Palm Springs Heat (13 page)

“Yes, she will be in on the
discussions.” Rafe sighed and took his hand off Lara’s knee.

Meilani focused on Lara. “You’ll
have your own blog, of course, and a Facebook page. And you’ll be tweeting two
or three times a day. More, if you like.”

“Sounds like I’ll be busy.”

“Oh, don’t worry—my staff will take
care of all that. We just need to know where you’re coming from.”

“Your staff will write my blog and
tweets?”

“Oh, yes. They’re very good.”

“When it comes to
new
media.” Rafe straightened his tie.

“So, you two work together?” Lara
asked.

“Actually—” Meilani began. Rafe cut
her off.

“To a degree.
My
staff will
develop the overall Lara Dixon marketing plan.”

Meilani looked at Rafe with her
eyelids at half-mast.

Candy jumped in. “Okay, so that’s
something you have to look forward to, Lara. We have more immediate business to
conduct.”

She stood and moved to her desk. “I
know you two won’t mind,” she said without looking at Meilani and Rafe. They
got up and left.

“I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Candy poured herself another glass of iced tea. “While we try to maintain a
familial corporate culture at Fast Lane, ego sometimes infects matters. Rafe’s
never been happy Sushma created a separate department to handle new media, much
less hiring a twenty-three-year-old to run it.”

“I can see that.”

Candy checked something on her
phone. “Do you think you’ll have a hard time working with a
twenty-three-year-old?”

“Why would I?”

“Your age is kind of a delicate
issue.”

“There is nothing delicate about it
at all,” Sushma said as she strode into the room. “It is, in fact, very
straightforward: The women in Clay’s Rotation have always been much younger.”

“
Much
younger? How old do
you think I am?”

“We know exactly how old you are.”
Sushma poured herself a glass of tea.

“We?”

“Our researchers.”

“If you wanted to know my age, you
could’ve just asked.”

“The average age of the previous
girls was twenty-two and four months,” Sushma said.

“And they all got along with the
new media coordinator?”

“Touché.” Candy put her phone down.

“Are we dueling?” Lara responded to
Candy, but looked at Sushma.

“Events of the last week have been
highly unusual,” Sushma said. “There is no precedent for the way you came to be
in The Rotation, and that sends up a number of red flags at the corporate
level.”

“Maybe it’s just a sign that Clay’s
growing up,” Lara said. “He is, after all, thirty-nine years old. A man might
be satisfied with twenty-two-year-old girls when he’s twenty-two, or even
thirty-two, I suppose. But he’s—”

“You have made your point,” Sushma
interrupted. “And it could very well be a good one. Still.”

“Still, I didn’t ask to be in The
Rotation.”

“Not directly, no,” Sushma said.
“But you are saying the thought never entered your mind?”

Lara hesitated.
Walking on thin
ice
. “Look, I know who Clay is. Who doesn’t? But when Anton invited me to
the party in Malibu, I thought,
‘Okay, I’ll go to see what it’s like.’ I might never get another chance.”

All eyes in the room moved to
Sushma.

“You never had chances like these
when you worked in the motion picture industry?” Sushma said.

“You know what kind of movies my ex
made. It’s not like I hobnobbed with Brad and Angelina.”

“If it’s all right,” Candy said
forcefully, “I’d like to get this other stuff taken care of. It’s not my place
to judge what, if anything, is going on between you and Mr. Creighton. I just
need these documents signed.” She took three stacks of documents bound by metal
clips from a folder and laid them out neatly, side-by-side. “Do you have an
agent?”

“An agent?”

“Most of the girls who enter The
Rotation either have an agent or hire one,” Sushma said. “If you don’t know
any, I can suggest a few.”

“No.” Lara shot Sushma an icy look.
“I can do this right now.”

Candy handed her a pen. A really
nice pen. Sleek and perfectly weighted. Ignoring Sushma, Lara scanned the top
document, then put the pen on the dotted line and signed her name in one bold
stroke.

* * *

When Lara finally got back to the Oasis,
the waterfall sounded like a thousand angels sent to drown out the noise of the
day. Someone had hung her new clothes in the closet, so Lara sat at the edge of
the bed and looked over her copies of the papers she’d signed with such furious
intent.

