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.”
15
Great,” Daniel said on an exhalation, which sounded like relief. He nudged Wendy’s laptop aside and opened his own on the desk. “Let me see what I can set up before I go.”
Now that his back was turned and the clicks of his keyboard filled the silence, Wendy slid off the bed. She buttoned her blouse, which seemed awfully wrinkled, but she had no time to re-iron. Daniel wasn’t the only one with a busy afternoon. She found her skirt and shimmied into it, then searched the floor for her panties. Their whereabouts were not immediately apparent. She felt kind of stupid about this. A lady should always know where her underwear was.
She looked up at Daniel. He was rising from the chair to pull her panties out of his pocket. He held them out to her.
She took the wad of silk. “You had my panties in your pocket,” she complained, half accusing, half teasing.
“Sorry.”
“Were you going to give them back?”
He gave her a brilliant smile. “Maybe.”
She couldn’t help grinning back at him. For that brief moment, the complications and jealousies between them fell away, as they did every so often, as if their relationship were meant to be.
Then he turned back to his laptop, and she wiggled into her panties.
“This is a problem,” he called. “All the wedding chapels close at midnight or so. I had a four a.m., end-of-the-night wedding in mind.”
“That would be good, but this is better,” Wendy said to the mirror over the dresser as she ran a brush through her hair and repinned the bun hiding her missing locks. “Lorelei is supposed to cut her birthday cake at midnight. We’ll schedule the wedding for eleven thirty. Around eleven we’ll spring the whole thing on her and Colton. We’ll ask them to be our witnesses, and we’ll all take Colton’s limo to the chapel. The paparazzi will see them leaving the casino and go wild. Some of them will follow the limo straight to the chapel.”
Daniel spun in his chair to beam at her. “Right!”
“We’ll get lots more attention that way than if we do it in the wee hours,” Wendy went on. “Some photographers will have given up and gone to bed by four, but this will be prime time. Then we’ll skate back into the casino just in time for Lorelei’s cake cutting. If we’re fashionably late, so much the better.”
“Colton and Lorelei will act innocent,” Daniel said, “because they will be. For once. But the tabloids will assume they got married on her big day of celebration, right before their TV reunion, and they’re just being coy about it. Wow.” He turned back to the laptop and resumed typing. “We may be too good at this.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
He ignored that comment. “There’s no blood test or waiting period, but we do both have to apply for a marriage license. Can you meet me at the county clerk’s office at five?”
“It’s going to be tight.” She retrieved her phone from the bed and thumbed through her schedule. “I have to get changed for the party fairly early so I can supervise. There is to be absolutely no penis cake.”