Star Crossed (Stargazer) (2 page)

And she sounded just like Zane Taylor.

No, that was the jet lag talking. She desperately needed a fifth cup of coffee. Shaking her head to clear it, then pushing her hair behind her shoulders, she settled into her e-mail again, confident she could knock out half these messages before the taxi deposited her at Stargazer’s door. That would help free up her afternoon so she could deal with her other clients. They were counting on her to solve their problems, so she certainly didn’t have time to dwell on her own. Especially when they weren’t even real.

*   *   *

“I am
very
freaking likable!”

Wendy knew instantly she shouldn’t have said this to her three bosses across the conference room table. And she shouldn’t have said it so loudly.

Her direct supervisor, Katelyn, sat back in her leather chair and touched two manicured fingers to her perfect red lipstick, which had not smeared while she took dainty sips of coffee.
Her
supervisor, Jonathan, ducked his head and looked furtively over his shoulder at the Flatiron Building out the long bank of windows. But Archie, the head honcho of Stargazer PR, just put his chin in his big, hairy hand and scowled at Wendy, unflappable as ever.

She pretended she hadn’t noticed their reactions. She sipped her own coffee, trying her best to remain calm, though her blood pounded in her ears with over-caffeinated dread. She understood now that her bosses hadn’t called this meeting to talk strategy for Stargazer. They hadn’t brought her here to promote her, as she’d hoped, or even to talk her into representing Lorelei Vogel, the latest self-destructive client on the roster, as she’d feared. They’d ganged up on her so she wouldn’t pitch a fit—at least, not as much of one—when they fired her.

It had been ten years since Wendy had moved from West Virginia to Manhattan, coming for college and staying for her job with Stargazer. Now that she was losing her job, she didn’t have to move back to Morgantown. There was nothing left for her there. She
wasn’t eighteen anymore, and she wasn’t vulnerable to Rick. But the way her panicked heart was racing, she might as well have been boarding the next bus back home.

“I mean,” she said, and her backtracking petered out. She’d already said what she’d meant. She did too much of that, which was her whole problem.

“Wendy,” Katelyn said, “you know we love you like a daughter.”

Wendy squinted at her. “A daughter you’re firing?”

“Yes!” Katelyn exclaimed. “If Arabella wasn’t up to snuff, I swear I’d hand her ass to her on a platter.” Her eyes shot sideways to Jonathan, who shook his head, warning of another outburst from Wendy. Taking the hint, Katelyn leaned forward across the table and patted Wendy’s hand soothingly. “Not that I’m trying to hand
you
your ass.”

Archie slouched diagonally in his chair with one ankle propped casually on the opposite knee. He punctuated each syllable with a plastic coffee spoon as he told Wendy, “You’re not
really
family, but we did want to make this as painless as possible for you, and this is the thanks we get?”

Gripping the arms of her chair, Wendy took a deep breath and said, “My job is to salvage the public images of stars who are about to go off the deep end. I’m dragging them back from the brink of drug addiction, alcoholism, whoring, or just plain stupidity before they fall into the abyss. Sometimes I go into the abyss
after them and drag them out. They emerge kicking and screaming. You can’t expect them to
like
me.”

“That may be true,” Katelyn acknowledged. “By nature, your relationship with them is adversarial. However, if they hate you so much that they don’t want to work with you at all, we can’t send you anymore. You’re no good to us.”

“Who doesn’t want to work with me at all?” Wendy protested. Unfortunately, lots of possible answers rushed to mind. Zane topped the list.

“Brad McCain,” Jonathan piped up.

“That guy is dead,” Wendy told Jonathan. She was losing interest in being especially polite. Brad McCain was a sore point with her, and she wanted to set the record straight. She said quietly but firmly, “He was hell-bent on being dead, too. He was halfway there when you sent me to him.”

In fact, that was
why
they had sent Wendy. If anyone could have prevented Brad from getting plastered in a West Hollywood club and driving his Porsche off a mountain, over a privacy fence, and into the swimming pool of an up-and-coming handbag designer, it was Wendy. As it turned out,
nobody
could. But what she
had
done, after his death, was publicize that he’d set up his mom in a florist business and bought her a beautiful oceanside home in Florida. Because the public saw him in a more positive light, a movie studio rushed to release special editions of his older gross-out comedies, sending even more money to his deserving family.

