“I tried to catch up with you right after you left,” he said. “I meant to tell you that I don’t want to get divorced. Wendy, I love you.”
She looked up into his worried face, his dark eyes. “I love you, too.”
Their lips met. As they kissed, she marveled that he could make her feel this good while she was half-naked and detained by the police in the parking lot of a seedy hotel. It boded well for the rest of the marriage, she decided.
“Thank you so much for coming for me,” she said. “How did you find me?”
“It’s a long story, but Colton and I are the ones who led the paparazzi here. That was an accident.” He nodded to the distant flashes. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten you fired.”
“Why?” she asked. “Just because Lorelei Vogel’s PR rep is going to be on the front page of the tabloid blogs tomorrow, at a shitty hotel, in her underwear, with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other?” She let out one halfhearted chuckle of resignation. “Maybe that won’t happen.”
Daniel looked over at Colton, also handcuffed, who was talking animatedly to a cop. He moved his elbows awkwardly, trying to talk with his hands. “This is going to be great for Colton,” Daniel said. “When the reporters hear what really happened, the public will love that he actually lived these action-adventure movies he’s trying to land. The publicity could be great for Lorelei, too.”
“And if that doesn’t work,” Wendy said, “I could tell my bosses the truth.”
“The truth?” Daniel repeated. “Innovative.”
“Stargazer prides itself on being cutting-edge.”
“And if that doesn’t work,” Daniel said, “I know of another difficult case you can tackle to save your reputation. Again. I’m pretty sure Olivia Query and Victor Moore’s marriage is about to crumble, and they’ll be looking for different PR representation.”
Wendy gaped at him. “Why aren’t you in L.A., taking care of that?”
“Because I’m here, taking care of you. Finally.” He set his forehead against hers and closed his eyes. “Besides, after I give my father two weeks’ notice, it won’t be my problem anymore. I’m going to work for Senator Rowling.”
Wendy stepped back to grin at him. “You are?”
He smiled. “I am.”
“I think you’ll be happier.”
“I think I will, too.” He leaned down to kiss her again.
While they were still kissing, she felt someone manipulating her handcuffs and removing them. She was able to reach both arms up and put her hands in Daniel’s uncharacteristically rumpled hair, and she felt his strong arms encircle her bare waist. They only broke the kiss when a man cleared his throat beside them.
“So you weren’t making the whole thing up,” Detective Butkus said. He dropped Wendy’s ring into her hand.
She was about to thank him for retrieving the ring from the crime scene, as she’d asked, when Daniel broke in. Keeping one hand on her hip, he directed at Detective Butkus a string of filth the likes of which she had never heard from his lips. She stared at him, taking it in, memorizing a few choice turns of phrase to use in case she really did get assigned to Victor Moore and Olivia Query.
Detective Butkus held up both hands. “Give me a break! Would you have believed this story if you were me?”
“No,” Daniel and Wendy said at the same time.
“I mean, what a freak this guy is.” Detective Butkus jerked his thumb over his shoulder, where paramedics were wheeling Rick on a stretcher out of the hotel room. He asked Wendy, “Did you see he braided your hair and made it into a camera bag strap? Sicko.”
Daniel pushed past the detective and lunged for the stretcher. The detective caught him by the arm and yelled, “Get him!” He and two cops wrestled Daniel back from attacking Rick.
Wendy watched the whole surreal scene, the muscles of Daniel’s back and shoulders glowing in the shifting light of the hotel’s cheap neon, and wiggled her ring back onto her finger where it belonged.
“You know what?” the detective called to Wendy. “Just get in that car, both of you. We’ll let you put some clothes on at your hotel before you come down to the station. Get him in there with you.”
The cops gave Daniel a final shove. He glared at them resentfully. Wendy took him by the hand and led him into the backseat of a police car and shut the door behind them. He still looked over her shoulders at the ambulance. Finally, to snap him out of that violent mood, she said, “They’re taking us to the room to change. Do you think we’ll have time for a quickie? Because we never got around to doing it against the wall.”
He blinked at her. She thought he hadn’t heard her. Finally he smiled, slowly at first, his grin becoming broader as she slid her hand onto his thigh. “We will always make time for a quickie,” he said. “And that is a wedding vow.”
* * *
After midnight, the four of them—Daniel, Wendy, Colton, and Lorelei, who had jumped on a private jet when she heard Wendy was in trouble—lingered over dinner in an exclusive room in the restaurant on top of the Stratosphere tower. The lights of Vegas inched underneath them at one rotation every eighty minutes.
Daniel tightened his arm around Wendy’s shoulders as she nuzzled against him in the booth. After hours at the police station, he knew she was beat. He was, too. But they’d also been starving. They could have gone to a cheap diner, but he’d insisted on treating everyone at this tourist trap. The past week had convinced him to look for fun where he could find it.
His phone beeped with a text.
“Again?” Wendy teased him.
“Yeah, again?” Colton asked from across the table, and Lorelei giggled. The last call Daniel had received had been from Colton’s agent. The tale of Colton’s heroics had spread like lightning through the Internet. Both producers Daniel had talked up in the past few days wanted Colton to star in their action flicks, audition or no audition.
“Pesky multimillion-dollar deals interrupting dinner,” Daniel muttered. But he really was reluctant to look at his phone, because the beep was the one he’d set for texts from Victor Moore. He wound a tendril of Wendy’s hair around his finger. Now that he finally had her—again—he never wanted to leave her. And if she did end up handling the Victor mess after he quit the Blackstone Firm, he never wanted her to leave him.