Star Crossed (Stargazer) (28 page)

“My mouth.” Slowly he pulled his fingers out of her and rubbed his thumb back and forth across her slick clit. “Right here. We’re going to have to take your panties off, though, because they’re in the way.” He used both hands to slide her panties down. She half stood to let him ease them off her hips, then picked up her feet. He pulled her underwear down and off her toes and kneeled there with the silk crumpled in one hand, watching her.

“Lie down,” he said firmly.

She eased down and let the softness of the duvet surround her. She loved being exposed for him, and the electric anticipation as she waited, staring at the white ceiling, listening to the soft drone of the air conditioner, wondering when he would touch her. The silence and stillness were so complete for long seconds that he must be looking her over. At the thought, a new wave of pleasure nearly made her cry out.

There.
He was touching her at two small points, his long fingers teasing her open. Those fingers pushed into her again, farther than before. She
simultaneously squirmed with discomfort at how far he had invaded her and lifted her hips so he could reach farther inside.

There.
Now his mouth was on her, a warm circle that covered her clit and lapped at her.

“Ah.” She felt like saying a lot more, but she just dug her back and elbows into the soft bed and tilted her pelvis up to him.

He began to fuck her with his tongue. She cried out and gripped the duvet in both fists as she felt herself climbing toward orgasm. His tongue was deep inside her. His thumb massaged her clit. Her body jerked upward against him, and she came. A warm shock ran through her, a sensation too good to withstand. His mouth and his hands stayed with her as she gasped and bucked under him for long minutes of bliss. Slowly the waves faded, replaced by an awareness of cool air touching her wetness.

Without warning he scooped her up—his hand covered her bare ass, which was all she had time to note—and set her down at the head of the bed with her back against the pillows. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the other side, facing her.

She reached toward his crotch. He didn’t stop her. Beneath the expensive cloth of his pants, his dick was thick and hard. “Your turn,” she said.

Across the room, his phone rang. They gazed at each other for a few moments, listening to it. She’d heard his normal ringtone before. She knew this was a special ring he’d programmed for an unusually problematic
client. She did the same thing on her own phone. She asked, “Who is it?”

“Victor Moore,” he said flatly.

“Better get it. His storybook marriage to Olivia Query may be in trouble.” As soon as the sarcastic words had left her mouth, Wendy was sorry. She wanted to give Daniel a blow job, not drive him away.

He did roll off the bed then, but he didn’t seem offended. He reached for his phone on the desk. “Hello, Victor,” he said. “No, this isn’t a bad time at all.” Looking at Wendy, Daniel shot himself in the head with his finger.

She covered her mouth with her hand so she wouldn’t giggle out loud. All of a sudden she was the floozy mistress in the middle of Daniel’s workday, and he was her extracurricular activity.

She knew their session had to come to an end now so they could follow their clients to rehearsal. But she enjoyed a few more minutes of Daniel’s dark eyes roving up and down her body while he listened to Victor, his white shirt rumpled, his collar askew, his dark hair as wild as she’d ever seen it.

“It’s not something we can discuss over the phone?” He ran his hand back through his hair, mussing it further. “No, I’m in Vegas with another client this week—”

Wendy pointed to herself and mouthed, “Me?”

Daniel grinned at her. Ah, how she loved those cheekbones.

“—but I’ll come to L.A. as soon as I can. Yes. Call my office if they can help you with anything in the
meantime.” He wrapped up the call and set the phone down. “He’s either dying or he needs advice on choosing a brand of dishwashing detergent,” he told Wendy. “Good actor, though.” He glanced at his watch.

“Don’t tell me,” Wendy said. “Rain check?”

He nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

“How sorry
are
you?”

With a devilish grin, he closed the space between them, crawled onto the bed, roughly moved the cup of her bra aside, and took her nipple into his mouth. Releasing her, he murmured, “Pretty . . . ” He circled her breast with his tongue. “ . . . damn . . . ” He centered on her nipple again and suckled her until she cried out with pleasure. “ . . . sorry,” he sighed, pulling her bra cup back into place.

