In front of Wendy, a door opened in the dark velvet wall as the bouncer admitted someone from the outer club. Against the backdrop of the crowd pressing around him, Daniel was tall and dark, face chiseled into stone, black hair styled perfectly as if she’d never tousled it. He sauntered along the soft wall, scoping out the joint. Then he looked down at his cell phone. The screen lit his face in the black room, highlighting the sharp lines of his high cheekbones and his narrowed eyes. He glanced up at her. Realized he’d been busted looking at her. Glanced back down.
Not so fast. Wendy rushed across the club before he could escape, only slowing as she stepped around the last dancer so Daniel might not notice he was being ambushed. Wrong. He watched her unabashedly now with a look that said both of them knew exactly what was going on but neither was ready to admit it. She grinned brilliantly and stepped right up to his shoulder. He leaned down. She said in her most innocent bimbo tone, “Hi! I’m glad you got into the party after all.”
“I’m so excited,” he said, sounding ironically bored. “I’ve never been to a celebrity party before.”
His voice in her ear sent electricity straight through her. They smiled at each other again, his expression visibly forced, hers genuine. She wanted to laugh out loud at his joke, but showing her appreciation would give him an advantage over her. She wished she could take her phone out right there and text Sarah, Daniel Blackstone makes me feel all funny inside, because making fun of herself would take some of the edge off.
As it was, she just inched a bit closer to him against the padded velvet and pretended to watch the crowd with him in companionable silence. She longed to make him laugh again. Then they’d definitely look like they were together. She was pretty sure Daniel didn’t go around laughing in his daily conversations with Colton Farr and his ilk.
However, with Daniel standing so close to her, impeccably dressed, dark eyes casually roving across the dancers in front of them like he owned the place, her sense of humor failed her. She felt like she was in ninth grade and a hot senior stood next to her in the lunchroom line. Between arms and legs flailing in the strobe lights, she spotted Colton staring at them, and she went cold in the sweaty room. Now was the time to look like she was flirting with Daniel, now now now, and her brain was a blank. She did the next best thing. She put her hand down by her side, slightly behind Daniel. Then she brought her hand closer to him, closer.
Daniel looked over at her. Her heart skipped a beat as he leaned down and cupped his hand around her ear. “Why are you touching my ass?” He backed away from her to let her respond, but he was watching her reproachfully.
Damn it! But whispering to each other also made it look like they were lovers. She stood on her tiptoes and said, “I beg your pardon. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. You have a very sensitive ass.”
He stared at her. She’d let him off the hook a few minutes before when he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge his black eye, but he wasn’t going to give her the same courtesy.
She decided to come clean with him, since he saw through every tactic she tried anyway. She took him lightly by the elbow and turned him until they both faced the wall and could talk privately in their own bubble.
She kept one hand down, though. Ideally Colton across the room would think she was touching Daniel intimately as she spoke in his ear. “Here’s the thing. I know you said you’re here on vacation, but I’ve begun to suspect you’re working with Colton Farr.”
“Why would you think that?” Daniel asked without bothering to feign surprise.
“Lorelei Vogel is telling the whole world that Colton gave his PR guy a black eye.”
“What black eye?” Daniel asked flatly.
“Don’t worry. It’s not noticeable at all. I detected it only because of my super-honed senses as a trained PR professional.”
Daniel nodded. “Why are you keeping tabs on Lorelei Vogel?”
Wendy batted her eyes at him. “Wouldn’t this conversation be easier if we both let our guards down and talked like we’re not insane? Ready? One, two, three.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She noted that he glanced at her cl**vage as her br**sts rose and fell. His expression never changed.
“Is this what you look like when your guard is down?” she asked him.
“Yes. Does this have something to do with why you’re still touching my ass?”
She scowled at him. He raised his eyebrows in response. He was going to make this as difficult as possible for her. She needed to go into a longer explanation than she could manage while they shouted into each other’s ears, standing against the quilted wall.
“Come with me.” Holding his gaze, she reached for his hand. There was a chance he would jerk it away, even make a production of rejecting her in public. They were enemies, after all. But she counted on the importance he laid on decorum. He wouldn’t pull away from her, for the same reason he hadn’t mauled Colton when Colton hit him.
Without looking—instinctively, it seemed—Daniel put out his hand to connect with hers. She felt a shock of awareness at his warm touch. She couldn’t see his pupils in the shadowy room, and doubted if she could have seen them anyway because his eyes were so dark, but her heart sped up at the idea that his pupils dilated as his body reacted to her touch. She stared into his black eyes and lost herself.
Nonsense. She jerked him into motion a little harder than necessary and led him between and around dancers, back to the corner bench where she’d found privacy and relative quiet to text Sarah before. As he slid around the far end of the cocktail table in front of them, she quickly sat and adjusted herself so that her skirt rode higher on her thighs than usual, the neckline of her blouse was pulled low, and her long hair fluffed around her shoulders. This way, Lorelei or Colton, glancing over, would assume she was having a sexy confab with her lover Daniel, whether Daniel played along or not.
It seemed that he would not. Eyeing her warily, he said, “Spill it, Mann. You’ve changed your tack in the last half hour. What happened?”
She glanced out at the crowd and saw nobody watching them. But she turned her chin toward the wall just in case, so her lips couldn’t be read. “Colton is coming on to me,” she said. “I can’t have that.”
“Why didn’t you tell him to f**k off?” Daniel spoke so forcefully and looked so concerned that she felt a rush of the same fight-or-flight reaction she’d had when she first saw Colton here in the club, as if she really should consider this threat to be serious.
She swallowed her explanation: her job security was dicey, and she couldn’t afford more trouble. Daniel wouldn’t understand that. He was about to own the Blackstone Firm.
