“This sounds like a relationship talk.”
“It’s not. I’m going to disappear at the end of June, if not before. I’m not your girlfriend. I’m a stowaway. I’m here to fuck and be friends.”
“All right. You first.”
“Fine.” Georgie rolled her eyes. “There was one guy who I dated in high school for a while. He dumped me.” When her father had been arrested, when all her friends had dumped her. “Since then, I really haven’t wanted to get involved with anyone. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and I don’t want anything more than just some fun.”
“All right.” He sighed, a deep one for dramatic effect. “There have been two women whom I was rather fond of. One was a girl in upper school. We went around together for less than a year before we graduated. I moved to New York for Juilliard. She stayed in Europe. It was amicable and remains so. The other was more complicated.”
“Yeah?” Georgie snuggled closer to him.
“There was another woman. We went our separate ways two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.” She wound her leg around his, feeling the rough denim with her bare leg.
Xan tugged on the green crystal swinging at the end of his earring. The stone caught the light from the bathroom door and threw bright sparkles on the bedroom walls for a moment. “She was wrong for me, and I recently found out that she is engaged to the conductor of her orchestra. She is utterly devoted to classical music, and she wanted me to join the L.A. Philharmonic, perhaps start a quartet.”
“She wanted you to go back to the violin?”
He nodded, swallowing.
“And give up Killer Valentine?”
He nodded again.
“Oh, Xan. I don’t want to speak badly about someone you were involved with, but you’re amazing on the stage. I can’t believe that she wanted you to give that up.”
“She never saw me perform.” His voice sounded even worse, not just hoarse but choked. “And I can’t give it up.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” Georgie said. “When you’re with someone, they don’t tear down things that you love. They build you up. They make you more than you could have been. They don’t make you choose.”
Xan settled his arms around her. “If I ever feel the need for a proper girlfriend, I shall have you interview them.”
“Deal. And if I ever lose my mind and indulge in having a boyfriend, I’ll have you interview them.”
He laughed. “I would grab the man around the throat and whisper in his ear that I will kill him if he hurts you.”
“You’d threaten someone with bodily harm for me? That’s so sweet. Are you going to sleep in those jeans or what?”
“I’ll just find some pajamas.”
He was rustling around in the dark, rummaging through his suitcase and softly swearing, when Georgie asked, “Was it Xan or Alex that had the girlfriends?”
“Alex,” he said, sliding back into the bed. “It’s always Alex. Natasha, the cellist, knew me as Xan and called me that, though Alex was usually the one with her.”
Sleep was beginning to drag her under, and she slurred her words. “Why was that?”
Xan wrapped his arms around Georgie, and she cuddled into his warmth. “I met her at Juilliard, and I called myself Xan Valentine there. I wanted to leave Alexandre Grimaldi behind, so when I moved to New York, I thought up the name. I liked having a different name, a whole fresh start, where no one knew me.”
She meant to ask why, but dawn was breaking over the horizon, and his body was warm in the blankets.
FLICKA CALLS
Georgie
The next day, Xan sneaked out of bed early in the morning, and Georgie hid under the sheets while Boris’s blow dryer whooshed in the bathroom. When she finally did stretch and crawl out from under the covers in the late morning sunlight, a note on the pillow beside her read, I’ll be back for lunch and gym.
Georgie needed to make her getaway to Atlanta soon, but not too soon. The luxury of the high-end hotel rooms, going to the gym, and seeing Xan perform at night was beginning to grow on her. Not having classes and homework and work was sheer laziness, and it felt great. She had been grinding for years.
Besides, Tatiana Butorin’s henchmen were out there somewhere.
Georgie’s phone vibrated beside the bed, and she disconnected the charger cord from the buzzing phone. The screen read, HRH Bossypants.
Missed call icons littered the top of the screen from most of her friends.
Oh, yeah. When Georgie had decided to save her hide, bolt from her university and all her friends, and create a new life for herself, she had set an email blast to go out, apologizing for disappearing from their lives and dumping their asses.
It must have sent itself.
And now Georgie was in deep shit with her friends. Her plan had been to deactivate this phone, but with Xan suddenly taking over her life, she had been letting his lawyers handle everything. It was easy to forget details like that.
Details like that could get her killed. The Russian bratva probably wouldn’t have the resources in the police to track her phone, especially not at the national level, but they sure as hell knew this number. God only knew what you could search for on the internet these days.
You might be able to search for a cell phone’s location.
Well, the band was moving on today to where the show would be tomorrow. She would be hundreds of miles away from this cell phone tower before the Russians could even catch a flight. Maybe being a nomad was safer for her.
It wouldn’t make any progress toward paying back the people she owed money to, but that was only her conscience and her immortal soul, not her ability to keep on breathing.
Her phone buzzed in her hand again.
Georgie flicked her thumb across the answer dot. “Hello? Flicka?”
“What the hell is this email?”
Flicka normally cultivated sweet, dulcet tones when she spoke, the essence of genteel, royal femininity, as befitted a young woman who was absolutely literally a princess and royal for more generations than the English royal family, whom she called cousins.
