Palm Springs Heat (22 page)

He reacted not at all to her
presence. He just kept sifting rocks.

Morgan and the other guards arrived
at the bottom of the steps. Lara looked back at them plaintively, and Morgan
led his cohort out of earshot.

“I want you to know something.”

Still Clay did not look at her. “I
already know too much.” He sounded tired.

“I don’t think you do.”

Clay pulled up a handful of
scraggly grass and let the blades flutter away in the breeze. “I heard the
voice message.”

“It’s true. I came here on a
mission. I was mad because I thought you gave my ex-husband the idea he could
have a Rotation of his own. I made up this plan and sold Gina on the idea.”

“She got Anton Roche to say all
those nice things about you?”

“I don’t know if it matters, but
most of that stuff was true.” She bit her lip. “The conversation we had that
first night, what we talked about…I had to do a bunch of research to make it
look like we had something in common. To fool you into thinking I was your kind
of woman. But, you seemed to be really interested in me, and that made me more
interested in that stuff.” Her voice trailed off. “And in you.”

She paused.
Give me some kind of
reaction. Resignation. Anger. A shrug, even.
“I’m not a bad person. In
fact, I thought I could do a lot of people some good if I—”

“Cut me down to size—and make a
million dollars while you were at it?”

Lara hung her head. “I was wrong.
About everything.” She swallowed hard, fighting tears. Tears were winning. “I
know that now. I knew it a week ago, but I didn’t know what to do. I was in
over my head. I kept trying to climb out.”

“Well, you’re out now,” Clay said,
“and you didn’t have to do anything.”

Lara stepped toward him. “Clay, I—”

“Stop,” he said. Lara could hear
the disappointment in his voice, and that hurt more than anger or meanness ever
could. “I’m not in the mood for a big discussion.”

“I thought—”

Clay shook his head. “I said I
don’t want to talk.”

 “Then don’t,” Lara said. “But
I thought we had something. I thought that, in spite of everything—the
deception—there was something real. I felt it—and I thought you felt the same.
That first night, when we talked about love and war…I never had a conversation
like that with a man. Or anyone, for that matter. Not since my dad…” She
swallowed hard. “The salt flats. The waterfall at Heat. Didn’t any of that mean
anything to you?”

“Fun times.” Sarcasm poisoned
Clay’s words.

“That’s all?”

“I wanted you to feel like—”

“Like what? The center of the
universe?”

Clay shrugged. “If that’s what you
want to believe.”

“It’s not what I
want
to
believe. But if it’s true, you can’t hate me for lying and leading you along.
You were deceiving me, too.”

“
I
was deceiving
you
?”

“You made me believe we did have
something special. Like I was the center of your universe. And then you slept
with Corynne.”

“I
what
?”

“I’ll bet you didn’t have to
sweet-talk
her
. She’s already the center of her own universe.”

Clay stood up. “You’re crossing a
line—”

“
I’m
crossing a line?” Lara
stepped onto the rock with Clay and tapped his chest with her finger. “
You
left
my
side to go spend the night with
her
! Or are you going to
tell me that was just business?”

“I guess it depends on how you
define ‘business.’ We had an appearance in Seattle.
For charity.”

Lara’s heart jumped.

“We didn’t sleep together. In fact,
I didn’t get any sleep. I was too wound up thinking about you.”

 “That was your ‘previous
engagement’?”

Clay turned away. “What difference
does it make?”

It would have made all the
difference in the world—an hour ago.

“Making appearances is part of my
job, Lara. And Corynne’s. It’s what the girls in The Rotation do.”

“But—”

 “You have to leave now,” Clay
interrupted. “I’m meeting with the lingerie people in a few minutes. I believe
you’ve met some of them.” He took out his phone, pressed a button and spoke.
“Do your job, Morgan.”

Morgan came back down the steps and
held out a hand to help Lara negotiate the rocks.

“Oh,” Clay said, “the next time you
see Virginia, tell her I
understand.”

Lara paused. “Who?”

“Ma’am, please,” Morgan said.

Clay had turned back toward the
water. Lara accepted Morgan’s hand and headed up the stairs.

