“Of course it’s real!” If he’d had facial expressions, she would have thought he was almost offended.
“Did you expense it?” she squeaked.
“No!” He hid it in his pocket, then took both her hands in his. “Everything we do from here on out is real.”
She stared at the lapel of his coat, where the ring had disappeared. She should have bought him a real ring instead of a toy. Or should she? They stood in a rushing river with their former lives as corporate enemies on one bank and a future as lovers on the other. Every time she made a decision to head one way, he turned in the opposite direction.
“Wendy,” he said. “Are you still with me?”
She nodded.
He watched her for a moment more, looking for something in her eyes. Whether he found it or not, she had no idea, but he let her hands go. “Now we need to tell Lorelei and Colton that we’re getting married and we want them to be witnesses. Remind Lorelei we work for rival companies and we have to keep it secret. That way, she won’t squeal in the middle of the party.”
“I know,” Wendy said. “We went over this before.”
“Just making sure.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “You don’t look well.”
Right. She needed to get over her sentimental squeamishness. She still had a job to do.
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. “See you at the limo.”
* * *
“Would you like to say a few words?” Elvis asked Wendy.
She glanced at him, then over his shoulders at the massive display of plastic calla lilies on the dais where they stood. Daniel waited in front of her.
Lorelei and Colton watched from the red carpet that stretched down the aisle of the tiny chapel, standing at a noticeable distance from each other. She thought she’d seen them having an argument at the party. She’d been afraid Lorelei or Colton would storm out of the club, and she’d hurried over to placate them. But they’d insisted everything was fine.
The aisle stretched past four rows of empty pews to the chapel doors. There were no windows for photographers to take pictures through, thank God, or all this would have been for nothing. There were windows above the doors, though. Both bodyguards and Colton’s driver waited outside, guarding their privacy from the paparazzi. Their cigarette smoke curled behind the glass.
No, Wendy thought. She didn’t want to say a few words at her own wedding. She just wanted to get this over with.
But Daniel looked haggard at the end of his fourth long night in a row, with the purple bruise not quite faded under one eye, and oh so handsome. She probably shouldn’t, but she did have something to say to him.
“Daniel,” she began.
His eyes widened at her, warning her not to make a joke and give them away.
She wanted to tell him to chillax. Instead, she said, “This year, I’ve traveled to Los Angeles, Seattle, Paris, and Rome to assist the rich and famous with their problems. This month I’ve resurrected the career of Satan and his band, and I’ve tried and failed to stop a rock princess from having her bare buttocks posted online.”
Wendy was interrupted by a farting noise. She, Daniel, and Elvis all looked toward the red carpet. Lorelei’s tongue was sticking out. She was blowing Wendy a gentle raspberry.
Wendy turned back to Daniel. “And yet I can unequivocally say that the most interesting time of my whole life has been the time I’ve spent with you.”
She expected his face to remain unchanged, even if his emotion actually went from patient to exasperated. To her astonishment, she detected a movement in his jaw, as if she’d elicited an actual emotion so strong that it made his face move—almost into a facial expression. She still couldn’t tell which one.
As she was contemplating this, Elvis turned to Daniel. She thought Elvis would have to remind Daniel that he was being asked to say a few words at his own wedding. She hoped not, because if Daniel seemed too bored, Lorelei and Colton might suspect the whole wedding was a publicity ploy.
To her surprise, Daniel said, “Wendy,” looking straight at her. “When you make me laugh, I feel like I’m finally alive again.”
His expression could have been anything. Anger? Fear? Love? This last thought made tears form at the corners of her eyes. To keep herself from crying, she stuck out her bottom lip in fake sympathy for him.
He laughed. There in the middle of their cheeseball wedding, he genuinely laughed with the corners of his dark eyes crinkling. He stepped forward and took her hand.
Elvis moved forward through the ceremony. Wendy watched Daniel grinning at her. Her hand tingled where her palm met his. The tingle spread warmly up her arm and across her chest.
