Reunion Girls (4 page)

Tonight's Jane Bond routine was unusual. She only did the secret agent act on those rare occasions where the risk was worth the potential payout. Wedding photos of Dean Paul and Aspen could easily command a price in the low six figures. On a typical project, Babe kept a safe distance, turning out surveillance-quality pictures of the famous in captivating situations—Jennifer Garner calming her daughters in Central Park, Sarah Jessica Parker arguing with Matthew Broderick outside their apartment building, Emma Stone on Bleecker Street stuffing a Magnolia Bakery cupcake with pink icing into her mouth.

"Hey, baby, can I see your backstage pass?"

She jolted as Dean Paul's mellifluous voice shattered her reverie. His warm breath bathed her neck. The bastard was closer than skin. Babe smiled in spite of herself, turning to face him. "I don't need one. I'm with the band."

He moved in to kiss her hello.

Babe turned her head so that his lips met her cheek. It was bad enough that she already wanted to rip off his clothes. Why pile on the misery?

"Those pants are in strict violation of the dress code," he teased, checking her out in an obviously approving way.

She challenged him with her eyes. "So throw me out."

"Nah . . . I don't want to cause a scene." He winked.

She almost sighed.
Damn him.

"It's good to see you, Babe. It means a lot to me that you're here."

"I'd be a fool to miss it," she said silkily. How would he feel if he ever found out that his wedding had earned her the down payment on a fabulous apartment?

Dean Paul leaned in to whisper conspiratorially.

Babe could make out his cologne—the fragrance Arousal by a British designer whose name escaped her. Hints of sangria, lavender, green tea, and vanilla. The combination was edgy, intoxicating, and seductive. In a word, Dean Paul's signature.

"You can blame me for
212
not getting the exclusive," he was saying. "I didn't want you working tonight. I wanted you to come as a guest."

If only you knew.
Babe's bullshit alarm was blaring. She narrowed her gaze. "Come on. You can level with me. How much did
InStyle
offer?" A calculating glance around the room. "Did they pay for all of this?"

Dean Paul's smile was instantly disarming. "They could have rights to our first child for all I know." He shrugged helplessly. "Aspen's manager worked everything out. I didn't even get a say."

"Her manager?"
 
Babe raised an eyebrow. "Interesting. I didn't realize that appearing on a reality show a year ago constituted a need for outside management. Stupid me. I spent a fortune on college."

Playfully, Dean Paul shook a scolding finger at her. "Careful. That's my wife you're talking about. She's been touring the country on the college lecture circuit ever since the show stopped, but that's beginning to wind down."

"Tell her not to worry. There's always
Big Brother."

He breezed past the insult. "Actually, she wants to get into broadcasting. Aspen loves politics. She watches Fox News all the time."

There could be no better opening. "My boyfriend works at MSNBC. I'll put in a word. Maybe she could intern." Babe savored what was coming next. "I'm sure Jake could find something for her."

The transformation on Dean Paul's face was total.
"Jake?"
You could almost see the TelePrompTer of his brain running the blind item from the "It Parade" column. He shut his eyes for a long second. "Please tell me you don't mean Jake James."

Babe grinned in confirmation. "You're not still carrying around that old grudge from college, are you?"

Dean Paul flashed a hot look of indignation. "
Old
grudge? That asshole uses his television show as a bully pulpit against me regularly. There's nothing old about it." He hesitated a moment. "I shouldn't care, though. He doesn't even register a full point in the ratings. The show's a joke."

"Don't be so sure," Babe said casually, careful not to come off as defensive. "Jake's numbers are steadily building. In fact, last week he edged out CNN. The network is thrilled."

Dean Paul just looked at her, silently fuming.

Babe moistened already moist lips, relishing his reaction.

For all practical comparisons, Jake James was a young, sexy, in-your-face and on-the-rise cable news star gunning for Bill O'Reilly credibility. His MSNBC talk show,
In the Ring with Jake James,
was building buzz on account of its infamous verbal sparring between the host and anyone who dared to go up against him. Sometimes, as in the case of Dean Paul and others on his personal hit list, Jake would simply shadowbox his opinions directly to the camera, the intent being to excoriate them to such a humiliating level that they would agree to guest on the program to defend themselves in person.