Georgie had not been aware that Flicka could shriek.
She said, “I’ve had some problems.”
“What the hell, Georgiana! I get back from my honeymoon and see this in my inbox? Why would you cut everyone out of your life and do such a thing again?”
Georgie had a sneaking suspicion that many of the voicemails on her phone were going to sound just like this. “I have to.”
“I just found you again. We’ve barely spoken, and now you’re disappearing into the mountains again. You can’t do this!”
“My father swindled money from the Russian mob, too. They want to kidnap me to blackmail my mother to pay them back.”
“That’s barbaric! Surely they wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“They’re the Russian Mafia, not the White Rose Cotillion,” Georgie said. “They told me to have her arrange for payment or else they would kidnap me and send bloody pieces of me to her until she paid.”
“Why doesn’t she just pay them?”
Georgie’s stomach twisted, a writhe of mortification, so she lied, “She doesn’t have the money.”
“I’ll pay them! How much money do you owe?”
“Talk about throwing good money after bad, Flicka. I can’t let you pay off my father’s debts to criminals.”
“I will. How much money do you owe them?”
“Eight million dollars.”
“That’s nothing! I mean, I’ll have to convince my brother to let me have it. He handles my money. But I’ll just pay them off and you’ll be fine.”
“That’s the sweetest, most generous offer I’ve ever heard. The problem is that it wouldn’t ever end. My dad stole a lot of money from a lot of people, and a good number of them would be fine with using my body parts as currency to get their money back. I looked into his books at the lawyer’s office, and that’s why I disappeared the first time. He stole
money from New Jersey and Chicago politicians, the yakuza, and drug cartels. It runs to hundreds of millions of dollars. These guys are all going to be after me until I can pay them back.”
Flicka’s sigh echoed through the phone. “My brother won’t let me dip that far into my trust funds.”
“And he shouldn’t. Flicka, you’re the kindest, most generous person on Earth, and I would be just as bad as he was if I took your money. I mean, when you think about it, I set some bait and made you call me in a highly emotional state. I said that a certain amount of money would get me out of trouble, and now I’m asking for more. This is a classic con. I know how these things work.”
“I know you. You would never.”
“You never know what people will do.”
“You thought you were doing me a favor.”
“I gave you the same spiel that my father gave every one of his investors, from them having to be a sophisticated investor, to his hedge fund being closed, to maybe he has a small opening just for you. I just believed what I was saying, instead of snorting the money and running the pyramid scheme.”
“Are you safe now? I can call my brother. Wulfram can send someone. His security guys are really good.”
“I’m okay right now. I’m kind of hiding. I’m nowhere near home.”
“So you’re safe.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“It’s been going on a while, a couple weeks. Even at Wulfram’s wedding, some mobster guy grabbed me.”
“Is that why you disappeared from the reception for a while? I was looking for you.”
“Oh, well, no. I hooked up with somebody.”
“Hooked up? You hooked up with somebody at his wedding?”
“Well, yeah.” Georgie was just a little pleased with herself.
“You? Virginal little I’m-saving-myself Georgiana Oelrichs, The Ice Princess?”
Georgie laughed. “It’s your fault. You introduced me to him.”
“I introduced you to everyone, darling. Be more specific.”
“You remember Alex Grimaldi, um, Alexandre de Valentinois?
“You went to bed with him? Well, you obviously survived, so all’s well that ends well.”
Georgie asked, “You know who he is here in the US, right?”
“Yes, he turned to the dark side, popular music.” Flicka sounded distracted by something over there.
“He came to see me at school the next week, and that’s when the Russians found me. They tried to grab me again, and he whisked me off. I was planning to disappear, but I’ve been staying with him ever since.”
“Holy shit, Georgiana! You’re with Alexandre Grimaldi?” Her Royal Serenity was shrieking again.
Georgie smiled and shrugged, even though she was talking on the phone and Flicka wouldn’t see either. “He and I kind of hit it off, in our own way.”
“Is he there with you right now?” Panic rang in Flicka’s voice.
“Um, no. He had an appearance to do.”
“Jesus Christ! You need to get away from him. I set you up to sing with him because I figured nothing would happen in the middle of a crowd, but you can’t be alone with him. You can’t be going places with him where no one knows where you are.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“He is not. He killed one man and damn near killed another one.”
“What, did they set a soda can on his violin or something?”
“He beat them to death with his bare hands. The only reason that he didn’t kill the second guy was because his security guy pulled him off.”
Alex? Slightly music-obsessed Alex? The man who wrote “Alwaysland?”
Georgie couldn’t picture that at all. Alex-who-was-Xan might storm around and glower, but then he’d have his assistants rectify the situation and play the violin for a while to cool off. “Then why isn’t he in jail?”
“It happened when he was fifteen and again when he was sixteen. For the first one, the courts went with counseling rather than prison. The European system is different than in the U.S., especially for minors. The second guy wouldn’t press charges and refused to testify.”