One said Lara did not have
representation and was acting as her own agent. Another bound her to wear
clothes and shoes from merchants that had merchandising deals with Fast Lane.
Another, to attend events Fast Lane scheduled for her.

Lara also had to acknowledge that
she understood she would be receiving a stipend instead of a salary. Gina had
prepared her for this. “They’re going to say it’s a stipend and not a salary
because paying women to fuck Clay Creighton would piss some people
off—including a few in the district attorney’s office.”

And then came the nondisclosure
agreement. A sheet of paper, nothing more. And yet Lara kept staring at it. She
had come in believing she would disclose the truth about Clay Creighton. But
the better she got to know him, the less sure she was about the truth.
How
could a man who could treats a woman so well be associated with something like
The Rotation?

Then again, Kyle had seemed like a
pretty good guy. For a while.

Lara put down the papers and
massaged her temples
. Maybe it’s not too late to call the whole thing off
with Gina.

Lara’s phone rang. It was Gina.

“Can you talk?” Gina asked in
hushed tones.

“Yes. I’m alone.”

“It’s all over the Internet that
you’re in The Rotation,” Gina said, still whispering.

“You can talk normally.”

“You totally rock, girl,” Gina said
so loudly that Lara had to move the phone away from her ear. “You
totally
rock!”

“I do?”

“Getting in was the hard part. Now
all you have to do is hang around and wait to see things almost no one gets to
see.”

“Yeah. Pretty cool. I’ve been
thinking…”

 “Uh-oh. I hear ellipses.”

“You hear
what
?”

“That hitch in your voice says
doubt’s creeping in. Do
not
let it happen. Do not permit yourself to
start any sentence with ‘I’ve been thinking dot, dot, dot,’ or ‘it’s just that
dot, dot, dot,’ or ‘
anything
dot, dot, dot’ when you’re talking to me—or
anyone else. You got that?”

Lara stood and walked to the glass
wall. It had been pitch black the night before. Mysteriously, invitingly dark.
Now a pool party was in full swing. Topless women and bottomless margaritas and
men with rippling pecs batting beach balls into the air like lottery balls in a
see-through tank. Lara’s eyes followed the balls without really seeing them.

“Lara?”

“It’s just that—”

“What did I just say?”

Lara paused. “I’m not so sure Clay
is what I thought he was.”

“Of course you’re not sure. That’s
part of his game.”

“But—”

“He manipulates women—and he makes
his living teaching men the tricks of his trade. You said so yourself.”

Lara looked blankly out the window
as a particularly well-endowed blonde on the diving board, a goddess who
already lacked the upper half of what was, according to her tan lines, an
itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bikini, slipped off the bottom and snapped it like a
rubber band to a group of slobbering males in the water below.

“I signed all the papers,” Lara
said.

“Good. Then everything’s still on
track?”

Lara opened her mouth to reply, but
stopped as the blonde turned to wiggle her bare backside, causing her worshippers
to thrash spastically in waves of foam. A spiky-haired man wearing nothing but
skin appeared on the board and struck a Scarface pose. Lara didn’t have to be a
lip-reader to know he shouted, no doubt with Al Pacino brio, “Say hello to my
little friend,” which he then graciously pointed out for anyone who might be
oblivious to his cleverness. He cupped his hands in front of his crotch to
approximate a large-caliber rifle and proceeded to shoot at the blonde, who,
much to the delight of the faithful, grabbed the place on her chest where the
bullets would supposedly have entered, then took a header into the frenzy
below.

“Lara, remember: Clay Creighton’s
a—”

Lara turned away from the window.
“Don’t worry, Gina. Everything’s still on track.”

“That’s my grrrl,” Gina said. “Keep
fighting the good fight. Call whenever you think you need to. Remember, I’m
behind you. Me and umpteen million women. We all want you to succeed.”

Lara hung up and sat back down at
the edge of the bed.

She stared into the waterfall’s
veil of mist and thought about how telling her life story to the marketing
gurus was more grueling and invasive than she could have imagined, about how
signing the papers had made her intentions seem even more underhanded. She
approached the cascade and stuck out her arm. The water felt welcoming and
warm, as if it could wash away her doubts and fears.

