“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 p**n 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 f**ked.
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.”