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.
He was already in the elevator when he began to have second thoughts. A heart? He’d encircled the blurb with a heart? He hadn’t done something that dorky since his punk band dedicated a song to a girl he liked who promptly walked out of the club in response. And Job saved! Great work! was something he would say to one of his employees, not his wife.
He entertained the thought of going back to the room and retrieving the paper before she could see it, like a total loser. Glancing at his watch, he saw that would make him late for breakfast with a second movie producer interested in having Colton audition. He tried to get his head back into work and let Wendy go.
Only he couldn’t. All through his meal with the producer, he thought about the way her hair had spun golden across the pillows. When their meeting ended, he found she’d texted him in response to the newspaper article—Yay!!!!—and he stared at one word and four exclamation points for a long time, trying and failing to come up with something clever to text back. For the next few hours, as he met with reporters gathered at the theater to cover the awards show, he remembered his night with her, how he’d spent his scant three hours of sleep spooning her with his hands underneath her T-shirt, on her br**sts, and she had folded her hands possessively over his. Finally, when he got a free moment an hour before the awards show began, he called her.