As he did this, he realized for the first time how vulnerable they were. The exit sign over the doorway behind him and a faint glow around the corner from the lobby were the only lights preventing the room from plunging into blackness. The legs of the statues around them were visible. Beyond them, anyone might be lurking.
A new surge of adrenaline rushed through him. He should get her out of there, but he was afraid to move her. He would protect her if anyone came at them from the shadows.
“I think the phone is long gone,” Wendy said dismally. “That’s what the guy wanted. He took it from me before he hit me.”
“Well, if what he’s after is to sell the picture of Lorelei, that might be hard for him. I’m sure Colton has security on his phone, so someone would have to enter a numeric code to access his files.” Daniel was not actually sure of this at all. Colton was turning out to be that kind of celebrity.
“He probably does,” Wendy acknowledged, “but the security block hadn’t kicked in when I came back here to delete the photo. That’s why I was in such a hurry. If the guy who hit me e-mailed the picture to himself right away, it’s his. It’ll be on the tabloid websites by tomorrow night.” She gave a shuddering sigh, bolstering herself. “Maybe that won’t happen.”
“Maybe not,” Daniel lied. “Maybe it was just a robbery. If the guy stole your wallet, he probably doesn’t even know whose pictures he has on the phone.” He reached way out to retrieve Wendy’s purse by the strap.
Wendy’s eyes widened. As Daniel held her purse for her and she fished inside, she muttered, “Just what I need, for some jackass to be passing himself off as Wendy Mann and charging a hundred thousand casino chips on my Stargazer credit card. Archie would send someone to break my legs.” She opened her wallet and fumbled with the contents. Daniel noticed that her fingers shook as she slid out one card after another and slid them back. “Driver’s license, Stargazer card, my card. I wouldn’t vouch for my shoe store card and stuff like that, but the important stuff is here.”
“Money?” Daniel asked.
“I didn’t have much cash. I’ve bribed a lot of people in the past twenty-four hours.” She peeked in the long compartment for her bills. “Still here. Oh—nope, my phone’s still here, too, thank God.”
“Then just relax.” He moved her purse aside. “Don’t think about it anymore. The ambulance will be here soon, and I’ll go with you.”
“No!” she tried to struggle up again.
Daniel held her down. “Stop.”
“Daniel, seriously, please. You have to stay here and make sure everything gets taken care of.”
“I already sent Colton and Lorelei to bed.”
“Not together,” Wendy insisted.
“Not together,” Daniel agreed. “And I can’t let you go alone to the hospital.”
“Yes, you can.”
“What if that guy comes after you?”
She hesitated as if thinking of that herself. But then she said, “He won’t. He got what he wanted.”
“If all he wanted was Colton’s phone, yeah. That sounds like business. But he’s cut your hair twice. That sounds personal. And he could be anybody. Let me go with you until we figure it out.”
“I need you to stay here and protect my job, not me. I would rather get attacked again than lose my job.”
He eyed her. “Seriously? That’s some job.”
She closed her eyes and rolled her head to one side on his thigh. He caught her wrist again. Her pulse had sped up.
Her soft voice sent a vibration through his thigh as she said, “Remember that last paper for Dr. Benson, the one that won you the Clarkson Prize?”
He remembered, but he said nothing. He didn’t want to upset her more.
“Of course you don’t remember,” she grumbled. “It was just another victory for you. I worked forty hours on that one paper, Daniel, making sure all my research was bulletproof. I didn’t sleep for the last two nights and probably suffered brain damage just to turn a perfect paper in.”
Daniel had worked sixty hours on that paper, even traveling by train to Philadelphia one afternoon to interview the president of an image management firm, a friend of his father’s, because he was so terrified that Wendy would beat him out for the Clarkson Prize and his father would be ashamed of him.
“You still beat me,” Wendy went on, “and you were the celebrated graduate at the top of the class. But since you didn’t want a job at Stargazer anyway, I lucked out and snagged it. I’m not giving up that job now. Not after six years of a ridiculous workload. Not just because of a bump on the head. Please, Daniel, please stay here.”
She was getting so agitated that he really did think it would be better for her to go alone. The decision would torture him, though. In his mind he would be with her in those bright, cold rooms. “If they let you out of the hospital tonight,” he said, “can I stay in your room with you? Or you stay with me. I have a suite. You can sleep on the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
She hesitated. “You don’t have to take care of me.”
“If something like this happened to me when I was out on assignment, I would want a friend,” he said truthfully.
She sighed a long sigh. “Okay. Thank you. I’ll take your couch. But I’m going to remind you that you said this if you get hit in the head.”
“Fair enough.” He wrote his room number on her palm and slipped his extra key into her purse. “Do you want me to get some things from your room and bring them up?”
“Oh, man, would you? Yes, take my extra key. Promise you won’t look at the mess. I guess that’s impossible.” She closed her eyes and groaned softly. “You can’t let Lorelei know anything about this, okay? If she asks, some random woman was attacked in the back hall, not me.”
“Why not? Don’t you think she’s going to find out?”
“Not if you don’t tell her. She’s got a lot of important performances on her mind right now, and I’m supposed to be her rock. Nothing can happen to me.”
He wished that were true. Gently he stroked her hair away from her eyes. He felt the warmth of her body through his slacks. Every instinct told him to pull her closer and never let her go.
But he did let her go. At first he braced himself, thinking the noises from the depths of the exhibit might be the bad guy coming back, but it was only the paramedics weaving with a gurney around the wax statues. Reluctantly he moved out from under her. The paramedics worked over her on the floor, then lifted her onto a stretcher. He felt another wave of misgiving as they hovered over her. Now that he wasn’t touching her, she seemed to go limp. She didn’t look at him again. Though there was nothing for him to do, he stood there watching until they wheeled her out and disappeared behind the statues.
