Hot and Bothered by CRYSTAL GREEN

you . . .”
    â€œNeeded anything.”
    A do-over from all those years ago? A chance to show her that he could wipe away the awkward memory of that night in the barn?
    A chance for him to lose himself as he buried himself in her?
    After a laden pause, she raised her hand in good night, then disappeared from his doorway.
    As if Gideon could get any sleep after
that
.
    But he still got ready for bed, threw on his sweatpants, then explored the room, every nook and cranny. That didn’t chase away any of the restlessness, though, so he thought he’d explore what was in the fridge downstairs, and he wandered into the hallway, passing by Rochelle’s closed door.
    No light underneath the crack. No gape of her doorway.
    No invitation at all.
    But he hadn’t been expecting one, so he moved on, putting distance—a lot of it—between him and her and managing to avoid Harry downstairs on his way to the kitchen.
    He was almost there when he came to the box of books he’d seen in the foyer earlier. He bent down, lifted a copy of
Cherry Red
out, and thumbed through the pages, still thinking of how useful this would be in profiling the creeper. And thinking of how Rochelle had been reading
him
and how he’d love to read her, too.
    He brought the book up to his room, took possession of the bed, and started at chapter one. Before he knew it, he was at chapter two.
    Why Cherry?
he kept thinking. What had really drawn Rochelle to her?
    It wasn’t until chapter four that he started to read Rochelle much, much better.
    ***
    â€œDo you like it, Tommy?”
    Cherry stood at the door of her apartment, preening and showing off her new strawberry-blond hairdo for her very best friend in Vegas. True, she’d met Tommy Rhodes only a few days ago while she’d been wandering around the Sahara, hoping to catch Elvis’s eye since he was staying there, but it wasn’t as if she was a long-timer in the city herself, after having moved here with Jason Vandecamp. Yet the kid with stars in his eyes and the ambition to raise money for producing beach movies in LA had gone broke at the craps tables and left her with a tacky apartment and a thirst to show him that she’d make it without him.
    She had been this close to moving back to California so she could find her big break with someone else when . . .
    Viva Las Vegas!
    She’d only won a role as an extra, but Cherry was twenty-one, tan, long-legged, and determined to make bigger things out of a bit part. She always did.
    Tommy looked confused as he stood in the doorway dressed in his light blue collared shirt and tan trousers, his wheat-colored hair slicked back. When Cherry had buddied up to him at the Sahara after seeing that he was a bellboy and probably had the inside scoop on guests, she’d thought he was cute—but in a nonthreatening, handsome lifeguard way.
    â€œYour . . . hair,” he finally said.
    â€œIsn’t it fab?” She modeled the new ’do for him some more. “Just like Ann-Margret, right? She went strawberry blond for her role in the movie, so I figured why not me?”
    Now Tommy seemed pained to come up with anything good to say as he scanned her new hair. “Why do you want to look like her?”
    â€œI heard from other extras that there’s someone on the camera crew who’s caught up in Ann-Margret’s pretty little web, so he gives her great camera angles and all that.” She primped again. “Any actress with ambition should want to be Ann-Margret—they should want to look like her, act like her, imitate her. She’s a force of nature.” Rumor even had it that, at first, Elvis himself hadn’t been too happy about the force of nature and her smitten cameraman—and about the fact that Ann-Margret might steal the spotlight in the movie altogether—but that hadn’t lasted long.
    â€œWhat I meant,” Tommy said, “is