark, but as Daniel reentered the party, the museum was darker. The spotlit statue of Lorelei’s dead mother seemed to suck all the light out of the rest of the room. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, movement was the first thing he detected. The tiny figure edging past the barrier into the exhibit rooms was Wendy, the front of her long hair swept into a braid that hid the space where her missing lock should have been, the back cascading in loose curls around her shoulders. Her curve-hugging sequined dress caught one sweeping strobe light, and then she disappeared.
Colton was harder to find. And it was harder to move around the room looking for him now that the partiers were drunker. Some people wanted to stop Daniel to ask him about Victor and Olivia’s wedding of the century. Others wanted to discuss whether Lorelei was really on coke after all, the way she’d pulled her skirt down. What? Daniel became alarmed as more people told him parts of this story. He suspected Colton had something to do with it.
He finally found Colton coming out of the restroom. Daniel asked, “Did you take a picture of Lorelei mooning you?”
“Yes!” Colton laughed.
“What did you do with the picture?” He prayed Colton hadn’t posted it online. If Lorelei wanted to self-destruct, that was Wendy’s problem. But if Colton posted a picture of that self-destruction and helped it along, the public would associate him with it, even blame him.
Colton opened his hands. “I didn’t do anything with it. I lost my phone.”
“You lost your—” Daniel stopped himself before the top of his head blew off. Colton eyed him sheepishly. Daniel stepped out of the way of another man entering the restroom, then started again. “How could you lose your phone? Do you realize what the paparazzi could do with your photos and your contacts?”
Colton nodded. “I know. I think Wendy may have it. I hope she does, but I haven’t seen her since I gave it to her.”
Daniel pressed his lips together and counted to five. “Why did you give Wendy Mann your phone? She’s the enemy.”
“She was doing me a favor, taking a pic of me and my home slice,” Colton protested. “Since when is she the enemy? I thought you were back to tapping that ass.”
Daniel uttered the filthiest rebuke he had ever delivered to a client in his six years of representing the Blackstone Firm. Colton looked outraged. Daniel thought for a moment that if his father found out, this could be the end of his career. He didn’t care. Colton was not going to talk that way about Wendy. He turned on his heel and stalked toward the forbidden exhibit where Wendy had disappeared.
As he went, he tried to calm himself down. He was afraid he was falling for Wendy. Nothing could be more horrible when he needed to manipulate her to get Colton out of hot water.
She had the upper hand.
And now she had Colton’s phone. Daniel had no idea what she planned to do with the information she found on it. Possibly pure evil. Tomorrow he would get another ten calls from his father telling him that his inability to control Colton was a disgrace to the firm. His brother, had he been alive and in charge, would not have allowed this to happen. Daniel plowed around the velvet rope.
In the shadows, Wendy’s body was a pink and blond spill across the floor.
He skidded to his knees in front of her, grabbing her wrist so he could take her pulse, which was still there, thank God. He kept his fingers on her artery and counted her heartbeats. With the other hand he found his phone and dialed 911, quickly explaining the situation to the dispatcher.
“Daniel,” Wendy murmured. “I’m up. I think somebody hit me.” She reached for the back of her head.
“Don’t move.” He leaped up, hurried to the edge of the lobby, and waved Colton’s bodyguard over. Daniel gave the bodyguard his phone with 911 on the line and told him to bring the paramedics through the back of the building so the paparazzi wouldn’t report that someone had been injured at the party.
On second thought, Colton might be in danger if Wendy’s attacker was still in the building. Lorelei, too.
On third thought, why had he left Wendy alone?
He barked instructions for the bodyguard to find Franklin, and for both of them to close the party down and take Colton and Lorelei to the hotel, pronto. He dashed back to Wendy, who was trying to sit up, bracing herself against Cher’s knee-high boot.
“Hey. No.” Daniel settled on the floor and pulled Wendy’s head into his lap, blond hair everywhere. He ran his hands over her arms, down her legs. “What else is hurt?”
