Better than good—she looked delicious. With a smile, she accepted a pink-tinted pomegranate martini from a waiter who stood just inside the entrance, and took a hearty swallow, gasping as the alcohol burned its way down her throat. With her eyes watering, she stepped into the ballroom.
The lights had been dimmed and a large stage had been set up at one end, where a tuxedoed band played dinner music. Artificial trees, sparkling with minilights, lent a magical quality to the event. Three enormous movie screens had been placed at even intervals on the far wall, and clips from the show Galaxy’s End played endlessly so that no matter where you looked, there was Graeme Hamilton in the role of deep-space convict Kip Corrigan.
For a moment, Lara stood in the doorway and just stared, transfixed by the Technicolor images. Would she ever get used to seeing his face? Would the day ever come when her heart didn’t stop at the sight? Her life would be so much simpler if seeing him didn’t affect her so much.
But it did.
With a soft groan, she gulped down the rest of the martini. She just had to keep remembering that the pictures she saw on the big screens weren’t really Graeme. They were illusions, figments of somebody’s imagination, the same way the stories she wrote were the embodiment of her own unfulfilled fantasies.
She was so done with fantasies.
Across the sea of linen-covered tables adorned with flowers and flickering candlelight, Lara could see a long buffet table where white-tuxedoed waitstaff served food to the masked and costumed ballgoers. On the parquet dance floor in front of the stage, couples dressed as various Galaxy’s End characters danced together. The costumes were so impressive and so much like the ones from the actual show that Lara had a brief moment of unease. How badly did she stick out with her Star Wars getup? She shivered, aware that her scantily-clad body drew more than several appreciative glances from the men in the room.
Lara forced herself to move through the buffet line and then, plate in hand, searched for an empty seat among the crowded tables. She finally found one right next to the dance floor. The six women already seated there were dressed in identical costumes as Kip’s onscreen love interest, a prison guard named Lily, despite the fact they were easily in their midfifties. They each gave her welcoming smiles, although Lara didn’t miss how their eyes absorbed every detail of her own skimpy outfit.
Needing a little more false courage, she stopped a waiter as he passed near their table and snagged a second martini from his tray, although the first one seemed to be doing the trick. Even now, her limbs were feeling looser and the second drink didn’t taste nearly as overpowering as the first had.
The woman closest to Lara turned to her and winked. “Now that’s what I call a costume,” she said.
Lara flushed behind the concealing mask, not sure if the woman was being sincere or sarcastic. Maybe she should have chosen a table of men. Maintaining an aura of sensuality was so much more difficult when surrounded by six matronly women, several of whom clearly disapproved of her revealing outfit, judging by their expressions.
“Thanks,” she responded. “This isn’t the costume I ordered, but by the time I received it, it was too late to get something else.”
The woman on Lara’s other side patted her arm reassuringly. “Don’t think twice about it, hon. If I had a body like yours, I’d wear that costume, too. And that mask is absolutely fabulous.”
Lara smiled gratefully at her. “So is this your first Galaxy’s End convention?”
“Goodness, no,” the woman laughed. “We were here last year, too. We’ve been Graeme Hamilton fans since day one.” She indicated the other women at the table. “We call ourselves Hamilton’s Hussies. Maybe you’ve heard of us? We practically started Graeme’s fan club!”
Lara had heard of them. In fact, she was a frequent visitor to their Web site, dedicated to Graeme and to his career. She’d posted countless erotic stories about Kip Corrigan and the other Galaxy’s End characters to the fan fiction page of the site, and had even exchanged e-mail correspondence with the Hussies under her screen name, Secret Lover.
But she didn’t share any of this with the women at the table. Her stories were too personal to talk about with strangers, especially since they were based completely on Graeme Hamilton himself. She shivered to think how he would react if he could read her lusty tales. There was no doubt in her mind that he would recognize the main character as himself. Most of her stories were drawn directly from her own experiences with Graeme, right down to the dialogue.
Then there were her other stories …the ones based solely on her own imagination. With her writing, she was free to explore all her forbidden fantasies about Graeme, disguised as fan fiction about the Galaxy’s End characters. In her stories, she could do anything, and she could have Graeme respond in any way she desired. She could relive every moment of that summer when she had first fallen in love with him. She could replay every heated second of their time at the Scottish inn when he’d aroused her to the point that she thought she might die from sheer pleasure, and then he’d shown her there was even more.
In her fan fiction, she enjoyed dominating him, forcing him to submit to her desires. But in the end, he would always wrest control back from her and then subject her to the most delicious torture.
“So you’re a big Graeme Hamilton fan, huh?” she asked, picking at the cheese manicotti on her plate, and then mentally rolled her eyes at her own inane question.
“Aren’t we all?” asked the second woman. Her short brown hair was liberally sprinkled with gray, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth, but the excitement and anticipation in her eyes made her look like a schoolgirl. “I fell in love with him the first time I saw him in the pilot episode. I mean, how could any woman not fall head over heels for him, right?”
Lara avoided answering the question by taking a gulp of her martini. This was exactly why she’d been reluctant to attend the convention. Any minute now, they’d start gushing about Graeme’s physical attributes and speculating about his love life. Was this what he had to endure every time he made a public appearance?
The woman on Lara’s other side smiled knowingly as she speared a small roasted potato with her fork and popped it into her mouth. “So, when did you lose your virginity to His Royal Hotness?” she asked, her eyes gleaming with mischief.
“Excuse me?” Lara knew her mouth was open, but she couldn’t seem to close it, any more than she could prevent the sudden, hard slamming of her heart within her chest. They couldn’t possibly know! Nobody, aside from her parents and Val—and Graeme, of course—knew that she had relinquished her virginity to him five years earlier. In the years since, she’d been so careful not to let anyone find out ….
The woman grinned as she observed the hot color that turned Lara’s neck pink. “I mean, when did you first discover Graeme Hamilton? When did you first realize you were smitten?”
Just over five years ago, when I was almost eighteen years old and nobody in the entertainment industry even knew Graeme Hamilton existed.
She looked at the expectant faces of the women. How would they react if she told them the truth? If she told them that she had known Graeme before he became Hollywood’s hottest heartthrob? That she knew him intimately? That she’d fallen in love with him the first time she’d met him and had lied to him about her age, telling him that she was actually twenty-one and not seventeen? He’d been twenty-three and she’d known instinctively that he wouldn’t want anything to do with her if he realized just how
