by Cassia Leo
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 shined 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.”
“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.
“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.
Because she had wanted to see if he would show up.
She shrugged. “Just ‘cuz.”
“I don’t believe that you have ever done anything at all, ‘just ‘cuz.’ You seem far too deliberate, measured.” He settled back on the couch, his long arms stretched along the back of the sofa, encroaching to where he could touch her, if he wanted to. “Let’s hear the truth this time.”
“It’s the music.” Oh, wow, she wanted to take that back. “It’s like an obsession. I should stop, but I need those three hours a day.”
And if she had to run again, she didn’t know how she would get them.
Alex swiveled on the couch and looked at her. His brown eyes focused right on her, like she had his full attention.
She said, “I’m acing my classes. I’m doing everything I should to get into a very good law school, but I should be doing more. I should do more volunteering to copyedit at the law review or something, but the music calls me back.”
“And you can’t let it go,” Alex said.
“School should be my number-one priority, my only priority, but it’s not. Those practice rooms in the dark mornings at the music buildings are when I feel alive. I do all the rest so I can get back there. When I’m in the practice room, it’s like the only time I can breathe.”
“It’s like the only time you can breathe,” he repeated, and he blinked.
“Yeah. That’s what it feels like.”
Alex was looking above her head. “Music is the breath of life? No. Music is how I breathe?” He squinted. “There’s something there.”
“What?” she asked, trying not to frown but she didn’t know what he was talking about.
Alex stood and held out his hand, pulling her to her feet. “Let’s dance.”
“Okay.” She followed him over to the small dance floor in the corner of the VIP area that was obviously the source of the pot smoke, and his hand slipped around to the small of her back.
Georgie wasn’t a flashy dancer, not like her friend Lizzy who ran the gamut from exuberant to twerking, but she could wiggle and sway to the beat. She had had ballet lessons as a child, of course, along with equestrian, skiing, and sailing lessons and the usual team sports, but piano lessons had overwhelmed her schedule when she was ten, when it had become apparent that she had some small talent for expression and the diligence to practice for four hours or more every day.
Alex, however, could dance. The music flooded his body and inhabited him, and he turned the sexy music into movement and held her while the music flowed through them both. His hands drifted over her skin and the green dress, never groping, never anything gross in public, but his hands knew just where to be when her arm or hip would be there, too. Every sinuous movement of his lean, muscled body had a connotation of sex. Because she had been to bed with him, as he curled his torso in a wave, she could imagine him gathering himself to thrust into her, or his step toward her reminded her of the way he had climbed onto the bed.
They ended up with their faces close together, his forehead nearly touching hers as he bent to reach her, and his fingertips just brushing her cheekbones and jawline. Georgie could barely breathe with the nearness of his body, with that light scent of green forest and something clean, like lemon. His breath, tinged with champagne and mint, feathered down her neck.
He whispered, “When I touch you, I can breathe again.” He kissed her, his lips caressing hers, and running his fingers down her face and dropping to her neck. “Yes, that’s it.”
Georgie scrutinized his face for any signs that he was going all mushy on her. The dreamy expression in his dark eyes seemed a little more like a light case of intoxication rather than something that might lead to a declaration of undying love, which was all good in Georgie’s book.
Over Alex’s shoulder, Georgie first caught the impression of blue eyes looking at her.
She glanced up, and a man was staring at her. His pale skin could have been from the windburn and cold chap of winters in Moscow.
Georgie whispered to Alex, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Absolutely,” he whispered back.
As he led her to her car, Georgie scanned the crowd, but the pale man with the wide, Slavic cheekbones and eyes like a winter sky didn’t show up again.
BACK TO THE DEVILHOUSE
Georgie
The dark street, clogged with cars leaving bars and driven by drunks, stretched away from Georgie toward the full moon hanging over the city. Three sedans and a monster pick-up truck swerved to follow her white Lexus as she drove through the night, trying to evade the man at the nightclub, who may or may not have been one of Tatiana’s Russian hit men.
Or kidnappers.
Or whatever kind of criminal they were going to send to grab Georgie and take her somewhere that her screams wouldn’t be heard by anyone except her mother over the phone.
The full moon shone down on cars even more brightly than the streetlights passing overhead.
Beside her, Alex wore his sunglasses and watched the streets with passing interest. The streetlights marched in a dotted-yellow line up the mirrored lenses when he looked toward her. “To the hotel?”
The hotel he had rented was downtown, a long way. She wanted to get off the streets and hide somewhere safe sooner than that.
Going back to the dorm would be stupid on many counts: the Russians might have laid a trap there if they already knew where she lived, or else she would lead them back to where she lived if they didn’t know. All bad. Bad, bad.
Without realizing it, Georgie had driven to familiar streets, maybe for comfort, and the two Starbucks next door to each other reminded her that they were two blocks away from The Devilhouse.
The Devilhouse had excellent security. When it was closed, steel bars barricaded the front doors and windows. Security cameras watched every room and the perimeter. She wasn’t sure whether the security guys kept guns on the premises, but they might.
Georgie wanted a gun in her hand right then, even though she had never fired one or even held one. Her own hands were too small to push away someone who grabbed her. Her fingers were too weak to pry a man’s grip off her arm or throat. Her punches were merely flailing that would patter on a kidnapper’s shoulders or chest as he threw her in the trunk of a car.
She turned into The Devilhouse’s long driveway and sped for the back parking lot, a level, empty flat of black asphalt cross-hatched with white lines. The street lights dumped pools of sallow light on the empty space.
No other cars followed them in.
Okay, this was far from a disaster. It looked like she wasn’t being actively followed at the moment, and she had both of her bug-out bags—the one in her trunk and the one from her dorm closet—a luxury that she had not dared to dream of.
Alex said, his British accent more pronounced because he was being prim, “Now, if a man took a woman whom he had met only twice to an empty building in the middle of the night, he might be thought a creeper or perhaps a serial killer.”
Georgie watched to see if
anyone had waited to turn into the parking lot. “You want to leave?”
“Oh, no. Just noting gender bias. Are we going to break in?”
“We shouldn’t have to.”
“Really?” His astonished tone was definitely playing for comedy—bemused, proper British comedy.
Georgie grinned a wide smile that she didn’t feel. “Come with me.”
They got out of the car into the chilly night air. Georgie had parked right next to the door, because why not? It wasn’t like anybody else was going to need the parking space.
“What is this place?” he asked as Georgie sliced her card through the reader and the light flickered green.
The locks whirred and clicked, and Georgie leaned back as she pulled open the reassuringly thick, steel door. “This is the employee’s entrance.”
“Are you an employee here?” He held the door for her while they walked into an office building-style hallway.
“I was,” she said, staying matter-of-fact and not letting anything wistful enter her voice. “There was a huge employee walkout last week over the new owner’s changes. It’s closed now. I don’t know if it’s going to reopen.”
“Are you okay, financially?” The concern in his deep voice almost poked at her heart.
Georgie laughed one derisive snort out of her nose and led him toward the women’s locker room. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Georgiana Johnson,” Alex said. He cocked his head to the side. “Aren’t you?”
“You know,” she said. “Let’s not ruin this. I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m good at figuring stuff out, and I’m a responsible person. Let’s just have a good time.” She waved her hands, flourishing like a game show hostess. “This is the women’s locker room.”
Alex followed her inside but didn’t remark on the high-end, wooden cabinetry or the delicate, silvery sconces on the walls. She was pretty sure the lockers were teak.
Dukes must have high expectations for locker rooms, like the ones they were used to at the private country clubs and yachting clubs that Georgie remembered. He evidently hadn’t attended a public high school with banks of steel lockers.