Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

  It was downloaded ten thousand times before midnight and blew up the charts the next day.

  Elfie held Tryp while he grieved, but it was gone.

  Radio Interview

  Elfie had thrown on her work clothes and was ready to leave Tryp’s room, practicing her nonchalant swagger as if she had been only rousting him out of bed and force-feeding him oatmeal instead of lying in his arms dressed only in one of his big tee shirts with his body wrapped around hers, when the interview phone rang.

  Tryp consulted the cheat sheet that Jonas typed up every morning and said into the phone, “Hey, Bob and Doug, thanks for having me. It’s great to be back in L.A. on KROQ. All of Killer Valentine is going to stop by your studio tomorrow morning for an in-depth interview, but I appreciate that I get to talk to you guys first.”

  Some tinny sounds came through the phone, and Tryp extended his hand toward Elfie, his fingers stretching. She buckled her belt around her pants. “Yeah, it’s the first time that I’ve sung lead. This single is very personal for me.”

  Elfie came back and sat beside him on the bed. He wrapped his arm around her waist. “There are actually three stories in there. I’ll tell you about the first one.”

  Groaning over the phone started high and sang down an octave.

  “I have a band meeting in a few minutes,” Tryp said. “So here’s the first one. From the time I was seven until I was fourteen, I grew up in a polygamist cult on the Utah-Arizona border.”

  High-pitched wails of disbelief came from the phone speaker that Tryp held to his other ear.

  Elfie took his hand and held it. Tryp’s fingers wrapped around hers.

  He said, “It was actually a pretty good place to grow up. Lots of other kids. Lots of little kids to read baby books to. But when I was fourteen, I fell in love with a girl. She was fifteen. We held hands one afternoon.”

  Elfie stared at their intertwined fingers, knotted together.

  “They caught us, and they married her to my step-father the next day before she could be sullied further. She was his eighteenth wife.”

  More squawking over the phone’s speaker.

  “Yeah, it does happen in this day and age. That’s not even the worst part.”

  Silence from the phone. Tryp shifted the phone to his ear by Elfie so she could hear the DJ. A small voice asked, “What happened?”

  “She went to his room that night. I was downstairs, freaking out inside, knowing what was happening up there. When I heard her screaming, I pulled a Galahad and broke the door down. There was blood everywhere, all over the bed, and she was bleeding from her mouth because he punched her when she didn’t thank him afterward. I lost it. I attacked him, but I was a skinny fourteen-year-old kid, and he was a fifty-year-old man who was used to beating people up. I think I weighed a hundred and thirty pounds but was already six feet tall. My mother called the other elders, and they hauled me out before he killed me. I got in a few haymakers, though. He had a broken nose, and I broke his arm, too. The next morning, my mother drove me ten miles to the highway and told me to get out, that if I ever came back, they’d shoot me on sight.”

  Hushed silence on the phone. Tryp’s hand squeezed Elfie’s tighter. It didn’t hurt, but his grip was that of a man getting a root canal without Novocain. Rock radio interviews were supposed to be feel-good fests, not gut-ripping exposes.

  “What did you do?” the DJ asked over the phone.

  “I started walking toward Los Angeles because I thought it was somehow better than Phoenix or Las Vegas. I hitchhiked, and a trucker picked me up.”

  The DJ said, “I don’t think I want to know what happened next.”

  “This is a happy part. He bought me my first hamburger and soda in years, and he dropped me off at a crisis shelter in L.A., five miles out of the way for him, driving down the L.A. city streets in that big rig of his. I wish I could find him now. As a matter of fact, Yeager, if you can hear this, call KROQ. I want to tell you that I’m all right and buy you a burger.”

  A small voice on the phone said, “Did you ever go back?”

  “As soon as I got my driver’s license, when I was sixteen, I went back for her.”

  The DJ barked a nervous laugh. “They didn’t kill you, right?”

