Star Crossed (Stargazer #1)(73)
Author: Jennifer Echols

She swallowed and shook her head no.

He burst up from the chair. Before she knew what was happening, she was sliding down the wall, head exploding with pain, fingers pressed to her cheek. He’d only slapped her, she realized as she moved her jaw, noting that it still worked. But the ache in the back of her head, which had faded over the last few days, had worked its way loose again.

The guilt was worse. The embarrassment that Paul had seen Rick hit her. The feeling that she must have done something to deserve all this. Those emotions from ten years before rushed back at her and settled like a weight in her lap.

“Sorry, baby,” Rick whispered, holding a hand down to her. “I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.” Unlike ten years before, he was grinning as he said it.

She reached for his hand. Her hand trembled.

He pulled her up to standing, then backed across the room to sit in his chair again. “Now.” He sounded exasperated, as if their fun game kept getting interrupted. “Take your pants off.”

With shaking fingers, she unfastened her jeans and pushed them down her legs and off—carefully, so that her ring stayed in her pocket, just in case she made it out of this alive. For once, she wished she was wearing crappy granny panty underwear like Sarah favored. When Rick saw that, if he hadn’t canceled the photo shoot and sexual assault, at least he would have delayed them until he could make a side trip to buy her better lingerie. But her bra and panties were red and matching for Daniel, damn it.

Kicking her jeans aside with one stylish high-heeled sandal—again, she looked like she’d dressed up especially for this nightmare—she thought of another argument she could make to stall Rick. “What tabloid would believe these pictures are real?” Her cheek felt stiff where he’d slapped her, but she had to keep talking. Anything to put off the inevitable. “Nobody will buy photos that are obviously fake. Colton might get drunk and let someone take pictures of him with a girl in a hot tub, but he wouldn’t let someone take pictures of him getting a blow job. Even he is not that stupid.”

“It’s not about stupidity,” Rick explained. “It’s about jealousy. I can tell by what he’s been saying about Lorelei online. He loves her. She’s beautiful and she left him. He would do anything, anything, to f**k with her and ruin her, even if it ruined his own life, even if it took him ten years. Come here and kneel down in front of me, Wendy.” He laughed. “I like the sound of that.” He sat up on the edge of his chair and unzipped his pants.

With a gasp, she looked to Paul for help. He simply leaned forward in his own chair, camera poised. There was no horror in his eyes at what she was being forced to do, and no lust, either. Just the jaded resignation of a professional who made money from other people’s misery.

She turned back to Rick. Heart pounding so hard that she could feel the throb of blood in her ears, she said, “I’m not going to do that.”

His eyes narrowed. He was still as handsome as he’d been at twenty-one—more so, in fact, with a man’s thick muscles and sharp features. But that shift in the set of his eyes hadn’t changed at all. It still signaled that she’d crossed a line with him. He was about to call her a bitch, get rough with her, put his forearm across her throat.

He said smoothly and clearly, “You are going to do that.”

“I’m not,” she said, panting now. “You can’t make me. Kill me if you want.” Without another glance at Rick, on legs like rubber she walked toward the door.

A few steps and nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. The ordeal had been horrible, but now it was over. She had called his bluff. She would reach the door and open it, and she would be free.

Paul barked, “Rick!” Though his yell filled the small room and thudded against the ceiling, underneath it she heard another, smaller sound with excruciating clarity: the meaty click of Rick’s gun.

She stopped short. Tingles rushed across her bare arms as she realized that she was very lucky the gun had jammed. And that she likely would run out of luck in the next second when Rick tried again and the gun fired.

BANG. She braced for the pain of the bullet to tear through her.

Instead, in slow motion, the door burst open in front of her. Daniel dove through it, locked eyes with her, shifted his gaze past her, and kept coming. Colton was right behind him.

In the next second, time snapped back to normal. Colton tackled Paul, knocking the chair over. The camera smashed into the wall.

“No!” was all Wendy had time to scream before Daniel yanked Rick out of his chair by the throat. As he took him to the floor, their movements were a blur. Daniel had no idea about the gun—

BANG. This noise sounded totally different from the door slamming open. It really had been the gun this time. Heart sinking into her gut, Wendy rushed over. If Rick had shot Daniel, he could still shoot Wendy, too, but this was only a fleeting thought as she slipped her whole arm between the two of them and pulled Daniel away.

His shirt was soaked with a fist-size circle of bright blood.

“It’s him,” he said, nodding to Rick.

Rick’s shirt showed a circle of blood in the same place, the barrel of the gun still pointed toward his stomach. His fingers trembled on the grip, and he stared into space, breathing heavily.

Wendy used both hands to lift his fingers away until she could take the heavy gun. He didn’t resist. She leaped away from him and grabbed the knife from the table with her other hand. Passing Colton, who sat on Paul’s chest with both muscular thighs squeezing his neck, she stuck the toe of her sandal through the crack in the doorway and nudged the door all the way open to toss the gun and knife outside before Paul or Rick could make a grab for them.

She was blinded by camera flashes that heated her bare skin. Beyond them she could hear sirens chirping and see blue lights spinning. “Clear out!” a man called over a bullhorn. “Police! Photographers, clear out! Lady, we’ve got guns on you. It’s over. Very slowly put down your weapons.”

* * *

Five minutes later, Daniel had joined her against the wall outside the hotel room. The cameras still flashed, though they’d been reduced to taking telephoto shots from across the parking lot. Uniformed police scurried in and out of the room. Daniel’s and Wendy’s hands, cleaned of Rick’s blood, were cuffed behind their backs, but they hugged as best they could, her head against his solid bare chest. His heart raced. Gently he pressed his lips to her bruised cheek where Rick had hit her.