The phone rang again. Clay. Seeing
his name on the screen made her heart flutter.
Just like a seventh-grader
getting a call from a boy in biology class—again!

“Hey,” she said. She couldn’t help
sounding tired.

“I understand you had a big day.”

“Your people certainly know how to
keep a girl busy.”

“They’re
your
people now,
too, you know.”

Lara hadn’t really thought of it
like that, especially since no one seemed to be on her side. “So what’ve you
been up to all this time?”

“I had to take care of some things
at the Rev office, then they whisked me over to the ICE House.”

Lara wished she were at Clay’s love
pad, on the bluff where she could hear the ocean and breathe in the salt air.
And feel Clay’s arms around her. “Is that where you are now?”

“Yeah. I’d rather be in P.S. with
you, but Sushma’s worried about all the things that have to get done tomorrow.”

“I’ve been filled in on the
schedule.”

“It’s not all that bad. We hook up
at eleven.”

“Hook up?”

Clay laughed. “I didn’t mean—it’s
just that, there’s a photo shoot—” He paused. “You know, we could try to sneak
off.”

Lara laughed
. My god, he’s
acting like a middle-schooler, too
. “We could. Think about it, I mean.”

“Yeah, we could. Think about it.”

Lara bit her lip through a long
silence.

“In the meantime,” Clay finally
said, “how ’bout I hang up and you turn off your phone and get a good night’s
sleep?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“It’s going to be hectic the next few
days,” he said. “Just remember, I’m behind you.”

“Great.”

The room was again quiet except for
the rushing water. Heeding its siren call, she turned off her phone, stripped
off her clothes and let the water work its rejuvenating magic.

11

Lara slept dead to the world,
buried in the heavenly featherbed, when she swore she heard a bird peep.
Directly into her ear. Her eyes blinked open to someone—bending over her!

And peeping!

An explosion of adrenaline blasted
her out of bed. Lara shook as she struggled to maintain her footing and figure
out what the hell was going on.

“Oh! Miss D! I’m so sorry.”
Tiffany’s voice came from the floor on the other side of the bed. Her head
popped into view, a deer-in-headlights look on her face.

“What are you doing here?” Lara
clutched a giant, overstuffed bed pillow to her body like a shield.

Tiffany climbed back to her feet,
clutching her phone to her chest. The candy striper look was gone, replaced
with a hipster vibe that included a day-glo pink romper customized with
hand-painted skulls.

“I did not mean to scare you,” she
said. “Really. I’m really, really,
really
sorry.”

“Okay, apology accepted. Now tell
me why you’re here at—” Lara looked around, but couldn’t see her phone or a
clock. “What time is it?”

“Five-thirty.” Tiffany sounded a
little sheepish, and a little perky
. How is that even possible?

“In the morning?”

“Yes.”

“
Five
-thirty.”

“Ms. V said she talked to you about
today’s schedule.”

Lara’s arms ached from holding the
pillow so tight. As she put it down, she thanked her lucky stars she had
decided not to sleep in the nude. “I remember talking about the schedule, just
not anything about getting up at five-thirty.”

Tiffany pulled the phone away from
her chest and scanned the screen. “We’re scheduled to take Elway to the Malibu
house for a series of shoots with the other girls, then it’s—”

“Wait.”

Tiffany stopped and looked at Lara
expectantly.

“Two questions.”

“Okay.”

“Actually, it’s more like three
questions, since you never answered my first.”

“Okay.”

“Elway?”

“The Rotation’s helicopter.”

Right. Fast Lane owned four
helicopters, each named after a famed NFL quarterback: Favre,
Montana, Brady and Elway. In his blogs,
Clay referred to trips in them as “air strikes” or “going long.”

“Oh,
Elway
,” Lara said.
“Like the quarterback.”

“Wow—you follow football?”

“Kind of,” Lara lied. “Everyone
knows Elway.”
I think
.

They blinked at each other, Tiffany
wide-eyed and waiting, Lara with sleep still tugging on her lids.