Read Online Cruising the Strip by Radclyffe, Karin Kallmaker - Free Book Online Page B

some serious tarnishing.”
    “But does the photo shoot have to be with her ?” She faced the wall when a group of women emerged from the restroom. She enjoyed conventions and she liked talking to fans, but not on the way to the bathroom.
    “Cindy Crawford was never so hot as when she was shaving k.d. lang’s face. What’s the matter? Are you afraid that more than Barrett Lancey’s reputation will rub off on you?” Ling said something to someone that Farrah couldn’t make out, then the connection cleared. “Her girlfriend is the photographer. What could happen?”
    I could make a fool of myself, Farrah wanted to say. She hadn’t been fighting these feelings for all these years to lose her reputation now. Maybe it was shallow, but she worked hard, and she intended to stay at the very top of romance best seller lists where image, image, image was everything, everything, everything. Farrah Fotheringay was romance’s most eligible bachelorette. A long-nursed rumor of a love lost to a tragic, early death had hidden her secrets so deep even she didn’t remember what she was. That is, until she looked at Barrett Lancey, her gorgeous girlfriend, and women like them.
    Managing to complete her business in the restroom without being asked for an autograph, she tried to shake herself out of her poor-little-me state of mind. Makeup repaired, she made her way across the Palace Casino to the meeting rooms where there was already a queue at the doors for “Farrah and Barrett in Conversation.”
    She ought to be annoyed they were even paired on a panel like that. She had fifteen years in the business and Barrett only four. Farrah Fotheringay was her publisher’s cash cow, and so far, while sales were strong, excitement in the existing fan base was the only thing Barrett Lancey was generating. Meow, meow, meow, Farrah thought. She’s generating plenty of excitement in you.
    What really annoyed her was that Barrett Lancey had groupies, both lesbian and straight. “Lance” could snap her fingers and any of the cute young dykes would crawl over cut glass for her. She needed to keep some distance from the shaggy-hair, dark-eyed woman, needed to downright hate her if she could, otherwise her racing pulse might become obvious to the woman who caused it. Even worse, Barrett’s equally dynamic girlfriend could notice, and the last thing she needed was for Racie Racine to decide that her lens would highlight Farrah’s crow’s feet, cellulite, and suspiciously silver highlights.
    Barrett and Racie—honestly! What kinds of names were those? Didn’t lesbians have names like Mary or Jane or Patty? Oh stop it, she told herself. Fotheringay might be fake, but she was a closet-case lesbian named Farrah with no room to cast stones.
    The groupies were clearing a path for the couple, who walked everywhere arm-in-arm. From the very start of her skyrocketing career as the new breed of romance writer, Barrett had made her sexuality plain in dedications of her work to her girlfriend. She could get away with that in this day and age, but Farrah hadn’t had that option when she’d broken into romance publishing fifteen years ago. Back then a virginal aura meshed with that handy broken heart had been her only choice if she didn’t want anyone wondering why she never married, never had children, lived alone.
    She had only to look at Carly Vincent’s rapid descent from A-List to B-List when she had come out fifteen years ago for proof. She wondered if Carly was as bitter as she was that these newbies, with no history, no baggage, could burst on the scene, peccadilloes and all, with nary a consequence.
    Fifteen years ago, she had had to play it straight, and her heroines had to faint at least once every book. They couldn’t be kick-ass super spy martial arts Navy Seal ninjas who spoke five languages while curing cancer and racing thoroughbreds.
    So Barrett got everything she wanted, Farrah thought viciously, while other people were stuck