[Billionaires in Disguise 01.0] Every Breath You Take

by Blair Babylon

  He rested his head on the wall behind the couch. “Is the music building empty, so we can keep our secrets?”

  “Well, no,” she admitted. “Not until the early morning.”

  “Then let’s go out. What kind of nightclubs do you have in this backwater town?”

  “You mean the fourteenth-largest metropolitan area in the US with a population of more than four million souls?”

  “Exactly.”

  “We’ve got a couple here in the university district that are pretty good.”

  “Tell me the good ones and I’ll have my people call ahead. No use waiting in a line, right?”

  “Not when you put it that way. You want to grab some supper first?”

  “Yes.” He swallowed, and his throat worked in the most interesting way. Even the stubble on his chin and neck was a rich chestnut color. “Maybe something light.”

  “Are you hungover? A big man like yourself?”

  “Me? No. Never.” He looked a little pale as he rested his head against the wall.

  “I know a great Mexican place, Los Dos Molinos. It’s a little spicy, but I’m sure a big, bad duke like yourself could handle it.”

  “Of course. Do you mind if I use your shower?”

  “Go ahead. Make yourself at home. Just lock the adjoining door while you’re in there, otherwise you might give Hester a heart attack. When do you have to go back?”

  “Saturday afternoon.”

  “Oh.”

  He opened his eyes to squint at her, a small smile tightening his lips. “You sound disappointed.”

  “Me? No. I’m the Ice Princess. Just ask anyone. Don’t let the front door smack your ass on the way out.” She leaned forward and looked up at him from under her eyelashes. “Unless you’re into that, in which case, you should let me know.”

  Alex’s smile broadened. Most guys would have laughed it off, but he didn’t. “You’re an interesting one, Georgie. Why don’t you pack an overnight bag, just in case we don’t make it back here? I grew up in a dorm room much like this one. I’ve slept in enough twin beds to last me a lifetime.”

  Alex made his way back through the bedroom to shower, and Georgie went back to pounding on her computer. If they were going out tonight, she needed to power through a couple pages before that. Otherwise, Thursday night was going to be a bear, a sleep-deprived, groggy, coffee-tweaking bear. Nobody wanted Grumpy Georgie around.

  She knocked out about half a page before her phone rang.

  “Hello?” She hadn’t checked the number before she thumbed the screen.

  “Hello, Georgiana Oelrichs,” a woman’s voice said. The woman rolled her R in Georgie’s first name, and all the O’s were short and flat, a Russian accent, like Hell-aw and Georgie’s last name, Awl-ricks.

  Georgie gripped the phone tight in her fist. “I’m sorry. You’ve got the wrong number.”

  “No, I don’t. This is Tatiana Butorin, and your father knew my brother.”

  Georgie blinked back tears at the name, and she clenched a pen in her fist like a stabbing knife. Dima Butorin had been a Pakhan, a Godfather, in the Moscow-based Solntsevskaya Bratva. She had met him a few times before he had been killed, and he had flirted with her in that condescending way that most middle-aged men flirt with teenage girls: an attempt to be complimentary, perhaps to lay groundwork for something else in a few years, but mostly the equivalent of tickling a cat under its chin, just to make the cute little thing happy.

  “They did some business together,” Tatiana continued, “but it wasn’t good business, was it?”

  “No,” Georgie said. Fear sweat popped on her skin, chilling her.

  “And now, there are eight million dollars missing.”

  “That much?”

  “Yes. It is very disturbing.”

  “I can only imagine. You’ve got to know that I’m a college student. I don’t have anything like that.”

  “But your mother was allowed to keep much money by Attorney General.”

  “I haven’t talked to her in years. What they did was unethical.”

  “I think not having my money is unethical.”

  “I’m certainly sorry about that, and I have plans to pay everyone back—” Though her very lucrative job at The Devilhouse was now gone, so no more money was going to come in.

  “Your mother needs to pay this debt back sooner, rather than later.”

  “I don’t even talk to her.”

  “You need to talk to her, to tell her that it has to be paid back within next month, or we come after you.”

  “But I don’t have any money. I’ve got some that I’m saving for law school, so I can be a lawyer and make enough money to pay everyone back, including you.”

  “Maybe your mother change mind if we have her daughter.”

  “She doesn’t give a shit about me or anyone but herself.”

  “We can be very persuasive.”

  “Oh, I’m already persuaded. I’ll give you everything I have.”

  “No. We want all eight million. Now, you take down phone number, and you have her call us to arrange payment. You understand?”

  “Yes.” Georgie nodded. A tear flipped out of her eye as she wrote down the phone number that the woman told her. As instructed, she read it back to make sure that she had written it down correctly and that she could read the jagged, shaking numbers.

  After they hung up, Georgie composed herself while she listened to the shower run through the thin dorm walls. Alex would be out in a few minutes. She had to be done talking to her mother by then.

  Luckily, he had all that hair to condition.

  Georgie dialed a number into her phone and waited through the rings.

  A woman answered, “Hello,” her voice as smarmy as usual. Georgie ached when she heard it, of loneliness and in dreading this call.