Half standing, he slid both their phones from the desk and offered his to her. “Trade?”

They spent a few minutes side by side on the bed, thumbing through each other’s phones, deleting the dirty pictures.

“Oh man,” he murmured, “it’s a real shame to trash this one.” He showed it to her.

She looked, blushed, and went back to deleting the photos on his phone. She’d reached the end of her porn shots, apparently, because the next photo was of Daniel scowling next to a giddy-looking young brunette in expensive sunglasses. Only their heads were in the shot, close-up, as if the girl had held the phone at arm’s length and taken the picture herself. Wendy showed it to him. “Is this your sister?”

He glanced at it and smiled. “Yeah.” He went back to perusing her phone.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to browse your photos. I didn’t realize I was done deleting.”

“You can look,” he said.

So, curious, she swiped the screen. The next photo back in time was a scene she recognized: the view of the street from a front room of the Beverly Hilton. The next view was familiar, too: Chicago. And the next: San Francisco. She said, “You take a lot of pictures from your hotel rooms.”

“Wishful thinking, I guess. I always want to see the sights in cities where I’m working. I never have time. I take a picture of what I can’t have.” He held out her phone. She accepted it and gave him his. He took it from her and snapped her picture.

She blinked against the afterimage of the unexpected flash. “Delete that. I’m dishabille.”

He laughed heartily. “You’re more than dishabille. That’s not clear in the picture, though.” He held the phone up for her to see.

True, her hair spilled over her shoulders and down her chest, hiding her bare skin. But she still didn’t recognize herself. The girl in the picture looked like a dazed blonde who’d just been thoroughly fucked.

He pocketed his phone. “I have a confession to make. Now I really do have that over-the-top idea to save Lorelei and Colton’s careers, and yours.”

“Which you got while going down on me?”

“No, while talking to Victor.”

Suddenly very, very tired, Wendy rubbed her eyes. This was smearing her carefully applied makeup, she realized too late. Being human did not mix with this job. “What’s your idea?”

“Colton and Lorelei will get married.” Daniel glanced at his watch again.

Wendy asked, “To each other?”

“Of course, to each other. We’re here in Vegas, so we can have it taken care of tonight, and it will be in the news tomorrow. We’re rehabilitating their public images, but that takes time. We need people to tune in to the awards show
tomorrow
. Do you see how getting them married would help? It will be perfect.”

“You and I have different definitions of
perfect
.”

Her words came out angrier than she intended. As Daniel watched her somberly, she realized she was letting her emotions get in the way of what ought to be a straightforward PR fix.

“I do see how it would help, actually,” she admitted. “When they’re not serious and he’s taking pictures of her ass, she seems like a ho. But if they’re married, or even if the rumor circulates, it seems like they’re intimate and playful, and the millions of people following their every move are somehow invading their privacy.”

“Exactly.”

“And they’ll tune in to the show because they want
more
.”

Daniel pointed at her. “See?”

“Or . . . ” She couldn’t believe she was actually thinking through this possibility, but she was. “That’s the best-case scenario. More likely, people will think Lorelei and Colton got plastered and decided to get married the same night they got matching portraits of George Washington tattooed on their ass cheeks.”

“Lorelei has run out of room for art on her ass cheeks,” Daniel pointed out.

“No,” Wendy said firmly, “I don’t want to marry Lorelei off to that fountain pisser just to solve a public relations problem. That is
your
modus operandi, not mine.”

“Just present the idea to her,” Daniel said. “What if she agrees?”

“She won’t agree. She has a better head on her shoulders than that.” Wendy realized as she uttered these words that they weren’t true.

“Can you think of an alternative?” Daniel challenged her.

“Fake a wedding,” Wendy said.

