Georgie
After showering in the rough granite spa-stall showers of The Devilhouse’s locker room—because what the Hell, no one else was there—and stealing yet another cocktail dress from the costume closet—because The Devilhouse was closed and Bonfils owned it—Georgie drove her Lexus through the deserted streets to Alex’s hotel.
In the passenger seat, Alex laid his head against the headrest, his long hair spreading against the beige leather.
The streetlights shone yellow circles on the vacant asphalt, and the emptiness of the streets made her think that the zombies must have already eaten everyone in town. However, she was sure that no one was following them because there were no other cars on the roads. She dragged both her bug-out bags out of the car, unwilling to leave even a few of her remaining possessions in the car overnight, even in a hotel parking lot where black globes on tall poles kept watch inside the chain-link fence.
Alex took her around to the back entrance where several fawning bellhops tried to snatch their bags to ferry them up to their room, but Georgie wouldn’t let anyone take her bug-out bags—even a cursory shakedown would find her stacks of cash in there—and Alex seemed freakishly, if very subtly, possessive about his guitar case with its hidden fiddle compartment. The two gentlemen in black slacks and shirts settled for carrying Alex’s garment bag.
He must have pulled the I’m-a-real-Duke card. Hotel staff don’t fall all over themselves for mere rich guys, especially at tall hotels like this one.
Though he had reserved the penthouse. Maybe they pulled out all the organ stops for penthouse guests.
As soon as the bellhops left with what Georgie thought was an exorbitant tip for only carrying one bag, Alex and Georgie walked through the gold-splashed living room, fell on the gilded bed, and twined around each other, holding on tight, and slept deeply for a few hours until three in the dark morning, when Georgie’s phone cheeped.
Alex shook his head, his long hair an artfully mussed bedhead that tousled over his shoulders. He drew his hair back from his temples, and it fluffed and fell in gorgeous waves around his strong cheekbones and jawline.
Because he was a guy.
It wasn’t fair. They got longer eyelashes, too. Damn them all.
Georgie could feel that her own long hair was a magpie nest. Half of it was snarled like tangled fishing line on one side of her head, and she was pretty sure that the chocolate left on the pillow by the turndown service had melted onto her scalp.
She grumbled, “I’ll be just a minute in the bathroom.”
Luckily, she could shower quickly, even if her long hair dripped down the back of her shirt while she drove them both through the very early morning to the music building.
“It’s always unlocked,” she explained, walking through the front doors. Alex caught the spring-loaded door before it could crash closed on her or on his guitar case. “People practice at all hours because there are too many music majors and not enough pianos.”
“Why wouldn’t a music major go to Juilliard or Berklee?” he asked, looking at the lobby as they walked to the elevators. As much as the outside of the building looked like a terra cotta wedding cake with frosting swags looping from each story, the lobby had been remodeled a few years before and was paneled in long curves of inlaid dark and blond wood.
“Yeah, let them eat cake,” Georgie said, sarcasm lilting in her voice. “Are you related to Marie Antoinette, oh Monsieur French Duke?”
“Very indirectly,” he said, sounding distracted because he was examining the shape of the silvery ceiling three stories above them. “The Monégasque princely family is descended from nobility, counts and dukes, but very little royalty. Flicka was quite a catch for Pierre. Why would they put aluminum up there? The acoustics in here are deplorable.”
Marie Antoinette? Georgie had been screwing with Alex. She stopped him with a hand on his elbow. “Seriously?”
“Yes, the acoustics are awful. Our voices are echoing so much that I can hardly see. Tell me that the performance rooms are better than this.”
“No. The thing about Marie Antoinette.”
“Distantly, and indirectly,” Alex said, still looking up as if scanning for dive-bombing birds. His fists knotted around his backpack straps, and his knuckles were turning white. “We share some common ancestors and have noble relatives in common, most of whom were Austrian or German. Can we get out of this lobby?”
Georgie watched Alex’s dark eyes. They were a little wider than usual, and he almost seemed to be watching things that weren’t there. She hadn’t seen him drop any acid or anything.
“Come on.” She took his hand—which was uncharacteristically cool and damp under his calluses on his fingers and palm—untangling his finger’s from his guitar case’s backpack straps around his chest, and led him to a hallway with the standard, pock-marked acoustic tile on the ceiling and white-washed drywall sopping up any stray vibration.
Alex leaned against the wall and scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Sorry.”
“What happened out there?”
“Nothing.” He sucked in a deep breath—Georgie’s counselors would have called it a fortifying breath—and said, “Lead the way to the practice rooms?”
“Sure.” She kept an eye on him in the elevator up into the top layers of the birthday cake, but other than a furtive wipe of his face by stretching his tee shirt up, he didn’t fidget any more.
When they got to the practice room, Alex slung his guitar case to the floor. “So I have this piece I’m working on,” he said. The upright piano in the corner left just enough room for a chair for Alex and his guitar case on the floor.
“Yeah?”
“It’s a song.”
“Like ‘Alwaysland?’”
“Yes, a ballad, but I’m having problems fitting words into it.”
“What do you do with all these songs?”
