Sometime before intermission, the tremors in her hands and legs had quieted, and she had fallen into the music and the performance. By the second set, she had kicked her wheeled chair back and was dancing as she played. Cadell had caught a glimpse of her bopping to the music, and he had hopped over, trailing the wire from his electric guitar, and rocked with her every chance he got.
It was kind of awesome, she had discovered.
By Xan’s second-set break, Georgie was flirting with the front row, dancing with the guys who were left behind when their dates half-crawled onto the stage, reaching for Xan while they slithered on their bellies and their legs dangled over the edge, until the security staff pulled the girls back and admonished them.
The roar of the audience blasted through her, and their passion did feel like love, or it would have if she hadn’t known what love felt like.
For the final encore, “Alwaysland,” she dropped the somber Mozart references in, ending with references to the Kyrie, the joyous section of the Requiem Mass, infusing some resolution into the song.
At the end of it, Xan bowed his head. The cones of white light pouring down on him extinguished.
Georgie blinked at the deep darkness, trying to adjust her eyes.
The pinprick safety lights warned her where the edges of her riser were, and she picked her way down, holding her skirt out of the way.
Xan’s pale face loomed out of the darkness. He plucked the earbuds out of her ears and wrapped his fingers around the microphone by his mouth to silence it, telling her, “Curtain call.”
“Oh, I can’t.” She turned toward the metal stairs leading off the stage and the pale light of the tunnel to the dressing rooms.
He caught her hand. “Come on. The guys had theirs. You’re a band member.”
“No, I’m not,” she said. She was fucking not a band member.
“Yes, you are.” He led her toward centerstage, even though she leaned back and dragged her feet.
At the middle of the stage, Georgie and Xan could just see the front few rows in the sparkling dark, and the people down there screamed, the cell phone flashes glistening on their eyeballs and teeth. Their wail propagated through the cavern of Madison Square Garden, echoing and doubling off the far-away walls and ceiling, filling the enormous expanse of air and darkness. The spotlights flipped on in the rafters, blinding Georgie.
The roar of the crowd became a tsunami, crashing into them.
Xan held up her hand and bowed into the lights. Georgie had just enough presence of mind to stick her leg back and curtsey, just like she had practiced at a thousand recitals, although at classical performances, she had never braced herself for the roar of eighteen thousand throats screaming at her, nor had pink, lacy panties ever skittered to a stop at her toes before. She kicked them toward Xan.
They jogged off the stage and down the steps. A high pitch whistled in her ears.
Adrien and Paul trotted behind them, alert to the movements of the crowd around them. They had crouched behind her riser all night, watching, with their right hands hovering near their chests, ready. After a few minutes, she gave up watching the crowd for the man with the Slavic face or anyone else who expressed an inordinate amount of interest in her. Adrien and Paul were trained a hell of a lot better than she was.
The tunnel loomed, and Jonas offered his arm on the way to the green room. She demurred and tried to shake off Xan’s hand, but he held onto her fingers.
She yanked her hand out of his grasp, twisting her fingers away.
He laughed and set his hand on her lower back, escorting her into the green room, where the other guys—Tryp, Cadell, and Grayson, rushed them.
Cadell caught her hands and spun her around, laughing, and handed her a bottle of water. “Hydrate first,” he told her.
“I’m fine,” she said, but she took the bottle and sucked down a long drink. The water poured onto her parched tongue and throat, and she hadn’t even been singing.
Xan finished chugging a bottle of water and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, closing his eyes in relief.
Georgie knew that she should be a good little girl and ask if he was all right.
Instead, she turned her back, thanked Cadell, and strode toward the door.
Xan caught her arm as she went by, rasping, “Have a drink. We usually wind down for a few minutes before we hit the showers.”
She stared right into his dark eyes, which were too damn happy, all crinkled at the corners like that. “I’m calling a car to go to the airport.”
“What?” Anger hardened his haggard voice.
His fingers loosened, and she popped her arm out of his grip. “I’m not staying. I have a plane to catch.”
He blinked, hard, like he couldn’t believe what she had so obviously just said. “But tonight was a triumph. You were dancing back there, having the time of your life. You integrated into the band perfectly.”
Cadell began to edge away from them, heading toward the buffet table.
Georgie said, “I’m not a band member, Xan. I never was.”
“But you are, or you should be. You fit in perfectly. Your playing was phenomenal.”
Over on the couch, Tryp sucked on a beer and looked away, bristling, probably at the insinuation that she was better than Rade, who was lying on a coroner’s slab somewhere.
Georgie told him, “I’m leaving.”
Xan caught her around the waist with one strong arm and dragged her to his chest. “I want you in the band. You’re an amazing musician, and you make us better.”
“No.”
“The crowd loved you. You felt them. You belong on a stage, playing music.”
She shoved his chest and broke out of his arms. “Fuck, no.”
“You were dying for this. You were starving for music and performing. You can have a career in music.”
“I don’t want a damn career in music. I want to be a lawyer and make fat stacks.”
Tryp snorted. “You can make ‘fat stacks’ as a musician, too, at least if you’re in this band.”