“Do you have any vows?” Elvis asked next.
Daniel cut his eyes toward Elvis, then back toward Wendy, and his lips parted. He was about to make up an excuse. Or, worse, a vow he didn’t mean.
Wendy cut him off. “Better not,” she said. “After all, it’s Vegas.”
This time everyone laughed, but Daniel’s eyes looked worried. He squeezed her hand as if to give them both the strength to get through the rest of this.
Elvis said, “Then, by the power vested in me by the state of Nevada, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Wendy went cold. She actually felt all the blood draining out of her brain, and she thought she might faint. She was calculating how that rumor would spread through the tabloids, and whether it would get warped into good publicity or bad publicity for Lorelei, when Daniel stepped forward and reached one stable hand around the small of her back.
“You may—” Elvis said.
Daniel pushed his other hand into her hair.
“—kiss the—”
Daniel eased her backward. His dark eyes met her eyes for a moment before his lips found hers.
He kissed her deeply, but she felt more than the kiss. She felt her whole body melting into his.
It was going to be really bad when they got divorced.
Lorelei and Colton burst into applause and wolf whistles. High-class. But it made Wendy happy, and when Daniel finally broke the kiss and stood her up straight, he was laughing again.
Mission accomplished.
* * *
In the wee hours of the morning, when most of the party guests had stumbled down to the casino to lose some money before finally making it back to their hotel rooms, and the pounding music had shut down, Lorelei swayed her way across the club to bring Wendy a flute of champagne. “To you,” she said, tapping Wendy’s glass with her own.
Wendy took a long sip. She needed it.
But then she said, “No, to you. I didn’t expect the press to ask you about my wedding. I didn’t prep you, but you handled it exactly right. You denied you got married, but you never said you’d been to your PR rep’s wedding, so you didn’t throw me to the wolves. I’m proud of you!”
“You told me not to admit I was friends with anybody who wasn’t famous,” Lorelei said.
“I did tell you that, but I didn’t expect you to remember it when you were under pressure.” Wendy leaned back against the wall, satisfied. “My little chickadee has flown away. You don’t need me anymore.”
Lorelei gasped. “No! You’re quitting?”
“Of course not! I couldn’t quit anyway. Your contract is with Stargazer. I could quit the company, but I couldn’t quit you. They’d just send someone else. I’m saying your crisis is over.”
“Well, I might let you go back home now. But I still want you to handle stuff for me when it comes up.” Lorelei pointed her flute at Wendy. “And when there’s an event like this, I want you to come party with me.”
“Even if I’m the downer?”
“Especially if you’re the downer. I had a lot of fun with you this week. I know you said I’m not supposed to be friends with bodyguards and hairdressers and people like that, but I feel like you and I are friends, and not just because I’m paying you.”
“I feel like that, too,” Wendy said honestly. “I’ve felt like that ever since the first morning when I heard you sing. I knew you were special. And I already thought you had killer taste in shoes. Come here, pretty girl.”
They hugged each other, careful not to spill their champagne. Wendy rubbed Lorelei’s bare arm and was surprised to feel chill bumps. She was a real person, of course—Wendy’s job was all about helping the stars when they turned up human—but it still came as a little shock when Lorelei looked so flawless.
Wendy let her go. “Let’s talk about tomorrow, because we’ll both be so busy that we might lose track of each other. Daniel and I have arranged for you and your whole posse to ride back to Los Angeles with Colton in his limo. You’ll hop in and be off the instant the show is over.”
“Really?” Lorelei complained. “What a bummer!”
Wendy shook her head firmly. “Sorry. Right now, during the week with the city kind of dead, it’s reasonably safe for you to go out. After the show on Friday night, when so many extra people have been pumped into town for the awards show and the weekend, and when they’ve seen your awesome act onstage, you won’t be able to go anywhere. You had a great party tonight. Know beforehand that you’ll spend tomorrow night in the limo, sipping more champagne. When you get to L.A., they’ll drop you at home, and you’ll sleep until Tuesday.”
