Star Crossed (Stargazer #1)(72)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“You’re kidding!” Colton exclaimed as they pushed open the exit to the Strip, neon glowing everywhere in the night. “We thought you guys kept leaving the party early to screw.”

“I wish.” Daniel led the way down the sidewalk to where the paparazzi sat on folding chairs. They all jumped up as Colton approached. Cameras blazed as they took his picture. Daniel’s instinct was to guide Colton calmly away, because every bit of what they did next would be at the top of the gossip blogs tomorrow. It didn’t matter anymore.

Blinking into the flashes, he called, “Is Billy here?”

“I’m Billy.” Sure enough, the old man stepping forward wore a Wild West moustache and a floppy fishing hat.

Daniel drew him out of hearing of the other photographers, though they had no time to get out of shooting range. As the cameras flashed on, he handed Billy his last hundred, then asked, “You have a colleague who looks like my friend here?” He put a hand on Colton’s shoulder.

“Sure,” Billy said, folding the bill into his pocket. “Rick.”

“Do you know where he is?” Daniel asked, trying hard not to sound like he was afraid for his wife’s life.

Billy gave the worst possible answer to a man whose wallet was empty. “I might, if I didn’t have to work for a living.”

Daniel had no idea what to do now. He thought Detective Butkus might finally help him, but by the time the detective took Billy to the police station and pressed the truth out of him, it might be too late for Wendy. Daniel glanced toward the paparazzi, then back toward the security guards at the entrance to the casino, and calculated how quickly the two groups might come to Billy’s aid, and therefore how long Daniel could kick the shit out of him.

Colton reached into his pocket and drew out the three ten-thousand-dollar chips. “Would this pay your salary for a few days?”

Billy looked over his shoulder at the other photographers, grabbed the chips, and threw them under his hat. “I been drinking beer with Rick at his hotel room all week. Him and his friend Paul.”

“Paul’s balding?” Daniel guessed. “Likes Hawaiian shirts?”

“That’s the one.” Billy gave them the address and room number of the hotel.

While Billy was still talking, Daniel walked into traffic on the Strip and hailed a taxi. Colton called over his shoulder to Billy, “If you’re bullshitting us, I’m coming back to find you, because that was some expensive bullshit.” He climbed into the taxi behind Daniel.

Daniel gave the driver the address. “Step on it.” Then he realized he had no bribe to get the driver to go faster. He had a credit card to pay for the fare, but plastic didn’t talk like cash.

Colton produced a hundred and tossed it into the front seat. The engine revved higher.

“Thank you,” Daniel told Colton sincerely.

“When we get there,” Colton said, “I’m coming in with you.”

“All right.” One more time, Daniel pressed the button on his phone to call Detective Butkus. The detective would maintain that Daniel had no proof of what was happening and nothing to go on.

Daniel Blackstone was about to lose his cool.

* * *

“Take your clothes off, Wendy,” Rick said smoothly. “Nice and slow, so we can enjoy it.”

Wendy had heard those words from him before. She’d been eighteen and excited that he considered her an alluring grown woman. When they’d had sex, they’d been in her bedroom or his tiny apartment. Both places were shabby and poor. Either would have been an improvement over this seedy dump of a hotel room five blocks from the Strip.

Paul, a stranger to her with a receding hairline, hadn’t been in the room back then to take pictures of them with a state-of-the-art camera and a special lens. Rick hadn’t relaxed in a chair, watching her, with a gun and a hunting knife beside him on the table—the same knife he’d shoved against her side in the Paris casino, and which he must have used to hack her hair off three times that week. And Rick’s own camera bag hadn’t waited on the floor, the padded canvas handle replaced with a sturdy braid of three thick hanks of Wendy’s hair.

When she’d known Rick before, he’d been a possessive bully. Now he was out of his mind.

“How much money did you make from the picture of Lorelei on Colton’s phone?” she asked as she pulled her blouse off over her head. She wished she knew some kind of stealth move to catch two men by surprise and overpower them while she was taking her shirt off, but her mind was a blank.

“We made a lot of money,” Rick said. Paul echoed Rick’s satisfaction by laughing.

“This gig has cost me, though. I had to dip into the funds when Colton changed his style,” Rick said, fingering his suit, a cheap version of the outfit Colton had been sporting since he traded in his usual trucker hat. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

“We knew you were here in Vegas,” she told Rick. “People kept sighting Colton when he wasn’t there. We figured out it was you. We told the police about you. If you’ve made so much money already, why are you taking the chance of hanging around and kidnapping me to take another picture?”

“It’s what we do,” Paul said without emotion, adjusting a dial on his camera.

“And the opportunity was too perfect,” Rick said. “I think I might have a little leeway, don’t you, since we’ve been here all week and a cop hasn’t so much as questioned me?”

Wendy agreed. Detective Butkus had pretended to listen to her and take notes, but he might as well have laughed at her for all the following up he’d done.

“Besides,” Rick said casually, “the risk is worth the reward. Ten years ago your little bitch friend called the cops on me in New York, Wendy, when all I wanted was to talk to you. I told you that.” His voice cracked, but he maintained his charming, wisecracking demeanor like nothing had gone wrong. “Because of the warrant, I haven’t been able to work for the movie studios like I planned. Like both of us planned, remember?”

She nodded solemnly, heart racing, skin cold, stomach turning flips. She wanted desperately to tell him that if he’d dreamed of a Hollywood career, domestic violence and evading arrest weren’t his best course of action. But his fingers drummed impatiently on the arm of the chair, dangerously close to the gun and knife beside him on the table. She didn’t dare speak.

“You ruined my job for me,” he said, “so I’m going to ruin yours for you. I’ve been to your fancy parties. I’ve seen Colton Farr coming on to you. I know he’s still in town. So Paul will take a couple photos of you blowing me, from just the right angle so I look like Colton and you look like . . . you.” He smiled at her. “Lorelei will break up with Colton again. Your company will kick you out on your ass for ruining your star’s publicity just to satisfy your own lust. That bastard you’ve been f**king will see you for the whore you really are, if he didn’t figure it out already when you were dry humping that pole at the strip club.” He picked up the gun from the table and waved it at the waistband of her jeans. “Keep going. You obviously remember how to strip.”