Star Crossed (Stargazer #1)(26)
Author: Jennifer Echols

The morning sun backlit Lorelei’s messy curls and shone in a halo around her face. She wasn’t a stereotypical beauty—her eyes were narrow and wide-spaced, her nose long, and of course there were the diminutive boobies—but she was pretty enough for girls to want to be her, and not so pretty that they hated her. Wendy had always thought Loralei’s offbeat looks added to her appeal—back when she had appeal, that is.

Her song ended. She kept her eyes closed, basking in the warm sun streaming through the window, listening to her last guitar chord ring through the room. Finally she opened her eyes, saw Wendy leaning against the wall, and flared her nostrils. “No, bitch,” she said firmly. “I told you to take your weave and your cheap ass home.”

Wendy had lots of experience with West Virginia schoolgirls taunting her. And with bratty young stars who possessed all the eloquence and sophistication of those schoolgirls. In either case, Wendy’s usual response would be to let herself get angry and to dish it out just as well as she could take it.

This time she had her career to worry about. She needed to shut Lorelei down in a way that made Lorelei want to thank her for it later. Being nice was doubly difficult when Lorelei had punched her in her soft spots: insulting her hair and calling her cheap.

Reaching deep inside herself, she came up with this: “Hey, pretty girl.” She didn’t remember much about her mom, but she remembered pretty girl was what her mom had called her in a quiet, loving moment.

Lorelei stared uneasily at Wendy.

Exactly what Wendy wanted. She continued in a chipper tone, “You hired me to get you out of this little PR scrape. I’m certainly not going to let you fire me. That’s just going to get you deeper in trouble, especially when you’re accusing me of . . . what are you accusing me of, again? Having long hair?”

Lorelei let her guitar slide down to her lap and crossed her arms. “Stealing my boyfriend.”

“Colton’s not your boyfriend anymore,” Wendy said firmly. “But in any event, you don’t need to worry about me and him, because I’m with Daniel.”

Lorelei squinted at Wendy. “Who?”

“Daniel!” Wendy repeated in an exasperated tone, as if her relationship with Daniel Blackstone were the most obvious thing in the world. “He was sitting right next to me in the club last night.”

“Wait a minute!” Lorelei exclaimed, pointing at Wendy. “Isn’t he Colton’s new PR guy? No way! You’re sleeping with the enemy.”

Wendy shrugged. “I fell in love with him before he was the enemy. I promise we’ll be able to keep our personal and professional lives separate. So . . . ”

Lorelei still stared at her as if stunned. Wendy had the advantages of surprise and a confident delivery. As long as she could keep Colton off her and Daniel on her, she doubted she’d personally have any more trouble from Lorelei.

She needed to keep going, capitalizing on her momentum. But here she lost her train of thought, distracted by the fantasy that she and Daniel had fallen in love.

Forget it. She pressed on, “We need some ground rules for getting you out of this mess. First, no throwing drinks in anyone’s face.”

“But Colton called me—” Lorelei started.

“Sticks and stones,” Wendy interrupted. “Throwing anything at anybody could be construed as assault. Do you want to go to jail? Again?”

Lorelei’s slim shoulders sagged. “No.”

“No posting pictures of your lady parts online,” Wendy persisted. “Your pics from the beauty shop bar last night were adorable. They were of you and your friends and your nightlife and your fingernails. Judging from the responses, the fans seemed to love them. We need more of that. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lorelei said reluctantly.

“No calling your new PR specialist a twat.”

Lorelei looked up sharply at Wendy, suspicious again.

“You hate it when people judge you without meeting you,” Wendy pointed out, “or knowing the facts, or giving you a chance.”

“Okay,” Lorelei grumbled, looking out the bright window.

Wendy had won the battle, it seemed. Lorelei had accepted her authority. But they couldn’t win the war with an absence of negative publicity. They’d have to generate the positive, too. The sunlight glowing in Lorelei’s curls gave Wendy an idea.

“We need to get you on TV,” she burst out. Lorelei’s TV performance wouldn’t be nearly as special as the song Wendy had just witnessed, snatched from thin air. The sunlight wouldn’t stream in behind Lorelei. She would insist on wearing her usual heavy makeup. She would be wearing leather and sequins instead of soft clothes to sleep in. Belatedly Wendy realized she wanted Lorelei to look like she’d just gotten out of bed, and that was kind of perverted.

But even without these details, Lorelei’s real talent and her easygoing, sweet nature—when she didn’t feel threatened—would come through on the small screen, possibly for the first time ever.

“TV!” Lorelei drawled. “TV and I don’t agree with each other.”

“You’ll like this kind,” Wendy said. “Let’s see. You’ve got the awards show on Friday night. So at lunch on Thursday, between your rehearsals for the show, we’ll get you into a local news studio to play a few songs. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but they’ll post the video of your performance to their web page. We’ll link to it and make sure it goes viral before the awards show.”

Lorelei tilted her head, confused. “How can you make sure it goes viral?”

“We’re Stargazer PR. We have our ways,” Wendy said mysteriously. Daniel Blackstone might be able to engineer a wedding on a private island and convince megastars to maintain a fake relationship for a span of years, but Wendy could make a video go viral with a few phone calls. So there.

“Even if it does, how will that help?” Lorelei asked.

“Trust me,” Wendy said. “It will help that people see you being yourself. Except don’t tell the anchors or the audience to f**k off.”

Lorelei laughed. “I was about to say, that’s me being myself—”

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Don’t do that. It might even be okay not to talk much. Sometimes you tell people to f**k off, or you say something else to them that seems inappropriate and too harsh in retrospect, because you couldn’t think of anything else to say, right?”