  “Mother? It’s me, Georgiana.” Just saying that, just those four words, brought back her New England accent a little. Muthuh, it’s me, Geohgianuh. Seriously, why would anyone in New England name a child anything with an R in it? It was just cruel.

  “Georgiana?” her mother said. “This is a surprise.”

  Her monotone voice didn’t sound like it was a suhpwise. When Georgie had moved to the Southwest, she had spent a month growling at herself in the mirror, trying to learn to say her R’s right. Lizzy had laughed at her and helped her a lot, growling right alongside her.

  “Mother, I have a problem.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Tatiana Butorin contacted me. She’s Dima Butorin’s sister. She’s taken over his organization, and she wants the eight million dollars that Dad stole from them.”

  “Well, that’s just not possible.”

  “You have to.”

  “No, I don’t. Under the plea deal, I don’t have to pay anyone back out of the pittance that they left me with to live on.”

  “You kept fifty million dollars plus property instead of paying back Dad’s victims. You need to pay Tatiana Butorin back or else she’s going to kidnap me and start sending you my fingers and ears.”

  “Oh, she will not. Everyone knows the terms of the court settlement. Everybody got something back.”

  “No, they didn’t, and Tatiana Butorin wants it all back right now.”

  “She can’t have it,” her mother said.

  “You have security guards. I don’t. You need to write down this phone number that I’m going to tell you, and then you need to call her or have the lawyers call her, tonight.”

  “I cannot believe the nerve of you. First, you call me all those filthy names and run away, and then you don’t contact me for years, and now you call up wanting money.”

  “I don’t want the money! The Russian mafia is going to kill me for what you and Dad did.”

  “I cannot believe your nerve, wanting money after all these years.”

  The line went dead.

  Holy shit.

  Shock slammed Georgie first, a flash of cold like being whipped
by a New England blizzard, and she tried to get mad that her own mother would want to keep her money rather than protect her daughter from getting kidnapped, but the shock flowed over her and past, and all that was left was the rigid frost of fear.

  Nightclub

  Georgie

  Georgie pulled a slinky dark green dress out of her closet and draped it over her nearly naked body while standing in front of her closet door mirror. She had meant to return the dress to The Devilhouse but hadn’t had time because the sucker was closed. Maybe she could do it tomorrow.

  She drew a deep, deep breath, inflating her whole body, and refused to think about what tomorrow meant.

  Georgie shrugged the silky dress over her head and smoothed it over her hips. The green silk clung to her ass a little too much.

  Worst case scenario: If her mother didn’t pay off Tatiana, Georgie would die horribly and slowly sometime in the next month.

  That paper comparing English and Early American common law seemed less important, as did the dress being a little snug in the ass.

  If Georgie wasn’t kidnapped and slowly chopped up, The Devilhouse’s closure was a huge problem.

  If she could convince Tatiana to wait for her money, Georgie had enough funds to finish college and pay for some of law school, but she would start her life in official, government-financed debt and have to pay that back either first or concurrently.

  And everyone else would get paid back much more slowly.

  And so she would break her word.

  And thus she would be just as much of a fucking asshole as the rest of her family.

  And the people whom she had planned to pay off first wouldn’t get their money until after Tatiana did.

  Ah, fuck.

  Tonight was not the night to stew on all this.

  Tonight, Alex was here.

  Tonight, she would enjoy his company, and she would have one last fling, and then she would boot his ass out of her life Saturday afternoon.

  Then, if she needed to, she would run.

  It wasn’t like this was a new situation. She had fought it for six years. It was only that her plan to repay everyone had been derailed and the Russian mob had finally found her.

  Besides, if she and Alex went to a nightclub, if they stayed in a hotel tonight, then if the Russian bratva broke into her dorm room to take her captive, Georgie wouldn’t be here.

  If she needed to run soon—and there was a very strong possibility that she would—then she was already one step away from the dorm if she went with Alex. She could withdraw all of her savings and just buy a few new clothes. She wouldn’t need much until she found someplace new to settle.

  She retrieved the large, black backpack from her closet. Georgie tucked her laptop and her phone charger deep within the soft clothes and beside the ten thousand in cash. Downloading all her files from the cloud backup onto a new laptop would be a pain in the butt. Better to toss her old one in her bug-out bag.

  Alex walked out of the bathroom, her blue towel wound around his waist just below his navel. Even though the towel was cinched tightly, it barely dented his flesh. There wasn’t any chub there to pouch around the towel, just the stacked bricks of his abdominals and the deep vee of his obliques running down his hips.

  He took a long, scorching glance down the green dress to her ankles and toes. “Ready?”