“I beg your pardon?” Alex asked. He cocked his head like he was politely quizzical. The blond ends of his hair slipped over his shoulder.
“There’s ‘Alwaysland.’ Now you’re working on this one. What do you do with your songs?”
His tight smile was rather proper. “Isn’t it enough that they exist?”
“You’re being very Socratic, answering my questions with more questions. No, it’s not enough that they exist. Assuming this wasn’t a nookie run, you flew all the way here to bust into the music building in the middle of the night to play a song for me. It isn’t enough to say that it just exists.”
“I’m one of those spoiled rich brats. We do things like write songs for no reason.” He laid his guitar case on the floor and unclipped the latches.
“And fly on a moment’s notice in the middle of the night to work on a song that no one will ever hear?” She sat down on the piano bench but didn’t face the keyboard.
“Yes.” He lifted his guitar and sat on the chair, flicking his fingers over the strings and twisting the tuning pins at the top.
He wasn’t going to tell her. She was withholding all kinds of stuff from him, too, so that was probably fair. “Well, all right then.”
“Shall we begin?”
“Sure. What’s the name of the song?”
“Scrambled Eggs,” he said.
“Ooo. Romantic.”
“Just listen.” He warmed up for a moment, running his fingers up the fretboard and plucking the steel strings with his other hand. He held the guitar like a classical guitarist with the body between his legs and the fretboard running up near his shoulder, not like a contemporary musician with the instrument lying across his lap like it was falling-down drunk.
Georgie had played instrumental music all her life, to the point where lyrics sometimes seemed intrusive to her.
Alex’s song drifted out of his guitar, a haunting, wrenching melody of longing.
By the time he was finished, her hands were clenched into fists in her lap. “Oh, my God, Alex. You wrote that?”
He nodded. “What do you think?”
/> “It’s gorgeous.”
“Words haven’t fit it yet.”
“It’s beautiful the way it is. You shouldn’t distract from the music with words.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. It needs words.”
“Well, I think it’s gorgeous.”
“Notes?”
“I don’t know, Alex. Let me hear it again.”
They stayed in the practice room past dawn, with Alex playing his song and Georgie playing it back to him on the piano, varying the cadence and tempo, until they had strengthened it.
“It’s an amazing piece of music, Alex, but I have an eight-forty class that I should be at.” If no burly Russian bratva guys were waiting for her outside of it. “I just have the one class, though. I’ll be done in an hour.”
“I’ll noodle around here,” he said, tightening a tuning peg on his guitar what Georgie could only call an imperceptible amount. “When you get back, we’ll go for breakfast.”
“Cool.”
Outside the music building, Georgie dodged through the crowd thronging the sun-drenched sidewalks. She watched—oh, she watched hard—but no big Russian guys were lurking behind the palm trees that lined the pedestrian malls nor did anyone film her on their cell phone for nefarious purposes.
After class, no one followed or intimidated her then, either, so she swung by and picked up Alex from the music building. He tucked his long hair in his black baseball hat and donned sunglasses as if he were the one being followed by the Russian mafia, and they went to breakfast at a coffee shop across the street.
At breakfast, the waitress flirted with Alex, laying her hand on his shoulder and bending way, way over, as if Georgie wasn’t sitting right there. Georgie even caught her taking an over-the-shoulder selfie of him. So fucking unprofessional.
Alex was polite, and he didn’t precisely flirt back, though he smiled at the waitress a bit too broadly. When they had finished their egg white omelets, he left the woman a huge tip, the sap.
God, men were so easily manipulated. Flash a little boob and their wallets fall out of their pants.
For the rest of the day, Georgie went to classes when she had to, ditching Alex in a piano practice room or her dorm room. He worked obsessively on the guitar, practicing extraordinarily complex technical scales and changing parts of that Scrambled Eggs song, and then composing others.
Four others.
These new songs had words that he sang under his breath at first, scratching in a notebook, then for her. Over the hours and days that they had together, his voice healed, and it was the first time she had heard him when he wasn’t so hoarse he could barely speak.
He was a bright tenor with an extraordinary range down to a deep baritone.
Sitting on her bed, listening to Alex sing songs of love and heartache in a wide-open, velvety tenor was spell-binding. After one song about a guy longing for his girlfriend, singing, “When I touch you, I can breathe again,” where the word “breathe” sounded like Alex was spreading his arms and turning his face to the sun, Georgie joked that he needed to excuse her to go change her panties.
But she meant it. Her body was beginning to crave him, and they had so little time before he had to fly back on Saturday afternoon.
Over time, Georgie became more certain that she wasn’t being followed and so the Russian bratva must not know where she lived, just her cell phone number. That guy at the nightclub must have been just some guy, not a Russian hit man. She attended class and walked around campus with more confidence, even though she kept at least one of her bug-out bags close at hand at all times.
When she was walking to class her phone buzzed in her purse. Georgie checked the screen before she answered, dreading an unknown number, but the screen said Lizzy.
She thumbed the screen. “Lizzy?”
“Yeah, Georgie?” Her raspy voice was a relief. “I need to ask you a favor. It’s about The Devilhouse.”
