Sure, that could be useful information—what Lorelei had looked like in the photo. “Let’s just pause here for a moment,” Wendy said. “I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, pretty girl, but if you don’t mind, let’s run to the restroom. I want you to show me what you did so I’ll have a better idea of what we’re working with.”
“You mean, if my ass is nasty, we’re in worse trouble,” Lorelei said flatly.
“Of course!” Wendy exclaimed. “Don’t you read the tabloids?”
“No.”
Wendy couldn’t imagine this. The tabloids were her life. But it was probably best that Lorelei didn’t read them. That way, Wendy could interpret them for her and tell her when to worry and when not to worry. Though Lorelei didn’t seem like much of a worrier.
Wendy explained, “If your ass looks good, the photo will run with an article about how out-of-control you are. That’s exactly what we don’t want when the awards show is watching you and thinking about firing you because they don’t trust you, and concertgoers are weighing the probability that you’ll go into a tailspin and cancel your tour after they’ve already bought a ticket. However, if your ass looks bad, the photo will run with lots of other photos of stars’ asses and an article about cellulite. That would be worse.”
Lorelei nodded. “You want me to moon you guys? Hell, I don’t have to go to the bathroom and moon you in private. I’m not ashamed of my body.” She stepped up on the coffee table and unfastened her jeans.
“That isn’t necessary,” Wendy said, to no effect. “It’s better if you’re elevated, is it?”
Sarcasm was no deterrent. Lorelei wiggled to loosen the waistband of her jeans, then shoved them down, bending over. Daniel sauntered from his corner and crossed behind the sofa for the view.
“See?” Colton said. “This is how she is.”
It certainly was. Lorelei had a dragon tattooed on her ass. Not a dragon in profile that started on one ass cheek and extended to the other, either. It was the head of a dragon with its snout coming forward, one nostril on each buttock. She had gone full dragon.
“Satisfied?” Lorelei called between her legs.
“Yep,” Wendy, Daniel, and Colton all said at once.
Daniel bent to speak in Wendy’s ear. “We’re toast,” he understated. He took up his post at the window again as Lorelei buttoned her jeans and plopped down on the sofa beside Colton.
“So . . . ” Wendy wasn’t often at a loss for words, but it was hard to find a segue after what they’d all seen. The plan she’d been about to explain melted away. Lorelei’s rump kept marching across her vision, clad only in its imaginary serpent. Maybe it really would be better if Wendy lost her job, because this did not qualify as actual work.
She felt the dark mountains of West Virginia crouching over her.
“What’s the matter, Wendy?” Lorelei asked. “You look sick all of a sudden. You’ve never seen a tattoo on somebody’s naked booty before?”
“Excuse me just a minute,” Wendy said to the tunnel vision infiltrating the afterimage of Lorelei’s bottom. She stood up too fast, forgetting her head injury. Dizziness rushed upward. She stood very still, pretending to look out on the vista of Las Vegas but actually waiting to regain her balance.
Daniel was at her side, holding her up by the elbow. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. Just give me a minute.” She swayed on her way to the restroom, where she leaned heavily on the door as she closed it, then felt her way to the toilet and collapsed on the shut lid with her head between her knees.
She thought about her father, always talking about escaping work at the coal mine, and then, when he broke free because he was laid off, utterly unable to hold a job doing anything else. He finally took the first coal mining job he could find and died there a week later in a massive tunnel collapse, no air pockets, no saving grace, no lives spared.
She wiped her hair away from her clammy forehead before remembering with a start that the ink in her palm, Daniel’s room number, hadn’t disappeared during her bath. She didn’t want his number smeared across her forehead. She did want to keep it in her hand. The 7 had a horizontal line through the middle as the Europeans wrote it, something he must have picked up from his father.
Out in the suite she heard him say almost apologetically, “She’s missed a lot of sleep.”
“Maybe you should leave her alone at night,” Colton said.
“Maybe you should shut the fuck up,” Daniel said.