  She would think about all that tomorrow. If tonight was the last night of her life, it was going to be fantastic, damn it. “I’ll just throw a couple other things in this backpack. We can be out of here in five minutes.”

  ~~~~~

  Georgie drove them through the spring night to the nightclub in her white Lexus, her one splurge, though she had bought it pre-owned. Alex had taken a cab from the airport to the dorm, which had been an excellent decision, considering how drunk he’d been, so he didn’t have a car there.

  “We should go around to the private entrance in back,” Alex said. After Georgie had told him the name of the nightclub, he had called somebody, and then somebody had called him back with details like where the entrance was.

  “Okay, sure.” She turned out of the parking lot to drive around the huge building. Colored floodlights painted the walls lurid green and blue.

  Alex’s black baseball hat and a pair of mirrored sunglasses slid over the dash, and he reached up and caught them.

  At dinner, Alex had coiled his hair up and stuffed it under the baseball hat and pushed the sunglasses on his face until they were seated in the far-back, dark corner of the house converted into a restaurant. He had taken a sharp look around at the empty tables on the Wednesday night. The novena candles on the tables barely relieved the gloom. They could barely see each other in the candlelight, and he removed the hat and glasses. His hair had fallen around his face and shoulders, and he’d smoothed it with his palms, barely.

  Georgie gestured to the hat and glasses that he shoved back onto her dash. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble tonight, like in Paris.”

  “Of course not. But it never hurts to have a few accessories with you.”

  “You had a lot of accessories in Paris. Extras, even. Do you often need to go incognito?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  Wow. That was such a question to throw her off. “I just told you why. You carry disguises. Are you a spy or something?”

  He chuckled. “Nope. I’m not a spy. A violin-playing James Bond sounds like great fun, though.”

  “Then, why?”

  “Sometimes they come in handy. There’s the entrance.” He flicked his hand toward the door with a white awning above it, lit with white lights.

  Georgie stopped the car at the end of the awning. A valet appeared next to her door—seriously, the only way he could have gotten beside the car so fast involved a puff of magic smoke—and opened it for her. As she stepped out, he opened his hand for the keys.

  Alex emerged from his door, opened by a twin valet genie on the other side of the car, and Georgie walked around the car while he waited for her, looking into the darkness around the nightclub, but the only other people standing around in the parking lot were bored valets. The teens watched the bright stars above and smoked as Georgie and Alex walked in the door.

  Hey, she was doing pretty damn well for a woman who had just been threatened by the Russian mob. Good thing she was the fucking Ice Princess.

  A woman wearing a black dress was waiting at a lectern right inside the door. “Mr. Valentine, thank you for visiting us tonight. We’ll take you right up.”

  Another woman in another black dress led the way to a metal, spiral staircase to the upper floor, high above the rabble dancing and drinking below.

  “Wow,” Georgie said, leaning over the railing. An enormous disco ball like the moon hung at eye level because they were up near the ceiling, and spotlights aimed at it splintered into glitter over the conversation groupings and roaming waitresses. “This is nice.”

  “Let’s get a table and a drink,” Alex said.

  The reasons that Georgie liked this guy were several and plural. “Sure thing.”

  Coffee tables were surrounded by deep couches of some dark color that Georgie couldn’t pick out in the smoky, dark air and the bright fragments of light weaving over the walls and furniture. Georgie sank into a couch as she sat down and scooted to the edge rather than fall back and flail with all her limbs.

  The waitress appeared, and again, she was so fast that Georgie sniffed the air for more magic genie smoke or brimstone, but that burning-rubber scent was just someone smoking pot.

  “Champagne,” Alex told her.

  When the waitress left, Georgie asked, “Are we celebrating something?”

  “Every night should be a celebration,” he said and he stopped like someone had shone a flashlight in his face, but the only light up in the VIP loft was the bright fragments from that disco ball slipping across his face and the bleedover from the pink and green light show below. “That’s interesting.”

&nb
sp; “What?” Georgie glanced behind her, looking for whatever Alex thought was interesting back there.

  “Nevermind.” The waitress set the champagne on the table and flitted off to check on the next table. He poured champagne in their glasses. “Do you want food with this?”

  She grinned at him over her champagne flute. The carbonated bubbles popped in her nose as she sipped the wine. “You didn’t get enough to eat at Los Dos?”

  “I think you were trying to punish me for, perhaps, being just slightly hungover. My throat is still burning. I think the primary seasoning in the meat was napalm.”

  “On the contrary, in order to choke down those adovada ribs, you had to drink a ton of water, and the chips had enough salt to keep the water in you. You have to be hydrated by now. New Mexican is the best cure for a hangover.”

  Alex touched his temple, and a wondering smile broke over his face. “I didn’t think about it, but I’ll be damned. It actually is.”

  “We only have a few days together. We can’t waste any of it with a hangover.”

  “That’s true.” His smile slipped a little at her mention that he had to leave soon.

  Time to prod. She asked, “So why did you show up here, anyway?”

  “Because you gave me your address. Considering how jealously you guarded your phone number, your address must be a rare and precious thing. I would be a cad to throw away such a jewel.”

  “How poetic,” Georgie said. “Let’s hear the truth this time.”

  Alex’s bemused expression didn’t change. Indeed, he seemed frozen until he blinked, swallowed hard, and drained his glass. “I had to get away.”

  “From what?”

  “Work.” He refilled his glass and offered her more, but she was driving so she shook her head. “Why did you give me your address, if you were going to give me the third degree for utilizing it?”

  Because she wanted to hear “Alwaysland” again. Because she wanted to know if he had more songs like it. Because he had saved her from the Russian mob. Because she wanted him to touch her again, and because she wanted to take him to bed again.