Couples ground against each other in the dark space where sweat and alcohol and sex were all coming together. Marcus moved deeper into the darkness to stand on a rise overlooking the dance floor and scanned the crowd with a clinical eye.
* * *
Nicola Harding stood in the window of her penthouse suite looking down on San Francisco’s Union Square and watched the people walking below.
She was young and single. She should be out there with them. Six months ago, she would have been eating dinner at some glitzy restaurant, surrounded by people who were flattering her and trying to make her laugh, trying to make her like them. But she’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t her they were interested in.
Nicola Harding, who liked Monopoly and building sand castles, was an inconsequential nobody. They all wanted a piece of Nico. They wanted to say they’d hung out with a pop star. They wanted to take pictures of her on their cell phones to text to their friends.
She stepped away from the window and turned back to the huge suite.
It was too big for one person, but her record label thought putting her up in a place like this for a video shoot and concert was treating her right. No one would ever know how alone she felt, one small person in an oversized suite that could have housed her entire family with room to spare.
And the truth was, if she were a stranger reading her press, she certainly would never come up with the word alone to describe herself. Party girl would be closer. Because, somehow, every single event found her photographed with another famous man. She’d wake up in the morning and turn on her computer to learn that she was systematically screwing her way through not only the Top 40 charts, but through Hollywood, too.
Her record label and PR people and management team had told her “any press is good press” enough times that she’d stopped protesting her innocence to them. Besides, she knew they didn’t believe her, not after seeing the pictures that had leaked over the holidays last year—horrible pictures that still seemed to turn up whenever she thought they were finally buried.
After working nearly twenty-four hours a day for years to try to get people to listen to her music, she’d been overjoyed to see her work pay off with her first number one hit last summer. Although everyone had warned her that the business would chew her up and spit her out if she wasn’t careful, she’d believed it was different for her, that she was smart enough to surround herself with good people.
Until the day she trusted the wrong one.
Kenny had been so charming, so sweet at first, that she’d fallen for him hook, line, and sinker. But he’d used emotions like barter and she’d soon realized the only way to keep him happy—and to be sure he still loved her—was to give in to some of the things he wanted her to try.
Stupid girl.
A thousand times since then—no, more like a million—she’d asked herself how she could have been so naive. Naive enough that when he’d sold his story of wild nights with the pop star, complete with pictures that he’d been secretly taking of her on his cell phone, she’d actually been shocked.
Well, she’d learned her lesson. Big time.
She would never again trust that easily, especially good-looking, persuasive men.
Nicola caught a glance of herself in sweatpants and a tank top in the full-length mirror on the living room wall. Some party girl she was. After a grueling day of rehearsing dance moves for the video they would be shooting on Friday, her big plans included watching a Laverne & Shirley marathon on cable under the covers.
The doorbell rang and she realized she’d forgotten about the ice cream she’d ordered from room service. On a night like this, she simply didn’t have the energy to care that the hotel staff member would see her without any makeup on and immediately get on Twitter and tell the world about it.
No question about it, chocolate ice cream was her last hope tonight.
She opened the door. “Hi.”
The guy looked at her, then actually looked over her shoulder for the real Nico. Finally, he looked back at her, his features twisting toward recognition as he stared. “I’ve got your room service, Nico.”
She stepped aside so that he could wheel in the big tray, even though she could easily have just picked up the container on top.
“It’s just the brand you asked for. A quart of it.”
“Thanks.” She took the pen he handed her to sign the room tab and felt, like laser beams, the guy’s eyes on her butt in the snug sweatpants. She’d been feeling those eyes from one guy or another for the past ten years, ever since she’d woken up one morning with br**sts and hips.
She didn’t even mind the leering. What she minded were the assumptions that came with it, that just because she had the T&A that guys drooled over, it meant she was going to hop into bed with them indiscriminately.
She wasn’t a slut, no matter what the world thought.
She went to hand him back the pen, but he was too busy ogling her chest to notice.
Nicola always made it a point to be nice to the staff anywhere she was staying. It wasn’t that long ago that she’d been waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms while she waited to be “discovered.”
Tonight, she was all out of nice.
“Here.” She jammed the pen into the guy’s palm, then went to the door and held it open for him.