Palm Springs Heat Read online

  Clay was so handsome. So charming. So adept at making a woman forget about his repulsive Rotation and testosterone-plagued theories. Lara had started out pretending to be interested in his globetrotting adventures with the beautiful, the well-heeled and the marvelous. Every woman knows listening to a man’s stories is a surefire way to make him believe she cares about him. At some point, though, Clay became truly interesting.

  “The brandy was good,” Lara said.

  “He broke out the Black Pearl,” Gina said. “That stuff’s got to be for special occasions only.”

  It could have been the brandy or the lateness of the hour, but at one point Lara had imagined leaning over to kiss Clay and unbutton that immaculate white shirt. Her hands had tingled at the thought of caressing his rock-hard chest. Other things tingled when she imagined him unzipping her dress, pressing her back into the couch cushions and working his way from her neck to her breasts with soft, easy kisses. It seemed so real at the time—and still did. Especially when she pictured Clay over her, shirtless, his golden eyes gazing into her eyes as he unbuckled his belt. She could feel her back arch as he held her wrists beside her head and whispered, “What do you think your next move will be?”

  Isn’t it obvious? Let me help you get me out of this dress.

  “Lara?”

  “Mmmm…”

  “Lara?”

  Lara’s nose wrinkled. She smelled smoke. Gina had moved around the desk and stood looking down at her. “I said, ‘What do you think your next move will be?’”

  “Next move?” Lara tried desperately to get back into the moment—and resented having to. She could see in Gina’s mirrored walls a hint of red in her face and neck. She felt a little feverish, too, and down below, a little moist. “Right,” Lara said to buy time. “All set up. I’m meeting him for dinner at Rev on Tuesday.”

  “At Rev?” Gina froze with the cigarette an inch from her lips.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Gina said. “That’s very good.”

  * * *

  Rev was Clay’s newest—and poshest—restaurant. In the heart of the

  Rodeo Drive shopping district, it epitomized L.A.’s fabled consumerist playground. Clay scanned the street scene from his rooftop terrace. The best of the best cars whizzed by: Ferraris, Bentleys, Maseratis, a Lexus or two. Others decorated the curbs like shiny sculptures. The beautiful people are coming out to play. That included, of course, women who had the looks to entice the gods away from Olympus, but Clay could think only of Lara. It had been that way since he first saw her three days before. It had been a while since he’d focused on one woman this way.

  That she knew so much about what was important to him—sports and cars and such—made her unusual. But what really intrigued him was how Lara had challenged him on his theory of love and war. Clay had always preferred the company of smart women—intelligence was sexy—but few women had ever challenged him to the core. Except Sushma. But with her it was business. With Lara, it was an aphrodisiac.

  That had happened with only one other woman, but Clay blocked her from his thoughts as he waited for Lara. He saw her on the big couch in The War Room. He imagined a merger of their bodies so powerful it would bring about a merger of their minds, their souls. The fantasy began with his arm brushing against hers as they admired the seat from the Spyder and proceeded with her turning to him wearing a wicked smile and pushing him onto his back, undoing his belt and pulling his pants to his knees. Straddling him, she whipped off her dress and whisked it playfully across his chest and face before tossing it over her shoulder. He reached up to fondle her natural breasts through the lacy bra, before she dispatched it to the floor and moved close enough for him to reach one nipple, then the other, with his eager tongue.

  He saw them trading places so he could kiss her lightly all over, maintaining this soft-touch approach as he continued southward, teasing her flesh with the waft of his breath until he came to the place between her legs where, to his delight, he would find her already wet.

  And then the scene in his mind moved to the Upper Deck, where they would be outside, exposed to the whole world and yet alone in the shroud of the night mist. Lara would lean against the railing, her hair blown by the same ocean breeze that drove the tiki torches into a frenzied demonic dance. Clay could distinctly hear the crackle of flames…a siren calling to him from the rocky shoreline.

  “Mr. Creighton?”

  “Call me Clay.”

  “Sir?”

