SIX
AT HOME, she’d collapsed in bed, exhausted, chastising herself any time Roman popped into her head.
If Brooker was blamed for events of the night, there could be major fall out. No one could do that, could they? Blame Brooker? Its people didn’t orchestrate the power cut, that was like an act of God or something. Totally outside their control.
And no one knew about her… their… Did it class as a hookup when they hadn’t completed the transaction? Sad as it was, she would’ve done it. She’d have given herself to him right there on the floor. What a hussy.
Was she that sex deprived? Dating hadn’t been high on her priority list. Maybe that should change. Until him, sexual frustration wasn’t on her radar, now the two words went together like peaches and cream. Shit, did she have to go there?
The phone woke her up. No amount of stuffing the pillow over her head would shut it up. Damn thing.
As soon as it stopped, it started again. Over and over.
Growling through gritted teeth, she tossed the pillow behind her when she leaped out of bed and stomped across the room.
The phone stopped ringing, damn, just missed it. Pounding on her front door brought her around; the phone started again, then her cell buzzed in the bedroom.
“What the hell is going on?” she said, frozen by decision paralysis.
Had she won the lottery or something? More likely the building was about to explode. Wouldn’t it just be her luck to be smack bang in the middle of a terror plot? Maybe LA wasn’t so great after all.
Focus. Which should she answer first? The cell? The door?
“Miss Bennett!”
Hollering in the hallway wouldn’t be appreciated by her neighbors. Priorities clicked into place and she rushed to open it.
Three men stood on the threshold. Strangers. Serious, but not in uniform. Good. Getting arrested would be a crappy start to any day.
“Who are—”
“Miss Bennett, my name is Magnus Anders,” he said. “Would you come with me, please?”
Wearing an oversized button-down nightshirt, last night’s smudged makeup and her hair all over the place, she had to look like she’d just rolled out of bed because, well, she had.
“You… who are you?”
“Magnus Anders,” he said again and shifted back a step. “I’m Roman Lowe’s representative.”
Oh… Big, huge oh.
Throat clear, she could handle this. “Oh.” With that out there, the hair on the back of her neck prickled. “Uh… look, I won’t cause any trouble. If there’s an issue with the technical problems last night, my superior—”
“Forgive me, but do you have a computer?”
“A… a what?”
“A computer,” he said. “A laptop?”
Phones still droned in the background, though he didn’t react to their insistence.
“Yes, why—”
“Search last night’s event on Huddle Hunt,” he said.
“Huddle—”
“It’s a search engine.”
“I know what it is.”
She was from Washington, not Mars.
“Search,” he said and stepped back, straightening his cuffs. “We’ll wait.”
Wait? While she searched…
Pushing the door closer to its frame without closing it, she breathed for a second. What the hell was going on? Had she woken up or was this a dream? Maybe she was hungover. Yeah, she was still recovering from the previous night’s intoxication. That was it. Brain fog explained. As to the cause, the alcohol or the man, the jury was still out.
Ignoring the ringing, she quickly went to her laptop and booted it up. She opened the internet to type and grabbed the phone to shut the damn thing up.
“Hello?”
“Miss Bambi Bennett?”
“What?” Line after line of search results listed the scandal. Scandal! “Oh my God.”
The voice came again, but she slammed the phone down fast. Ears ringing, her hand went to her mouth. The first thing that loaded was a still image of a video. Stacked mattresses, open bathroom door, this was her life! The spread blankets. Them beneath…
Her jaw sank.
Security footage of the storeroom. They were on tape! There were cameras? Darkness, the red light, the damn convergence of sucky fate and a bunch of unforeseeable incidents, and boom, their secret interlude was available to a vast audience, playing on a screen near you.
She didn’t press the space bar to let the film roll, couldn’t press it. The headlines beneath were horrific. One story after another supposed the truth, without citing their words were speculation.
The phone rang again, driving her to her feet. This wouldn’t do, this… one thing at a time. Rushing across the room, she pulled the phone wire from the socket then dashed into the bedroom. This wasn’t her wheelhouse. Hollywood scandal? Not even close. She needed help, direction. Roman would know what to do.
As she dressed, her stress level rose. They hadn’t planned to see each other again. Would it be awkward? This internet interest was a huge responsibility. Anything she said to the press could cost Roman his career, right when he was trying to put his history of womanizing and partying behind him. Well done, Bambi, she’d screwed everything up, not just in her life, but his too.
The last thing she wanted was for him to lose his job or for his reputation to be impacted because of one impulsive decision. Because of her and goddamn gummy bears. Yeah, ‘cause the bears were the guilty party.
Grabbing her biggest jacket and her purse, she went for the door and found Mr. Anders on the other side with the other two men.
“I’m sorry for this inconvenience, Miss Bennett,” he said. “We will take good care of you… I’d advise you to put your hood up.”
Her hood? Was the rain still falling? Gales—the reason slammed into her when the communal door opened. Dozens of reporters swarmed the street, cameras, aloft smartphones, flashing, waving, people called, shouted, her name was an erratic chorus on the crowd’s unpredictable tide. Magnus kept a guiding arm around her while she held her hood over her face. The other two guys acted as security and did their best to keep a perimeter around her.
When she almost lost her footing, Magnus held her up to bundle them into the back of a car and then they were on the move.
She intended to sit up, but Magnus put a hand on her head and pushed it down. “Stay low a minute.”
The flashes were still going. When his hand finally relaxed, giving her a chance to sit up, they were five blocks from her apartment.
