Rock It

by Jennifer Chance

  Lacey burst into Harry’s room, but it was already too late.

  There, splashed across the flat screen in garish living color, was the final page of her sweet sixteen Certified Authentic Dante Falcone Scrapbook. And in bright pink glitter paint she’d scrawled “Lacey + Dante forever.”

  It was official.

  She was going to die.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Oh my gawd, Lacey,” someone said. She couldn’t even have said who, and she’d been living, eating, and breathing with these people for two solid weeks. “I had no idea.”

  “Did you, like, completely have no life whatsoever?”

  “Shhh!” someone else said. “Will you look at that one—remember that show?”

  And so Lacey found herself staring, goggle-eyed, at the same screen that everyone else was for another harrowing two minutes, as the laughing, giggling groupie who had taunted her over champagne a few nights earlier paged through the scrapbooks and mocked her. The intercut images from the YouTube cameras today looked jarring in comparison. Here’s Lacey Dawes looking smart and professional; here’s a frizzy-haired, braces-wearing, lunatic grinning Lacey Dawes photographed next to a cut-out image of Dante’s teenaged likeness, like they were best friends going to the freshman dance.

  The groupie was perfect for her role, laughing at the silly girl who’d lost her mind over the rock star. The camera then posed lovingly on a transition from teen dream Dante into a cool, smokin’-hot close-up of Dante perched on an overlook of Virginia Beach, the wind rustling his hair, his dark eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. “From everyone’s teenage dream guy to everyone’s rocker fantasy” was the subtext, and then the cameras cut again to Lacey, clutching her folders to her chest, looking far off and contemplative—Lord, they could have caught that image at any time in the past two weeks. That was just her look. And finally, mercifully, it slid away to the last shot, the most recent show, with the screaming fans and full-on rushed attack on the band—bodies flying, hands everywhere, and in the center of the storm was Dante.

  And then someone else sighed—some random roadie with a whiskey voice. “Oh wow, Dante, I can’t believe how much you—”

  You? That snapped Lacey back to reality. She jolted, wheeling, and realized that Dante Falcone had joined the group—probably had been there the whole time, seen the whole mess. He wasn’t looking at the flat screen anymore, however, he was looking at her, his lips curving into a smile.

  “So I guess you’re a fan?” he asked.

  Everyone burst into laughter, and Lacey’s world devolved into a sharp pinprick of pain that seemed to squeeze all of her vital organs into dust. Her phone chose that moment to ring, and she snatched it and thumbed it on, her eyes registering the caller before her brain could fully catch up. If she didn’t make it outside, get some fresh air, she was probably going to puke.

  “Cameras,” Dante reminded her as she pushed past him, and she looked up at him wild-eyed. But of course he was right. The camera guys would be waiting for her, perched outside. They’d probably seen her fly down the hallway toward the viewing room. It’s not like she’d noticed anyone around her.

  “Hang on,” she muttered into the phone. “I’ll call you back—” Concerned voice, shrill on the other side, and Lacey shook her head. “Hopefully thirty seconds. Really. Don’t worry about it.”

  She shoved her phone into her pocket, put on her brightest, sunniest smile, and glided out into the hallway. She had now become part of the show.

  Thirty seconds turned into twenty long minutes. Reporters seemed to be everywhere, as if Brenda had bussed them in for the event, and all of them wanted to know the same thing. Where had she gotten the scrapbooks? Were they really hers? Was she that much of a superfan? What was IMO planning next for the tour? No sooner had she finished one set of sound bites, when another mike was thrust in front of her and she had to compose her face again, smile broadly, and admit to an entire new viewing audience that yes, in fact, all of those scrapbooks were real.…

  And on it went. It was Dante who finally rescued Lacey, shouldering into the fray and announcing to the laughing crowd that he had a few questions of his own for his number one fan. He pulled Lacey into the elevator and barely blocked the reporters from following them in.

  The doors closed and Lacey sagged into the back of the space. “Oh, God, Dante—I’m so sorry.”