Like Babe, Jake had been an outsider at Brown. He was there on scholarship. The scrappy son of an uneducated single mother, he was hardwired to be hostile toward privileged rich kids. Given the campus environment, he spent his entire undergraduate career being pissed off. But girls still loved the pugnacious boy from the wrong side of the tracks. It helped that tales of his sexual prowess were legendary. Everything about him was the subject of rave reviews—the size of his endowment, his skill at cunnilingus, his phenomenal staying power during intercourse. What drove the coeds crazy was Jake's reverse snobbery. He had little interest in horny trust-fund girls. One of his oft-repeated cast-off lines: "Why would I want to sleep with a skinny bitch like you when I can have real legs and eggs anytime I want?"

Jake had been referring to the girls at the Foxy Lady, a local club. The dancers there loved him. He couldn't tip worth a damn, but after a long night of awkward groping from sexual inadequates and drunken boasts from college dorks who couldn't deliver, Jake became a popular after-the-shift party guest. He was fun, he treated the girls like real people, and he always satisfied them, usually more than once.

That he got regular free sex from hot strippers only polarized him more on the Brown campus. Women were intrigued. A true bad boy and a proven dynamo between the sheets? Those kind of guys definitely had their place. As for the men, they couldn't stand him. Jake was nothing but an arrogant, loudmouthed, poor son of a bitch. And it drove them insane that he had the looks, the athleticism, and the sexual power to make any girl wonder... and sometimes wander.

The true campus rivalry had been between Jake and Dean Paul, though. Babe had never figured out exactly why Jake hated Dean Paul so much. But it was an animosity that seemed to feed on itself. Intellectually, they would square off in classes and at student protest events. Physically, they went toe-to-toe in intramural sports. And once, at five o'clock in the morning, after a particularly raucous party, the prince and the pauper had even gone fisticuffs at Ruby's, a local diner.

To Jake's credit, though, he was close to living up to his constant boasting about making it big. He left Brown and started out as a field reporter for an NBC affiliate in a small market. Great looks and a cocky attitude got him noticed. Cutting a swath through small, medium, and major markets, he eventually turned up as a correspondent on
Dateline
before being lured to MSNBC for his own show in an effort to punch up the network's younger demographics. Mission accomplished.
In the Ring with Jake James
had a core dedicated following of eighteen-to forty-nine-year-old females. They liked his brash, macho, the-bullshit-stops-here style. His media exposure attracted the interest of publishers, and his first book,
Put Up Your Dukes,
featuring a shirtless Jake in boxing trunks on the cover, was being prepped for a big launch and was already a top advance-order title on Amazon.

Dean Paul didn't have as much to brag about. His post-Brown years were unfocused at best. An aborted stint at law school. Flirtations with acting in Los Angeles. The ski bum years in Vail. An eighteen-month European adventure. His parents had revolted—and even threatened to cut him off—when he got tapped to headline the next season of
The Bachelor.
Dean Paul bowed out and hung around the L.A. scene, where he ultimately met Aspen. Throughout the years, enthusiastic rumors had persisted that Dean Paul might step into the political arena and run for a New York congressional seat, his incredible charisma superseding any lack of true achievement.

Jake had written about the media's love affair with Dean Paul Lockhart in his new book. Babe had read the passages in advance galley form. They were explosive. At the time, she had taken perverse delight in Jake's attack. But now, standing here with Dean Paul, she felt guilty for knowing about it. Why did her feelings for him have to be so complicated? With physical distance, she could hate him. For being the catalyst that ruined two great friendships. For breaking up too soon. For not staying in touch while he wasted time globe-trotting around the world. But here, face-to-face, she almost felt ready to forgive him. But the key word there was
almost.

"I just can't believe you're seeing that guy," Dean Paul was saying. "You could do so much better for yourself."

Babe's gaze cut to his new wife, close to being officially drunk, and whooping it up with her fellow
Survivor
alums. "Right back at you."

Dean Paul parted his perfect lips in protest, but the words didn't come out. His eyes zeroed in on something or someone behind her. "Dean Paul Lockhart, this is your life," he murmured.

Babe turned to see for herself.