Xan glanced sideways at him, his dark lashes sweeping down over his long eyes, made all the more deep and sexy by the smudged stage make-up. He asked Georgie, “Can we speak privately?”
His tone was arch British again, London high society. Did the rest of the band even notice that his voice changed, or were they so used to Alex and Xan and Alexandre Grimaldi switching around that they didn’t care?
Or did they not know what it meant?
Georgie said, “No. We don’t have anything to talk about. I’m leaving.”
“Just hear me out,” Xan said.
Actually, Alex said.
“If you need cash,” Tryp butted in from the couch, “you should listen to him. I don’t know what your deal would be, but Xan spreads the songwriting royalties around, even though most of us don’t contribute shit.”
“You write,” Xan said to him.
“All of us together don’t write half as much as you do. Yet we rake in the cash.”
“It’s only fair.” Xan looked down at the carpet.
“It’s not, but we appreciate it. We didn’t know what it meant when we signed the contracts, but my accountant explained it to me during our day off in California.” Tryp gestured at Georgie with his beer. “It means seven figures a year, is what it means. You can pay off fucking anything you want to.”
“For as long as this lasts,” Georgie told him.
“Yeah, and I’m officially still on sabbatical from the Colburn Conservatory. Theoretically, I could go back, though now I’m a rocker, not a classical musician. I can’t go back to all that prissy shit. I would wither and die. But you should listen to Xan.”
Georgie looked right back at Alex, who had hope in his eyes and a slow smile curving his lush lips. She said, “I have nothing to say to Xan.”
His smile faded. “You haven’t forgiven me.”
“No,” she said. “And I won’t.”
“I see.” He
leaned his shoulder against the wall and stared at his feet.
“Music is a bitch mistress—”
He flinched at her angry words.
“—and you chose her. You used what we have to get me on that stage because the music, this show tonight, was more important to you than I am.”
“You didn’t seem to mind in Paris or the other times.”
“Those were different. You supported me and helped me go on, but this one was different.”
He nodded.
She stepped closer to him, and he leaned his head down. She whispered, but she projected enough so he could hear her over the whine ringing in her ears, “You Dommed me onto that stage tonight. You felt me submit.”
He leaned toward her, and his cheek pressed hers. “I won’t deny it. We both know what happened.”
“You chose the show, the band, and music over me.”
He whispered, his voice rasping like it was painful, “I gave you what you desired so very much, even though you didn’t know it.”
“You forced me.”
“You desperately wanted the music and to perform. I let you have what you wanted most, what you craved, but you dared not admit, even to yourself. Even though you had stage fright—”
“I do not have stage fright.” She threw that derogatory shit right back at him.
“You won’t have it anymore, not after playing The Garden, and you wanted to perform. You were drowning for lack of music in your life, but you couldn’t let yourself go. Performing is an enormous risk. You couldn’t open yourself and allow yourself to be so vulnerable.”
“It’s not about vulnerability. It’s that you forced me onto that stage.”
His voice dropped still lower, even though they were still whispering. “You didn’t use your safe word.”
Her heart thudded as loud in her ears as the ringing. “I was stunned. I was horrified you did that.”
“I think it was that you wanted to perform, that you crave the crowd and the music and sharing it like every other musician because that’s what you are. In your core, in your soul, you’re not a lawyer.” He cupped her cheek, pressing her face against his smooth cheek. “You’ve always felt the music.”
She leaned on his cheek, feeling his skin because it was for the last time. “It doesn’t matter what you think I am. I’m going back to college and then to law school.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. I have to,” she whispered.
“I need a keyboard player. You’re an incredible musician and you know the music. I would be a fool not to offer you anything you want to keep you in the band.”
“There is nothing that you have that I want.”
He kissed her shoulder, not a sultry kiss to seduce, just a quick nuzzle. God, she was going to miss that easy intimacy. “I’ll give you a share of all the royalties on the new songs, forever.”
“No.”
“I’ll pay you any signing bonus you name.”
“It’s not worth it.”
His whisper sharpened to a hiss. “I will keep you safe from the Russians.”
“No. And I’m leaving. Don’t grab me again.” She stepped backward.
He didn’t touch her, but his gaze was so intense that she stopped. “I understand. You need a day or two to cool off,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
“Don’t call me,” she told him. “Don’t ever call me again.”
UNFORGIVEN
Georgie
Georgie backed away from him—from Alex who could talk her into anything, from Xan who could make her body submit with one blistering kiss, and from Alexandre who could break her heart with his music—and stepped out of the green room into the corridor.
One end of the long, white hallway opened to the arena. The bland house lights shone on the empty stage and the crowd trickling out of the rows and down the stairs to the exits.
A metal gate, not even waist-level, protected the end of the hallway from the crowd out there. Good thing everyone was civilized. She could imagine some of those groupies from the front row hopping that little barricade and stampeding Xan Valentine, and he had been flirting with them so hard during the concert that they could reasonably plead entrapment.
See? Georgie was a lawyer at heart, not a musician.
Roadies were crawling over the stage, their cordless drills whining over the crowd’s rumbling feet and voices and the high whistle in her own ears, disassembling the risers and Georgie’s keyboard set.