Wendy had counted the case a partial success. Being accused of failure made her feel like crying in frustration. She couldn’t allow herself to tear up with her bosses watching her, so she did what she always did when she felt like crying. She lashed out. “If you want to present this argument to me, fine, but you can’t use the opinion of a dead guy as evidence.” She sounded bitter and defensive, and she knew it. She wasn’t just on shaky ground now. The ground crumbled under her feet. As she flailed, she couldn’t find a handhold.

“We’ve got a long list,” Archie said. “Not all of the complainants are dead. But the reason we’ve decided to terminate you today, Wendy, is that Darkness Fallz doesn’t want to work with you anymore. They never want to see you again. They’ve gone to the length of writing that into their new contract with their record company.”

Now Wendy felt like she’d been slapped. Darkness Fallz had sunk so low by the time Wendy was sent to them that they were getting fired from pub gigs in Tacoma because their meth-addicted lead singer couldn’t drag his ass to work at nine o’clock at night. The rest of the group had been grateful to Wendy when the funny, self-deprecating video she arranged to be shot for them went viral. They were invited to tour the talk shows, then to sign a new recording contract. She’d thought the lead singer might have been grateful to her, too, in the end, despite some of the things she’d said to him
about acting like an overgrown Halloween trick-or-treater.

As the sting of the slap faded into a deep ache, again she felt like crying at the betrayal. Instead, she laughed shortly. “Their contract actually
says
they don’t want to work with me again?”

“Show her the contract, Katie,” Archie said.

Katelyn peered into her designer tote, thumbed through a stapled sheaf of papers to a particular page, and handed the contract across the table. Wendy took it as if Katelyn were dressed in a red rubber Satan costume like the lead singer of Darkness Fallz himself. She peered at the underlined sentence:
Manhattan Music agrees that it will not employ Stargazer Public Relations to work with Darkness Fallz for the period of this contract.

To be on her bosses’ desks this morning, the contract must have been on its way while Wendy was still in Seattle, helping Darkness Fallz through their issues. Which hurt even more.

“The contract doesn’t specify me,” she grumbled.

“They meant you,” Jonathan said.

Katelyn told Wendy, “You’ve lost their business for everybody at Stargazer. We hear Manhattan Music has already retained another firm for them. Can you guess what firm that might be?”

Wendy knew. Katelyn wouldn’t have posed the question otherwise. Manhattan Music must have hired Stargazer’s biggest enemy, whose heir apparent was Wendy’s own arch-rival from college. Daniel
Blackstone was the undisputed expert among PR experts at getting stars out of trouble. He was also one of Wendy’s least favorite people, along with her ex, Rick. But she was trying to save her job, so she swallowed her medicine. She attempted to look contrite rather than ill as she ventured, “The Blackstone Firm?”

“The Blackstone Firm,” Jonathan repeated in a whisper, as if he dared not say the name of the dragon too loudly for fear of calling it down from the icy mountain to slay them all.

“We can’t keep you on staff if you’re losing us business,” Katelyn explained.

“What about my current business?” Wendy asked, realizing as she did so that her bosses had already finished up her current business. That’s why they’d sent her all over town this morning, touching base with her clients. Her stars would feel taken care of for a few days, until Stargazer was able to send in someone else. But there was one client she’d met with on her own. “What about Zane Taylor?”

“We’re giving him to Tom,” Jonathan said.

Which was why her bosses hadn’t put Zane on her visitation list. She wanted to say something cutting about Tom Ruffner’s chances of whipping Zane into shape, but she couldn’t. She was Tom’s mentor and friend. And despite his youth and inexperience, Tom was good at this.

Wendy was beginning to feel expendable.

“But I
get
you business,” she said weakly. “Maybe my sunshiny personality doesn’t, but my results do.
I’m the best you have at pulling stars out of scrapes. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Archie said, “but you’re not doing us a lot of good if the stars employ us for a month, you pull them out of their scrape, and then they fire us. We need long-term relationships.”