  Oh, for the love of—

  It was Turnbow, Fast Lane’s security chief, on the intercom. Clay went to the control panel by the door and flicked the switch.

  “Turnbow?”

  “Evening, Mr. C.”

  “I thought it was your night off.”

  “Yes, sir. Your guest is arriving. Would you like me to escort her up to The Box?”

  “No. I’ll be right down.”

  * * *

  Lara looked out the window as the limo Clay had sent moved slowly up

  Rodeo Drive. Two limo rides in one week! This ride, though, was tinged with melancholy. Lara thought about her previous visits to this neighborhood. Like most people who walk this mile without the money to back it up, she had always felt like a rubberneck. An interloper. A tourist in her own hometown. She had grown up in a nice enough neighborhood in the valley, but the valley was nonetheless on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks. Except that the barrier separating Lara’s L.A. from here wasn’t railroad tracks, but mountains. During her marriage to Kyle Lobo, a producer of low-budget, straight-to-video actioners like Death Chase and Terror Strike: Bel Air (which had been shot entirely in Encino), Lara had ventured into the shimmering swimming pool of Beverly Hills on occasion. But with her budget, she was barely able to dip her toes into the water.

  The car passed a Catalan eatery that charged sixty-five dollars for a hamburger and fries. It amazed her how many people were accustomed to the high cost of extravagance. The dress she was wearing was extravagant, but Gina hadn’t batted an eyelash when they found it at Century City. White cotton with a scoop neck and puffs of pima encircling her waist, it looked like something Gina would buy for herself. And while Lara could tell why it didn’t cost $23.95, she also saw no reason it should cost nine hundred dollars. Especially since she was wearing it to a glorified sports bar. On the other hand, it looked great with her new dark hair.

  The limo pulled to the curb, and as Lara got out, she found herself looking into the face of a pretty young blonde she knew she’d seen somewhere before. On TV? Singing? The blonde looked Lara over with a steely gaze, a look reserved for serious competitors in the mating game, before turning her head with a flick of her ponytail and marching off with her nose high in the air.

  That is a very good sign.

  An imposing doorman in a coat with epaulets that made his shoulders look even bigger intercepted Lara as she approached the entrance to Rev.

  “Welcome, Miss Dixon,” he said in a decidedly unimposing voice. “Mr. Creighton is waiting for you.”

  “Actually,” came Clay’s voice from just beyond the doorman, “Mr. Creighton couldn’t wait, so he came down to meet you himself.”

  The doorman stepped back as Clay stepped up. “I see you’ve already met Chip,” Clay said. The doorman nodded politely. “And that’s my security man, Turnbow.”

  Turnbow stood against the building, keeping his eyes peeled. He looked like a bank robber.

  Chip opened the door.

  “Shall we?” Clay placed his hand in the small of Lara’s back. Just that gentle touch sent a zing of electric energy through her body. Did he feel that, too?

  When they were inside, Turnbow put a hand on Clay’s shoulder and tried to speak to him privately, but Lara could hear him just fine.

  “I assume you will be going to your box?”

  “Actually, I assume we’ll go to the main floor.”

  “I think your guest might enjoy the more intimate at
mosphere of The Box.” Turnbow nodded at Lara and smiled.

  “Why don’t we ask her? Lara, would you like to go to my private dining room, or to the main floor and rub elbows with the rabble?”

  “I don’t expect any special privileges,” Lara said, smiling back at Turnbow.

  “You know I own the place,” Clay said. “That means I can dole out privileges to whomever I please.”

  “I wouldn’t mind hanging out with the rabble.”

  “That settles it, then,” Clay said as he guided Lara toward the elevator.

  Chip the doorman threw the door to the street open, and shrieks of pubescent girls filled the vestibule. Turnbow joined Chip in forming a human barricade to let a scruffy young man and his entourage slip inside. Lara recognized him from billboards advertising the upcoming initial installment of the umpteenth series of hunky teen vampire movies. Not bad looking, but a far cry from what’s on the billboards.

  Chip and Turnbow managed to stave off the worshippers and get the door closed, but the shrieks still came through loud and clear.