19

In Gina Wray’s office the next day,
Lara looked tired and beaten.

“Don’t worry about that
nondisclosure bullshit,” Gina said. “Fast Lane has deep pockets, but we’ve got
big guns on our side, too.”

“It’s not that I’m afraid to write
about anything,” Lara said. “It’s that I don’t have anything to write about.”

“Oh, come on. You have
something.
You were there, on the inside. Hell, you had Clay Creighton
inside
you!”

Is that supposed to be a joke?
“There isn’t anything,” Lara said.

Gina’s face grew stern. “Didn’t you
come in here talking about how he’s a monster and a prick and how he needs to
be taken down—”

“I was wrong.”

“—and how you had this great plan—”

Lara slouched. “I was wrong about
that, too.”

Gina sat down and kneaded her
temples. “Let’s think about this. What about the fact that he’s not in charge?
His loyal readers will love
that,
right? It’s Fast Lane’s thing: The
man’s in charge. And here is The Man, himself—
the
man among men—and his
whole fucking life is run by a
woman
?”

“Hugh Hefner’s daughter has run
Playboy
for years.”

“Yeah, but he’s old enough to be a
grandfather. Hell, he’s old enough to be
everyone’s
grandfather. And,
besides, no matter who’s in charge, he still gets to pick his own blondes.”

And Clay has Ms. V-as-in-Viper
do it for—wait.

Lara’s head came up off her hand.
“You
know
that a woman calls the shots at Fast Lane?”

Gina’s shoulders and neck
stiffened. “Of course.”

Lara sat up straight. “And you
know
Clay doesn’t pick the women in The Rotation?”

Gina rummaged through papers on her
desk. “For God’s sake,
everyone
knows
that
.”

“Actually, as far as I can tell,
almost
nobody
knows that.” Lara sat on the edge of the chair. “And they work very
hard to keep it that way.”

Gina got up and dug through the
pockets of a jacket on a coat tree and pulled out her chrome-plated lighter.
“That’s something you can put in there, too, right? The great lengths they go
to to keep people in the dark?”

Lara noticed Gina’s hands shaking
as she lit a cigarette. And that her chin was pointy. Lara mentally leafed
through the photos of every woman who’d ever been in The Rotation.
So many
with dark hair.
She looked down at her own painted chocolaty locks.
Every
woman in The Rotation for the past six years had brown hair. Except for that
red-headed slut, Corynne.

Lara looked back up at Gina, still
framed by the window. Smoke swirling around her caught the sunlight, making it
look like she had a tangle of curls hanging over her face.

Lemony
curls.

Lara jumped to her feet. “How much
do you know about Fast Lane?”

“No more than anyone else. Stuff that’s,
you know, just out there. Media reports. Online sources. Rumors. For God’s
sake, there’s rumors up the wazoo. Anyway, I’m sure we can block out your piece
without too much trouble.”

Gina paced behind her desk as she
rambled on about the inner workings of Fast Lane’s corporate structure, but
Lara’s eyes locked on the lighter, which Gina had tossed onto the desk.
Specifically the engraved initials.

V.W.

“So you’re a big fan of German
cars?” Lara asked.

“What do German cars have to do
with…” Gina followed Lara’s gaze back to the lighter. Lara reached for it, but
Gina dived over the desk and scooped it up.

“V.W.? Huh.” Gina stared at the
lighter as though she had never seen it before. “I never thought about it. I
don’t think it has anything to do with cars. It’s just a cool piece I picked up
at a vintage shop a few years back.”

“I don’t think it has anything to
do with cars, either—Virginia.”

“What are you—“

“Virginia
Warren
, to be
specific. The woman who was in The Rotation for just a few weeks.”

Gina’s eyes narrowed to knife-edge
slits. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Smoke escaped from her flared
nostrils and pursed lips. She looked like a dragon preparing to blast a pesky
villager. “What are you getting at?”

“I think we both know what I’m
getting at. My question is, why get
me
involved?”

“Okay, let’s just say I
am
this Virginia Warner.” Gina took a deep pull on her cigarette. “So what?”

“It’s
Warren
,”
Lara said, holding her steely gaze. “And this meeting is over.”

