American Diva (2 page)

When Carol asked Marty if there was anything special he wanted in addition to all that plus the two hundred names on his guest list, Marty said yes. He wanted Audrey LaRue.

Carol thought he was nuts. “That
girl
you are so enamored with is younger than your daughter, pervert,” she reminded him. “And a whole lot younger than the whores you usually hook up with.”

There were certain things a woman never forgave, and an extramarital affair or three topped the list.

But Marty was steadfast, and seeing as how he controlled the purse strings for this party, Carol had no room to argue. Besides, as it turned out, Marty’s friend in Hollywood knew a friend who knew Audrey LaRue’s business manager.

And now, on the day before his sixtieth birthday, Marty was standing on a private beach on a private island off Costa Rica and was already lit, even though it was just two in the afternoon. He was wearing his new Tommy Bahama board shorts whose waist kept folding over below his belly. His fifteen-year-old leather flip-flops were keeping the sand from burning his feet, and he was holding a scotch neat with a little paper umbrella in one hand as he watched the boat ferry Audrey and her crew to the island.

Marty Weiss could not have been happier. And he could not wait to tell the cyber-fan club all about it.

 

 

After two days of fun in the sun with the gang from Chicago, the Thrillseekers Anonymous crowd was exhausted. The four partners—Michael, Eli, Cooper, and Jack—agreed that this was one of the hardest gigs they’d ever done. Not sports hard, because what they were doing here could hardly be called
sports
, but hard like a big kiddie birthday party with unruly kids. Of all the trips they’d taken, this one had to rank right up there with Satan’s Wedding at the top of the Rocky Mountains, otherwise known as the meltdown of Olivia Dagwood, an A-list movie star.

They couldn’t quite put their finger on what, precisely, it was about this group that was making this so hard. The windsurfing had gone off without a hitch, mainly because only three of the two hundred had tried it. The ocean kayaking had turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of fat guys paddling around the shallow end of the pool playing bumper boats. The hike up the waterfall to the volcano had included six trophy wives and one personal trainer—and not one guy from Chicago.

They weren’t certain what made this trip so miserable, but as two young Costa Ricans strapped the birthday boy’s fat ass into the harness to ride the zip line down to the beach, Jack Price thought he had a pretty good idea—it just wasn’t any fun to baby-sit.

As Cooper gave Marty Weiss a healthy push off the rock outcropping, Jack cringed—either at Marty’s girlish shrieking or the way the zip line bounced, bungee-like, to the tops of the trees and back up again, high in the air.

“I said we should have done a load test, but no one listened,” Cooper sighed as they watched Marty land on the beach and plant his face in the sand.

When TA had signed up to stage this birthday party, they had thought the zip line would be a safe, easy form of entertainment for a bunch of Chicago business moguls who wanted extreme adventures. But what these guys really wanted was extreme adventure without the extreme. Every one of them who’d ridden the zip line from the hilltop to the lagoon had screamed with terror on their way down.

These guys didn’t want to do anything but sit on their asses, drink maitais, and eat. And that wasn’t what Thrillseekers Anonymous was all about.

“Whatever happened to a little kite surfing?” Michael had complained last night as the fat cats danced a drunken rumba around them. “Since when did we become event planners?”

“Since you saw the green,” Eli’s girlfriend, Marnie, cheerfully reminded them.

No one could argue with her. It was true that they were being paid a king’s ransom by some of the richest men in the United States for this party, and wads of cash did have their own special attraction.

Still, if someone was going to pay
that
kind of money, the least they ought to do is
try
a few of the excursions TA had set up for them. But oh no—more than one man had asked if there was a golf course on the island, and then had complained when told no, as if that was the only sport that interested them.

As Jack and Cooper watched Marty’s pals pick him up and toss him into the surf to wash off the sand, a woman said, “Excuse me, Mr. Hunk, but Ms. LaRue would like to ride.”

Jack and Cooper turned to see a pretty redhead wearing a pair of board shorts and a very tiny swim bra. She smiled at Jack’s crotch.

“Who?” he asked, momentarily distracted by her bold smile.

The redhead glanced up. “Ms.
LaRue
? The
singer
?” she said in a tone that suggested he was a moron.

“So where is Ms. LaRue?” Cooper asked.

The redhead jerked a thumb over her shoulder at almost the same moment Audrey LaRue, arguably the hottest pop star in the country, and dressed in very short shorts and a skimpy tee, picked her way down the path, pushing through underbrush and looking very irritated. “Good God, where
is
this place?”

The redhead sighed wearily as Audrey cleared the brush and inched her way to the edge of the outcropping. She ignored Jack and Cooper as she stepped in between them to have a look over the edge. She craned a very lovely neck to see down, and instantly grabbed their arms. “
Shit!
” she whispered.

“It’s a
zip
line,” The redhead said. “It has to be high up.”

“I
know
that,” Audrey snapped.

“What . . . are you afraid?”

Audrey gave the redhead a cool look over her shoulder. “
No
. . . Just a little.”

“If you aren’t comfortable, you probably shouldn’t do it,” Cooper suggested.

“I have to,” Audrey grumbled.

“Why?”

“Because they promised a sizable donation to my foundation,” she said, gesturing to the fat cats on the beach.

Standing behind her, the redhead smiled at Jack again, and let her gaze slide down his body to his crotch again. What was wrong with this girl? He glanced at Audrey. “If you want to ride, strap up, sweet cheeks. We need to wrap this up.”

Audrey glanced at him. “Where do I . . . strap up?”

He pointed to the two young Costa Ricans standing a few feet away. One of them held out the harness to her.

“Oh my
God
,” she sighed, and started picking her way toward them.

The redhead followed her. Jack and Cooper watched as the Costa Rican boys strapped her into the harness.

