Star Crossed (Stargazer) (23 page)

The applause for her was growing wild. The thought passed through her mind that if she got fired from Stargazer, maybe she really
could
go back to her first career. She could laugh at this now, almost, because she had hope of salvaging Lorelei’s image.

She did a few more tricks, until her head wound began to throb from all the blood rushing to her brain. She dismounted from the pole, curtsied ironically, high-fived the stripper, and jumped down from the stage. The table went crazy. The women kept screaming “Wow!” at her and the men were agog. She focused on Daniel, who’d been laughing moments before but now looked dangerous, his face full of dark shadows, the smudge under his eye still visible.

She shouldn’t come on to him. It wasn’t fair to lead him on, and she couldn’t risk her job by following through. But she wanted him. She breathed deeply, feeling her nipples tight against her bra, and imagined him wrapping his hands around her heavy breasts. She was twenty-eight years old, a grown woman, and so needy tonight.
Why
did the man she was falling for have to be the one she couldn’t have?

Against her better judgment, she slid into his lap. He still watched her seriously, which was starting to make her nervous. She tried to lighten the mood by saying, “Boy, will I be sore tomorrow. I’m in okay shape now, thanks to Sarah’s badgering, but I was so much better at eighteen. I used to be built like a truck.” When he looked grim and didn’t respond, she clarified, “A feminine, dainty truck. What’s wrong?”

“We have to get out of here,” he barked. “Now.”

Heat rushed to her cheeks. Daniel wanted to leave with her. She couldn’t say yes to sex with him, yet she’d never wanted anything more in her life.

But as she stared into his dark eyes, racking her brain for what she should say, she realized that wasn’t what he’d meant. His tone was wrong. And then he said, “All of us need to get out of here.”

“Why?” she breathed.

“Someone drugged me.” He nodded to his glass, pushed to the middle of the huge table. “Someone is trying to get past me to Colton. Or the guy who’s been after you is trying to get past me to you.” His intense gaze dissolved into a vacant expression. He looked lost.

A chill swept over Wendy. She felt afraid for the first time. It was not in Daniel’s nature to look lost.

“What?” she squeaked. “Like, a roofie?”

He nodded solemnly at her.

She hopped off his lap, jerked him up by the hand, and dragged him through the club, despite him calling, “Wait. Wendy, wait.” Finally he stopped next to the main stage. Her pulling didn’t budge him. When she turned to him, desperate and questioning, he said, “We have to tell the bodyguards, at least.”

“I’ll call them from the cab,” she promised.
“We can’t screw with that right now. We have to get you to the hospital. People die from that stuff.”

“I only drank a sip.”

“You don’t know how much drug was in that sip, though. Come on.” She tugged at his hand.

“We can’t go to the hospital by ourselves,” he insisted. “We can’t leave you out in the open now that I can’t protect you.”

“It’ll be crowded,” she reasoned. “Nobody would dare do anything there. We’ll walk to the crowded taxi stand and take a cab to the crowded hospital. Stop arguing. Don’t make me cause a scene. That’s not good for PR.”

She kept tugging his hand until he reluctantly took a step after her, then another, and followed her through the packed club, dancers jostling them on all sides. When Colton brushed past them, she put out her other hand to grab him so she could warn him what was going on. But he’d already hurried three deep into the crowd. She kept going, pulling Daniel out the door.

She flinched in panic as bodies moved toward them. She’d forgotten about the paparazzi lying in wait for Lorelei and Colton. She forced her heart to stand down, and the photographers, realizing she and Daniel weren’t the celebrities they were after, retreated.

In the taxi, she phoned Franklin, then Colton’s bodyguard. They couldn’t hear their phones in the din, and she had a flash of panic that someone else would get a mouthful of tranquilizer. But on another try, Franklin answered. She told him what had happened and extracted a pledge from him to close the party down and tell the club manager—quietly—what they suspected. Then she phoned Detective Butkus and left a message. She sounded stupid to her own
ears. A stolen phone, stolen hair, and a roofie. Their case would hardly be high on the priority list for the crime task force.