“Just my head, ow.”
Gently he moved his fingers through her thick hair to the back of her scalp. He felt the gash, then parted her hair to look at the bloody wound and cringed. He pulled out the handkerchief he always carried—an old-fashioned habit that had served him well, because he’d used one for many things in PR over the years. But never for this. He pressed it to her head. “I’ll bet it hurts. You may need a stitch or two. And . . . ” He went cold with the realization. He didn’t want to tell her, but she needed to know. “You’re missing more hair.”
“Where?” she squeaked.
Gently he picked up her hand from her lap and placed it over the chopped-off lock, on the other side of her head from the first.
“Daniel,” she wailed. “He had his hands on me. Where is my hair? He has my hair, like a trophy.”
“What else? Do you think he . . . ” Daniel’s voice trailed off. He couldn’t bring himself to finish. Something seemed to catch in his throat.
Wendy finished for him, “ . . . touched me in a way that made me feel all funny? No.”
He sighed with relief at her answer. If her sense of humor was coming back, maybe she didn’t have a concussion. “Have yourself checked out, though, okay? The ambulance and the police will be here soon.”
“Daniel!” She was trying to sit up again. “What did you call them for? Are you trying to get me fired?”
He pressed her back down into his lap. “Why would you get fired for being attacked?”
“Not for being attacked,” she said to the black ceiling. “For the headline LORELEI VOGEL’S PUBLIC RELATIONS MANAGER ASSAULTED IN VEGAS CLUB running the same day as the picture of Lorelei mooning her own musical career good-bye. It all sounds like one big drunken brawl. Oh shit. Oh, Daniel.” She looked at him so sadly, like she was sorry she’d just killed his cat. “That’s what whoever hit me must have been after. Colton’s phone is gone.”
The possible consequences were astounding. And Daniel couldn’t think about any of that right now. Not with Wendy bleeding and devastated in his lap. He said soothingly, “Maybe it’s around here on the floor. I’ll look for it after the ambulance comes.” He cast a glance around the dark room. He might even catch a glimpse of the glow from the phone’s screen.
As he did this, he realized for the first time how vulnerable they were. The exit sign over the doorway behind him and a faint glow around the corner from the lobby were the only lights preventing the room from plunging into blackness. The legs of the statues around them were visible. Beyond them, anyone might be lurking.
A new surge of adrenaline rushed through him. He should get her out of there, but he was afraid to move her. He would protect her if anyone came at them from the shadows.
“I think the phone is long gone,” Wendy said dismally. “That’s what the guy wanted. He took it from me before he hit me.”
“Well, if what he’s after is to sell the picture of Lorelei, that might be hard for him. I’m sure Colton has security on his phone, so someone would have to enter a numeric code to access his files.” Daniel was not actually sure of this at all. Colton was turning out to be that kind of celebrity.
“He probably does,” Wendy acknowledged, “but the security block hadn’t kicked in when I came back here to delete the photo. That’s why I was in such a hurry. If the guy who hit me e-mailed the picture to himself right away, it’s his. It’ll be on the tabloid websites by tomorrow night.” She gave a shuddering sigh, bolstering herself. “Maybe
that won’t happen.”
“Maybe not,” Daniel lied. “Maybe it was just a robbery. If the guy stole your wallet, he probably doesn’t even know whose pictures he has on the phone.” He reached way out to retrieve Wendy’s purse by the strap.
Wendy’s eyes widened. As Daniel held her purse for her and she fished inside, she muttered, “Just what I need, for some jackass to be passing himself off as Wendy Mann and charging a hundred thousand casino chips on my Stargazer credit card. Archie would send someone to break my legs.” She opened her wallet and fumbled with the contents. Daniel noticed that her fingers shook as she slid out one card after another and slid them back. “Driver’s license, Stargazer card, my card. I wouldn’t vouch for my shoe store card and stuff like that, but the important stuff is here.”
