Star Crossed (Stargazer #1)(21)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Daniel and Wendy recognized his voice and jumped up at the same time. While Wendy pushed through the dancers and disappeared in the direction of the disturbance, Daniel walked around the edge of the crowd, toward the bar, until he spotted Colton’s bodyguard in the shadows against the far wall, deep in conversation with Colton’s driver. Daniel waved to get the bodyguard’s attention, then opened his hands toward the crowd. The bodyguard looked surprised and hustled his big body in that direction. Either he’d been the only person in the bar not to realize that Colton was involved in an altercation, or he’d thought Colton getting in an argument in public didn’t break the threshold of occasions when he should intervene. Daniel mentally added lecturing the bodyguard to his long to-do list for tomorrow.

He didn’t stick around to watch the bodyguard pull Colton from the crowd. Instead, he rounded to the other side of the room, where he’d seen Wendy disappear into the fray. His pulse quickened as he heard a woman’s shrieks. Pushing through the bodies, he could see when he was still several rows from the center that Lorelei, a tall, slender blonde in a designer top and six-hundred-dollar jeans, was screaming at Colton with her finger in his face and an empty martini glass in her other hand. The bodyguard had reached Colton and pinned his arms behind his back and was attempting to tug him away. Colton’s eyes blazed fire at Lorelei, and his face dripped what appeared to be a pink girly drink. A plastic monkey hung in his hair.

Camera phones flashed.

Daniel suppressed the urge to snatch all the phones away from their owners. There were too many. And that would be bordering on illegal, since these people weren’t paparazzi. The last thing Colton needed, on top of the barroom-brawl/drink-in-the-face headline, was an assault on a fan by a member of his public relations team.

No, Daniel’s best bet now was to work Lorelei’s side of the equation. Rather, Wendy’s side. He snuck up behind her at the edge of the circle around Colton and Lorelei. Over Lorelei’s screeching, Wendy was talking to Lorelei’s enormous bodyguard.

“Do something,” Wendy said.

Eyes never leaving Lorelei, the bodyguard shook his head. “She’s told me not to, unless somebody’s about to get shot. She likes to be free to express her emotions.”

“Oh, is that what she calls it? Get her and follow me. Otherwise, she’s going to scream her way out of a concert tour. Whoops, there goes your salary and your raison d’être.”

Daniel would not have used the term raison d’être when issuing orders to a bodyguard, but Wendy obviously knew best. The bodyguard stepped forward, looped Lorelei around the waist with one arm, and dragged her out of the center of attention. Lorelei hardly seemed to notice, still hollering at Colton even as the spectators melted away and the music cranked up.

Wendy hurried back to the table she and Daniel had just vacated. She nodded to the plush seat she and Daniel had shared before. The bodyguard plopped Lorelei down on the bench and eased his huge frame around the table to sit next to her. Wendy pulled up a seat and crossed her legs. Daniel grabbed a seat, too.

She stared at him. Her face was a blank, but he understood her meaning: What are you doing? Why are you here? Go away. He grinned back at her. She couldn’t send him away if she also wanted to keep up the facade that they were lovers. While that nonsense was going on, any business she chose to discuss with Lorelei was his business, too. That was his price.

Seeming to understand his message, she leaned across the table and told Lorelei, “I’m Wendy Mann. Your new PR specialist?”

Lorelei’s eyes widened at her. “No. Not you!” She jumped up too fast and put one hand on the bodyguard’s shoulder to steady her drunken sway. At her full height on heels, she pointed down at Wendy. “Chicks let their people take advantage of them all the time, but I am not having a ‘helper’ ”—she made finger quotes—“who tries to steal my boyfriend. See ya!” She stepped around the table. Daniel and Wendy both watched her over their shoulders as she bounded away on her long legs, disappearing into the silk and sequins of the other party guests.

Daniel had seen what Lorelei posted online from the club, but he hadn’t put it together with Colton coming on to Wendy until now. No wonder Wendy had been so desperate to make it look like she was with Daniel instead.

He was careful to make his face a blank, with no hint of triumph, as he turned back to Wendy and said, “That went well.”

She glared at him. But he detected the hint of a smile on her lips, as if to say, Watch this.

She leaned across the cocktail table to the bodyguard. “Franklin, I’ll give Lorelei a talking-to tomorrow morning, when she’s sober. Right now we need to keep her out of trouble. Tell her to grab some of her girlfriends. Take them to the fifties beauty shop bar on Fremont where they can get an appletini and a pedicure.”

Franklin grumbled, “I ain’t getting no pedicure.”

She allowed him a few seconds to think it through.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Wendy was turning Daniel on.

“She can even take pictures and post them,” Wendy said. “But not of her boobs. I’ll call the owner of the bar and ask him to send their VIP limo for you. I’ll follow you and stay out of her sight, but I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong. Or more wrong. I’m going out of the bar to the casino floor now, where I can hear and call for the limo. Give me a couple of minutes and then collect Lorelei and her chicas and bring them out, okay?”

As she stood, Daniel expected her to give him an extra-special good-bye—some acknowledgment of what had passed between them in the last hour, and what they’d pretended. But she only crossed her eyes at him before walking away.

Franklin chuckled. “You look like a man who’s been had.”

“Yeah.” Daniel turned to watch Wendy maneuver around the drunks on the dance floor and finally swing through the doorway to the outer club. He felt disoriented. He was the one who was supposed to decide when the major players came and went, and he was the one with the contacts.

He stood. “I’m sure I’ll see you around,” he told Franklin. Ideally, sooner rather than later. Franklin nodded. Daniel dodged dancers and a waitress wearing little more than pasties to step through the doorway to the outer bar.

There in front of him, near the glass wall onto the casino where he’d originally sat with Wendy, women were screaming and falling into each other. Wendy would have been walking through there at just that moment. He dashed forward to pull her out of danger.