Star Crossed (Stargazer #1)(41)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“She cheated on me!” Colton burst, voice breaking.

“I did not,” Lorelei said.

Wendy held up her hand toward Lorelei and looked to Colton. “Let’s take turns. Tell us your side of the story.”

“She . . . ” He jumped at the chance to start. After that first word, though, he sat blinking at the Strip, the sunlight reflecting in his eyes.

For the first time Wendy felt bad for him. Unless he really was a good actor, which she doubted after viewing a few of his TV episodes, he felt so strongly about Lorelei that he didn’t know where to begin.

He finally said, “She went behind my back with her drummer.”

“I did not.” Lorelei rolled her eyes.

Wendy put up her hand to stop Lorelei again. She asked Colton, “What evidence do you have?”

“I don’t have any evidence,” he spat. “I don’t need any. I just knew. Everything was fine when we were on the show together. Then she decides she’s going to start a band. She handpicks the players herself. All dudes. She can’t go out with me like she used to because they practice all the time. She tells me she’s going on a world tour with these guys and I’m not going to see her for months. And then I find texts from the drummer on her phone!”

“Because we’re friends!” Lorelei hollered with her hands open.

Wendy turned to Lorelei. “And what’s your side of the story?”

“Yeah, I picked my own band,” Lorelei said. “That’s what musicians do. Yeah, we practice. Yeah, we’re going on tour. Yeah, I’m friends with my own band-mates!”

Wendy nodded solemnly. She turned to Colton. “And then you called her names online.”

“Because she deserved it,” he said.

Wendy resisted the urge to throw her tumbler at him. She turned back to Lorelei. “And then you started posting photos of your lady parts, and everything went downhill from there.”

“Basically.”

Wendy glanced over her shoulder at Daniel, who was gazing out the window like he couldn’t care less about these ridiculous people and the argument they’d been having online with millions of witnesses. The usual hard lines of his brow and mouth relaxed. He seemed ten years younger. In fact, the longer she looked at him, the more he seemed like a tourist on vacation, watching the Strip with interest as if planning what he would do with his delicious free day.

Then he surprised Wendy by shoving off from the corner and taking a few steps toward the sofa. “Lorelei is telling you the truth,” he said to Colton. “She’s a free spirit. She does what she wants and says what she thinks. She’s also honest to a fault. There is no way she would cheat on you and not admit it. If she didn’t want you anymore, she would tell you.”

“How do you know?” Colton asked angrily, but sounding a lot less confident than he had a few minutes before.

“I’ve been in this business for too long,” Daniel said.

“But she never came to me and said she wasn’t cheating on me,” Colton said, looking at Lorelei now.

“Because you were already calling her names,” Daniel said, “and she made an executive decision not to beg when you were in the wrong.”

Lorelei raised her brows at Colton. Colton looked pensive. The conversation was going in the right direction.

But then . . . something changed for Wendy. The sunlight caught Colton just right. Now that he was dressing better, he didn’t look as much like Rick as he had in some of his previous tabloid photos. But with the light glinting in the blond stubble on his cheeks, he looked a lot like Rick had looked whenever he blew up at her, blew the f**k up at her, and came back the next day to tell her he was sorry. And then blew up at her again.

Wendy fought hard to shake off that memory. “Here’s what I think,” she told Colton. “I think you were comfortable with your relationship with Lorelei when you were the TV star first, and she was invited to be on your show. It was precisely when she formed her own band, picked her own musicians, decided on her own tour, and made her own decisions that you got uncomfortable. But instead of stating what the problem was, as in, ‘I am too insecure to trust this talented girl full of gumption,’ you did the worst thing you can do to a female in society right now, which was to accuse her of being a fallen woman!”

The room was carpeted and filled with plush furniture that should have absorbed noise, yet her words echoed against the ceiling. She hadn’t realized she’d stood up at some point and stuck her finger in Colton’s face.

Daniel put his arm around Wendy’s shoulders, easing her away from Colton. “Wendy, can I speak with you in the hall for just a minute?” As he guided her toward the door, he called back into the room, “Why don’t you make yourselves that drink now?”

He closed the door behind them. The long, vast hallway with insanely patterned carpet was empty, but he whispered anyway. “I thought I was supposed to be the bad cop.” He reached for her hand and—didn’t hold it, exactly, but wrapped his hand around her cold fingertips. “You’re shaking. We’re working together now. You have to tell me what’s going on. Did Colton say something to you I didn’t know about?”

“No.”

Daniel let her go and stepped back. “Come on, Wendy. Colton is my client. If he said something inappropriate to you, I need to have a talk with him. And then kill him.”

“It’s not that at all, I promise. Reluctant as I am to jump to Colton’s defense, he didn’t do anything.”

“What is it, then?”

She raked her hands back through her hair, stopping suddenly when her fingertips encountered soreness on her scalp. “I promise I’ll tell you later.”

He eyed her warily, then opened his arms. “Come here.”

She couldn’t resist that invitation. She stepped forward willingly. He wrapped his arms around her, hugging her close. His hands rubbed up and down her back with enough pressure to warm her and wake her up. She sighed into his shoulder.

“Need to take ten?” he asked. With her ear pressed to his chest, she heard his voice as a rumble.

“Already did,” she said.

After a few more seconds of rubbing the life back into her, he set her upright, holding her by the shoulders. He looked into her eyes as if to make sure she was stable. Then he dropped her hands, took his key card out of his wallet, and slipped it through the lock. “Back to the grind.”