“Money?” Daniel asked.
“I didn’t have much cash. I’ve bribed a lot of people in the past twenty-four hours.” She peeked in the long compartment for her bills. “Still here. Oh—nope, my phone’s still here, too, thank God.”
“Then just relax.” He moved her purse aside. “Don’t think about it anymore. The ambulance will be here soon, and I’ll go with you.”
“No!” she tried to struggle up again.
Daniel held her down. “Stop.”
“Daniel, seriously, please. You have to stay here and make sure everything gets taken care of.”
“I already sent Colton and Lorelei to bed.”
“Not together,” Wendy insisted.
“Not together,” Daniel agreed. “And I can’t let you go alone to the hospital.”
“Yes, you can.”
“What if that guy comes after you?”
She hesitated as if thinking of that herself. But then she said, “He won’t. He got what he wanted.”
“If all he wanted was Colton’s phone, yeah. That sounds like business. But he’s cut your hair twice. That sounds personal. And he could be anybody. Let me go with you until we figure it out.”
“I need you to stay here and protect my job, not me. I would rather get attacked again than lose my job.”
He eyed her. “Seriously? That’s some job.”
She closed her eyes and rolled her head to one side on his thigh. He caught her wrist again. Her pulse had sped up.
Her soft voice sent a vibration through his thigh as she said, “Remember that last paper for Dr. Benson, the one that won you the Clarkson Prize?”
He remembered, but he said nothing. He didn’t want to upset her more.
“Of course you don’t remember,” she grumbled. “It was just another victory for you. I worked forty hours on that one paper, Daniel, making sure all my research was bulletproof. I didn’t sleep for the last two nights and probably suffered brain damage just to turn a perfect paper in.”
Daniel had worked sixty hours on that paper, even traveling by train to Philadelphia one afternoon to interview the president of an image management firm, a friend of his father’s, because he was so terrified that Wendy would beat him out for the Clarkson Prize and his father would be ashamed of him.
“You still beat me,” Wendy went on, “and you were the celebrated graduate at the top of the class. But since you didn’t want a job at Stargazer anyway, I lucked out and snagged it. I’m not giving up that job now. Not after six years of a ridiculous workload. Not just because of a bump on the head. Please, Daniel, please stay here.”
She was getting so agitated that he really did think it would be better for her to go alone. The decision would torture him, though. In his mind he would be with her in those bright, cold rooms. “If they let you out of the hospital tonight,” he said, “can I stay in your room with you? Or you stay with me. I have a suite. You can sleep on the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
She hesitated. “You don’t have to take care of me.”
“If something like this happened to me when I was out on assignment, I would want a friend,” he said truthfully.
She sighed a long sigh. “Okay. Thank you. I’ll take your couch. But I’m going to remind you that you said this if you get hit in the head.”
“Fair enough.” He wrote his room number on her palm and slipped his extra key into her purse. “Do you want me to get some things from your room and bring them up?”
“Oh, man, would you? Yes, take my extra key. Promise you won’t look at the mess. I guess that’s impossible.” She closed her eyes and groaned softly. “You can’t let Lorelei know anything about this, okay? If she asks, some random woman was attacked in the back hall, not me.”
“Why not? Don’t you think she’s going to find out?”
“Not if you don’t tell her. She’s got a lot of important performances on her mind right now, and I’m supposed to be her rock. Nothing can happen to me.”
He wished that were true. Gently he stroked her hair away from her eyes. He felt the warmth of her body through his slacks. Every instinct told him to pull her closer and never let her go.
But he did let her go. At first he braced himself, thinking the noises from the depths of the exhibit might be the bad guy coming back, but it was only the paramedics weaving with a gurney around the wax statues. Reluctantly he moved out from under her. The paramedics worked over her on the floor, then lifted her onto a stretcher. He felt another wave of misgiving as they hovered over her. Now that he wasn’t touching her, she seemed to go limp. She didn’t look at him again. Though there was nothing for him to do, he stood there watching until they wheeled her out and disappeared behind the statues.
