by Cassia Leo
Everything was a feedback loop like a shrieking microphone that he clutched in his hands.
From behind him, he heard, “Hey! Are you ready to go on, or you just going to stand there with your dick in your hands?”
Tryp Areleous, the drummer, stood shirtless while the swirling lights splashed the tattooed roses and vines on his skin blue and green instead of vibrant scarlet and black. He twirled a drumstick across his knuckles. “Well?”
The roar of the crowd infused him with a manic energy that he could not resist.
Xan Valentine shook back his long hair. His guitar was onstage, waiting for him. “Fuck, yeah. Let’s blow the roof off this fucking arena.”
DRUNK DIAL
Georgie
Blaring, loud blaring, first inside Georgie’s dream about an enormous piano that she couldn’t reach and then in the dark. Her phone cast bright light onto the ceiling of her dorm room.
She grabbed the phone and swiped the dot. “Hello! Lizzy!”
A man’s hoarse, wrecked voice said, “It’s Alexandre. Did you mean what you said?”
She scooted up in her sheets and glanced at Lizzy’s empty bed. “What time is it?”
“I’m not sure what time it is there. When you said that we would play a duet, piano and violin, my music, somewhere where no one could hear us, did you mean it?”
“Yes. Of course. I can’t get ‘Alwaysland’ out of my head. It’s like it’s haunting me. You sound awful. Are you sick?”
His voice broke when he said, “We’ll play the duet?”
“Yes. Are you okay?”
“I’m drunk. But I’ll be there. Soon.”
“Alex? Don’t drive.”
“I won’t. Call me Alex again.”
“Alex?”
“Yes. Like that.”
“Or Alexandre.”
He sighed. “Both. I’ll be there soon.”
A click sounded through the line, and Georgie dropped the phone back on her nightstand and fell asleep hard, wondering if that had been a dream.
DORM INVASION
Georgie
The next morning, Wednesday, Georgie slapped open the door to her dorm room after her early classes. She had collected more class notes for Lizzy from their friends, all of whom had barraged her with questions that she couldn’t answer, and the huge stack of looseleaf paper in her arms was slipping and about to crash to the floor.
She juggled, dropping her purse, but held onto the paper so it didn’t splash across the thin carpeting.
She flopped the papers on her desk, right next to a suspiciously thick, black guitar case that leaned against it, and a garment bag emblazoned AV hung over the back of her desk chair.
The door to her bedroom was closed.
So the phone conversation hadn’t been a dream. Huh.
She called out, “Alex?”
Georgie pushed open the door to the darkened bedroom, a little wary that he might do something impulsive like pounce on her, but a large lump in her bed didn’t move. He lay on top of the bedspread like he had only meant to lie down for a few minutes. His stockinged feet hung off the end of her twin bed, and blond hair fluttered in the air conditioning blowing from the ceiling.
His jeans clung to his slim waist and hips, and his white tee shirt had ridden up to expose a few ripples of his abs. Blue and green tendrils from the tattoo on his back crept around his waist, curling like storm-tossed water.
“Alex? You okay?” She walked over to him, skirting Lizzy’s stripped bed, and shook his shoulder. “Alex?”
He grabbed her wrist, tugging her into her own bed, and he rolled on top of her.
“Whoa!” she called out, even as she ran her hand down his muscled side to the waistband of his jeans. Her body remembered his touch, and she couldn’t quite catch her breath, and not just because his chest was half-lying on her. She asked, “This isn’t just a nookie run, is it?”
“You would think that I would know vernacular English better by now, wouldn’t you?” His hoarse voice was barely audible, like he had been screaming for hours.
“What?” She wasn’t sure if she had heard him right.
His brown eyes were glazed, and he wove a little even though he was braced on his elbows. “I don’t know what a ‘nookie run’ is.”
Georgie rolled her eyes. “Are you just here for sex?”
“No.” He rested his forehead against hers. “Nookie run. Sounds like a Mötley Crüe song. I brought my violin. I want to show you a song.”
She touched his cheek. “You okay, there?”
“Just call me Alex.”
In her arms, his body was shaking. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Alex.”
“Such august company,” he grated out.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m drunk.”
“It’s ten in the morning, honey.” She smoothed his hair back. He smelled like sweat and smoke, and his breath was rife with whiskey.
“I’m still drunk. I had my plane fueled up and in the air on no notice. That’s more difficult than I had thought it would be.”
“Especially when you’re wasted?”
“I wasn’t too trashed until I got on the plane with nothing to do except kill a couple bottles, and then I couldn’t stop him.”
His glazed eyes looked different. Unfocused, maybe. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Call me Alexandre. Talk to me about music. Tell me that art still matters.” He laid his head down beside hers on the pillow.
The creases around his brown eyes seemed like he held so much pain that she stroked his cheek. “Are you cracking up?”
“I’m Alexandre,” he croaked.
She could barely hear him. “Of course you are.”
“The other side is taking over. I can’t remember who I am half the time. I drop so far into character that I’m not me anymore.”
“Alex?” He closed his eyes and she shook his shoulder. “Alex!”
“Yes. Bring me back.”
“Did you take anything other than booze?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t, usually. I don’t have time to recover, and anything that goes up my nose or that I smoke irritates my throat. I can’t do that.”
“How did you get in here, anyway? You need a keycard to get past the lobby.”
He chuckled, and the pain lines around his eyes eased. “I grew up in a boarding school. I am adept at sneaking into and out of a girls’ dorm at all times of the night.”
“It’s actually co-ed because it’s the honors dorm, but I get where this is heading.”
“Just let me stay.”
“Of course. Is there anyone I need to call?”
“No,” he whispered. “No one will even think to look for me for three days.” His dark eyes cracked open. Even so exhausted, his long, lashed eyes looked exotic and altogether sexy. “Are you going to get in trouble if the dorm mother catches me here?”
“What? No. If you stay for more than three days, the resident assistants will want to have a welfare meeting with my roommate to make sure it’s okay with her, and I’ll have to call her to set that up because I doubt that she’s coming back to the dorm.”
“Ah. Such liberal policies. But I was a child.” His breathing evened out, and Alex went to sleep again.
Georgie let him fall more deeply asleep, and then she slipped out from under his heavy arm (she was adept at that,) snagged one of the folded blankets from Lizzy’s bed and flipped it over him, and tiptoed back out to her study room, closing the door to the bedroom softly behind her.
Good Lord, she had a drunken duke in her bed. In a romance novel, she would be obliged to marry him now.
Georgie almost giggled, because there was no fucking way in Hell that would ever happen.
THE ICE PRINCESS
Georgie
Georgie was typing at her desk, working on a report that contrasted common law in England with early American common law, her staccato fingertaps echoing in the silent room, when Al
ex staggered out of her bedroom.
He leaned his shoulder against the door frame and croaked, “Did I do anything stupid?”
She spun in her desk chair to face him. “Other than getting on a plane in the middle of the night and breaking into a college dorm while trashed? Not that I know of.”
“No harm, then.” He stumbled to her couch on the other wall and blinked in the setting sunlight, glaring golden light in the windows beside the front door. He smoothed his hair behind his shoulders. “What time is it?”
“Seven-ish.”
“Great. Let’s go out.”
“I thought you were here to play a sonata for piano and violin with me.” Not that she didn’t have some other ideas, since he was there anyway.
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 r
ight 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.