Star Crossed (Stargazer) (35 page)

Colton reached into his pocket and drew out the three ten-thousand-dollar chips. “Would this pay your salary for a few days?”

Billy looked over his shoulder at the other photographers, grabbed the chips, and threw them under his hat. “I been drinking beer with Rick at his hotel room all week. Him and his friend Paul.”

“Paul’s balding?” Daniel guessed. “Likes Hawaiian shirts?”

“That’s the one.” Billy gave them the address and room number of the hotel.

While Billy was still talking, Daniel walked into traffic on the Strip and hailed a taxi. Colton called over his shoulder to Billy, “If you’re bullshitting us,
I’m coming back to find you, because that was some expensive bullshit.” He climbed into the taxi behind Daniel.

Daniel gave the driver the address. “Step on it.” Then he realized he had no bribe to get the driver to go faster. He had a credit card to pay for the fare, but plastic didn’t talk like cash.

Colton produced a hundred and tossed it into the front seat. The engine revved higher.

“Thank you,” Daniel told Colton sincerely.

“When we get there,” Colton said, “I’m coming in with you.”

“All right.” One more time, Daniel pressed the button on his phone to call Detective Butkus. The detective would maintain that Daniel had no proof of what was happening and nothing to go on.

Daniel Blackstone was about to lose his cool.

*   *   *

“Take your clothes off, Wendy,” Rick said smoothly. “Nice and slow, so we can enjoy it.”

Wendy had heard those words from him before. She’d been eighteen and excited that he considered her an alluring grown woman. When they’d had sex, they’d been in her bedroom or his tiny apartment. Both places were shabby and poor. Either would have been an improvement over this seedy dump of a hotel room five blocks from the Strip.

Paul, a stranger to her with a receding hairline, hadn’t been in the room back then to take pictures of
them with a state-of-the-art camera and a special lens. Rick hadn’t relaxed in a chair, watching her, with a gun and a hunting knife beside him on the table—the same knife he’d shoved against her side in the Paris casino, and which he must have used to hack her hair off three times that week. And Rick’s own camera bag hadn’t waited on the floor, the padded canvas handle replaced with a sturdy braid of three thick hanks of Wendy’s hair.

When she’d known Rick before, he’d been a possessive bully. Now he was out of his mind.

“How much money did you make from the picture of Lorelei on Colton’s phone?” she asked as she pulled her blouse off over her head. She wished she knew some kind of stealth move to catch two men by surprise and overpower them while she was taking her shirt off, but her mind was a blank.

“We made a
lot
of money,” Rick said. Paul echoed Rick’s satisfaction by laughing.

“This gig has cost me, though. I had to dip into the funds when Colton changed his style,” Rick said, fingering his suit, a cheap version of the outfit Colton had been sporting since he traded in his usual trucker hat. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

“We knew you were here in Vegas,” she told Rick. “People kept sighting Colton when he wasn’t there. We figured out it was you. We told the police about you. If you’ve made so much money already, why are you taking the chance of hanging around and kidnapping me to take
another
picture?”

“It’s what we do,” Paul said without emotion, adjusting a dial on his camera.

“And the opportunity was too perfect,” Rick said. “I think I might have a
little
leeway, don’t you, since we’ve been here all week and a cop hasn’t so much as questioned me?”

Wendy agreed. Detective Butkus had pretended to listen to her and take notes, but he might as well have laughed at her for all the following up he’d done.

“Besides,” Rick said casually, “the risk is worth the reward. Ten years ago your little bitch friend called the cops on me in New York, Wendy, when all I wanted was to
talk
to you. I
told
you that.” His voice cracked, but he maintained his charming, wisecracking demeanor like nothing had gone wrong. “Because of the warrant, I haven’t been able to work for the movie studios like I planned. Like
both
of us planned, remember?”

She nodded solemnly, heart racing, skin cold, stomach turning flips. She wanted desperately to tell him that if he’d dreamed of a Hollywood career, domestic violence and evading arrest weren’t his best course of action. But his fingers drummed impatiently on the arm of the chair, dangerously close to the gun and knife beside him on the table. She didn’t dare speak.