Gina stormed across the room and cut
Lara off at the door. “I don’t think so.”

 “Well, then, feel free to go
on without me.” Lara reached across Gina and opened the door. “Oh, and I have a
message for you: Clay says he understands.”

“Oh, does he?” She coughed. “You go
tell Clay-boy to fuck himself! Because one thing’s for sure, he’s never going
to be fucking
you
again. He has plenty of better options.”

Lara looked deep into Gina’s eyes
and saw rage boiling in her soul the way smoke billowed from her throat. And
something more.

Pain.

Lara felt her own rage subside.
“Now I understand.”

“What do you understand?”

“You loved him.”

Gina half-spat, half-laughed a
mouthful of smoke into Lara’s face. “
Every
woman loves Clay Creighton.”

Lara was unfazed. “But he loved you
back, so you had to go.”

“What a fucking joke!”

“You
still
love him.”

 “I’ll tell you what you
understand.” Gina’s voice rose by one octave and several decibels. “You
understand jack shit. But my lawyers will be happy to enlighten you.”

“How did they do it? Fake sex tape?
Or did they slip something into your tea that made you fail a drug test?”

 “I don’t have to listen to
this anymore.” Gina stabbed Lara’s chest with the fingers that held her
cigarette, flicking ash onto Lara’s top. “You signed a contract, and when you
get hit with a million-dollar judgment for not living up to it, you’ll
understand something, that’s for goddamn sure.”

Lara moved Gina’s hand away and
brushed off the ashes. “Don’t worry. I have every intention of keeping our
agreement.” She exited calmly, closing the door behind her.

Gina threw open the door and yelled
after Lara, “I don’t care what you write—you and Clay Creighton can both go
fuck yourselves!”

She slammed the door, then jerked
it right back open. “And the same goes for that whore, Sushma Vishniedoodoo!”

20

Lara spent the next couple of days
in seclusion, writing Gina’s article. She left her apartment only to let in the
Salvation Army guys who were there to pick up the clothes from Fast Lane.
Someone
might be thrilled to buy a $1,400 hand-painted Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt for
$6.95
. She threw in the clothes she had gotten from Gina, too. Including
the crimson dress she never got to wear.

While in the lobby, she also picked
up her mail. Her new phone had come, but she was in no hurry to even take it out
of the box. She didn’t care if anyone tried to call her and didn’t plan to
answer if they did.

The first draft poured out of her,
but she revised carefully, double-checking sources and weeding out innuendo.
She emailed her final draft to Gina first, and then to Sushma.

Gina’s reply came just a few hours
later “My lawyers will be contacting you—and don’t think you can avoid them by
not answering your phone.”

The next day Lara received a terse
reply from Sushma: “Where and when would you like to meet?” Lara suggested
lunch at a market in the valley on Sunday. She needed to visit the area anyway,
so why not consolidate trips?

* * *

Sunday’s excursion began with Lara
pulling into the driveway of an unassuming Chatsworth bungalow and parked next
to an SUV so big and shiny it made her Taurus look like a rusty tin can. Lara
cut through scraggly desert plants and weeds toward a chain-link fence laced
with green plastic privacy strips. Shimmying through an opening between the
house and the fence, she heard exactly what she expected to hear: bubbling
water and bimbos in a hot tub.

A bleached-blonde with enough
silicone in her chest to fill a three-layer Jell-O mold saw Lara first. A
redhead was preoccupied, what with her mouth being full of Kyle’s cock.

“Oh-oh,” the blonde said. “I think
the meter maid’s here.”

“Meter reader?” Sitting on the edge
of the Jacuzzi, Kyle couldn’t be bothered to open his eyes until the blonde
poked him. When he saw Lara, he hollered, “Oh, shit,” then shoved the redhead into
the froth between his legs.

“Lara—what the fuck?”

Apparently the Mae Wests affixed to
the redhead’s torso made her too buoyant to stay under for long. She came up
spitting water from her collagen-engorged lips. “I was thinking the exact
goddamn thing,” she sputtered.

“Then we’re all on the same page,”
Lara said, “because that’s
exactly
what I was thinking.”

“Lara…sweetie…you’re going to have
to be a little more specific.”