  “About what?” he leaned against the wall on the other side. “Those books?” His smile was gentle, all tender again, and made her want to curl up in a ball and disappear. “You want to talk about it?”

  “No. Not at all. Not ever.” She reached out to punch the button on the elevator door for her floor, but Dante stayed her hand.

  “You know they’re going to be waiting for you outside your room,” he said reasonably. “You want to hang out with me for a while?”

  “God, no,” she said, waving him off and hitting the button. “That’s not going to help. You need to stay as far away from me as possible.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Lacey,” he said. “It’s not that bad.”

  “Dante. It’s bad.” Lacey pressed her hand to her forehead. “I mean, for heaven’s sake. I wrote you a hundred letters in one year.”

  He blinked at her. “That was you?”

  “That was me.” Lacey closed her eyes, wondering what sort of a wreck her face was by now. That was going to make for some lovely video—member of rock-star crew outed as crazed perma-fan. She wondered what the fallout would be. She should probably call her mom back. Or the girls. Or maybe a headhunter.

  Lacey’s phone shrilled, and when she glanced at it, she realized her brief reprieve from IMO was over. “Oh, fucking perfect,” she muttered, then lifted the phone to her ear just as the elevator doors slid open at her floor. Her gaze caught and held Dante’s for just a moment, and at his clear concern, her heart broke into a dozen pieces. What sort of freak did he think she was?

  He started to speak, but she shook her head, hard, the tears sparking in her eyes. “Hello, Jim,” she said into the phone, steeling her voice as her gaze swept the corridor. The reporters hadn’t followed her up. Maybe her fifteen minutes of fame were already over. She dashed into the hallway, grateful that Dante didn’t follow her out.

  “Lacey Dawes, I’d like to personally thank you for taking one for the team.” The booming voice of IMO’s president bellowed out of Lacey’s phone, and she grimaced as she keyed open her hotel room door. She walked in and dumped her crap on the bed, jabbing her iPad on again as Jim Greer said something else she couldn’t understand about hits and comments. In the intervening half hour of Lacey losing her last shred of sanity, the Wi-Fi had finally kicked in for her room. The YouTube Dream It Tour channel now filled the small screen, and Lacey realized what Jim was yammering on about, his words hitting her ears like a crashing, distant storm.

  She’d gone viral.

  The webisode series always drew its share of comments and poll votes—they were all tied to giveaways, and Dante had scores of devoted fans. But even as Lacey responded rotely to Jim, she could already tell this reaction was outside of the expected. Thousands of comments were scrolling down the page. The video had gotten nearly double the hits in just a few minutes that it normally would have in the immediate aftermath of a webisode, and the Twitter feed into the page was exploding. Everyone wanted to dish about the girl and the scrapbooks, the scrapbooks and the girl, how pathetic she was, how romantic, how creepy, how it was all a setup, how it couldn’t have been a setup. How amazing it was, and how weird.

  “Lacey—Lacey are you there?” Jim’s voice now contained an authoritative edge.

  Lacey shook herself. “I’m here, Jim. Did you know this was going to air?”

  “Brenda told me she had worked it out with you—I’m impressed with your dedication to IMO, Lacey. Of course, I agree with Brenda, we may need to replace you on the tour if it doesn’t blow over in a day or so. The people need to be focusing on Dante, not his love-struck tour h
andler.” He chuckled and Lacey closed her eyes, felt the blood drain out of her face. Replace me on the tour … Worked it out with Brenda …

  Why had she not seen this coming?

  “But we’ll deal with all of that after tomorrow night’s show. In the meantime, play nice with the camera guys, okay? And let me know your availability for interviews.”

  “Interviews?” Lacey looked at the phone in horror. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Are you kidding? Something needs to jump us from Internet phenomenon to pop-culture news of note. If the Scrapbook Princess doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will!”

  Jim was still chortling when Lacey hung up.

  This was even worse than she had imagined.

