He stroked her hair, murmuring something that she didn’t understand.
“Alex?” she asked.
“No.”
“Xan?” Her voice sounded a little desperate, but she was running out of names.
“Non.” She heard that he was speaking French that time.
He pushed himself up above her, and he smiled.
Georgie wondered if she should be afraid, but he didn’t look angry. Xan’s intensity lived in his dark eyes, but Alex’s gentleness seemed to be there, too.
He smoothed her hair back from her face.
She paused before she asked, “Is there a different name that I should call you?”
“Alexandre Grimaldi.” His accent made it clear that it was the French pronunciation.
“All right, Alexandre.” She did her best, but she hadn’t ever taken French. She tried to growl the R in her throat.
His smile curved his lips.
Georgie should leave. She should shove his lean, rippled body off of her and get the hell out and catch her plane to Atlanta.
She took a deep breath. “Alex writes the songs. Xan performs. What do you do?”
He blinked, his lush, black eyelashes touching his cheeks. “I play the violin.”
There was something about the violin, Flicka had said. Don’t let him play the violin, Flicka had said.
She asked, “It’s always you, playing the violin?”
His dark eyes searched hers. “Yes.”
“So, the Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and ‘Ave Maria?’”
“It’s always me. Once I touch the violin, it’s me.”
“But, we talked while you were playing the violin. You didn’t have a French accent.”
He smiled. “It’s not like that. It’s not like demonic possession or an alien wearing my skin.”
When Rade and Grayson had been stoned at the band meeting a few months ago, when Xan had nearly been nearly unable to contain the violence, he had played the violin, which meant that Alexandre had played the violin.
This part of him was the genius that people risked their life to taste.
Genius, and maybe violence.
She let her fingers trail up into his hair, touching the dark strands beside his eyes. “Is the violin all that you do?”
His expression softened more, his smile reaching his eyes. “Non.”
Georgie should dash to the car and sprint to make her flight. She didn’t have to check luggage and she had her boarding pass downloaded to her phone. She could make her plane if she left in the next twenty minutes.
But she had been immersed in music for months.
The missing violin prodigy was in front of her. The reviews of his recitals as a child and teenager soared into the rhapsodic.
She could hear him play, if only for a few minutes, before she left for Atlanta and her new university and another life.
Just a few minutes with Alexandre Grimaldi.
The temptation to the classical musician that Georgiana had been was enormous.
“Do you want to play the violin?” she asked.
“For you?” he asked.
“Just for me,” she assured him. “Just for a minute.”
His guitar case with the concealed violin compartment stood in the corner of the dressing room, leaning against the light bulb-studded make-up table and boxed in with a chair. Georgie assumed that you didn’t leave Stradivari worth millions of dollars lying around hotel rooms, even if this one was hidden behind a guitar.
He climbed off her, getting rid of the condom and buttoning his jeans. Georgie snagged the blanket from the couch and wrapped it around herself.
Watching Alexandre walk across the room was fascinating.
Alex walked like an aristocrat. His every gesture was restrained and minimized, controlled as if he also wielded the power of a kingdom, and a fingertip out of place might decimate a country.
Xan was a rock star, his long hair waving as he rocked entire arenas packed with people. His glower and stalking gait brought to mind the phrase sex incarnate.
Alexandre looked slimmer as he walked, still muscular, but lithe. He skirted a chair as he made his way across the room, and the way his body bent around the chair wasn’t like a dancer, an overly limber flipping of loose joints and elastic ligaments. He was muscular and strong, but supple.
Georgie pulled the blanket up to her neck and watched him crouch to extract his violin from the case and stand with it in his hands, looking at the red-toned wood and holding it lightly. If he had spun the priceless instrument over his knuckles, Georgie would have believed that he had done it a thousand times.
He pressed a cotton pad to the chin rest, tucked it under his chin, and laid the bow on the strings.
Georgie saw his chest deflate under his tee shirt as he exhaled, and he closed his eyes. His long hair lay behind his shoulders. Silver death’s head and steel rings glinted on his fingers in the light from the make-up table as he held the bow in his fingertips.
The bow moved in his hand, and a low, haunting note spread through the room.
He was, if anything, better.
Georgie tucked the blanket more tightly around her naked body, still sweating from sex.
A few delicate notes dropped from the strings, and then Alexandre began a lilting ascension in scales. The notes rose higher, each note keening like the music was climbing to the sun and must be the apex, but then the next measure drifted upward to fly impossibly higher.
He angled his head, pressing his cheek to the violin like he was caressing it or listening to the soul of the instrument.
Her own cheek was still warm from where he had pressed his cheek to hers exactly like that.
The run broke, and the music fluttered back down the scales as if the music was falling through the sky.
The song was so familiar that Georgie could almost hum along, but words floated just beyond where she could grab them. “Is that Debussy?”
“No. Freddie Mercury. ‘Who Wants to Live Forever.’”