  “I hid in the bushes around the compound for two days until she left the house alone. She had a kid by then and wouldn’t leave her. I begged her to get her daughter and come with me, but she wouldn’t leave.”

  “So she’s still there?”

  “Yep. I tried twice more the last couple years, but she won’t leave. She even wrote me a letter to tell me not to contact her again.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  Elfie tried not to tense.

  “She was my first love,” Tryp said, hanging onto Elfie’s hand. “I would do anything to get her out of that compound, but I let her go. I had to. Until I did, I was still out on the road. I couldn’t let myself love again.”

  “So it’s just like the song.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So does that mean that you have let yourself love again?”

  “Wow, Doug, will you look at the time? We’ve been talking for way longer than our five-minute interview slot,—”

  “No, we’ve still got two minutes left.”

  “—and I don’t want to delay your listeners’ music any more. Thanks for inviting me today, and I’ll see you in the studio tomorrow. KROQ rocks.”

  The DJ let him hang up, maybe because of the time, maybe because they were going to corner him in the studio the next day anyway.

  Elfie sat beside him on the bed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not hiding it anymore,” he said, staring ahead at the wall. “I won’t be ashamed of it. I didn’t do anything wrong, except for leaving Sariah there. I should have gotten her to come with me somehow. That, I’m ashamed of.”

  “They should be ashamed,” she said. “They should be arrested.”

  “The state authorities don’t care as long as they’re quiet about it.”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist.

  He said, “I can’t believe I went public.” He grabbed the front of his tee shirt. “I figured I’d be a pathetic heap under the bed, dead drunk by now.”

  “It’s only been two minutes since you hung up.”

  “Hey, I’m a dirty rocker. I can get fucked up in two minutes.” He slid his arms around her and laid his forehead on her shoulder.

  She stroked his back. “Are you going to get drunk, Tryfon?”

  “Sure. Any minute now.” His ragged breath fluttered against her neck.

  Elfie held him in her arms, stroking the heavy muscles of Tryp’s back through his shirt, until it was time for the daily pre-show band meeting in Xan’s room. He spun his drumsticks over his knuckles all the way there and through the door.

  Rolling Stone

  Jonas heard Tryp’s radio interview and insisted that he skip the station interview the next day.

  Elfie worried that Jonas was mad, but Tryp said, “Nope. He doesn’t want me to blow it on local radio, not even for KROQ.”

  The reporter who had written the original Rolling Stone article called the next day, demanding a follow-up interview.

  Jonas okayed that one.

  A couple days later, after a show in San Diego and a two-day bus ride to Wichita, Kansas, the Rolling Stone reporter called Tryp’s hotel room and, very slowly, very precisely, scalpeled the story out of Tryp.

  Elfie held his hand again while Tryp opened a vein.

  He said, “The mothers each had a small bedroom, and then my step-father had a bedroom, what other people would call a man cave. Kids were shacked up five or six to a room, boys in triple bunkbeds, girls in double beds, sleeping two or three to a bed.”

  His voice brightened. “You never felt lonely there, because there were always lots of babies and little kids around. From the time I was nine, I carried around a little toddler brother or sister half the time or had a gaggle of rug
rats following me around like I was the daddy duck. They’re like puppies at that age. I taught dozens of little kids to play ball and read hundreds of books to them.

  “Sariah was beautiful, and yeah, I was fourteen. I didn’t know that holding hands would get us both into trouble. Neither did she, I guess.

  “Blood was everywhere. On the bed. On her face. On her legs. It was brutal and cruel, and he expected her to thank him for it. When she didn’t, he hit her, first with his fist, then with his belt.

  “I guess I was lucky that he didn’t break my hands. I had no money for doctors, so there’s no way they would have healed right. While we were recording the first album, Xan Valentine offered to pay to have my nose fixed if I wanted it, even though he thought it was fine. I jumped at the chance. It was smashed flat to my face.

  “And so I walked for miles before Yeager picked me up. I don’t know how many miles. Hours. At least five hours. Maybe fifteen miles or more.

