[Billionaires in Disguise 01.0] Every Breath You Take

by Blair Babylon

  Alex already had his arms wrapped around her, and Georgie buried her face in his thick shoulder. “I thought you left.”

  “I couldn’t leave. You looked too frightened.”

  “I did not.”

  “All right. You didn’t.”

  She looked behind them. Cars cut through the lanes in the thick traffic, but no one seemed to be following the SUV. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to run.”

  His arms tightened around her. He said, “Gentlemen, to the plane, please.”

  Georgie pointed behind them. “I need my car. My car is back there.”

  “Doubtlessly, they will stake out your car and wait for you, probably for days or weeks. You can’t go back.”

  She looked back. “Shit. My bug-out bags are in there.”

  “Do you have your passport?” he asked, his hand stroking her braid.

  “In my purse.”

  “That’s all you’ll need. I’ll get you anything else.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “I believe you.”

  “You shouldn’t.” Hot tears gathered in her eyes. “I already owe you a hundred Euros for the concierge sneaking us out of the hotel in Paris. I don’t want to end up owing you anything more.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  He held her wrists, drawing her hands down his chest. He looked right into her sweet brown eyes. “Come on tour with me.”

  She dropped her face to her hands again. “Oh, God. I can’t.”

  “You said it’s not safe for you here. I have two layers of security on the tour. One for the band, and a private one. No one could get to you.”

  “There would be pictures all over the place. They will find them, and then they will find me. They’re highly motivated.”

  “No one would notice just another roadie. Travel with the crew. Stay with me in my room. Your name won’t be anywhere on our rosters until we fly to Europe. You’ll be safe for now, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

  “I can’t go on tour with you. I have to get a new name, a new identity. I have to start a new life and go to law school to pay everyone back.”

  “Someone is after you. You need to hide. You can hide with me, even if it’s just for tonight. Let’s go to the plane. There will be no record of you leaving the Southwest. I’ll take you anywhere you want, but you should go with me.”

  Men with guns had chased her. Russian mob bosses had ordered her kidnapping. The bright desert sun glared off the cars around her, stinging her eyes everywhere she turned. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Just for now, come with me. If you want to go off on your own, we’ll buy you a car and the essentials.”

  “I have money. I have my credit cards. I can buy stuff.”

  “Then fine, but in the meantime, get on my plane, and let’s get into the air where these men can’t get to you.”

  “Okay,” she said, hanging onto him. “Okay.”

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  Georgie clung more tightly to his muscular, warm body. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  On the Gulfstream

  Alexandre de Valentinois

  Alexandre led Georgie out of the private terminal and outside onto the warm tarmac. The jetwash from the engines blasted through his hair, swirling it around his face so that he could hardly see through the blond and brown mess. Still trailing Georgie, he bounded up the staircase to his Gulfstream. Her cold fingers worried him that she might be in shock.

  She paused in the entryway for a moment, and he glanced back to see her taking a long look at the inside of the plane. Her searching assessment wasn’t the wide-eyed stare of someone who had never seen the inside of a private jet nor the calculating appraisal of a peer who was sizing up Alexandre’s social rank. The sadness in her eyes seemed like reminiscence.

  He was just about to ask her if she was all right when Guillaume stepped out of the galley and drawled, “Your Grace.”

  “Guillaume,” Alexandre said and glanced pointedly at Georgie behind him.

  Guillaume leaned to peer around Alexandre and stiffened. He snapped back to a starchy correctness. “Your Grace, the flight plan has been refiled and we will arrive in Virginia on schedule. Will you and the lady be taking supper on board?”

  “Yes, I think so. Thank you.”

  “And would you like a drink?”

  “Scotch for me. Georgie?”

  She looked away from the plane and to Guillaume. “The same, please?”

  “My pleasure, miss. Do you require anything else, sir?”

  Alexandre said, “No, Guillaume.”

  “Very good, sir.” He pivoted and waddled back to the small galley on the plane.

  Alexandre turned back to Georgie. Red rimmed her eyes, and he took a step toward her but just held out his hand. He didn’t want to be too alpha wolf and scare her off, but she responded to a firm hand, quite well. “We’ll be taking off soon. We need to sit down.”

  She nodded and took his hand, letting him lead her into the plane. When they were past the galley area, she said, “I’ll just use the bathroom.”

  Alexandre pointed to the back. “Off to the right.”

  She walked ahead of him, holding her hands over her face.

  Alexandre trailed her, going about halfway to the back. His larger plane had been undergoing maintenance and would have taken an additional four hours before they could have left Miami. Alexandre stooped slightly as he walked, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. This plane hadn’t been made for passengers who were six feet-four. He steadied himself by touching the seatbacks of the sets of four chairs clustered around the dining table on his right.

  He swiveled one out and crouched to sit in it, and Guillaume brought him his scotch while the steward secured and cross-checked the door.

  The butler leaned back into the aisle to make sure that Georgie had closed the bathroom door and asked in exactly the same servile tone, “And will we be getting stinking drunk on today’s flight to Virginia, Your Grace?”