It was Daniel’s voice that propelled her up from the toilet with a final shake of her head. The talk with Lorelei and Colton had been going well. She needed to get back out there before male egos ruined everything. She glanced in the mirror and wished she hadn’t—she looked ashen and ill, which would not help her save her job—and went back out into the suite.
Daniel was waiting for her at the bar. He handed her a glass of ice water. “Want me to be good cop for a while?” he whispered.
She glanced dubiously at his expressionless face. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m better. I just needed a moment. Let’s do this thing.” She swept back into the room on her high-heeled boots and settled on the chair again like she’d taken a phone call instead of nearly passing out on the toilet.
“Lorelei,” she began again, “I’m here because you asked for me. Colton, Daniel is here because you’d driven your talent agent to the brink of suicide. We’ve told you both to stop slandering each other online. You haven’t complied, and this morning Daniel and I got calls from the awards show, wanting you replaced. We’ve talked them down, for now. But the photo is out there.” She turned to Colton. “And the tabloids are reporting that you upset Lorelei so much that she mooned you. Daniel and I can’t work magic, but we’ve thought of a way to mitigate the damage. You two need to get back together.”
“No way!” Lorelei yelled.
“Screw that.” Colton’s words were harsher than Lorelei’s, but his tone lacked her conviction.
Wendy explained that Colton and Lorelei wouldn’t really get back together. They would only fake it, and fake it well, at least through the awards show Friday night, and possibly until after Colton had snagged his movie audition and Lorelei had started her concert tour.
“But here’s the thing,” Wendy said. “We told you two to lay off each other and mind your manners, and you didn’t do it. This time you must do it. Daniel and I are releasing to the press that you’re together. If you prove us wrong, you’re not just threatening your own careers anymore. You’re threatening our professional reputations.”
“You tell the press lies about the stars all the time,” Lorelei protested. “Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Wendy acknowledged, “but we don’t admit it. Now, to ensure that we don’t have another public meltdown, I want us to have a conversation about your relationship.” She made her voice soothing, which was something of a stretch, especially since her head was aching. “You dated for three years. You both enjoyed the height of your popularity during that time. You never once broke up. What happened last month?”
“She cheated on me!” Colton burst, voice breaking.
“I did not,” Lorelei said.
Wendy held up her hand toward Lorelei and looked to Colton. “Let’s take turns. Tell us your side of the story.”
“She . . . ” He jumped at the chance to start. After that first word, though, he sat blinking at the Strip, the sunlight reflecting in his eyes.
For the first time Wendy felt bad for him. Unless he really was a good actor, which she doubted after viewing a few of his TV episodes, he felt so strongly about Lorelei that he didn’t know where to begin.
He finally said, “She went behind my back with her drummer.”
“I did not.” Lorelei rolled her eyes.
Wendy put up her hand to stop Lorelei again. She asked Colton, “What evidence do you have?”
“I don’t have any evidence,” he spat.
“I don’t need any. I just knew. Everything was fine when we were on the show together. Then she decides she’s going to start a band. She handpicks the players herself. All dudes. She can’t go out with me like she used to because they practice all the time. She tells me she’s going on a world tour with these guys and I’m not going to see her for months. And then I find texts from the drummer on her phone!”
“Because we’re friends!” Lorelei hollered with her hands open.
Wendy turned to Lorelei. “And what’s your side of the story?”
“Yeah, I picked my own band,” Lorelei said. “That’s what musicians do. Yeah, we practice. Yeah, we’re going on tour. Yeah, I’m friends with my own band-mates!”
Wendy nodded solemnly. She turned to Colton. “And then you called her names online.”
“Because she deserved it,” he said.
Wendy resisted the urge to throw her tumbler at him. She turned back to Lorelei. “And then you started posting photos of your lady parts, and everything went downhill from there.”
“Basically.”
