She paused beside a bank of giddy slot machines, unable to go on. She took a few shuddering breaths, trying to collect herself before she broke down in tears in public. PR professionals did not make scenes. Not over their own unimportant lives, especially.
Her skin turned to fire as a sharp point jabbed through her blouse and into her side. “It’s Rick,” a voice growled in her ear. “Remember me?” He wrapped his arm around her waist. “Don’t scream. I’ve got a knife and I will gut your pretty belly. We’re going to take some pictures.”
18
Daniel moved from the side of the Eiffel Tower overlooking the Strip to the side with the dull view of concrete suburbia stretching toward brown mountains, because it matched his mood. His heart had been racing ever since Wendy mentioned moving to L.A., which had shocked him into blind anger. She couldn’t leave New York. She just couldn’t. Couples had fun together all the time and then let each other go because a relationship would be inconvenient. People in love did not let each other go.
Daniel knew this. He’d known it when he asked Wendy to marry him. He’d known it when he asked for a honeymoon. He’d known it when he picked this fight with her, but in the back of his mind he’d been hoping she would be the one to cave so he wouldn’t have to deal with the inevitable.
But of course she’d been right. She’d been grasping for a solution to the problem and he’d refused to budge, but the solution was obvious. He hated his job. He’d always hated it. He’d taken it because he felt guilty that his brother was dead and he was not. He’d accepted that fate for years, right up until Wendy made him laugh. Now he remembered how happy his life could be. From now on, he wouldn’t settle.
Rapping his knuckles on the iron rail to bring himself back to reality, he hurried to the elevator, half expecting to find Wendy along the way. He looked for her again in the casino and on the walk back to his hotel room. Outside the door, he rehearsed in his mind what he would say to her, more nervous than he’d ever been meeting a megastar, because this really mattered. He slid his card through the lock and cracked the door. “Wendy?”
Nothing.
Damn, he’d missed her. She must have packed the same way she unpacked, by flinging things. But as he walked in, he saw that she hadn’t touched her clothes. She hadn’t been back to the room.
He called her, texted her, and e-mailed her, increasingly alarmed when she didn’t answer. She always answered something. She must be more pissed at him than he’d ever been at her.
He didn’t have much time before he needed to leave for the airport to catch his flight to L.A., but he packed his suitcase as neatly as he could. He really needed to leave and she hadn’t shown up. Pacing, he wondered whether he should pack her suitcase for her, on the off chance she suddenly appeared and they needed to rush out. If he didn’t pack it, they were strangers. Enemies. If he did pack it, they were a married couple who’d had an awful quarrel.
He packed it.
She didn’t show.
He sat on the bed, beating his brow with his fist. He would have to miss his flight and stay. He couldn’t leave without her.
His phone rang and he dove for it. Thank God!
But it wasn’t her, he realized as the ringtone played a few more notes. It was his father, barking at him in his clipped British accent that Olivia Query’s baby daddy couldn’t take the pressure anymore of his family living with another man. Though the world would find out with just a little digging the terrible secret that he’d served time in juvie, he’d agreed to be interviewed on a gossip show tomorrow, outing Victor Moore. That was the reason Daniel had to fly to L.A. tonight. He couldn’t stay until Wendy returned.
Cursing his job, his father, Victor, and all baby daddies who had never heard of condoms, Daniel scribbled a note for Wendy on a hotel notepad: Call me! I love you & I’m sorry. This time he had no regrets leaving it on her suitcase, because he meant it.
At the airport, already making calls to pinpoint what had gone wrong in Olivia and Victor’s marriage, besides everything, he sat down to wait at the gate for Wendy’s flight. The call for first class was announced. The rest of the plane boarded. The door was closed. The plane took off without Wendy.
Daniel called Sarah.
“She’s angry with me,” he admitted. “Would she decide to stay another day in Vegas on a whim? That sounds like her.”
“Yeah, she might,” Sarah said. “But not when she’s been in so much trouble here lately. She loves this job more than life itself.”
“So she said,” Daniel murmured. “And if she did decide to stay an extra day, she would call you and tell you that, wouldn’t she?”
“See, you know her pretty well.”
“I do,” Daniel said. “And no matter how mad she was, I don’t think she’d disappear without checking in, especially because we got married, and—”
“You did what?” Sarah shrieked through the phone.
“Two nights ago we got married, with Lorelei and Colton at the ceremony,” Daniel explained, “so the media would assume it was Lorelei and Colton tying the knot. Things were going okay, but this afternoon we had an argument and decided to get divorced. I didn’t mean it, and I hope she didn’t, either.”
Sarah was silent so long that Daniel was about to ask if she was still there. He couldn’t afford a dropped call right now—
“You got married?” she yelled. “Is that why she made Tom and me leave town, because we would have stopped her?”
“Yes, but—”
“You manipulative ass! I knew she was up to something. I let her get away with it because she hates my husband, hates him, and she’s never said a word about it. We don’t have to agree about everything just because we’re friends. But I thought you were going to screw her, Daniel. I never would have left her alone if I’d thought you were going to marry her!”
Daniel rubbed his brow. “So you don’t have any idea where she would have gone or who she would have contacted—”
“What if Rick really is after her, like you guys were thinking at first?” Sarah insisted. “Do you know how terrified she is of that guy? Do you know how hard she is to terrify?”
“Yes,” he said, jogging through the airport with his suitcase rolling behind him. “I’ll find her.”
Back in the taxi, he phoned Detective Butkus, who dutifully took down the latest details of the saga but said he couldn’t file a missing persons report until Wendy had been gone twenty-four hours. It sounded to the detective like Wendy was furious with Daniel and would come back when she was ready. If Daniel had been Detective Butkus, he would have thought the same thing. But as Sarah had said, Daniel knew Wendy pretty well. And he was scared for her.