  Some of the people in Alexandre’s employ had been with him since he was a small child and had seen his teenage years. They could produce an excellent pretense of decorum when the situation called for it, but when they were alone, these people had seen too much. “I don’t think so, Guillaume. Aren’t you going to join me?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Guillaume swiveled the chair across from him and fell into it. His knees popped on the descent, and the chair creaked at the heavy landing. He produced his own glass of scotch from some magical pocket that only butlers had. “Did everything go as planned with the young lady? Were your ashes adequately hauled?”

  “God, you’re crass.” Alexandre watched the airport mechanics remove the chocks from the wheels of the plane.

  “Said the rock star to the butler.”

  “The plan changed.” Alexandre sipped the scotch and watched the tarmac and blighted landscape outside the round portal.

  “And this is not to your liking, Your Grace?”

  Alexandre shook his head. “Someone is after her. They want to kidnap her or something. She won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” He produced the scotch bottle and sloshed more scotch in Alexandre’s glass just as the plane lurched forward to taxi to the runway.

  “Yeah,” Alexandre said, sipping the scotch whiskey. The burnt caramel fumes glided up his sinuses and became deep red smoke behind his eyes.

  “Will there be another temper tantrum and midnight flight in the foreseeable future?” Guillaume asked.

  Not if Alexandre could help it. He planned to keep Georgie with him rather than have to go rescue her. He shook his head.

  “The mechanics will be glad to hear that, Your Grace. I’ll just make sure your instruments are properly secured.”

  He waddled off, leaving Alexandre to contemplate the harsh sunlight outside the airplane’s porthole window.

 
Georgie came back while the plane was still taxiing and sat across from him. The afternoon sunlight bounced off the polished wood of the table and lit her face. Alexandre swiveled his chair toward her, drawn by her delicate bone structure and large, liquid brown eyes. He had noticed her before Flicka had introduced them. Her lean body appealed to him. Her trim, athletic lines spoke of rigor and commitment, not plastic implants or artifice.

  He leaned forward, his arms braced on the table. “I need to know who would send two men with guns after you.”

  “Saw that, did you?”

  “Some things escape my notice, but not men with guns.”

  Georgie’s mouth firmed, and Alexandre had a moment of distraction while he contemplated her full lips. She always looked like she had just been kissed, and it almost made him jealous.

  She said, “As soon as we get where we’re going, I will walk off the plane and you’ll never see me again.” Pride lifted her brown eyes and chin. “I can make my own way in this world. I pay my own debts. I don’t want to involve you in this any more than I already have.”

  She stared straight into his eyes. Her eyes were a pale shade of brown, not quite light enough to be hazel, but many shades lighter than his own, which his older cousin Pierre had assured him were the deep, dark brown of the Italian Grimaldis and oil-fouled mud. The color of his own eyes rang a melancholy G-minor chord in his head. Georgie’s were a bright, magnificent F-major, full of promise at an ascension down the frets.

  From the determined set of her mouth, she was ready to bolt, very ready.

  Alexandre reached across the table. She was just holding onto the edge of the table with her fingertips, like she was clinging to a crevice in a cliff face and in danger of a fall.

  He lifted her fingers from the edge of the table and held her hand. “Come to my concert tonight.”

  “I—what?” Her startled eyes amused him.

  Alexandre said, “The reason that I had to leave to go back on such a strict schedule was because I have a concert beginning at nine o’clock tonight. Come hear ‘Alwaysland’ like it was meant to be played: just me, a guitar, and thirty thousand screaming fans.”

  Energy infiltrated his calves, and one of his legs began to bounce, anticipating the crowd roaring at him.

  Alexandre tamped it down.

  Not yet.

  Georgie Flying

  Georgie

  One last night.

  As she sat in the buttery leather seat on the airplane while it taxied to the runway, bouncing along on shock absorbers and fluttering down such that it felt like the plane was trying to spring into the air, Alex was asking her to stay for one last night and to hear him sing “Alwaysland.”

  And whatever else that happened.

  Could her diamond-hard heart handle six?

  She thought not, but it was just her heart. She had to disappear again to save her ass and, eventually, to redeem her immortal soul, such as it was.

  Georgie flipped her fingers under Alex’s, feeling his warm hand. He had reached over with his left hand, and she ran her thumb over the hard, deep calluses on his fingertips, calluses so deep that steel wires couldn’t cut into them. It took years to build up calluses like those, many years.

  His dark eyes—so long and long-lashed, so exotic, so intense—watched her. Every twitch, every time she held back, every flush of her skin when she thought about his hands on her and dragging her body onto his, he saw them all.

  That’s the problem with artists, she thought. They feel too much, and they can sense everything that you hide so far down inside.

  He probably knew that even the mention of his song made her eyes burn with tears. He probably knew that the thought of seeing him perform it drew her like a hungry animal to offered food.

  He knew, from the glitter in his eyes and the smile beginning to curve the corners of his mouth, that the thought of him, on a stage, singing and playing “Alwaysland,” was irresistible.

  “Yes,” she said, because it was useless to fight that hunger. “I’d like that.”