  “I got the birth certificate of somebody who died as a baby, so I had I.D. that said I was eighteen. I worked at a music store for two years, until the owner, Gloria, who had me figured out within a week, got me an audition for a performing arts high school, and from there I got into the Colburn School, a music conservatory, for piano, but I loved drums. Gloria put drumsticks in my hand for the first time and taught me my first riffs. I played drums every chance I got, for hours a day in the store, and then at the high school. I understood drums. I could be angry when I played the drums, and it sounded better.”

  Tryp paused and searched the ceiling, thinking.

  “Every day. I thought about Sariah every day, and I went back twice to try to convince her to leave with me. She wrote me a letter to tell me not to try to see her again, that she would never leave. Wait, I have it somewhere.” From the zippered top of his suitcase, Tryp pulled out a leather-bound, hardback book of William Blake’s poetry, and a folded letter fell out. “Yeah, I managed to dig it up. I can read it to you.”

  Elfie tried to be a comforting presence at his side, but no one could comfort that.

  The article appeared on the Rolling Stone website five days later, after shows in Wichita, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Cedar Rapids, right after the band played The Mark at Moline in the Quad Cities on the Iowa-Illinois border and were driving three hours to Chicago for a day of rest and promo before the show there.

  Elfie hadn’t figured out how to stop shacking up with Tryp yet. Every time she tried to drag her rollie bag to her own hotel room that the band was paying for, Tryp had something for her to listen to or see, or he got frisky and started tickling her, or he said that Rade and Grayson were outside, or something.

  Every night, she slept in his arms, and Tryp was drinking so much less that he usually woke up before she did. They ate in darkened corners of quiet restaurants and watched dancers from VIP sections in nightclubs.

  At night, he was gentle as they explored each other’s bodies, careful with her, like he was trying to make up for all the evil in the world, but he never made love to her.

  Tryp’s notoriety as a whistleblower spread as Killer Valentine crossed the Midwest. Jonas fended off the requests for more interviews while they played shows in Chicago, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and Dallas.

  Shining the light of day on evil is a thankless job. Being a whistleblower is not without consequences.

  The consequences caught up with Tryp in Dallas.

  Brother Tryfon

  In a hotel room in Dallas, Tryp squinted to look through the peephole in the door, expecting to see groupies wearing postage stamps and rubber bands who had finagled their way up, which usually happened at least once a week. Some of the other band members, especially Cadell, ranted about “boundaries,” but Tryp kind of liked it. He had really liked it before he had discovered what was under the stage, but now he usually invited them in for a drink and then sent them on their ways. He picked up his own women elsewhere.

  Or he used to.

  Tryp stared at them through the fish-eye peephole that bent the hallway backward.

  There were no chicks wearing scraps of cloth outside his door.

  Two men stood, looking around.

  Groupies didn’t wear brown suits.

  Tryp hoped they weren’t feds. He had an accountant for all the IRS stuff. He wondered if he should flush his stash, but if they had a warrant, they would have had the hotel open the door or broken it down.

  Tryp flipped the locks and opened the door. “Uh, yeah?”

  The man on the left removed his sunglasses. “Brother Tryfon, we need to speak to you.”

  One man was about Tryp’s age, but those pale blue eyes, that nose that was a little bulbous on the end—Tryp took a shocked step backward. “Nephi?”

  Tryp reached across seven years of heartache, loneliness, and struggle back to the last time he saw Nephi Christianson, who was fifteen when Tryp was set out on the highway. The day before Tryp held Sariah’s hand for ten ecstatic minutes, he and Nephi had helped build some extra warehouse space for the feed store downtown before Tryp had to go practice piano for three hours and Nephi had to go study scripture with his grandfather.

  Nephi nodded. “And you remember Brother Teancum Smith.”

  The last time Tryp had seen Teancum, seven years ago in New Empyrean, he had been too naive to laugh at the man’s name. Now, he was too much of a man to do so, but he rubbed the side of his face, glad for his sake that Teancum had grown up in a place without a public high school.