He turned away, touching the bow to the strings with just a whisper of sound.
“Who Wants to Live Forever” by Queen
Performed by David Garrett
Alexandre’s back arched to the music, like the melody swirled around him and he bent like a sapling in a whirlwind. The last notes keened for his own mortality and hers and for Rade as they reached for the sky.
He lifted the bow from the strings, disengaging, and he looked at her from the corners of his eyes.
Georgie’s fists cramped around the blanket that she had crammed against her chin. When he looked at her, she saw herself as he must, so enraptured by the music that she had tears leaking out of her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” She rubbed the blanket on her face. “I’m sorry. It’s just Rade and everything.”
The door slammed open. Adrien stood there, his right arm reaching across his chest to his left armpit. His angry eyes surveyed Alexandre holding the violin and Georgie curled on the sofa.
Adrien addressed Georgie, but he watched Alexandre. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Of course.” She secured the blanket under her naked butt.
Adrien turned his chin back to Alexandre. “Are you all right?”
“Oui-oui,” he said and continued in French.
Adrien looked more concerned, and he was bouncing on his toes. “Miss, you need to come with me.”
“Alexandre was just playing the violin for me. I’m fine. I was just still upset about Rade.”
“You need to come with me now,” Adrien insisted.
Georgie smoothed the blanket around her legs, aware that her clothes were lying heaped on the floor. “He’s fine with me.”
Alexandre said something else in French.
Adrien studied Alexandre, noting everything from his motorcycle boots to the easy way the violin and bow dangled in his hands.
He turned back to Georgie. “If you need me, I’ll be right outside.”
“Okay.�
��
Adrien shut the door behind him, but she didn’t hear footsteps walking away.
Alexandre came back to the couch, holding the violin and bow in one hand between his fingers, and sat beside her to draw her under his arm.
Georgie let him, even though she almost worried that it was a prelude to strangulation. “Are you all right now? About Rade?”
He set the violin on the end table and laid the bow beside it. “No, and I won’t be for a while.” His accent was still heavily French. “He has been my friend and bandmate for several years. I knew him better than I know my sister, these days.”
His sister, he said. So he did have a sister. “I’m sorry.”
Alexandre stared ahead of him at the mirror on the other side of the dressing room, but he watched her through the glass. He said, “Rade’s other self was heroin. I could see it in him.”
She leaned closer and slid her arms around his waist. “I feel so bad about him.”
“His death was inevitable.”
His calm tone when talking about death was chilling. “Xan was distraught about it.”
“It was a shock. You always hope that they will have more time to stop. You always hope that it won’t be today.”
“Are you Xan now?”
“You can call me Alexandre.”
She leaned against his warm body. His cologne, spices and lemon, almost covered up the whiff of sex that she could detect when she was so close to him. “This is confusing.”
“I’m a bundle of white light, a duality of both particles and waves, composed of all colors. Sometimes, you can see certain colors more clearly.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. That clarifies things.” She still couldn’t wrap her head around it. “I think you need to let Alex come back. He needs to cancel the concert tonight.”
“Cancel?” He turned and looked at her, and she could already see the hard edges of Xan Valentine taking form.
Oops.
He said, “We’re not cancelling the fucking concert.”
“Xan?”
“Of course.” He said the R with the hollowness of a British accent, not a French growl.
No equivocation on that? She could see how Xan would insist that he owned their body, while Alex and Alexandre would consider a more nuanced metaphor.
She said, “Rade died. You have to cancel the concert.”
“Fuck that, and fuck him.” His British accent firmed, hardening the consonants until they squeezed out the vowels. “He killed himself though we all begged him not to. Suicide is an assault on the survivors.”
“It wasn’t suicide. He overdosed.” Georgie pulled back from him, watching.
“Same fucking difference.”
“The ticket service needs time to refund the tickets, right? Don’t you have to cancel it soon?”
“No.”
“Are you going to play with just guitars? Be a proper rock and roll guitar band?” She was trying to josh him a little.
“That’s not what I had in mind.”
“But you don’t have anyone to play the keyboards.”
She saw the trap as soon as she said it.
Xan turned, light burning in his dark eyes.
“Oh, no.” She scooted backward, dragging the blanket with her. “No way.”
“Georgie, I need you.” He crawled over the couch toward her, a slinking panther on the stalk.
“Nuh-uh.” She tossed the blanket aside and grabbed her underwear, hopping to pull the cotton fabric over her foot and damn-near tripping herself when the elastic caught on her big toe. “No way in Hell. No fucking way. I have a plane to catch.”
Xan snagged her elbow and yanked her backward, pulling her into his lap. The seams of his jeans were rough under her bare thighs. He wrapped his strong arms around her and growled in her ear, “You want this. You know that you want this. Every time I’ve convinced you to go on stage, you’ve loved it. You feel the thrill.”
She shook her head. “The Butorins know that I’m in New York today. I can’t be out in public.”
“I can keep you safe. I have a squadron of security people on you now.”