“That’s not going to work,” Daniel said. “We’ll have a leak. A lower-level employee at a Las Vegas wedding chapel will sacrifice a job just to nab a few thousand dollars for spilling the real story to a tabloid. But I’ll tell you what
will
work. We’ll put Lorelei and Colton at a real wedding ceremony tonight. Afterward, they and the chapel employees can swear up and down to the tabloids that it wasn’t Lorelei and Colton who got married, but another couple. Lorelei and Colton will
be telling the truth, so they’ll sound sincere. But the press won’t believe them, and we’ll get our positive PR anyway.”

“Now
that’s
perfect,” Wendy declared. She didn’t think they could pull it off, but in theory, it was perfect. “How are we supposed to find a couple getting married? Just hang around the chapel and wait for someone to drive up? People like that
definitely
won’t stay quiet for the tabloids, because they’re happy about their own wedding.”

Daniel was somber. He rolled away from her, rounded to her side of the bed, and went down on one knee on the carpet.

“No,” she said automatically.

He reached for her hand. She held it behind her back. He said, “Give it.”

“No,” she said, but he was stronger than her, and she didn’t want to struggle. He was fully clothed and she was wearing nothing but an unbuttoned shirt and a bra. She felt suddenly—and belatedly—self-conscious.

He pulled her arm from behind her back. “Wendy, will you marry me?”

“Nuh-uh.”

He tilted his head, wearing a bemused expression. “You’re taking this way too seriously. We’ll stay married on paper for a few weeks, until the awards show is done, Lorelei starts her concert tour, Colton gets his movie role, and this all blows over. Then, way before Stargazer has any reason to be suspicious, we’ll get a divorce.”

She pulled away from him and threw up her
hands—carefully, so the movement didn’t dislodge her hair from covering her. “I don’t want to get divorced.”

He still kneeled on the floor in his beautifully tailored suit pants, frowning up at her, imploring her with his dark gaze. Then his eyes fell, and he turned away to look out at the bright Strip, mirrored windows of the hotels across the street glinting in the daylight. He was calculating a new way to start a marriage rumor about Lorelei and Colton. Or maybe—just maybe—Wendy had hurt his feelings.

“Even if we agree it means nothing spiritually,” she said more gently, “it still means something legally. You could take me for half of what I’m worth.”

He turned back to her, eyes glinting, knowing she was back in the discussion. “You could take me for half of what I’m worth, too, and I’m worth a lot more than you. I’m trusting you not to do that, just like I’ve trusted you before.”

“I seem to recall that when you said you trusted me before, you followed that up with, ‘I can ruin you.’ When you tell me you can ruin me and you tell me how much money you have, you might as well go ahead and threaten to have me killed.”

“I promise I won’t have you killed. Not for this.”

She considered him on the floor in front of her. He was willing to attach himself to a woman—she assumed for the first time ever, though they should probably have that discussion—just for the sake of his job. Obviously his life didn’t hold anything else of value. He’d told her as much.

She was in the same boat. She had no personal life to speak of. She had plenty of friends, with Sarah at the top of the list, but all of them had significant others. She was the go-to person when the significant other was unavailable. She was everyone’s backup plan. This wasn’t much to forfeit, on paper, for a couple of weeks.

Because what she’d be saving was her job. A wedding rumor would truly put Lorelei over the top in terms of positive public interest. As long as she played a ferocious set of songs at the awards show, tickets for her concert tour would start to fly. Her tour would be a success. Her album sales would follow. Wendy would get her raise and her promotion. By the time anyone caught a whiff that the wedding rumor had been wrong, just as Lorelei had been insisting all along, they would be in the clear.

All Wendy had to do was suffer through a short ceremony and sign a piece of paper binding her, however temporarily, to the man waiting in front of her. A handsome, brilliant, dangerously sexy man who was exactly as lost as she was, and who had exactly as little to lose by doing this.

She said, “Yes.”