Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(63)
Author: Jennifer Echols

She put her chin on her knees and looked down at her bare feet. “I can’t tell you. I haven’t told anyone. I even lied to Wendy about the scar, because I don’t want to get her involved when she has the baby to worry about. I told her I was mugged in Rio.”

“You just jacked me off and threatened me with a knife in the space of an hour and a half. I’d say that makes us close.” He raked his hands back through his hair and took a deep breath before he leaned forward to ask her the question quietly. “Did he rape you?”

“No,” she said without looking up.

“Did he try?”

“Maybe.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Did he give you drugs you didn’t want?”

“He put something in my drink a few times,” she murmured. Then she squared her shoulders and sat up straight, as if suddenly ready to face it. Or, not, because she told the story in the second person, distancing herself. “The high you can deal with. The bad part is that you don’t know what he’s given you, or how much. He’s high when he gives it to you. You can’t trust his dosing.

“You can’t go to the hospital, because they’ll call the police. You can’t call the police, because you’re on drugs. You can’t reach your friend in Moscow. You can’t call your pregnant friend in America, and you can’t call your mother, because what can they do? It will only wig them out. All you can do is lock your hotel room door until you’re not high anymore, expecting to OD the whole time, and passing the hours watching Bewitched reruns in Portuguese, which somewhat exacerbates a bad trip.”

“Why didn’t you leave?” he whispered.

“Oh, this stuff was later.” She waved it away with the hand stuck with the IV needle. The tube tapped gently against the monitor. She gazed vaguely at the equipment before continuing. “It was fine at first. Nine Lives and his entourage were a mess, but I kicked them into shape. He got his album written and recorded. Slowly. He’d go on a binge and I’d have to pull him back out. But we got it done.”

She slipped back into the second person. “You want to be like them, so they’ll trust you. You have to do what they do. Like I did with you guys that first night.”

Quentin nodded, though he suspected that blending in with Nine Lives meant more than tequila and strip poker.

She went on, “You have to decide what you’re going to do, and you have to decide when you’re finally going to say no. Toward the end, he wanted me to do something I wasn’t willing to do, and I said no. It was lucky that I was cool with his bodyguard and his driver. If they had to choose between us, they’d pick Nine Lives, because he was paying them. But they held him off me a couple of nights.”

Quentin stared at her, the pretty, brown-eyed woman telling this horrible story frankly, as if recounting a jog down the road. “And you still didn’t leave,” he said in disbelief.

“Well, no,” she said as if it were obvious. “You don’t understand. My husband told me he didn’t want a baby, moved out, and got a girlfriend. I dyed my hair pink and wore leather and went to whip up trouble in Rio like I was the anti-mother, you know? I couldn’t have the family life that people want. So, hell, I was going to have the opposite life, so there.

“After about a month, I realized what paradise it would be to have my job back, and my friends back, and to spend my weekends alone in my apartment, eating Cheetos and downloading romance movies and letting myself go. But I’d lose everything if I fouled up the Nine Lives album. I’d lose my job, and no one else would hire me for this kind of work after I blew such a high-profile case.”

She shifted uncomfortably on the bed and tried to stretch her arms over her head, but the IV tube pulled taut and stopped her. She put her arms back down. “He finally finished the album, I sent it back by courier, and I was ready to get out of there. He had his people bribe the airline to cancel my flight reservation back to the States.”

“So you were stuck there with him.” Feeling sick, Quentin added, “He fell in love with you.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible, considering his mental state,” she said, so calmly. “And then he comes on to you when his bodyguard and driver are mysteriously absent, as if he’s upped their pay to get his way.”

“And then what happens?” Quentin tried to hide his horror. He needed to keep her talking.

With one finger, she traced the scar under her chin.

“With what?”

“He was wearing a skull ring. I think this was the crossbone,” she said woodenly. “So what do you do?”

“What do you do?” Quentin repeated.

“You do what you can.” She looked down at her bare toes. “You wield your shoe as a weapon.”

Quentin laughed shortly and bitterly. “You use that thing like a Chinese throwing star.”

She showed him the poker face. “Did I hurt you?”

“Rio,” he said. He would not allow her to change the subject before he got the whole story.

“Rio,” she agreed. “The hotel hears the commotion and calls the police. Of course, it’s your job to go with Nine Lives and get him out of jail. But you’re not going to take this, right?”

“Right,” Quentin said.

“And you can’t stay trapped in Rio, right?”

“Right.”

“You know he can have all the charges against him dropped with a bribe and come after you again.” She looked at Quentin with her dark-fringed eyes. “But not if you bribe first.”

Quentin blinked. “You used your money to bribe the police in Rio to keep him in jail?”

“No,” she said. “I used his money. I had access to his bank accounts because he gave me power of attorney one of the times he went to rehab. I set up payments so the police would keep him in jail indefinitely.”

She embraced her knees, curling into a ball again. “If he gets back to New York and tells Manhattan Music what I did, I’ll be fired from Stargazer for sure. And if Wendy knew about the whole thing, she’d try to cover for me. I can’t ask her to do that. The truth would come out eventually, and she’d go down along with me.

“But if I get your album first, and your concert goes smoothly, I’ll have enough clout at Manhattan Music that they’ll believe me over him. I can threaten to have him dropped from the label if he crosses me. He doesn’t have a lot of friends there.” Her chin went back down onto her knees. “And now he’s out of jail.”