She stopped, leaning against the wall, watching the black-clad guys yank it apart and thunk the keyboards into crates.
Treating musical instruments like that was obscene. Those were delicate pieces of equipment, meant for making art and sharing it with the world. She stuck out a foot to stomp over to them to tell them to knock it off.
Backward. She was falling backward.
A thick python wrapped her waist.
No, a heavily muscled arm had grabbed her around the middle and yanked her backward.
Hard flesh slapped over her mouth and nose, cutting off the air as his hand sealed to her face.
Georgie swung her elbow back, but it bounced off his arm around her.
She reached behind her head, feeling for ears.
Another man stepped around her, grabbing her legs.
Fuck, there were two of them.
The second guy—black-haired but pale-skinned—wrapped his arms around her feet, but she yanked her leg back before he got a firm grip and drove her knee under his chin, clacking his teeth together.
“Blyadischa,” he muttered, trying to grab her foot. His flat nose looked like he had been in dozens of fist fights.
She couldn’t breathe she couldn’t breathe she couldn’t breathe. Her lungs strained for air.
Georgie felt skin and cartilage in her fingers. She curled her fingers, dug in her fingernails, and clawed at the ear of the guy behind her.
“Yob,” that guy said, but his hand over her mouth loosened.
Georgie sucked air and blasted a scream, her rage grinding in her throat.
He shoved his hand over her mouth, cutting off her shout that echoed in the long corridor.
She twisted her whole body, trying to make them release her.
The muscled arms dropped her waist and mouth.
Georgie tucked and hit the tile with her back, spiking pain up her spine, but her head stayed up. She yanked her legs, trying to get away from the other guy. He looked over her head. His face twisted into a snarl.
One of her legs popped free. She kicked her spike heel at the guy’s arm, stabbing him. He jumped back.
Georgie rolled and scrambled to her feet.
Alex had cinched his arm around the first guy’s neck. Her attacker’s wide, Slavic face reddened, a startling contrast to his blue eyes.
Georgie gasped, holding onto the wall. The hallway dipped and spun around her.
The Slavic guy clawed at Alex’s arm around his neck, straining backward, trying to throw Alex off. Alex kicked the guy’s knees and choked him with his elbow around his throat. The guy’s skin flushed scarlet like his blood might burst out of his pores.
Georgie tried to scream, but her voice caught in her throat through her panting and gasps.
The other guy ran and crashed into Alex and the Slavic guy though they stayed on their feet and lurched into a wall.
Georgie looked for an opening. Maybe she should jump on the back of one of them, but they were all punching and kicking and swinging so fast that she couldn’t even see what to do to help.
The Slavic guy arched, slamming his elbows into Alex’s ribs, a lucky shot. Alex stumbled but found his balance and stepped forward, fists raised.
The blond guy skittered, trying to keep his feet as he gasped.
The black-haired guy threw a punch at Alex. He feinted and was already swinging, slamming his fist into the guy’s flat nose.
Alex grabbed the blond guy’s shirt, already punching again. His fast hook landed on
the guy’s cheek with a sickening crunch.
Georgie should run, should get help, but Alex and the blond Russian were between her and the green room. The black-haired guy was stumbling toward her.
She couldn’t outrun shit in these damn heeled boots. She couldn’t kick them off because they laced up to her ankles.
The blond guy twisted and escaped Alex’s grip. Alex kicked his leg again, and he fell. Alex punched him, pistoning his fists and smashing the guy’s face and chest.
The black-haired guy grabbed Alex from behind. Alex dropped the blond guy in a bloody heap and twisted, jabbing quick blows in his ribs.
Georgie sucked in air and slapped her palms flat against the wall behind her. “Fire!”
The black-haired guy looked beyond Alex and the other guy. He pivoted and ran for the barricade, hopped over it, and slipped sideways into the crowd streaming for the exits and Penn Station below the arena.
The blond guy stood and tried to dodge. Alex dug his fingers into the guy’s burly shoulder and spun him around, his fist cocked for another punch.
Footsteps pounded up the hallway. Georgie turned—and thank Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—Adrien and Paul were hauling ass like the black-suited cavalry.
“Adrien!” she yelled. “Hurry!”
He didn’t even look at her but barreled into Alex, grabbing him by both shoulders and yanking him back and away from the Slavic guy. Alex stumbled in a circle but oriented on her attacker, a snarl on his face, and jumped.
Paul and Adrien tackled Alex, forcing him against a wall.
“Non,” Alex yelled, and he yelled something else at them.
The Slavic guy scrambled to his feet and sprinted past Georgie. She stuck a foot out to trip the fucker, but he jumped over her leg and ran for the end of the corridor, finally stumbling into the crowd.
Alex twisted away from Adrien and Paul and ran past her, sprinting after the guy.
Oh, shit.
Georgie ran after him. “Alex, no! Don’t go out there!”
He vaulted the metal gate, his long legs curling to the side and his blond-tipped hair flying. Paul and Adrien ran after him.
“No!” Georgie ran after him, bobbling on those stupid shoes, dreading the riot that was about to break.
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