Wendy glanced over her shoulder at Daniel, who was gazing out the window like he couldn’t care less about these ridiculous people and the argument they’d been having online with millions of witnesses. The usual hard lines of his brow and mouth relaxed. He seemed ten years younger. In fact, the longer she looked at him, the more he seemed like a tourist on vacation, watching the Strip with interest as if planning what he would do with his delicious free day.
Then he surprised Wendy by shoving off from the corner and taking a few steps toward the sofa. “Lorelei is telling you the truth,” he said to Colton. “She’s a free spirit. She does what she wants and says what she thinks. She’s also honest to a fault. There is no way she would cheat on you and not admit it. If she didn’t want you anymore, she would tell you.”
“How do you know?” Colton asked angrily, but sounding a lot less confident than he had a few minutes before.
“I’ve been in this business for too long,” Daniel said.
“But she never came to me and said she wasn’t cheating on me,” Colton said, looking at Lorelei now.
“Because you were already calling her names,” Daniel said, “and she made an executive decision not to beg when you were in the wrong.”
Lorelei raised her brows at Colton. Colton looked pensive. The conversation was going in the right direction.
But then . . . something changed for Wendy. The sunlight caught Colton just right. Now that he was dressing better, he didn’t look as much like Rick as he had in some of his previous tabloid photos. But with the light glinting in the blond stubble on his cheeks, he looked a lot like Rick had looked whenever he blew up at her, blew the fuck up at her, and came back the next day to tell her he was sorry. And then blew up at her again.
Wendy fought hard to shake off that memory. “Here’s what I think,” she told Colton. “I think you were comfortable with your relationship with Lorelei when you were the TV star first, and she was invited to be on your show. It was precisely when she formed her own band, picked her own musicians, decided on her own tour, and made her own decisions that you got uncomfortable. But instead of stating what the problem was, as in, ‘I am too insecure to trust this talented girl full of gumption,’ you did the worst thing you can do to a female in society right now, which was to accuse her of being a fallen woman!”
The room was carpeted and filled with plush furniture that should have absorbed noise, yet her words echoed against the ceiling. She hadn’t realized she’d stood up at some point and stuck her finger in Colton’s face.
Daniel put his arm around Wendy’s shoulders, easing her away from Colton. “Wendy, can I speak with you in the hall for just a minute?” As he guided her toward the door, he called back into the room, “Why don’t you make yourselves that drink now?”
He closed the door behind them. The long, vast hallway with insanely patterned carpet was empty, but he whispered anyway. “I thought I was supposed to be the bad cop.” He reached for her hand and—didn’t hold it, exactly, but wrapped his hand around her cold fingertips. “You’re shaking. We’re working together now. You have to tell me what’s going on. Did Colton say something to you I didn’t know about?”
“No.”
Daniel let her go and stepped back. “Come on, Wendy. Colton is my client. If he said something inappropriate to you, I need to have a talk with him. And then kill him.”
“It’s not that at all, I promise. Reluctant as I am to jump to Colton’s defense, he didn’t do anything.”
“What is it, then?”
She raked her hands back through her hair, stopping suddenly when her fingertips encountered soreness on her scalp. “I promise I’ll tell you later.”
He eyed her warily, then opened his arms. “Come here.”
She couldn’t resist that invitation. She stepped forward willingly. He wrapped his arms around her, hugging her close. His hands rubbed up and down her back with enough pressure to warm her and wake her up. She sighed into his shoulder.
“Need to take ten?” he asked. With her ear pressed to his chest, she heard his voice as a rumble.
“Already did,” she said.
After a few more seconds of rubbing the life back into her, he set her upright, holding her by the shoulders. He looked into her eyes as if to make sure she was stable. Then he dropped her hands, took his key card out of his wallet, and slipped it through the lock. “Back to the grind.”
“I wish,” she said under her breath.
He glanced back at her and gave her his rare, brilliant smile.
