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 young she was. Then, when their relationship had turned serious, she hadn’t dared tell him the truth for fear of losing him. She’d continued the pretense of being a college student from California right up until after they’d eloped, when her father had tracked them down at the small Scottish inn where’d they’d spent their wedding night and dragged her from Graeme’s bed, telling him in explicit terms just what he’d done with a minor.
What would these women think if she told them that particular story? That she’d spent two days and nights locked in a bedroom with Graeme? That she’d kissed, licked and nibbled every delicious part of his body?
They’d never believe her. They’d think she was making it up, and she wouldn’t blame them. There were times when it didn’t seem real to her. Sometimes, that long-ago summer seemed no more than a dream.
“I’ve been a fan of Graeme Hamilton’s since before he made Galaxy’s End,” she finally said. That, at least, was the truth.
“Well, welcome to the club,” the first woman said. “My name is Sandra.”
“And I’m Claire,” the second woman added, indicating the registration badge she wore on a lanyard around her neck. “We’re both from Wisconsin.”
“I’m Lara. From Chicago.”
At that moment the band stopped playing, and a spotlight was turned onto the stage next to where Lara and her companions were sitting. As they watched, a round woman dressed in a figure-hugging prison-guard costume stepped forward and took the microphone.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, in a Southern accent. “Welcome to the second annual Galaxy’s End convention, where we joyfully celebrate everything related to that fabulous series, now in its third season.” She waggled her eyebrows meaningfully. “And we especially want to celebrate the gorgeous actor who made us women long to be marooned on that uncharted planet.”
There was scattered applause, and somebody from the back of the ballroom shouted, “We want Graeme!” followed by a ripple of laughter and more applause.
“I want to draw your attention to a slight change in our scheduled events,” the woman continued. “In your brochure, you’ll notice we have Finn McDougall, the director, scheduled to make a few remarks tonight. Unfortunately—”
She was interrupted by a collective groan of disappointment from the crowd, and she held her hands up, smiling.
“Now, let me finish, people. Unfortunately, Mr. McDougall’s flight has been delayed and we’ve rescheduled his chat for tomorrow morning instead. However …” She smiled secretively at the crowd. “We didn’t want you to be too disappointed, so we’ve brought in another guest. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome …Mr. Graeme Hamilton!”
There was an instant of stunned silence before the ballroom erupted in thunderous applause and ear-splitting shrieks of approval. Then, from the wings of the stage, a lean figure emerged, wearing Kip Corrigan’s signature black pants and shirt. The band struck up a resounding rendition of the theme song from Galaxy’s End, and amidst the swell of music, the man did a quick two-step dance move for the crowd, unleashing another, louder round of applause and screaming, before he strode across the stage toward the microphone.
Graeme saluted the band, kissed the emcee on both cheeks and then turned to the crowd with a wave. The spotlight turned his cropped hair into a gleaming halo of brown and bronze highlights, and from where Lara sat, a mere twenty feet from the stage, she could see his easy grin and the way his blue-green eyes scanned the crowd.
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
For an instant, her heart stopped beating, and then it exploded back