  “Good,” he said, and his smile stayed small, intimate, not a victorious grin. He covered her hand with his. “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?” She couldn’t stop watching his hands. As a pianist, her hands were lean and strong, but she had no calluses. The marks that music had left on his skin were fascinating.

  “When we’re there, you can’t call me Alex or Alexandre, and certainly not Grimaldi.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve called myself Xan Valentine since I matriculated at Juilliard. Even Cadell doesn’t know the whole Monégasque and French dukedom things.”

  “They don’t know your real name?”

  “No. None of them.”

  “Or about your background.”

  Alex studied her, but this time, he seemed to be searching her for something else. “How much do you know about that?”

  Georgie’s surprise stretched her eyes before she had a chance to compose herself. She drew a circle in the air, indicating the airplane. “The duke thing.”

  “They don’t know about ‘the duke thing,’” he said.

  “Or the Monaco connection.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Can I call you Alex when we’re alone?”

  His smile warmed, and the sparkle in his dark eyes was of an altogether different nature. “I’m counting on it.”

  Xan Valentine

  Alexandre de Valentinois

  Alexandre and Georgie stood in the cement tunnel hung with blackout curtains that led to the stage in the arena. Thumping music echoed off the concrete and blended into an atonal, chaotic mass of sound.

  He took her hand. The silver death’s head rings on his knuckles were hard between their skin. “Remember,” he said, projecting near her ear to be heard over the din from the stage and the screaming audience. “Remember, I’m Xan, now.”

  She nodded, and Alexandre caught one, last whiff of her perfume, night-blooming jasmine and vanilla, that sounded like the drawn-out notes of a cello speaking of love.

  He thought, Remember this. Remember her.

  Alex found his silver chains in his costume pocket and dropped them over his head. The heavy silver chilled the back of his neck.

  On the stage, Cadell cranked his guitar into a primal scream.

  Tryp battered an insistent heartbeat on his drums.

  Thirty thousand fans stomped the floorboards like thunder harnessed and forced into unison.

  “I’ll be done in a few hours,” Alexandre whispered, “and I’ll come back to you.”

  Cadell had begun the guitar solo intro to “Nine Levels of Tortured Souls,” an arena rock anthem that pulled the crowd to their feet. Alexandre felt them out there, their barely contained fury about to erupt.

  “I’ll come back,” he whispered to her.

  He took a flask out of his hip pocket, under the velvet frock coat, and knocked back a swallow. It burned his throat and vocal cords with dark red fire and infiltrated every cell in his body, and the alcohol stripped any slimy gunk off his vocal cords.

  The dark tendrils that Alexandre thought of as Xan Valentine’s persona trickled toward him, surrounding him with the flashing colors of rock music and the scent of dust burning in the stage lights.

  Alex let go.

  He and Jonas needed to meet with the Artists and Repertoire guy from Interscope Records late this week and the woman from Griffin next week.

  He needed to cut these demos and send the tracks to his producers for processing as soon as he could, probably as soon as he could roust Tryp and Cadell for a stripped-down cut. Those had to be done before the meetings with the A&R people.

  But now, right now, he needed to stride onto that stage and command every one of those thirty thousand people, mold them into his own army, and drive them into a berserker madness.

  Lightning cracked through him. This was what he was made for.

  Xan Valentine threw back another shot of the scotch and w
rapped one arm around Georgie’s waist, shoving her against the wall for one last fiery kiss, and he dropped her to take the stage.

  Alwaysland

  Georgie

  Georgie watched Alex, her sweet rescuer and introspective classical musician, who was so private about his violin and so sparkling in his discussion of music, his posh British accent smooth in her ears.

  Alex took a swig from the flask and looked out the part in the curtain at the roaring crowd and swirling lights, and he changed.

  She had seen glimmers of it before, that glower and swagger. She had felt it when his hands covered hers at the piano in Paris and when he had tied her up and fucked her at The Devilhouse.

  His dark eyes glittered, became almost malevolent. His face hardened.

  When he looked back at her, hunger and power flowing off of him, Georgie stepped back, but he was on her, his arm around her waist and bending her back and shoving her up against the wall, sucking at her mouth, his fingers almost bruising her arms.

  He released her and marched for the stage, his every movement eager to destroy the audience.

  Georgie slid down the cold, cement wall. The abrupt change was shocking, and she rubbed her lower lip where he had bitten her.

  She stood on shaking legs and made her way to the black curtains. Stage lights infiltrated the crease into the dark tunnel. She used one finger to part the curtains so she could see.

  The laser-cannon lights from the stage blasted her eyes, and she blinked to clear the tears.

  On the stage, Xan Valentine roared to the crowd, and they screamed back.

  He sang. He played the guitar. He rocked the crowd.

  For hours.

  For hours, he held them in his hands, and all thirty thousand were as helpless as Georgie had been when he had shoved her against the wall. You can’t resist a force of personality like that.

  Georgie watched him, unable to look away. Every move of his body exuded sex and power. When he tore off the frock coat and his shirt gaped open, silver chains and charms glittering in the stage lights, the women in the audience went wild, and then men felt the animal power wash over them.