She was behind him so she couldn’t see his expression, but she was sure he’d wiped away his smile before they rounded the sofa to face Lorelei and Colton again. In the end, it didn’t matter. His face contorted with the same fury Wendy felt when they saw Lorelei and Colton tangled together, making out.
Wendy couldn’t shout at Lorelei. Her job was at stake. She cleared her throat and said, “This is not what I had in mind.”
Colton released his lip-lock with Lorelei to turn around and glare at Wendy. “Could you give us some privacy?”
“Get off her,” Daniel said.
Colton and Lorelei reluctantly rolled away from each other.
Wendy told them, “These new feelings you’ve experienced toward each other while we’ve sat in this conference have been emotions rather than physical sensations. Let’s just stay on this for, oh, at least a couple of hours.”
Lorelei nodded and turned to Colton. “She’s right. I’m glad we talked, and I want to forgive you, but you accused me of sleeping around. You broke up with me. You called me dirty names to the whole world. You may be sorry, but it’s not like you didn’t do it.”
“That sounds like you don’t want to get back together,” Colton complained.
Lorelei started to say that she hadn’t decided—at least, that’s what Wendy hoped she was going to say—but Daniel broke in. “Colton, as I’ve told you, I’m not a high-priced relationship counselor. Neither is Wendy. You and Lorelei brought us here—”
“I didn’t bring you here,” Colton said testily.
Daniel was correcting himself even before Colton was through interrupting. “Your very smart agent brought me here to save the career that you have been so diligently attempting to flush down the toilet. That’s what you’re paying us for, and that’s what we’re going to do until the awards show on Friday. Repairing a real relationship takes time and work. You have neither to spare for the next forty-eight hours. But we’ve helped you to the point that you can treat each other like decent human beings. After Friday night, when you’re back in Hollywood, you could work on this further and see if Lorelei chooses to respond favorably. I would suggest groveling.”
Wendy bit her tongue. She was glad Daniel was putting the quietus on a hookup, but she wished he wasn’t so accepting of Lorelei and Colton’s future together. She was thinking of her relationship with Lorelei after the awards show, and w
hether Lorelei would hate her. True, the immediate problem was to get Lorelei through the show and drum up sales for her floundering concert tour. But Lorelei would still need PR after that. Wendy would be the likely candidate to give that to her—provided Lorelei hadn’t grown to despise her for facilitating her reconciliation with Colton. On the other hand, if Lorelei had a horrible breakup with Colton, perhaps she would run to Wendy for comfort, and Wendy would have a better chance of keeping her job long-term.
The thought of this made Wendy’s stomach hurt. She wanted to keep her job. She didn’t want to do it through the ruination of someone else’s life. Even worse than a bad breakup between Lorelei and Colton, in her opinion, would be if they stayed together. Lorelei and Colton had both heard her harangue, but maybe they hadn’t really been listening. Colton would pursue his career and ask Lorelei not to pursue hers. Lorelei would acquiesce. She would be pregnant with their third child when the tabloid photos appeared of him naked in a hot tub with two prostitutes and a discount store tycoon. He would lose his upcoming movie roles and sink into oblivion. He would make a small comeback as a wisecracking pimp in an Oscar winner’s pet indie project before sinking into his meth addiction. Lorelei would retreat to a bungalow in Burbank, raise her children, and marry a tax accountant. Occasionally she would appear at a red carpet premiere and the tabloids would post photos of how old and fat she had grown, a final indignity. She would never play guitar again.
“Wendy,” Daniel said.
“What?” she asked. All three of them were watching her expectantly. She’d missed part of the conversation. Both her hands were cupped over the back of her throbbing head.
“I am so sorry,” she murmured. “I am really out of it this morning.”
“Sit down,” Daniel said gently.
Suddenly fatigued, she thought sitting down sounded like a great idea. She sank into the chair. Daniel came up behind her and applied pressure to the crick in her neck. It hadn’t been hurting much—especially not in comparison with her head—but his firm fingers felt so good massaging her muscles that she let out an involuntary, “Oh.”