“You ruined my job for me,” he said, “so I’m going to ruin yours for you. I’ve been to your fancy parties. I’ve seen Colton Farr coming on to you. I know he’s still in town. So Paul will take a couple photos of you blowing me, from just the right angle so I look like Colton and you look like . . . you.” He smiled at her.
“Lorelei will break up with Colton again. Your company will kick you out on your ass for ruining your star’s publicity just to satisfy your own lust. That bastard you’ve been fucking will see you for the whore you really are, if he didn’t figure it out already when you were dry humping that pole at the strip club.” He picked up the gun from the table and waved it at the waistband of her jeans. “Keep going. You obviously remember how to strip.”

She swallowed and shook her head no.

He burst up from the chair. Before she knew what was happening, she was sliding down the wall, head exploding with pain, fingers pressed to her cheek. He’d only slapped her, she realized as she moved her jaw, noting that it still worked. But the ache in the back of her head, which had faded over the last few days, had worked its way loose again.

The guilt was worse. The embarrassment that Paul had seen Rick hit her. The feeling that she must have done something to deserve all this. Those emotions from ten years before rushed back at her and settled like a weight in her lap.

“Sorry, baby,” Rick whispered, holding a hand down to her. “I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.” Unlike ten years before, he was grinning as he said it.

She reached for his hand. Her hand trembled.

He pulled her up to standing, then backed across the room to sit in his chair again. “Now.” He sounded exasperated, as if their fun game kept getting interrupted. “Take your pants off.”

With shaking fingers, she unfastened her jeans and pushed them down her legs and off—carefully, so that her ring stayed in her pocket, just in case she made it out of this alive. For once, she wished she was wearing crappy granny panty underwear like Sarah favored. When Rick saw that, if he hadn’t canceled the photo shoot and sexual assault, at least he would have delayed them until he could make a side trip to buy her better lingerie. But her bra and panties were red and matching for Daniel, damn it.

Kicking her jeans aside with one stylish high-heeled sandal—again, she looked like she’d dressed up especially for this nightmare—she thought of another argument she could make to stall Rick. “What tabloid would believe these pictures are real?” Her cheek felt stiff where he’d slapped her, but she had to keep talking. Anything to put off the inevitable. “Nobody will buy photos that are obviously fake. Colton might get drunk and let someone take pictures of him with a girl in a hot tub, but he wouldn’t let someone take pictures of him getting a blow job. Even he is not that stupid.”

“It’s not about stupidity,” Rick explained. “It’s about jealousy. I can tell by what he’s been saying about Lorelei online. He loves her. She’s beautiful and she left him. He would do anything,
anything
, to fuck with her and ruin her, even if it ruined his own life, even if it took him ten years. Come here and kneel down in front of me, Wendy.” He laughed. “I like the sound of
that.” He sat up on the edge of his chair and unzipped his pants.

With a gasp, she looked to Paul for help. He simply leaned forward in his own chair, camera poised. There was no horror in his eyes at what she was being forced to do, and no lust, either. Just the jaded resignation of a professional who made money from other people’s misery.

She turned back to Rick. Heart pounding so hard that she could feel the throb of blood in her ears, she said, “I’m not going to do that.”

His eyes narrowed. He was still as handsome as he’d been at twenty-one—more so, in fact, with a man’s thick muscles and sharp features. But that shift in the set of his eyes hadn’t changed at all. It still signaled that she’d crossed a line with him. He was about to call her a bitch, get rough with her, put his forearm across her throat.

He said smoothly and clearly, “You
are
going to do that.”

“I’m not,” she said, panting now. “You can’t make me. Kill me if you want.” Without another glance at Rick, on legs like rubber she walked toward the door.

A few steps and nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. The ordeal had been horrible, but now it was over. She had called his bluff. She would reach the door and open it, and she would be free.

Paul barked, “Rick!” Though his yell filled the small room and thudded against the ceiling, underneath it
she heard another, smaller sound with excruciating clarity: the meaty
click
of Rick’s gun.

She stopped short. Tingles rushed across her bare arms as she realized that she was very lucky the gun had jammed. And that she likely would run out of luck in the next second when Rick tried again and the gun fired.