  Her phone immediately chirped again, indicating an incoming text. Lacey glanced at it despite herself—then blinked. The brief two-sentence message was from Anna, and it was the last thing she would have expected from the constantly working woman who, she knew for a fact, was scheduled well into the next century.

  Hang in there, sweetie. I’m on my way.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dante leaned back in his comfortable chair on the wide veranda, looking at the ocean, taking a long swig of his beer. Two very different women sat across the table from him, both of them way too intense, both of them on a mission that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said. “You think the way to get the world off of Lacey’s ass for her scrapbooks—which I had sent to my room by IMO, by the way—” He directed this last point to Lacey, but she just groaned and looked away.

  “Burn them,” she muttered.

  “Right. Anyway, you think the best way to handle the unwanted attention on Lacey is to put even more attention on her. As some sort of tricked-out superfan. How is that going to restore her credibility?”

  “Not attention on Lacey—on the superfan,” Anna said, her blonde hair pulled back into a messy bun that was already tangled in the wind. She was dressed in a style Dante could only describe as “corporate retreat”—soft black trousers, a polo shirt, and beach sandals—while Lacey was back in her habitual tunic and leggings. Neither woman looked comfortable—Anna was too focused, and Lacey too grim. But Anna had assembled a freaking spreadsheet to justify this course of action, so he was willing to hear her out. “I mean, Lacey will play the part, but the role will be sort of like a fantasy-come-to-life scenario. The ‘real’ number one fan of Dante Falcone gets a chance to break onto stage and stand in the spotlight with her dream come true.”

  He crooked a brow at her. “So then why don’t we get a real fan to play that part?”

  “Can’t control that,” Lacey said. She was worrying the edge of Anna’s printouts. “Too risky to let an unvetted person strut around on stage with a billion-dollar rock star. That’s why we have security guards.” She shook her head. “If we’re going to do this, it’s got to be someone we can control, someone we can trust, but who can still play the part convincingly.”

  “And that someone’s you.” He eyed her over his beer, watching the color creep up her cheeks. “You’re going to be the one to act like you’re in love with me.”

  “I can learn how to fake it,” she said stiffly.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s already under way,” Anna broke in. “I have a ton of friends who are perfect at helping with stuff like this. They’ve all liked and shared the Falcone and Paradiso pages, co-opted the Twitter feed, you name it. We’ve started to turn the tide from ‘Lacey Dawes is a freak show’ posts to ‘Maybe the scrapbooks were a plant’ to ‘What does it take to get a real fan to show up for Dante Falcone?’ to ‘Here she is.’ ” She sat back and gave them both a determined smile. “Give me another few hours, and I’ll have RockerGrrl firmly planted in everyone’s mind as the next amazing revelation on the Dream It tour.”

  RockerGrrl? Dante grimaced. He could feel a headache coming on. “I guess I just don’t understand what the big deal is,” he said. “I mean, they’re scrapbooks, Lacey. So you were a fan. Who cares?”

  “Dante, it’s my career,” Lacey said. “How do you think it looks for me to have gotten myself into a position to be your agency rep—all the while hiding the fact that I was obsessed with you throughout my teenage years? At best I look single-minded and intense. At worst I look like the scariest kind of freaky stalker. It calls everything into question. Would I be so successful with other clients? Am I even safe to be left alone with you? My reputation is everything. If I want to be seen as credible in this industry, clients have to trust me. And how can you trust someone who writes ‘Dante plus Lacey Forever’ on the inside cover of fifteen separate books, along with detailed descriptions of what our wedding and honeymoon would look like—in seven different places! Why did I not burn those scrapbooks when I graduated from high school? God, I’m so stupid!”

  Anna turned to her, ready to jump to her defense. “Lacey, you couldn’t have known—”

  “Oh, come on, Anna,” Lacey grumbled, and to Dante’s deepening concern, she really did sound depressed. “Seeing those books on screen was a pretty harsh wake-up call. I could have been excused for making them—I mean, you are amazing.” She directed this last to Dante, but he didn’t speak. He didn’t want to interrupt her train of thought. “But I can’t be excused for leaving them locked up at work where anyone could find them.”

