Star Crossed (Stargazer #1)(18)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I’m so excited,” he said, sounding ironically bored. “I’ve never been to a celebrity party before.”

His voice in her ear sent electricity straight through her. They smiled at each other again, his expression visibly forced, hers genuine. She wanted to laugh out loud at his joke, but showing her appreciation would give him an advantage over her. She wished she could take her phone out right there and text Sarah, Daniel Blackstone makes me feel all funny inside, because making fun of herself would take some of the edge off.

As it was, she just inched a bit closer to him against the padded velvet and pretended to watch the crowd with him in companionable silence. She longed to make him laugh again. Then they’d definitely look like they were together. She was pretty sure Daniel didn’t go around laughing in his daily conversations with Colton Farr and his ilk.

However, with Daniel standing so close to her, impeccably dressed, dark eyes casually roving across the dancers in front of them like he owned the place, her sense of humor failed her. She felt like she was in ninth grade and a hot senior stood next to her in the lunchroom line. Between arms and legs flailing in the strobe lights, she spotted Colton staring at them, and she went cold in the sweaty room. Now was the time to look like she was flirting with Daniel, now now now, and her brain was a blank. She did the next best thing. She put her hand down by her side, slightly behind Daniel. Then she brought her hand closer to him, closer.

Daniel looked over at her. Her heart skipped a beat as he leaned down and cupped his hand around her ear. “Why are you touching my ass?” He backed away from her to let her respond, but he was watching her reproachfully.

Damn it! But whispering to each other also made it look like they were lovers. She stood on her tiptoes and said, “I beg your pardon. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. You have a very sensitive ass.”

He stared at her. She’d let him off the hook a few minutes before when he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge his black eye, but he wasn’t going to give her the same courtesy.

She decided to come clean with him, since he saw through every tactic she tried anyway. She took him lightly by the elbow and turned him until they both faced the wall and could talk privately in their own bubble.

She kept one hand down, though. Ideally Colton across the room would think she was touching Daniel intimately as she spoke in his ear. “Here’s the thing. I know you said you’re here on vacation, but I’ve begun to suspect you’re working with Colton Farr.”

“Why would you think that?” Daniel asked without bothering to feign surprise.

“Lorelei Vogel is telling the whole world that Colton gave his PR guy a black eye.”

“What black eye?” Daniel asked flatly.

“Don’t worry. It’s not noticeable at all. I detected it only because of my super-honed senses as a trained PR professional.”

Daniel nodded. “Why are you keeping tabs on Lorelei Vogel?”

Wendy batted her eyes at him. “Wouldn’t this conversation be easier if we both let our guards down and talked like we’re not insane? Ready? One, two, three.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She noted that he glanced at her cle**age as her br**sts rose and fell. His expression never changed.

“Is this what you look like when your guard is down?” she asked him.

“Yes. Does this have something to do with why you’re still touching my ass?”

She scowled at him. He raised his eyebrows in response. He was going to make this as difficult as possible for her. She needed to go into a longer explanation than she could manage while they shouted into each other’s ears, standing against the quilted wall.

“Come with me.” Holding his gaze, she reached for his hand. There was a chance he would jerk it away, even make a production of rejecting her in public. They were enemies, after all. But she counted on the importance he laid on decorum. He wouldn’t pull away from her, for the same reason he hadn’t mauled Colton when Colton hit him.

Without looking—instinctively, it seemed—Daniel put out his hand to connect with hers. She felt a shock of awareness at his warm touch. She couldn’t see his pupils in the shadowy room, and doubted if she could have seen them anyway because his eyes were so dark, but her heart sped up at the idea that his pupils dilated as his body reacted to her touch. She stared into his black eyes and lost herself.

Nonsense. She jerked him into motion a little harder than necessary and led him between and around dancers, back to the corner bench where she’d found privacy and relative quiet to text Sarah before. As he slid around the far end of the cocktail table in front of them, she quickly sat and adjusted herself so that her skirt rode higher on her thighs than usual, the neckline of her blouse was pulled low, and her long hair fluffed around her shoulders. This way, Lorelei or Colton, glancing over, would assume she was having a sexy confab with her lover Daniel, whether Daniel played along or not.

It seemed that he would not. Eyeing her warily, he said, “Spill it, Mann. You’ve changed your tack in the last half hour. What happened?”

She glanced out at the crowd and saw nobody watching them. But she turned her chin toward the wall just in case, so her lips couldn’t be read. “Colton is coming on to me,” she said. “I can’t have that.”

“Why didn’t you tell him to f**k off?” Daniel spoke so forcefully and looked so concerned that she felt a rush of the same fight-or-flight reaction she’d had when she first saw Colton here in the club, as if she really should consider this threat to be serious.

She swallowed her explanation: her job security was dicey, and she couldn’t afford more trouble. Daniel wouldn’t understand that. He was about to own the Blackstone Firm.

She said simply, “I can’t state my case that forcefully right now. Colton was impervious to all my normal attempts at being obnoxious and repulsive. So I used the tools that were presented to me. He assumed you and I were together, and I jumped on it.”

Daniel’s mouth opened. He wasn’t gaping at her in shock, exactly. He never gaped. She was beginning to question whether an easily labeled emotion ever passed across his face at all. But his lips parted and his jaw shifted to one side, which she read as outrage. She wasn’t sure whether he was more outraged at Colton for coming on to her, or at her for dragging Daniel into it.

The next thing he said didn’t make his feelings any clearer. “You need to state in no uncertain terms to Colton that, for reasons of professionalism, you’re not interested.”