“The paparazzi will be camped outside my house when I get there,” Lorelei griped. “They’ll see me getting out of Colton’s limo, and they’ll think we really did get married. You know, some tabloids don’t like him and think he’s overconfident. They call him Colton Fart.”
“That,” Wendy said, “is my husband’s problem.”
“I don’t know,” Lorelei said. “Until they figure out we really didn’t get married, do you think they’ll call me Lorelei Fart?”
“Maybe,” Wendy acknowledged, “but it’s cute. Colton Fart is not cute. Colton sounds as big as mountains, and his fart would be powerful. Lorelei Fart sounds like a baby passing gas, or a little fairy.”
Lorelei laughed. “Why do I ask you stuff?”
Wendy yawned. “I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’ll ride with Colton back to L.A.,” Lorelei said, tilting a little on her high heels. Wendy could tell she would need to have this whole conversation again with the wardrobe mistress.
“Now you’re going to bed, right?” Wendy checked. She didn’t have to add that she wanted Lorelei to go to bed alone, without Colton. He’d left a few minutes before with his bodyguard and driver. Wendy thought again that something had gone wrong between him and Lorelei. But after all, this was what Wendy had wanted for Lorelei: to pretend to fall in love, not actually do it. Actually doing it was Wendy’s mistake alone.
“Promise me you won’t get up until you need to go to the theater tomorrow for the show,” Wendy said. “I’ll come wake you.”
“Okay,” Lorelei said. “What are you doing now? You’re going to bed, too, finally, right? With Daniel.” She gave Wendy an exaggerated wink.
“Ha,” Wendy said, unable to call up enough mirth. “Not like you mean. Daniel told me he has to get up in three hours for a breakfast appointment. I am like, screw that. I’m sleeping for four hours before I go back to work.”
It was just as well. She wasn’t sure whether they were supposed to have a wedding night or not. The inevitable awkward scene was more than she could handle, dead as she felt.
Still, she found herself touching the strangely heavy ring on her finger and searching the shadows of the club for Daniel. He’d sent Colton to bed with other members of his entourage so he could wait for her . . . and there he was at the long, dark bar, sipping from a tumbler and watching her over the rim.
“But after the awards show tomorrow night”—Lorelei grinned—“you and Daniel are going to bed.”
16
Rumors are running rampant that last night, embattled exes Colton Farr and Lorelei Vogel took a break from her twenty-first-and-a-half birthday party at posh club Wet Dream to get hitched at a Las Vegas chapel. Farr acknowledges he and Vogel are back together but has vehemently denied they are married.
We caught up with Vogel after she returned to her party. She elaborated when we asked whether the wedding was genuine or a stunt. “Two dear friends of ours did get married,” she told us. “The wedding wasn’t staged for publicity. If you’d been there, you would have known this was true. It was only a Vegas quickie marriage, but it was the most romantic wedding I’ve ever been to. I have never seen two people more in love.”
Fond words about that mystery couple—or perhaps coy words about herself and Farr?
Farr will emcee the Hot Choice Awards televised live tonight at 8 p.m. (EDT), and Vogel’s newly formed band will be the featured musical guest.
* * *
Daniel didn’t have time for his morning routine of room service breakfast and online perusal of what he was missing in politics. But as he carefully unlocked the door so he wouldn’t wake Wendy and stepped into the hall, the national newspaper was waiting. He quietly closed the door behind him and turned to the entertainment section. The little article about Colton and Lorelei was one of the front-page blurbs.
Daniel wanted to burst back into the room, shake Wendy awake, and give her a huge hug with the news. She would likely kill him, though, if she felt like he’d felt when his alarm went off.
He plastered the paper against the wall and pulled his pen from his coat. Outlining the blurb with a heart, he scribbled in the margin, “Job saved! Great work!” He snuck back into the room and set the paper next to her laptop, where she would see it first thing. With a final long look back at her, just the golden mess of her hair visible above the covers, he shut the door.