As he walked back into the party, Daniel gazed around at the drunken stars and hangers-on, laughing or arguing, wondering if any of them had hurt Wendy. But he suspected the guy was long gone. And the party was closing down. On Wendy’s behalf, he made sure there were no issues with the caterer or the museum. The museum’s administrators didn’t mind the notoriety that the mooning incident might bring them. To their credit, they seemed more concerned that someone had been attacked in an exhibit room. Daniel stayed to tell the police what he knew, simultaneously wrangling calls between Colton and his phone company to shut down access to his electronic files.
Finally Daniel hailed a taxi in the deserted street. After a quick call to Colton’s bodyguard to make sure Colton and Lorelei had been deposited safely, he texted Wendy:
They’re in bed. I’m coming to the hospital.
A minute later he got a response:
No, I’m on the way to the hotel. I’ll see you there. No concussion.
He breathed a huge sigh of relief at that news. His mind had been spinning with his plan of attack, offensive moves he could make to head off Lorelei’s photo going viral and the inevitable backlash against Colton. But as soon as he saw Wendy’s text, he stopped caring about work. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but his last glimpse at her being wheeled out between the replicas of stars.
At the hotel, he went straight to her room to gather her things for the night. His first horrified thought was that the place had been ransacked, possibly by the same person who’d hit her. It looked like several fashionable women had exploded. But as he carefully stepped around the outer edges of the piles, he realized there was some bizarre order to it all, and this was Wendy’s notion of unpacking. It rather resembled her logic. It seemed rude to rifle through it—though it was rifled already—so he just repacked everything, wishing he had more time to examine the bunny ears and cottontail, and headed for his own room.
As he exited the elevator, he spotted her in the hall in front of him. “Wendy,” he called softly, because, though Vegas, it was three in the morning.
She turned and stopped to wait for him. She was a small woman, but she’d never looked smaller than in this endless corridor with high ceilings. Her face was pale as paper.
When he reached her, he let go of the handle of her suitcase and encircled her in his arms.
She didn’t protest. It was only after he’d initiated the hug that he wondered what it meant, and what she must think of him now.
He didn’t have a clear view of the wound on the back of her head, but he could see a new pink streak down the middle of her hair.
He let her go and gently pressed her toward his room. “Did they give you good painkillers?”
“Not even.” She sounded bone-tired. “They gave me over-the-counter stuff. They said anything stronger could mask symptoms that come up later. You’re supposed to watch me, and if I forget what year it is or I fall down, you’re supposed to take me back to the hospital.”
“I can do that.” He unlocked the door and held it open for her while she ducked around his arm and walked inside.
“Wow, what’s up with all the booze?” she asked, gesturing to the bar. “Do you ask the hotel for this just because it looks cool?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
She nodded. “I always wondered about PR folks with that setup. I’ve wanted to do it myself, but I don’t have the budget. I guess you have any budget you want, since you own the place.”
“Almost,” he acknowledged.
Her lips parted, and she watched him. She probably was trying to think of another probing question for him with a joke at the end, but her brain wasn’t cooperating.
“Give up,” he said. “Here’s your bag.” He set it down inside the bathroom door. “I didn’t know what you would want, so I brought it all.”
“Thanks,” she said on a sigh of relief, trudging past him. “You’re not going to ask me about the bunny ears?”
“And the bunny tail? No, I didn’t see those.” As she was closing the door behind her, he warned her, “Don’t lock it.”
She stared at him blankly, like she suspected him of something but didn’t have enough evidence to accuse him.
“I’m worried about you,” he explained. “You seem a little unsteady.”
“I am completely steady,” she said, but she gripped the doorjamb so hard that her knuckles turned white. “Okay.” She disappeared back into the bathroom. He listened, but he didn’t hear the lock turn.
He moved some of the bottles aside on the bar and set water heating in the coffeepot. After he changed clothes, he poured water over a teabag for her. Then he walked to the window and stared out at the blackness shot through with all the colors of the rainbow, glowing to entice tourists toward their own destruction. For the millionth time in the day and a half he’d been here, he wished he were one of these tourists. The only sounds that penetrated the window were the occasional siren or an especially insistent horn, but the Strip looked like it should be noisy, even through the glass.
He heard the bathroom door open. She padded out in bare feet, boxer shorts, and a threadbare T-shirt, weaving a bit.
“You take the bed,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
She shook her head. “No, Daniel—”
“I’m so tired of arguing. Please.”
She slipped under the covers on one side of the bed and propped herself up against the pillows. He brought her the cup of tea.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the mug with both hands. “What is it?”
Sitting down in the desk chair on her side of the bed and propping his feet up near the mound of her feet under the covers, he said, “It’s tea. What did you think it was?”
She took a sip, then said with her eyes closed, “I have no idea what you’ve got at the Blackstone Firm bar over there. Beverages made of ground souls and topped with fallen stars.”
“I think you’re tasting the rose hips.”
She snorted, which turned into a short whine. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts my head.”
“Did a detective interview you at the hospital?” he asked.
“Yes. His name was Detective Butkus. I asked him if he made that up so people who’d been hit in the head would remember it later. He laughed uncomfortably.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t tell him anything helpful. I felt like a dork.”
“I talked to the police when they came to the museum,” Daniel said. “They didn’t find Colton’s phone, but they did find what they think the guy used to hit you. It was the butt of a long-barreled Colt .45 from a statue of Wyatt Earp. They didn’t seem optimistic about catching the guy, though. I told them he’d taken a hunk of your hair, and that he’d done the same thing at the casino bar. They said he’s probably an overzealous photographer who took a shine to you.