“One more chance,” Wendy insisted. She realized her voice had risen again when a flock of pigeons burst from the window ledge behind her bosses in a flurry of wings.

Startled, Katelyn and Jonathan turned toward the window. As they faced the table again, they looked at each other and, barely perceptibly, shook their heads no. Archie told Wendy, “It’s so much easier to fire you.”

Lowering her voice, Wendy said, “Most workplaces would counsel an employee and allow her the chance to improve before giving her the ax.” Wendy understood that most employees didn’t cost their workplaces hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight, but she left that part out. “I’ll prove to you that I can help some guy out of the gutter and make him love me, too.”

Katelyn and Jonathan shook their heads more vigorously. Archie said, “The only star we’d even
think
about letting you near—” Now Jonathan was wagging his head no in an exaggerated fashion so Archie could see him out of the corner of his eye. Archie put his meaty hand on Jonathan’s shoulder to stay him, then
continued, “—is the star who asked for you specifically, Wendy.”

“Lorelei Vogel?” Wendy guessed. It was that kind of day.

Archie watched her grimly, which meant yes.

Often when a huge star like Lorelei approached the agency, Wendy, Tom, and six other operatives fought over the account like lions over a piece of meat while a laid-back and calculating Sarah watched them as if she weren’t even hungry—which often resulted in the bosses handing the job to her. But nobody was touching Lorelei. Stargazer never turned down a difficult case, and the tacit message to employees was
Deliver or die.
Wendy knew if she saved her job today, Lorelei would likely be the death of her career anyway.

And she had another, much more personal reason to stay as far away from that chick as possible.

But Wendy’s future lay on the metal table in front of her, with Jonathan pulling the IV out of its arm, Katelyn holding her finger on the button to turn off life support, and Archie waiting with the body bag open and ready. Lorelei Vogel was Wendy’s only sad, unlikely chance at resuscitating her job.

“I’ll take it!” She slapped her hand on the table. The wood reverberated, the coffee sloshed, and all three bosses jumped. “You said Lorelei asked for me specifically. What do you have to lose?”

“A lot, honey,” Katelyn said. “This girl is the head-lining
act for the Hot Choice Awards on Friday. If she melts down, she’s doing it on national television and taking our good name with her.”

“Maybe that won’t happen,” Wendy said. “Send me. I’ll meet this pretty delinquent with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. Maybe I’ll even straighten her out, and in that case, I want a raise and a promotion.”

Katelyn glanced at Jonathan, who watched Wendy as if a lunatic stranger had sat down to this conference with him. Wendy got this look from him a lot.

“Come on, you guys!” she pleaded. “You’re concentrating on failure. What if I turned this girl around and made her a showbiz darling? Think of all the recs Stargazer would get from that! And aren’t the Hot Choice Awards in Vegas? That’s perfect. You can’t win big if you don’t take a gamble.”

Archie raised his eyebrows at Katelyn. Satisfied with what he saw in her face, he told Wendy, “Sure. You’re hired. But on a trial basis only, sweetheart. We’ve made clear how we feel about you.”

“Thanks! You won’t regret it.” Wendy jumped up and crossed the conference room before her bosses could change their minds. She took slow, deep breaths and tried to rid herself of the feeling that the dark mountains of West Virginia crouched over her. Then closed her into a narrower and narrower valley until she slipped into the only escape available, a mine shaft, and fell forever.

*   *   *

Daniel Blackstone was rolling his suitcase into his Las Vegas hotel room when he remembered he was supposed to call his father in New York first thing on arrival. Daniel rarely forgot to touch base with his father. He knew he wasn’t as good a PR rep as his brother would have been. He wouldn’t be as good a president of the company when he took over next month, either, which was why his father deemed it necessary to monitor him. Normally this thought made him feel sorry for his father and sad for his lost brother. But today he was jet-lagged and exhausted, and all he felt was angry.

He would not be calling his father until he was good and ready.

He surveyed the room. In a corner, the hotel staff had set up a bar for him with bottles of expensive liquor and a fresh bucket of ice, as he’d requested. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but the job required it. When he was forced to play host, the setup looked cool. He hoped he wouldn’t need it at eleven in the morning Vegas time. If he did, he was in trouble already.