Frustrated, she clicked her phone off and looked over at Daniel. He stared out the window, his head bobbing strangely as the car bumped over seams in the pavement. Anxious to make some connection with him, she smoothed her hand onto his knee. Without looking at her, he placed his hand over hers.

An hour ago she would have thrilled at this intimate gesture. Now it just seemed strange, and it certified how sick he was.

At the emergency room, still dragging him by the hand, she marched up to the counter and said, “Poisoned.” Four people rushed from behind the counter and led him through swinging double doors to the bustling network of examining rooms. Wendy followed, not sure whether she was allowed. After all, she was not Daniel’s wife or his girlfriend or even his friend, really, but his business rival, his enemy. This would become clear as soon as they wrapped up their jobs in Vegas and returned to New York. But right now, she was determined not to leave him.

A nurse pointed her into a tiny examining room and shoved a clipboard into her hands, along with Daniel’s wallet. Wendy paused a moment over the expensive black leather, then drew out his insurance card. She examined his New York driver’s license and slowly, neatly copied his name onto the form:
Blackstone, Daniel, I
. The act of putting pen to paper and
scratching down this representation of him tugged at her deep inside, as if helping him in this small way would heal his whole body. With difficulty she resisted the urge to dot the
i
’s with little hearts.

Soon he wandered in. He clung to the doorjamb for a moment, then pushed away from it, tripped over her feet, and managed to land in the chair beside her.

“Jesus, I’m toasted.” He laughed.

“There’s a whole bed for you to lie down on.” She knew instinctively that he wouldn’t take her suggestion. Lying down would mean he was a patient, out of control. As long as he sat beside her in a chair, he was as healthy and as free to leave as she was, theoretically.

He shook his head. Then he blinked rapidly, as if shaking his head had disoriented him.

Tentatively she reached behind him. She placed her hand on the other side of his head, fingers sliding into his coarse hair, and pressed his head down toward her shoulder. She was a lot shorter than him. She sat up straighter and squared her shoulders to give his head a place to settle.

He resisted, his head pressing up against her hand.

She whispered the words he’d said to her the night before: “Give up.”

After a final sigh, he relaxed against her shoulder with more weight than she’d expected. She remained steady for him, shoulder firm, while she filled out the rest of his forms. She listed herself as his emergency contact and felt another flood of warmth in her belly.

“Now, tell me what happened,” she said, setting the clipboard across her knees. “How do you know you were drugged? Did you taste it in your drink?”

“Not at first,” he said. “When I thought back on it later, yeah, it had tasted salty. But I wasn’t expecting it, so it didn’t occur to me until my face went numb. I’ve felt that way before.”

“All the girls give you the date rape drug?” she joked. Then she realized she shouldn’t be kidding about this. “When?” She heard her own alarm as her voice pitched higher. “Here in Vegas?”

“No.” He waved her panic away with one loose hand. “Back home. A long time ago. High school.”

“Somebody slipped you a roofie?” she asked in disbelief.

“No.” He paused so long that Wendy was about to remind him what they’d been talking about when he sat up straight and said, “It was on 9/11, when my brother died.”

“Oh.” He’d always seemed so aloof. Now she wasn’t just seeing him loose for the first time. She was seeing him more vulnerable than ever. And she was beginning to understand how his hauteur was a protective shell for the pain underneath.

“The first few days,” he said, “I had a hard time holding it together. And, you know, holding it together is everything.” He took a deep breath. “My dad told the doctor to give me something. He needed to fix the situation and he couldn’t help my brother anymore, so he fixed me. I did feel calmer on the surface,
but underneath, the horror was still there, just weighed down with sedative where I couldn’t access it, like oil floating on water.”

“You were how old?” Wendy thought back to 2001 and how surreal it had felt to see images of the Twin Towers collapsing from her living room in West Virginia. “Sixteen?”

He nodded.

“And you’ve been trying to make it up to your dad ever since.”

He looked down, black brows furrowed, lips pursed in concentration on that lost day he couldn’t help. She’d known him when he was college age. It was easy to picture him younger still: thinner, in a rock band T-shirt rather than a designer one, his face more open and trusting.