“This is insane,” she breathed out, watching the city go by.
“You’ll get used to it, Miss Bennett,” Magnus said, retrieving his phone from his inside pocket. “Roman’s at the house. He’ll be awake by the time we get there. This is his area of expertise. He’ll help you understand how to deal with it.”
“I don’t want to deal with it.”
Magnus was doing something on his phone and didn’t react.
A second later, he raised the device to his ear. “Hey, it’s me. You wake him up yet? What have we got?”
For the rest of the car trip, Magnus stayed on the phone. The clips of one-sided conversations didn’t give her much clue what was going on. She got the gist they were fielding a lot of press requests, and that Roman wasn’t up yet, so was oblivious to what was going on.
Lucky him.
A wrought iron gate opened as they turned off the street. They drove up a curved driveway to a two-story house, slightly taller wings flanked each side of the modest central building.
The car stopped and the door was opened by a driver, who waited for her to get out. Right, okay, ‘cause why would she have gotten in the car if she didn’t intend to get out when they arrived? Oh, butterflies, her throat dried. With more than usual effort, she climbed out and followed Magnus up the half dozen stone stairs to the covered entryway.
Inside, a double-height lobby with a grand central staircase awed her. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Magnus agreed, putting an arm around her to guide her into a huge living room.
And there was Roman, sitting in the middle of the couch.
“Oh, Roman,” she said and rushed away from Magnus to go to him.
His lazy eyes widened above a grin. “Heya, gorgeous,” he declared. His tone slowed her. “Wow, you’re something.”
“I… what?”
To her surprise, the heartthrob grabbed her wrist to pull her down onto the couch beside him. “I’m sorry about this, sweetheart.”
Resting a hand on the front of her thigh, he slid it up beneath the hem of her skirt.
Something weird trickled through her. This wasn’t like last night. This wasn’t arousal or crazy surging hormones. Seizing his wrist, and using quite a bit of strength, she pushed his arm away. The other snaked around her, holding her close to him. His body felt different; he felt different. The air around him, everything was off. Why? What was it? Sickness weighed in the pit of her stomach.
“Roman, this is serious,” Magnus said. “Very serious. We’ve worked hard to build your reputation. Now we’re looking at tape of you drinking and fooling around with a stranger.”
“I’ve seen it,” he said and scooped her hair from her neck to bow and kiss her there. “You’re a beauty, Bambi.”
Sleazy. Something in his voice was sleazy. Opposite to last night. No. Pushing away from him, she put space between them, seeking his gaze. Maybe if she could look at him… his eyes were too busy checking out every inch of her.
The man in the hotel basement made her feel cherished, special. He’d been in no rush and let her lead, he sensed her needs. How could he be so different just a few hours later?
Being hypnotized by his allure, she’d assumed, was his star charisma doing its thing. If it was, it failed them both. The trauma of the morning erased every trace of that instinctive attraction.
Roman reached for her again, but she pushed his hand away. “How did they get that footage?”
“I don’t know,” Magnus said. “We’re investigating. We’ll get together with the lawyers to find out if we have any claim against the hotel or event organizers. Best we can guess, someone in security leaked the tape from the inside.”
“But we can’t deny it happened, can we, Sugar?” Roman asked and scooted closer.
She scooted away. Get the hint. This guy was creeping her out. How could she have been drawn in by him? The man had to be the world’s best actor, beyond Oscar worthy. Either that or she was having some sort of psychotic break.
“We can’t put a claim in against the organizers. I am the organizers. I work for them.”
“You do?” Magnus asked.
She turned to Roman. “You didn’t tell anyone that?”
He shrugged and slouched deeper into the couch to finger the hem of her dress. “Guess that detail slipped by me with everything else we were doing.”
“You forgot?” she asked, pushing his hand out from beneath her skirt… again.
Sliding along to the arm of the couch, far from him, her face sank into her hands. She’d thought last night was a sign of inner strength. That she’d taken control of her own sexuality. Turned out she was a lousy judge of character, maybe she just had awful taste in men. Roman seemed mature and attentive, like the breath of fresh air her love life needed. She’d fuzzed it up again. How could she have fuzzed it up this bad?
“You smell amazing.”
Lifting her head from her hands, she found Roman at her side again. Up close. Too close. That was rich when she’d been rolling around with him not so long ago.
“Roman, your rep can’t take a scandalous one-night stand. Especially after the island. Your contract with the network states you won’t get up to old antics. They can drop you in a heartbeat and if they do it’s over,” Magnus said and, judging by his expression, lingered on a thought. “You can’t have a casual affair with a stranger, so what if she wasn’t a stranger? What if she’s the exact opposite of a stranger?”
“I don’t understand what—”
“What if she’s your fiancée?”
Roman laughed while she gaped. “His fiancée?”
His fingers curled around her knee. “Guess you’re stuck with me, Sugarlips.”
“No,” she said. “No. No.”
She stood.
Roman snagged her hand to pull her back down. “It’ll be fun to be my girl for a while. We have a lot going on.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t be your fiancée. No. No way.”
Tugging her arm from his, she leaped up and swerved around Magnus who tried to get in her way.
Where was she going? No clue. One thing she knew was the way out. Sounded like a good start. She felt sick to her stomach that such a man had touched her. What the hell was wrong with her? Kevin was an abuser and Roman a letch, why couldn’t she find herself a decent man?
Though the pair called after her, she ignored them to make a beeline across the foyer, front door in her sights.
“Fawn?” That voice stopped her in her tracks. “Is that you?”