As he walked back into the party, Daniel gazed around at the drunken stars and hangers-on, laughing or arguing, wondering if any of them had hurt Wendy. But he suspected the guy was long gone. And the party was closing down. On Wendy’s behalf, he made sure there were no issues with the caterer or the museum. The museum’s administrators didn’t mind the notoriety that the mooning incident might bring them. To their credit, they seemed more concerned that someone had been attacked in an exhibit room. Daniel stayed to tell the police what he knew, simultaneously wrangling calls between Colton and his phone company to shut down access to his electronic files.
Finally Daniel hailed a taxi in the deserted street. After a quick call to Colton’s bodyguard to make sure Colton and Lorelei had been deposited safely, he texted Wendy:
They’re in bed. I’m coming to the hospital.
A minute later he got a response:
No, I’m on the way to the hotel. I’ll see you there. No concussion.
He breathed a huge sigh of relief at that news. His mind had been spinning with his plan of attack, offensive moves he could make to head off Lorelei’s photo going viral and the inevitable backlash against Colton. But as soon as he saw Wendy’s text, he stopped caring about work. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but his last glimpse at her being wheeled out between the replicas of stars.
At the hotel, he went straight to her room to gather her things for the night. His first horrified thought was that the place had been ransacked, possibly by the same person who’d hit her. It looked like several fashionable women had exploded. But as he carefully stepped around the outer edges of the piles, he realized there was some bizarre order to it all, and this was Wendy’s notion of unpacking. It rather resembled her logic. It seemed rude to rifle through it—though it was rifled already—so he just repacked everything, wishing he had more time to examine the bunny ears and cottontail, and headed for his own room.
As he exited the elevator, he spotted her in the hall in front of him. “Wendy,” he called softly, because, though Vegas, it was three in the morning.
She turned and stopped to wait for him. She was a small woman, but she’d never looked smaller than in this endless corridor with high ceilings. Her face was pale as paper.
When he reached her, he let go of the handle of her suitcase and encircled her in his arms.
She didn’t protest. It was only after he’d initiated the hug that he wondered what it meant, and what she must think of him now.
/> He didn’t have a clear view of the wound on the back of her head, but he could see a new pink streak down the middle of her hair.
He let her go and gently pressed her toward his room. “Did they give you good painkillers?”
“Not even.” She sounded bone-tired. “They gave me over-the-counter stuff. They said anything stronger could mask symptoms that come up later. You’re supposed to watch me, and if I forget what year it is or I fall down, you’re supposed to take me back to the hospital.”
“I can do that.” He unlocked the door and held it open for her while she ducked around his arm and walked inside.
“Wow, what’s up with all the booze?” she asked, gesturing to the bar. “Do you ask the hotel for this just because it looks cool?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
She nodded. “I always wondered about PR folks with that setup. I’ve wanted to do it myself, but I don’t have the budget. I guess you have any budget you want, since you own the place.”
“Almost,” he acknowledged.
Her lips parted, and she watched him. She probably was trying to think of another probing question for him with a joke at the end, but her brain wasn’t cooperating.
“Give up,” he said. “Here’s your bag.” He set it down inside the bathroom door. “I didn’t know what you would want, so I brought it all.”
“Thanks,” she said on a sigh of relief, trudging past him. “You’re not going to ask me about the bunny ears?”
“And the bunny tail? No, I didn’t see those.” As she was closing the door behind her, he warned her, “Don’t lock it.”
She stared at him blankly, like she suspected him of something but didn’t have enough evidence to accuse him.
“I’m worried about you,” he explained. “You seem a little unsteady.”
“I am completely steady,” she said, but she gripped the doorjamb so hard that her knuckles turned white. “Okay.” She disappeared back into the bathroom. He listened, but he didn’t hear the lock turn.