It wasn't Gabrielle Foster. That girl had been the pretty, articulate, Black American Princess from the Michigan Shore. This was Brown Sugar. The metamorphosis had been total. Like a caterpillar to a butterfly. From upper-class black society daughter to ubiquitous hip-hop diva. Daring. Sexy. Nasty when she wanted to be. The four-letter word was already being whispered about her by people who declared such things...
icon.

Babe marveled at the way Brown Sugar's arrival instantly stopped the reception cold, as if someone had yelled "Anthrax!" in a crowded elevator. It was
Love & Hip-Hop
with an unlimited wardrobe budget.

She wore an open, full-length mink, a tube top that featured two distended nipples jutting out like baby bullets, hot pants, a wide belt with an enormous buckle that spelled out BLING in diamonds, thigh-high black leather boots, and enough jewelry to justify the 300-pound bodyguard scowling beside her.

The shock and awe on Dean Paul's face was priceless.

Babe couldn't resist capturing the magic moment. A brush of the hair. A turn of the wrist. A slight bracelet adjustment.

Click
.

The It Parade

by Jinx Wiatt

Fill in the Blanks

Everybody knows that overexcited publicists can stretch the truth a bit when promoting the racehorses in their stable. Who hasn't heard Oscar buzz about a fall movie that turns out to be a real turkey? But the flacks at a certain record company have taken the practice entirely too far. They didn't just fudge the facts. They put out total fiction. How will the hard-core fans of a major rap priestess feel when they find out that she cut her teeth not in the slums of Detroit but in a mansion with five bathrooms?

Gabrielle

YES, BITCH, THEY'RE REAL.

GABRIELLE Foster wanted to scream the fact at the top of her lungs.

The custom-made Mimi So pink sapphire and diamond earrings dangling from her lobes were worth three million. Her Lorraine Schwartz sixty-two-carat diamond pinkie ring was another three million. Jay-Z had one, too. But his topped out at sixty carats. The value of the Damiani diamonds draped around her neck? She didn't know. The necklace was a gift from her producer, AKA Bomb Threat, to celebrate the number-one debut of her new CD,
Queen of Bling.

Gabrielle stood there, impervious to the stares. She vibed on the band, moving her hips, digging the sound, as Rita Coolidge crooned her hit single from the mid-'80s. "Something said this is it . . . something said you can't miss . . . something said love . . ."

Her gaze was locked on to Dean Paul as the lilting music played, the lyrics an eerie poem for the way she had felt the first time he kissed her. That she even knew the song was a testament to how much she had changed. Rita Coolidge, Neil Diamond, and Barbra Streisand had all been favorites of her parents. Gabrielle remembered listening to their white-bread record collection growing up. The only black artists in the stack had been Roberta Flack and Diana Ross. It was all so hard to fathom . . . the cocooned childhood . . . the cosseted denial of her blackness and what that meant in the real, harsh, and sometimes cruel world. How could that existence have belonged to her?

Gabrielle tried to shake away the thought. Things were different now. Life was hard core. No coddling necessary. Her mantra: Bring it on.
 
Straight up. No chaser.

Dean Paul strode in her direction, moving toward the Gabrielle of before, not the Brown Sugar of today. He approached with a wry smile.

Gabrielle worked hard to reveal nothing. The pampered white boy had no idea. No matter, it all came rushing back . . . how beautiful he was. There was no other word for it. She stood there, bewitched for a moment, temporarily losing her edge.

"This is some kind of evil plot," Dean Paul said.

Coolly, Gabrielle questioned him with a single raise of her brow. His famous baby blues were locked on her emerald green eyes, which her makeup artist enhanced with a dot of fuchsia shadow in the inner corner.

"My three favorite ex-girlfriends look drop-dead beautiful tonight," he explained, moving in for a kiss.

Before she could stop the inevitable, her bodyguard took a menacing step forward to manhandle Dean Paul's arm.

"It's okay, Baby Bear," Gabrielle assured him. "He's an old friend."

Shocked, and more than a little pissed off, Dean Paul twisted out of Baby Bear's grasp and shook his arm free. "Jesus, Gabby, do you really need this storm trooper? At my wedding?"