The Devilhouse didn’t matter to Georgie. She would be far out of town before Mannix Bonfils managed to do anything about it. “What about it?”
Lizzy, in her raspy little voice said, “I’m taking over. I’m going to be The Domina of The Devilhouse.”
Georgie cracked up.
When she got her breath back, she asked, “What the Hell happened in France between you and Mannix Bonfils?”
“Mannix is dead.”
“Oh.” Georgie swallowed hard. “I’m sorry?”
“I’m not. He tried to kill Theo, and I’m still not sure why he thought that I would go with him if he did. Anyway, Theo was half-owner, a silent partner, so he owns it now, and I’m going to run it.”
“What about college?” Georgie asked.
“I’ll finish this semester and then go part-time. I’m switching my major to business. Remember, you said that you could get me through Diffy-Que!”
Georgie scrubbed her face with her hand. “Yeah, about that, Lizzy—”
“Anyway, we’re having an all-hands meeting at The Devilhouse tomorrow afternoon to discuss how all of Mannix’s changes are gone. There will be some changes at the D-H, but they’re the other way, better for contractors. You can come, right?”
Georgie glanced at the crowd around her, everyone hurrying to class, watching for anyone who might be following her. “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now.”
“I really need you to be there.”
If the Russian bratva really hadn’t found her, if they only knew her phone number, then maybe she could get her job back and continue with her planned payback scheme.
Yet, she shouldn’t commit until she knew. “I don’t know.”
“Please, Georgie! I need you. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
This was Lizzy, her friend who had helped her slay her Boston R’s. “Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Thank you! I’ll see you soon!” She hung up, and Georgie tucked the phone back in her purse.
It would be fine.
In those few days, she caught Alex playing his violin only once, when she had been at class for several hours and was just dragging in.
When she opened her dorm room’s front door, he wasn’t in the study room, but the bedroom door was closed. The soprano strains of violin music echoed through the dorm room, and she very gently cracked the bedroom door to hear better and sat on the couch.
Even his actual violin was exceptional, producing an extravagant, lush sound that she had never heard outside of a major concert hall. His bowing was so intricate that some parts sounded like two violins playing in harmony as he drew out the soaring, heart-wrenching notes of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”
Schubert’s Ave Maria
Performed by Joshua Bell
Georgie hadn’t been to Mass in years, so many years. She missed the music. She covered her face with her hands, not allowing any tears to break free, and sat silently until Alex strummed his guitar again. After a few minutes, she composed herself and slammed the front door, yelling, “Honey! I’m home!”
They stayed at his hotel those nights because his feet did actually hang off of the end of the twin bed in Georgie’s dorm room and because, as she said, reasons.
Something was changing, though.
In class, Georgie’s attention wandered sometimes. When her professors were expounding on hegemons and statistical modeling of elections, she found herself remembering lilting strains of violins and dissecting intricate guitar melodies, but she shook her head and put herself back together.
When Alex played for her, everything else in her life fled. For three glorious days, Georgie lived with music around her all the time, even when she should have been concentrating on her classes.
The timid musician lifted her head, drawn out by the music.
Thursday night, he stroked her body until she was floating. A dim flicker of Georgie’s mind noted that this was like being hypnotized, this languorous suspension of her mind even though her body wasn’t lifted by the ropes. Alex held her in his arm
s, murmuring music to her, delving into her body until they were both breathless and clutching each other, until she was safe on the other side.
Friday passed in a desperate haze of music and heated flesh with Georgie running her fingers over the ridges of the tattoos on Alex’s back.
Saturday morning came far too soon.
Saturday Morning
Georgie
Saturday morning, after Georgie and Alex spent the wee, dark hours in a practice room fine-tuning a song that he would surely stuff in a bag somewhere, they dropped by Georgie’s dorm room to grab some notes that she wanted to take with her when she fled. In her study room, the curtains were drawn tightly against the sun outside.
“I don’t want to leave,” Alex said, his hands lingering on her waist and hips. His dark eyes looked more forlorn than when he had arrived.
“Your plane doesn’t leave for a couple hours. I just need to meet some friends at the Student Union to exchange class notes,” Georgie said. “You can come with me, if you want.”
“Oh, God,” he laughed. “No, I cannot walk through a Student Union to help you get your notes.”
“Why not?”
Alex ran his fingers through his hair, tangling it around his fingers. “Lingering trauma from Juilliard. Just the thought of political science still gives me chills.”
“Yeah? You take a lot of poli-sci classes at Juilliard?” she asked, knowing full well that the whole point of attending a music conservatory was the laser-narrow focus on music. No math classes. No Biology for Non-Majors. No poli-sci. Just musical theory and craft and instrument classes. “Anyway, if you don’t want to wait, you can take my car to the airport. Just tell me where you parked it and I’ll have Lizzy—” but Lizzy was staying at Theo’s house, taking care of him while he healed and just showing up for class, “—or someone else drive me to the airport to pick it up.”
He shook his head, his long hair swaying. “I’m not going to take your car. I would call a car service to pick me up. I just don’t want to go yet.”
[Billionaires in Disguise 01.0] Every Breath You Take Page 18