  “Brenda raided your office and unlocked your drawers!” Anna protested, but Lacey shook her head.

  “Still my mistake. If I wanted to be totally safe, then I should have gone the extra step to protect myself. I was so eager to take advantage of the information I’d stored away, I didn’t think how it might look if anyone found those scrapbooks. And now I have my answer: I look like a fool. Nobody wants a fool on their team.”

  Dante slanted a look at Anna. “You consult with businesses in crisis all the time, right?” he asked her. “What do you think?”

  “My professional assessment?” Anna gave a little shrug. “Lacey Dawes is a business in crisis. She has placed herself in a position of great risk and opportunity. The risk is that she has garnered public notice at a pretty significant level; but that’s also the opportunity. If she can focus that attention on another element, and then later, ideally, present that distraction as her own invention to elevate and focus audience interest on a corporate-positive end target, which leads to a defined call to action that supports and extends brand awareness, she’ll be a hero.”

  Dante stared hard at Anna for a moment, and then looked back at Lacey. “You understood all of that?”

  Lacey shook her head, her face bleak. “Not in the slightest.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Anna said, rolling her eyes. “It means this: With distraction number one, the scrapbooks, Lacey looks like a love-struck fool. If she creates distraction number two, the superfan, and it’s successful—and if she then makes it seem like both distractions were created by her quite deliberately—then she has a shot at looking like a PR savant, willing to do whatever it takes in order to make IMO, and of course, Dante, look extraordinary.”

  Dante nodded, considering. “That makes a weird sort of sense,” he said. “So, how does this work, then? Another wig?”

  “Another one?” Anna frowned, and Lacey shot Dante a warning look. He grinned, taking that in, and Lacey jumped into the fray to stave off Anna’s clear curiosity.

  “Definitely a wig, makeup, some kind of outfit, whatever—just something that makes me look legitimate as a fan. If you can feed the flames that I’m the right grown-up fangirl for the real Dante, not the Dante of the past but the Dante of the here and now, and insinuate that maybe Dante really does like me back, that would probably play well. After the show, of course. He can’t really know what to expect before the show.” She eyed him with a look so endearingly serious, a little part of him became unglued. “So remember, act surprised.”

  “I can act surprised,” Dante said. “But—”

 
; Anna’s phone beeped, and she frowned down at it. “Oh, I’ve got to get this. It could be a date for the damn wedding.”

  Dante lifted his brows. “What wedding?”

  Anna fitted the phone to her ear and shot him a grimace. “Trust me, you don’t want to know. Hello, this is Anna!” she bubbled into the phone as she turned away and walked the short distance to the edge of the patio.

  Lacey immediately turned on him. “So, really? You’ll do this for me?”

  Dante rolled the bottle of beer in his hands, then set it down on the table. “I’ll do this for you, sure. But I think there should be something in it for me.”

  Lacey stilled, clearly still too keyed up to read his mood, and not wanting to play this the wrong way. Her vulnerability struck him to the core of his being, and he shifted, forcing himself not to just take her into his arms. He hadn’t been alone with her since that scene in the storeroom in Baltimore, and it was driving him absolutely insane. “Of course,” she said uneasily. “What—I mean, what did you have in mind?” She really needed him to help her, and he could tell that it was taking a lot out of her to ask for his assistance. He liked being able to be there for her, more than he wanted to admit. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to turn this to his advantage.

  He smiled and leaned forward, picking Lacey’s hand up and drawing her toward him until he was able to graze her knuckles with his lips. Her sharp intake of breath was all that he needed to stir the desire in his gut, and his smile was completely unfeigned. “I’ll think about it and let you know tonight after the show,” he said, squeezing her hand. “But stop worrying so much, sweetheart. I guarantee you’re going to like it.”