As she considered the sixteen-year-old Daniel, the older one finally came into focus for her. His need for control, his perfectionism—it all made sense to her now. With that knowledge came a wave of longing. She wished she could reach out to smooth her fingertip over his dark brows and stroke away some of that pain. But she didn’t dare. Whatever temporary and tenuous alliance they’d formed, that would crumble the instant he felt she was treating him like a child.

She simply turned back to the forms, placing her body at the ready, and relaxed a little when his head finally sank onto her shoulder again.

A few minutes later, he jerked away from her, as if he were embarrassed to be seen in a moment of weakness,
when a doctor stepped into the room to give them the report. Daniel did have the drug in his body, but the level was low enough that, since he hadn’t had respiratory failure already, he would be okay in another eight hours.

Back at the casino hotel, as they got out of the taxi, he murmured to Wendy, “Rick will see us and know I’m fucked. It’s not safe for you.”

His paranoia was catching. But she honestly didn’t feel like they were in danger. “Nobody’s going to do anything in a crowded casino,” she assured him.

“I can’t walk straight,” he said.

“Lean on me,” she said. “Act like we’re lovers.” She slipped her arm around his waist, and they made their way through the lobby.

Inside the elevator, he pushed away from her and backed against the wall. “I’m so sorry. I’m all over you, and I don’t mean to be.”

“You’re not all over me,” she said stoically.

“Yeah, I am, and you know why? You’re hot, and I am very attracted to you.”

She laughed lightly. “You’re high, as we’ve established.”

“No, seriously. I’ve been hot for you for a long time.” He settled his shoulders against the wood-paneled wall of the elevator and gazed at her sexily through half-closed eyes. “In Dr. Abbott’s class, you used to wear this blue tank top, and I would think,
Does she know how low that shirt is cut? Does she know what that looks like when I’m standing up and I pass by her desk?
”

Staring at his shadowed face, she felt herself flush. She
had
known how low that blue tank top was cut. She’d worn it to get his attention. She’d thought it hadn’t worked.

They both started as the doors slid open at their floor.

“Come on.” She held one arm out to him. They walked down the hall together, weaving only a little.

“I am so tired of this gargantuan hotel,” he whispered. “It’s like walking from my apartment to the Lower East Side.”

“Where’s your apartment?”

“Chelsea.”

“Mine, too. Do you ever go to the Hell’s Kitchen flea market?”

“All the time.”

They arrived at his room. He leaned his forehead against the wall as he reached into his pocket for his wallet, drew it out, and stared at it.

“Need some help with that?”

He laughed. She loved to hear him laugh. An hour before when he’d laughed, she’d been afraid for his health and his sanity. Now that she knew he would be okay tomorrow, it moved her to see him so undone. She treasured the moment, because she knew she’d never see him like this again, unguarded with her.

Putting her head close to his, she peered into his wallet and plucked out the room key card. She swiped it through the lock. He pressed down on the handle. As he pushed the door and followed it into the room,
he gave her a hard look over his shoulder, suddenly lucid. She wasn’t sure whether he was wishing she would stay out or sexily urging her in. Either way, she followed him inside, because she would have felt uneasy leaving him alone like this.

He shut the door behind her, turned the dead bolt, and placed the chain in the lock with surprising dexterity. And then she got her answer about what his look had meant. He backed her against the door, slid his hands around her waist, and kissed her.

Instinctively she opened her mouth for his. He accepted her invitation and swept his tongue inside her, making her shudder with want. She couldn’t do this, though. If he half remembered this later, he would hate her for letting it happen when she had control and he didn’t.

She would let him kiss her only for another second. She pushed her hands back through his short hair.

He released his hold around her waist. Propping one hand on the wall behind her, he stepped even closer so that the whole length of his body lay along hers. As he massaged her mouth with his, she felt his body heat burn through his jeans, through her jeans, into her thighs. And then his other hand crept across her crotch.

“Okay,” she gasped, moving her hands from his hair down to his chest. “We can’t do this, Daniel.”

“Seems to me we’re doing a pretty good job,” he murmured against her lips.

“You might not remember this tomorrow,” she said softly. “I don’t want to take advantage of you.”