  Nephi asked, “May we come in?”

  “Sure.” Tryp stood aside, opening the door. When they were inside and Tryp closed it behind them, he asked, “Are you all right? Do you need help?”

  Nephi frowned. “Why would we need help?”

  “They set you on the road, same as me, right? I mean, you guys must’ve heard me on the radio and known I would help you.”

  “No,” Nephi said. “Brother Tryfon, we need to talk to you about that radio interview and the one in the magazine, Rolling Stone. We’ve come on behalf of Prophet Spencer Christianson.”

  “Your dad is the prophet now?” So Nephi must not have been turned out at all, since he was speaking for the prophet. Homesickness slammed Tryp, surprising the hell out of him, and he wanted to punch Nephi for not getting thrown out of his home with only the clothes on his ass and twenty bucks.

  “Yeah.” Nephi shifted his weight to his other foot. “Brother Teancum, could you make sure we aren’t disturbed?”

  Teancum moved out to the hallway and closed the door behind himself.

  “Okay,” Nephi said. “We can talk.”

  Tryp walked over to the bar, stacked three deep with dark bottles. “You want a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Nephi said, sitting on the couch.

  “I won’t tell.”

  “Teancum would smell the liquor on me and report back.”

  “Do you want a soda?”

  He sighed. “No, thank you.”

  Nephi had had three older brothers, two of whom had disappeared before Tryp had left. Questions were punished, so it took Tryp months, even after he had been cast out, to figure out that they had been set out on the road, too.

  But Nephi’s eldest brother had been twenty-seven on Tryp’s last day in New Empyrean. “How’s Joseph?”

  “He’s well.”

  “Still there?”

  “Yes. He will probably become prophet after our father is called home by Heavenly Father.”

  Which meant that Nephi’s position as the second, spare son was tenuous. “How many wives do you have now?”

  Nephi bit his lip for a moment while he judged Tryp, his blue eyes weighing just how much apostasy Tryp harbored while he stood beside the bar, a drink in his hand, tattoos on his flesh, and piercings through his ears.

  Nephi said, “Three.”

  “Any kids?” Loss squeezed Tryp’s heart.

  “Four.”

  The bastard had four kids. Tryp looked out the window over the skys
crapers of downtown Dallas and waited for his aching heart to slow to normal.

  Tryp sipped his harsh whiskey and water and came back to sit with Nephi in the living room group. He set the half-full whiskey bottle on the coffee table between them, an aggressive display of just how much he had changed in seven years. “You doing okay?”

  “Sure,” but Nephi’s guarded expression told Tryp otherwise.

  Twice when Tryp was a kid, a couple wives and their children had been added to his step-father’s household when one of the few adult men was accused of apostasy or heterodoxy. Adult men were given an old car to drive out of town, but all the property, all the real estate, and all the businesses, everything that everyone had built for decades, were all legally owned by the church. This meant that no one paid taxes, state or federal, and that anyone who left did so with absolutely nothing, not even their wives or children.

  Only three wives, and only four kids. They would be easy to reassign to someone else if Nephi put a toe out of line.

  If Tryp were Nephi, he wouldn’t have accepted that drink, either. Children were too precious to risk. New Empyrean had one thing almost right: true wealth was the love of a good woman and children around you. They just fucked up how they did it.

  “So what are you here for?” Tryp asked.

  “We cannot do Heavenly Father’s work if you continue to expose us to ridicule like this. Mammon is against us, and we are under siege from every corner. We’re here to beg you to retract your interview, say that you were intoxicated and made it all up, to remove your recording about the road from sale, and to say that Sariah was older than you remembered, at least eighteen.”

  “But she wasn’t. She was fifteen.”

  “Heavenly Father decreed that she should marry.”

  “Bullshit. Prophet said she had to marry Kumen.”

  Nephi sucked air like Tryp had socked him in the gut. “Such language, Brother Tryfon.”