BANG
. She braced for the pain of the bullet to tear through her.

Instead, in slow motion, the door burst open in front of her. Daniel dove through it, locked eyes with her, shifted his gaze past her, and kept coming. Colton was right behind him.

In the next second, time snapped back to normal. Colton tackled Paul, knocking the chair over. The camera smashed into the wall.

“No!” was all Wendy had time to scream before Daniel yanked Rick out of his chair by the throat. As he took him to the floor, their movements were a blur. Daniel had no idea about the gun—

BANG.
This noise sounded totally different from the door slamming open. It really had been the gun this time. Heart sinking into her gut, Wendy rushed over. If Rick had shot Daniel, he could still shoot Wendy, too, but this was only a fleeting thought as she slipped her whole arm between the two of them and pulled Daniel away.

His shirt was soaked with a fist-size circle of bright blood.

“It’s him,” he said, nodding to Rick.

Rick’s shirt showed a circle of blood in the same place, the barrel of the gun still pointed toward his stomach. His fingers trembled on the grip, and he stared into space, breathing heavily.

Wendy used both hands to lift his fingers away until she could take the heavy gun. He didn’t resist. She leaped away from him and grabbed the knife from the table with her other hand. Passing Colton, who sat on Paul’s chest with both muscular thighs squeezing his neck, she stuck the toe of her sandal through the crack in the doorway and nudged the door all the way open to toss the gun and knife outside before Paul or Rick could make a grab for them.

She was blinded by camera flashes that heated her bare skin. Beyond them she could hear sirens chirping and see blue lights spinning. “Clear out!” a man called over a bullhorn. “Police! Photographers, clear out! Lady, we’ve got guns on you. It’s over. Very slowly put down your weapons.”

*   *   *

Five minutes later, Daniel had joined her against the wall outside the hotel room. The cameras still flashed, though they’d been reduced to taking telephoto shots from across the parking lot. Uniformed police scurried in and out of the room. Daniel’s and Wendy’s hands, cleaned of Rick’s blood, were cuffed behind their backs, but they hugged as best they could, her head against his solid bare chest. His heart raced. Gently he pressed his lips to her bruised cheek where Rick had hit her.

“I tried to catch up with you right after you left,” he said. “I meant to tell you that I don’t want to get divorced. Wendy, I love you.”

She looked up into his worried face, his dark eyes. “I love you, too.”

Their lips met. As they kissed, she marveled that he could make her feel this good while she was half-naked and detained by the police in the parking lot of a seedy hotel. It boded well for the rest of the marriage, she decided.

“Thank you so much for coming for me,” she said. “How did you find me?”

“It’s a long story, but Colton and I are the ones who led the paparazzi here. That was an accident.” He nodded to the distant flashes. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten you fired.”

“Why?” she asked. “Just because Lorelei Vogel’s PR rep is going to be on the front page of the tabloid blogs tomorrow, at a shitty hotel, in her underwear, with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other?” She let out one halfhearted chuckle of resignation. “Maybe that won’t happen.”

Daniel looked over at Colton, also handcuffed, who was talking animatedly to a cop. He moved his elbows awkwardly, trying to talk with his hands. “This is going to be great for Colton,” Daniel said. “When the reporters hear what really happened, the public will love that he actually lived these action-adventure movies he’s trying to land. The publicity could be great for Lorelei, too.”

“And if that doesn’t work,” Wendy said, “I could tell my bosses the truth.”

“The truth?” Daniel repeated. “Innovative.”

“Stargazer prides itself on being cutting-edge.”

“And if
that
doesn’t work,” Daniel said, “I know of another difficult case you can tackle to save your reputation. Again. I’m pretty sure Olivia Query and Victor Moore’s marriage is about to crumble, and they’ll be looking for different PR representation.”

Wendy gaped at him. “Why aren’t you in L.A., taking care of that?”

“Because I’m here, taking care of you. Finally.” He set his forehead against hers and closed his eyes. “Besides, after I give my father two weeks’ notice, it won’t be my problem anymore. I’m going to work for Senator Rowling.”

Wendy stepped back to grin at him. “You
are
?”