“No, you don’t.”
He rubbed her arm, calming her, comforting her. “Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. They’re very good at their jobs.”
“I thought they were supposed to be watching Rade and Grayson to keep them from getting a hold of drugs.”
“You were more important. You are still more important.”
Georgie put her hand to the side of her head where a headache was forming. “I should have left last week. Then they still would have been keeping Rade safe from himself.”
“No one can keep a junkie away from drugs when he is determined to get them.” He kissed her bare shoulder. “I need you to play with Killer Valentine tonight.”
Her heart jumped at the thought of that stage with Xan in front of her at the heart of that enormous arena. “No.”
“I have kept you safe for months and asked for nothing. I have sent lawyers to Atlanta to change your name and asked for nothing. I’ve given you everything I can think of, yet still asked for nothing.”
Her hands started to shake. “Xan, this isn’t fair.”
“But it is true.” His accent became more posh, more like a BBC announcer or a Shakespearean actor, enunciating the rounded vowels, which meant Alex was back. “This is the most important concert of this tour. For two years, this entire tour has been building to this one performance. This is our one shot.”
“Your keyboardist died,” Georgie said. “People will understand why you cancelled this show.”
“I have three other band members who have staked their careers on this concert. Cadell dropped out of Juilliard. Tryp gave up the Colburn Conservatory. They could have had important classical careers, but they walked away for me because they believed that I could lead them. Rhiannon was a working musician in Los Angeles, and she backed out of dozens of commitments to come on tour with us.”
“They’re grieving,” Georgie said. She was grieving. “They’re going to want to cancel the show.”
“We can’t cancel it. If this concert fails, the venue will sue Killer Valentine to recoup their costs. We will have to cut the remaining concerts back, reduce the size of the show, play smaller venues, and that means that I’ll have to lay off half the technical staff. Hundreds of people gave up other jobs to sign on to this tour. I am responsible for all of these people. If I allow this to fail, I will have failed them.”
Sarcasm laced her voice. “So it’s not Xan’s insane, monomaniacal ambition that’s pushing this? It’s not because he craves eighteen thousand people screaming his name?”
“Of course it is, but there are other excellent reasons for it, too.”
At least he admitted it.
He said, “It will destroy the band financially. We’ll have to liquidate everything we can in order to pay them.”
“You don’t have to sell everything to pay them off,” she pointed out. “You can pay anyone, anything you want, Monsieur le Duke de Valentinois.”
“The band doesn’t know who I am.”
“It would be a heck of a way to find out, when you need to save their asses.”
“We would still have eighteen thousand pissed-off concert-goers who would not see Killer Valentine tonight.”
“They will understand. Rade died.”
“No, they won’t. Fans are tyrants. They demand oppressive, damaging tour schedules. They demand to see me blast every note, every night. They demand new music constantly. If not, they tweet and ragebook and post and gif that we are slackers, that they are hungry, and we are cruel because we are not feeding the beasts.”
“It doesn’t sound like you think this is fun, Alex.”
“I’m a fucking rock star. I love every second of it.” His accent became Xan for just a few words. The fluidity of his changes was dizzying.
“Okay, good. I guess.”
“But that’s why we have to go on, and that’s why I need you out there with me.”
Georgie looked at the door, longing to get in the car and speed to the airport. “We’re in New York. Can’t you call Juilliard or someone you know and have them step in? If there is anywhere in the world where you could find someone to play with the band tonight, it’s here.”
“You know our music. You’ve been working on our oeuvre.”
Her own words were snaking around her and trapping her.
“You’ve performed with all of us once and with me several times. No one else in the world has that experience.”
All true. “What if someone with the Butorins pulls out a gun and shoots me on the stage?”
“I’ll have security dressed as roadies around you and planted in the audience. Really, the stage is the safest place for you in New York City. Everyone has to go through metal detectors to get in. You’ll have eighteen thousand witnesses around you, many of whom are fanatical enough to actually throw themselves in front of a bullet aimed at us.”
“I really should leave.” It was a half-hearted appeal. She knew it, and from the way a lazy smile spread across his lush lips, he knew it, too.
His smile turned knowing and sultry. “I will do anything you want.”
She smiled back at him, a little. “That’s not going to work on me right now, you know.” She gestured to her mostly naked body in his arms. “Even my libido is entirely satisfied.”
“Tomorrow is another day.”
“Tomorrow, I will be on a plane to Atlanta, come Hell or high water. You have to promise me that I will leave tomorrow, no matter what.”
He leaned forward, tightening his arms around her and running his lips up her neck. Even in her libido-depleted state, her skin trembled under his lips.
He whispered against her skin, his accent impeccably cosmopolitan French, deep in his throat and buzzing slurs, “I cannot promise zat I will ever let you go.”
She pushed him back, studying his face, but he was Alex again, clear-eyed but with a hint of mischief, a small smile on his lips.
Wild Thing Page 18