  The young lion slouched and shuffled along amidst his unsavory clique—big dudes with shaved heads and lots of tattoos, and women with fake breasts and tramp stamps who looked like they’d been plucked from an Arkansas trailer park.

  “Is that…?” Lara wondered.

  “Ah, yes.” Clay gave the James Dean wannabe a nod of recognition. “I was told he might be coming tonight. Would you like to meet him?”

  Lara gave the pretentious cadre of celebrity handlers the once-over.

  “Do they always travel with their own armies?”

  “The young ones do—until they discover that most of them are leeches and crooks.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know,” Clay said, “here’s another privilege that comes with ownership.”

  He led her around a corner to where a guard stood watch over an unassuming door.

  “Evening, Mr. C.” The guard punched some numbers on a keypad and the unassuming door opened to the most lavishly appointed elevator Lara had ever seen.

  3

  The elevator was lined with richly finished bamboo paneling alternating with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The ceiling itself was one big mirror.

  “Interesting décor,” Lara mused when they were safely inside. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be so big on Asian themes.”

  “I’m big on Asian themes?” Clay said as he pressed a button.

  “The tiki torches at the party the other night?”

  “Oh, right. I like tiki torches,” Clay said in a faraway voice. Then he snapped back into the moment. “This was a freight elevator before I took over the building—and it was trashed. I went with bamboo because it was the most environmentally responsible material.”

  Environmentally responsible? It sounded weird, somehow, to hear him say it, though Lara could recall having read something at the Fast Lane website about sustainable materials. Specifically, materials that were sustainable as well as exotic and expensive. Tree-hugging just for the sake of saving the Earth didn’t fit the übermanly metropolitan male.

  The door opened to the dining room. To say it was gaudy would be kind. Rev didn’t just flirt with tackiness, it made wild love to it. It resembled a sports stadium, with tables on a playing field in the center surrounded by concentric rings of tables on tiers that looked like stands. Diners in the lowest rings even sat in fold-down plastic grandstand seats and ate from retractable trays. A ring of private rooms that mimicked luxury boxes lorded over the entire scene.

  So this is what a gazillion dollars buys?

  Lara realized Rev went beyond the wildest dreams of Fast Lane’s founder, Clay’s father, Chase. The magazine flourished during the Swinging Sixties with smartly written articles on politics, business, cars, music, travel—and how to mix drinks, dress right and impress women. There were also pictures of shapely girls in swimsuits, though the swimsuits gradually got smaller, then optional, then disappeared.

  Chase Creighton died when his ultralight plane crashed into a cliff near Malibu, leaving Clay in charge at age twenty-three. Clay made no changes until taking Fast Lane exclusively online ten years later. After that, the company expanded into all kinds of moneymaking ventures, including the Toy Store, a resort in Palm Springs and Rev.

  Lara stepped out of the elevator and onto Astroturf painted with a giant number 50.

  “It’s football night,” Clay said, as though that explained everything. Lara gave him a blank look. He pointed toward glowing H-shaped neon tubes that dominated opposite ends of the room.

  “I thought Rev was all about racing,” Lara said.

  “Thursday is racing night.”

  “I suppose you take all this out and put in a racetrack every Thursday.” Lara said it with tongue in cheek. She knew what went on at Rev. She just thought it would be best to act as if she didn’t.

  “That’s exactly what we do,” Clay said. “My marketing people suggested the name Rev to go with Fast Lane, but I didn’t want it to be just about racing, so Sushma came up with the idea of changing the décor from one night to the next.” Lara recognized the name of Sushma Vishnuveda, a former Rotation member who had risen quickly in the past few years to the highest echelons of the Fast Lane empire. “We can do basketball, baseball, hockey—”

  “Hockey? Do the waiters have to skate?”

  “That would be fun,” Clay laughed, “but no, we put down acetate sheets that look more like ice than real ice does. I know that sounds unbelievable, but it really does.”

  “Do you have a synchronized swimming night?”

  “I’m not sure that would appeal to the demo.”