“I just can’t believe it. There must be a misunderstanding.”
“I was there for one of them.”
The door to the suite clicked open, and Xan strode in, followed by Boris and Yvonne. The blond woman was shoving an iPad at him and pointing to it, telling him that he had two hours for lunch and the gym before the tour busses pulled out for the next location so he had better move his ass.
Xan glanced up at Georgie, his dark eyes fathomless and his face, expressionless.
Georgie said into the phone, “I have to go.”
Flicka asked, “Is he there? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Flicka lowered her voice. “You need to get out of there. Just walk out, get somewhere safe, and call me. I’ll pay for anything you need, just get away from him before he goes nuts and kills you.”
“I’ll talk to you later.” Georgie tapped the screen to hang up.
Xan walked by her on his way to the bedroom. “Who was that?”
“Flicka.” She followed, watching the way his body moved. He was strong, yes. His muscles flowed under his clothes, but he worked out now. He had been to that Utahn shock gym to bulk up for the Rolling Stone shoot a few months ago.
She tried to imagine him as a teenager, a fifteen-year-old, probably lanky and scrawny from growing so much because he was six-feet-four, and that skinny kid beating a man to death with his fists.
And then nearly doing it again a year later.
She couldn’t even put it together in her head.
Yet, when that man had grabbed her in Paris, Xan had pulled the guy off, shook him, and then drawn back his fist, ready to punch the guy.
Anger had steeled his face.
He had looked comfortable with his hard fist by his shoulder, a powerful position to punch from.
Preparing to defend her from someone who had grabbed her was entirely different than beating a man to death.
And he hadn’t even punched the guy.
The sun shining through the hotel window lit Xan from the side as he unbuttoned his shirt, tossing his hair behind his shoulders. “Is Flicka back from her honeymoon?”
Georgie cleared her throat, which was unaccountably clenched. “Yeah, I guess. She only had time to talk for a minute.”
Xan glanced at her from the side as he peeled his shirt off his arms. His chest and biceps bulged, stretching his undershirt as he shrugged off the dress shirt and dropped it on the bed. “Something wrong?”
Georgie swallowed a lump in her throat. “No.”
“Do I have something on my face?”
“No.”
“Have I grown an extra head?”
Georgie smiled and shook her head.
He dragged his white tee shirt off over his head, baring the teal and blue tattoo that covered his back in a watercolor wash with musical notes and staves bobbing the cool water. He asked, “Shall we order room service before we hit the gym?”
Could Xan have almost killed two people before he graduated from high school?
Can anyone claim it was an accident if it had happened twice?
No matter what Georgie did in the next few hours before the buses pulled out, if she stayed or if she walked out of the hotel and away from him forever, her answer right now would have to be the same.
She smiled. “I could eat lunch.”
Georgie had been on the run before. You always eat, sleep, shower, and use a clean bathroom when you can.
Later, while Xan was eating lunch, she sneaked away to the hotel room’s bathroom with her new laptop computer and searched for “Alexandre Grimaldi murder.”
The only results were reviews of concerts where the young violin prodigy had murdered a piece of classical music, destroying it for all future violinists, and pictures of an impossibly young child, dark-haired and dark
-eyed, already stunningly beautiful, glowering at the camera lens over his violin.
She wiped the cookies and the browser cache.
LIZZY'S DEMANDS
Georgie
After a workout at the gym and a short bus ride to the next city over, Xan had an appearance that afternoon.
Georgie spent the couple of hours after that returning phone calls, assuring people that she was all right, that she was safe, and that she would be in touch when she could.
She was in the middle of talking to her girlfriend Reagan Stone-von Hannover, whom she called “Rae,”—who was giggling about how her new sister-in-law, Her Royal Bossypants Flicka, had seven fat three-ring binders filled with wedding planning contacts and pictures and ideas because, as Flicka had said, what use was a princess if she couldn’t throw a fairy-tale wedding at a moment’s notice—when the front door to the suite slammed.
A man’s voice called out. “Xan? Where the fuck are you, you bloody bastard?”
The man’s British accent was atrocious, obviously meant to goad Xan, but the good humor in it suggested that it was a running joke.
“He’s not here,” she called out and told Rae she would call her back. She flipped open the door to the living room. “I can give him a message.”
A lanky man with striking platinum blond hair, tipped with purple, leaned on the back of the couch, ogling her. He was one of the band members, the bass player, one of The Terror Twins, who always looked a little stoned when he wasn’t performing. He asked, “Hey, you’re the girl, right?”
“I’m a girl. I don’t know about the girl,” Georgie said.
“The girl that Xan has been keeping locked in his room.”
“Sure. Other than going to the gym, hanging out backstage at the concerts, and staying out at clubs until three in the morning, I guess I’ve been locked in the room. Except for the shopping. And the hotel’s spa. I like the spa.” She’d had a massage and a pedi so far.
“Well, right,” he said, bobbing his head, his neck flopping loosely. “But he’s not sharing you.”
Wild Thing Page 8