“What foundation, do you think?” Cooper asked idly.

“Got me,” Jack said with a shrug. And frankly, he didn’t care. He’d had about as much fun in the sun as he could stand this weekend. He couldn’t wait to get off this island.

Given how lame the entire event was turning out to be, the mystery of Audrey LaRue’s presence at this shindig was growing. The TA guys had wondered more than once how the real estate guys, who were currently splashing around like whales in a lagoon, could have enticed her to come to a private island in Costa Rica.

“Money,” Eli had hypothesized over beers one night. “What else? That’s why we’re all here.”

“Yeah, but you guys will do anything for money,” Leah, Michael’s wife, said, oblivious to their startled looks. “They must have offered her a
lot
of money, like platinum record money, because I cannot imagine what would possess
any
woman in her right mind to go to Costa Rica and spend an entire weekend with a bunch of drunks.”

Jack was half tempted to ask Ms. LaRue as she struggled to untangle the lines of the harness she had managed to tangle in the space of two minutes. “Can you fix it?” she asked one of the boys. He responded in Spanish as Audrey pushed a thick curl of blond hair from her eyes. She turned to Jack and Cooper. “Can
someone
help me?” she demanded.

The redhead turned her back and snickered.

Jack hoped Cooper would do it. But when he glanced at Coop, he noticed he wasn’t exactly looking at her harness. Jack couldn’t blame him—with those long tanned legs and green eyes that could light up a stage, this girl was
hot
.

Jack didn’t realize just how hot until he stepped up to help her with the harness.

“How did you get the straps so twisted?” he asked.

“I don’t know!”

He grabbed the end of two straps and gave them a good tug, cinching the harness up, and almost yanking Audrey into his chest in the process. She looked up at him with remarkable green eyes and raised one dark gold brow high above the other. “I think it’s tight.”

Jack smiled a little. “You sure?”

“
Yes
. I’m sure.”

He let go and stepped back, and gestured for her to precede him to the edge. She carefully inched her way forward to have another look over the end of the rock.

“You sure you want to do this?” Jack asked her most excellent ass.

“Like I have a choice,” she said irritably.

“She means she has to if she wants their fifty thousand dollars,” The redhead said gleefully.

“
Auuuuud-drey!
” Some numb nuts who stood in the shallow end of the lagoon was shouting up at her, flailing his massively white and flabby arms. “Come on down, baby! I’ll catch you!” A roar of drunken laughter went up from his compatriots.

Jack glanced at the sots below, then at Audrey. “Like I was saying . . . are you sure you want to do this?”

She groaned. “Dude, I’ve been here twenty-four hours now. I think I am battle tested, and besides, a few middle-aged men and a few beers don’t scare me.” She paused and looked at the beach below. “I mean, they
scare
me, but not like that. I can handle them. I just want to get this over with. So can you just back up and give me some space?”

Jack lifted his hands and did precisely that.

“Let’s go over a few things,” Cooper said. “Hands on the line,” he said as he hooked her harness to the line. “Legs together and in front of you. Eli and Michael will help you at the end of the death slide.”

She frowned at Cooper. “That’s a funny name for it. So okay, here I go.” And before Cooper could tell her not to jump, to step off the ridge, she jumped and bounced.

“
Damn
,” Cooper said, shaking his head. The redhead muscled her way in between them, and the three of them listened to Audrey squeal all the way down, landing on the beach in one huge sprawl. She was immediately swarmed by two or three fat guys, as well as Eli and Michael, who put themselves between her and the others so they could unhook her.

The redhead suddenly started laughing. But Cooper let out a low whistle. “Damn,” he said. “
Damn
.”

Jack’s sentiments exactly.

The
LaRue party was housed in a three-bedroom beach cottage with doors that opened onto a private patio overlooking the ocean. Audrey could be the Queen of England, and still, she would never get used to this sort of wealth. It was gorgeous here, absolutely gorgeous.

Gorgeous notwithstanding, she was still contemplating killing her longtime boyfriend and manager, Lucas, and her publicist, Mitzi—they’d talked her into this deal. She didn’t want to do it, but they had promised her it would be fun. They had used words like
vacation
and
relax
, and she’d really begun to feel the vibe.

But then she’d met Marty Weiss and his pals, and discovered that, once again, her instincts were dead on. She had survived twenty-four hours with men who ogled her like a good salami sandwich, then drank and ogled her like a hooker. Her concert—for which Marty Weiss had paid an unbelievable fortune to stage (would she
ever
have the kind of money he had? Did she
want
that kind of money?)—had gone well, she supposed, in spite of the two guys who kept trying to climb up on stage with her. Marty stood below, three sheets to the wind, tears streaming down his face.

The man was older than her dad, for Chrissakes, and furthermore, it wasn’t like she was singing opera or something that should really move him—she was singing a song about kicking a guy to the curb, and dancing around on stage as she sang.

It was Lucas who convinced her that the money—a half a million to bring her and the band here—was worth it. It would help bankroll her first national tour, timed to coincide with the release of her third album, the first with a major label. The label wanted her to tour, and they were even kicking in some seed money—but the majority of the tour’s costs would be borne by Audrey. After set design, staff costs, transportation, and lodging, that was not a cheap proposition. She’d be lucky if she broke even.

Lucas had convinced her, and it would have been okay, except that Marty would
not
leave her be. She had asked him, threatened him, pleaded with him to stop. And to his credit, Marty had vowed to try, but he had not succeeded. He followed her all day, knocked on the door of her beachfront cabin at odd hours, and seemed to be waiting for her when she stepped out of the communal kitchen. He’d obviously forgotten he had a wife—who, by the look of it, was getting cozy with one of Marty’s closest two hundred friends.