She said simply, “I can’t state my case that forcefully right now. Colton was impervious to all my normal attempts at being obnoxious and repulsive. So I used the tools that were presented to me. He assumed you and I were together, and I jumped on it.”
Daniel’s mouth opened. He wasn’t gaping at her in shock, exactly. He never gaped. She was beginning to question whether an easily labeled emotion ever passed across his face at all. But his lips parted and his jaw shifted to one side, which she read as outrage. She wasn’t sure whether he was more outraged at Colton for coming on to her, or at her for dragging Daniel into it.
The next thing he said didn’t make his feelings any clearer. “You need to state in no uncertain terms to Colton that, for reasons of professionalism, you’re not interested.”
Wendy nodded. “He’s an actor who pisses in fountains. He understands all about professionalism. I think you got me into this mess, anyway. Did you mention me to Colton before I got here?”
“I’d heard Stargazer was sending someone to help Lorelei,” Daniel admitted. “I discussed you as one of several possibilities. Why?”
“Did you describe me as some sort of dominatrix?”
He blinked at her. “Maybe.”
She laughed. “Really? Is that my reputation?”
He gave her the smallest smile. “Yes.”
“I guess that’s kind of cool.”
“If you say so.”
“I guess that’s Colton’s type. Lorelei is a dominatrix in training, like a fluffy kitten with a Taser.”
There! She thought she saw it for a split second: Daniel laughing. Almost laughing, but as soon as one corner of his mouth turned up, he regained control and turned his face impassive again.
Disappointed, she went on, “You don’t really want me hooking up with your client, do you? I would totally pervert him. Besides, it would be bad PR. That cougar story only sells to one demographic: the cougars themselves. The rest of the public just thinks it’s gross.”
“You’re—” Daniel said on a laugh. He cleared his throat, collected himself, and started again. “You’re twenty-eight years old, aren’t you? Not a cougar by any stretch of the imagination. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell him to stop hounding you.”
“You don’t know yet whether he’ll follow your orders. I can’t take that chance. Besides, you’ve already opened the can of worms. In Lorelei’s mind, without you, I’m available and therefore a threat. Dating you is the only way I can take the can of worms off the shelf. I’m really sorry, Daniel, but I’m going to have to insist that you help me. You got me into this mess. You have to get me out.”
“By acting like your boyfriend?” Daniel’s face was utterly blank.
She acknowledged him with a grim nod. “Here where Colton and Lorelei can see.”
His eyes slid away from her to the crowd undulating before them in the lush darkness. He seemed to be looking for Colton and considering his options.
And Wendy was fed up. She was out of options, because of Daniel. “I don’t think you quite understand,” she said. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”
This tactic worked on a lot of people. It had even worked on the lead singer of Darkness Fallz up until he nearly had her fired. It didn’t seem to work on Daniel. He simply stared at her coldly.
She tried to hold on to her own steely gaze. But inside she was cowering. She was that eighteen-year-old girl all over again, daring to leave her home state and her controlling boyfriend behind to pursue her dream, only to have him track her down and hurt her.
“Do you still have that crick in your neck from the flight?” Daniel asked. “Turn around.” He put his hands on her shoulders and started to turn her.
Maybe he was going to help her after all—although a neck rub wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind. She wasn’t sure how convinced Colton and Lorelei would be that Daniel and Wendy were lovers just because he worked the kink out of her neck, but it was better than nothing. She turned away from him, bent her head, and pulled her hair forward.
He smoothed his hands along her skin and across the shoulders of her blouse. Then his lips were at her ear. “My God, why are you so tense?”
She gave the smallest shrug. She’d nearly been fired today, she had an impossible job to do or else she would be fired tomorrow, and the hottest guy on earth was touching her. No stress there.
“Relax, Wendy,” he whispered. “It won’t look like we’re lovers if you don’t let go.”
With a shiver of pleasure at his voice, she took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and softened under his hands, as instructed.
She tried to suppress her gasp of surprise and pleasure as his hot fingers pressed into her shoulder muscles. Now she wasn’t so worried that they wouldn’t look like lovers. For her at least, this was the sexiest event of the past six months, since her last night with an on-again, off-again boyfriend. She felt self-consciously like a neglected dog rolling over happily for anyone who would rub his belly. The longer Daniel’s hands deftly moved up and down her spine and along her shoulders, the more boneless she became.
“Better?” he growled as he took his hands away.
She nodded a little, so sorry the session was over, but hopeful it had been enough to stave off Colton for a few days. Though a kiss would have been better . . .
She was just telling herself not to go there, not to entertain the possibility, because she was going to be disappointed. But as she faced Daniel, he was looking at her mouth.
The beat of the music, the volume, the frenzy of it, seemed to escalate with her heartbeat as he bent toward her. But he advanced lazily, like a hot southern afternoon. They were a special effect in a film, moving in slow motion, just the two of them, while their surroundings whirled.
She wouldn’t falter. She wouldn’t look away shyly. She’d asked him for this. She held his gaze as his hand moved down her back and underneath her blouse. It was all she could do to keep from shuddering with anticipation now that the silk didn’t separate them. His skin met her skin as he bent closer over her. His lips touched hers.
She froze against him, simultaneously telling herself she shouldn’t be freezing. That was something she would do if she thought he was unattractive. She didn’t want him to get that impression. It wasn’t true at all. Or, it was something she would do if she found him extremely attractive and was afraid of letting him know. That was true, and she didn’t want to give him that impression, either.
These panicked thoughts flashed through her brain in about two seconds, and then hormones took over as his tongue swept inside her mouth. She forgot what impression she was trying to give him or why as she responded to his kiss, opening for him. She pressed her hands against his crisp white shirt.
He shifted his solid arm up her back, holding her there, and wove the fingers of his other hand into her hair. His tongue slipped past her teeth and massaged inside her mouth.