The two girls with him checked out, so she said a polite good-night and left them. She took the elevator up another floor to Barry’s suite. As she dragged her body down the hallway, she thought of the beautiful hotel room waiting for her. Hot water, clean sheets, and heat.
The guard let her in, and she was relieved to see that everybody still had clothes on. The three girls, none of whom looked particularly happy, were playing cards. Barry was stretched out on the couch watching television. His face lit up when he saw her. “Hey, Fleur, I was just getting ready to call your room. I thought you forgot.” He grabbed his wallet from the coffee table and riffled through it for a scrap of paper he shoved toward her. “Here’s Kissy’s number. How ’bout calling her from your room. I gotta get some sleep. And take two of those bimbos with you when you leave.”
She clenched her teeth. “Any two in particular?”
“I don’t know. Whichever ones speak English, I guess.”
Fifteen minutes later, Fleur let herself into her own hotel room. She undressed and stared wistfully at her bed, then picked up the telephone. As she waited for the call to go through, she glanced at the scrap of paper in her hand. Kissy Sue Christie. Lord.
A voice answered on the fifth ring. It was distinctly Southern and very angry. “Barry, I swear to God…”
“It’s not Barry,” Fleur said quickly. “Miss Christie?”
“Yes.”
“This is Fleur, the new road secretary for Neon Lynx.”
“Did Barry get you to call me?”
“Actually…”
“Never mind. Just deliver a message.” In a soft, breathy voice that oozed generations of ladylike Southern breeding, Kissy Sue Christie reeled off a list of instructions, the majority of which concerned Barry Noy and his anatomy. The contrast between her voice and the obscene instructions was too much for Fleur, and she laughed. The sound echoed in her ears, rusty and unfamiliar, like a nearly forgotten song.
“Am I amusin’ you?” the voice asked with a Southern chill.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s really late, and I’m so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. And…you’re saying everything I’ve been thinking all day. The man is—”
“—toad spit,” Kissy Sue concluded.
Fleur laughed again, then got hold of herself. “I apologize for calling so late. I was under orders.”
“It’s okay. What’s Stu offering now to get me to come over? Last time it was two hundred a w
eek.”
“It’s up to two fifty now.”
“No kidding. Shoot, I’d love to go to Europe, too. I even have some vacation time coming up. The only places I’ve seen outside South Carolina are New York and Atlantic City, but to tell you the truth, Fleur, I’d swear off men completely before I ever went to bed with Barry Noy again.”
Fleur settled back on the bed and thought it over. “You know, Kissy, there just might be a way…”
Fleur’s wake-up call came at six-thirty the next morning. She waited for the familiar heaviness to settle over her, but it didn’t come. She’d barely had four hours of sleep, but it had been deep and restful. No pitching and tossing. No sudden heart pounding. No dreams about the people she used to love. She felt…
Competent.
She settled back into the pillows and tried the idea on for size. She had a terrible job. The people were awful—spoiled, rude, and blatantly immoral—but she’d survived her first day and done a good job. Better than good. She’d done a great job. They hadn’t thrown anything at her she hadn’t been able to handle, including Barry Noy. She was going to show Parker Dayton…
She stopped herself. She didn’t care about Parker Dayton. She didn’t care about Alexi, or Belinda, or anybody. The only person’s opinion she cared about was her own.
The band’s arrival in Munich was hectic beyond belief, and Stu coped by yelling at her. This time she yelled back, which made him pout and say he didn’t know what she was getting so mad about. The next two nights’ concerts were a repeat of the concert in Vienna, with girls fainting over the barricades and a crowd of groupies waiting in the hotel lobby.
Right before the last concert, Fleur sent a limousine to the airport to pick up the long-awaited Miss Christie, but to her dismay, it came back empty. She told Barry the plane had been delayed and then spent the next two hours while the band performed trying fruitlessly to track Kissy down. Finally she had to tell Stu, who yelled at her and said that she could personally explain the screw-up to Barry. After the concert.
Barry took it just about as she expected.
She calmed him down with some half-baked promises she probably couldn’t keep and dragged herself to her hotel room. On the way, she passed Simon Kale in the hallway. He wore gray slacks and an open-collared black silk shirt with a single gold chain at the neck. It was the most conservative outfit she’d seen on anyone other than Parker since she’d joined the Neon Lynx circus, but she suspected he had a switchblade tucked in one of his pockets.
She fell asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow, only to be awakened an hour later by a phone call from the hotel manager telling her the guests were complaining about the noise coming from the fifteenth floor. “I have not been able to reach Herr Stu Kaplan, madam, so you must put a stop to it.”