  Lara scanned “the demo.” Every table was occupied. She thought she recognized a face or two. Movie stars. Athletes. At least one cable news anchor. She could see into the boxes whose giant smoked-glass panels were open and revealed the private parties inside. But no matter where they sat, people seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  The people especially seemed to enjoy sneaking peeks at Lara and Clay as they walked across the floor. Lara struggled to look comfortable in spite of her mounting self-consciousness, but something must have tipped off Clay.

  “Maybe you’d rather go to my personal box after all,” he said.

  It might be easier. Then again, she didn’t want to make things too easy.

  “We can stay down here,” she said.

  “Great,” Clay said as they came to the last empty table, under one of the neon goalposts. Clay pulled out a chair for her. “So, is this what you thought the illustrious Rev would be like?”

  “I’d heard it was so…”

  “Opulent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ritzy? Swank? Classy?” He pronounced “classy” as “cuh-lassie,” as though it had three syllables.

  “Classy sounds right.”

  “Tell me what you’re really thinking.” His eyes so gleamed and his face looked so sincere that it was easy to believe he meant it. “

  “I’m thinking it’s unbelievably tacky.” Lara stopped. “Ooh. That was a little direct.”

  Clay laughed. “I like direct. Besides, this place is tacky. So tacky, it’s cool.”

  “But all these people. They’re so…” Her voice tapered away.

  “They’re so what?”

  “Rich. And famous. And successful.”

  “And, what? You think just because they’re rich and famous they have good taste?”

  Lara laughed, which brought a satisfied smile to Clay’s face as a waitress wearing a tight-fitting, low-cut referee’s jersey and hot pants came to the table.

  “Are you ready, Miss Dixon? Mr. C?”

  “Oh, but I haven’t even seen a menu.”

  “Menu?” The waitress looked to Clay for an explanation.

  “We’ll both just have the special,” he said. Lara agreed with a shrug. The waitress turned and snapped her fingers, and a guy dressed as a stadium beer vendor lugged over a cooler full of class
ic-recipe Schlitz and lager glasses on ice. He popped the tops of two bottles and then, holding them by their necks in one hand, simultaneously emptied them into two glasses he held in the other.

  “Wow,” Lara said, impressed.

  She and Clay clinked glasses. As they sipped their beers, a short, Rubenesque biker-leather-clad woman of forty-five with big 1980s-style orange-red hair, no neck and a twenty-two-year-old emo boy with pierced eyebrows and cheeks in tow approached the table.

  “Hey, C,” the redhead said.

  “Lucretia!” Clay started to get up.

  “Don’t get up on my account,” the redhead protested. She turned to the guy. “Muggs, do you want him to stand?”

  Muggs shrugged and shook his head so that more of his jet-black hair flopped into his face. Clay sat back down. “Lara,” he said, “this is—”

  “Lucretia Moray,” Lara said. “You’re on my iPod.”

  It was true, though just barely. Lara had exactly one of Lucretia Moray’s noisy, obscenity-laced songs.

  “I have some new shit coming out in a month. No fuckin’ ballads this time. Just balls-on rock ’n’ roll.”

  Lara didn’t fully hear what Lucretia said. She was preoccupied with Clay, who seemed to be making a cutting-off motion with his fingers right at the bottom of his nose.

  “Um…great,” Lara said, hoping that was the correct response.

  “Anyway, C, we just wanted to come over and check out your…um…date? Nice meeting you, Laura.”

  “Lara,” Muggs said.

  “What?”

  “Her name’s Lara, not Laura. God!” Muggs sounded irritated—and way too much like Napoleon Dynamite.

  Lucretia did not look amused. “You can kiss my enormously fat, ghost-white ass,” she said. She flicked even more of Muggs’ hair into his face, then turned to Lara and said, “They can be such children.”

  And with that, she trundled off with Muggs shuffling behind.

  “That was weird,” Lara said.

  “Um…” Clay used his napkin to wipe foam from Lara’s lip.

  “Oh, no…did I…the whole time?”