Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

  Tryp detangled himself from her, even though Elfie found it hard to let go of his lean torso. “Tonight,” he said.

  He walked through the tarps hanging at the end of the tunnel. Sunlight flashed into the dim cement bunker for a second, but darkness clapped around her again.

  Chairs lined the sides of the tunnel, and Elfie let her knees go out and sat.

  She was okay, see? Tryp was different.

  If she kept thinking that, maybe she would be okay.

  Light cut through the darkness again, and Xan Valentine appeared at the far end of the tunnel. He was leaner than the other guys, and his silhouette looked like a stretched shadow after seeing Tryp. His personal security guys skulked behind him like a cadre of black-suited shadows at the far end of the tunnel.

  Xan held his guitar by the neck and carried a notebook in his other hand. “Who’s on for sound check?”

  His British accent always seemed out of place to Elfie, like he should be on the television reading the news. Mitch did a devastating impression of him. She told Xan, “Tryp just started.”

  “Running behind again.” Xan collapsed in the chair across from her. He stretched his long legs halfway across the tunnel, propped his guitar against the wall, and flipped open the notebook, glaring at it.

  “What’re you working on?” she asked.

  “Songs,” he said.

  “For the next album?”

  He nodded, the blond ends of his long hair waving in the dim air. “Some people can write a dozen songs in a few days or weeks. I’m not a quick writer. I like to think the quality improves, but I’m positive that the quantity suffers.”

  “You write lots of singles,” Elfie said.

  “There have been in the past.” His dry tone made Elfie raise her eyebrows. Xan looked up at her. “How’s Tryp doing?”

  “He’s okay.”

  “All right,” Xan clicked a pen and went back to his notebook, obviously dissatisfied with her answer.

  Elfie wouldn’t sell Tryp out to ingratiate herself with Xan, and his songwriting problems were sad but not sufficient to make her narc.

  But the song that Tryp sang for her was really, really good. It had broken her heart and mended her, at least some, and he seemed too secretive about it. It needed to be out there. It should be out in the world.

  She said, “You should ask Tryp if he’s been writing.”

  Xan glanced up at her, his brown eyes evaluating what she had said. “He’s been writing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He hadn’t mentioned it.” He snapped the notebook closed. “I’ll be discreet. Thank you.”

  He strode off toward the end of the tunnel, leaving Elfie alone.

  Elfie made her way back to the stage and resumed working on her pyros. Too many special effects packs littered the stage, and she couldn’t remember which ones she had repacked. The long row of the gerbs stretched around the edge of the stage, some packed, some not, some recorded, some not.

  She angled herself on the edge of the stage so she could watch him. Tryp beat a long roll on his tom-tom, then leaned into the mic, spinning a drumstick between his knuckles. “How’s that?”

  Elfie flinched as the sound engineer’s voice blasted through the arena, “Fine. Try the crash.”

  A cymbal smash rang through the air, and Elfie almost ducked and covered that time.

  She needed to finish these pyros, but her notes on her tablet made no sense. She had entered at least one of the RFID tags twice, and she couldn’t seem to keep the numbers in her head because her mind kept flashing back to Tryp’s dismay when she started crying, and his kindness, and the feeling of his lips on hers and the rich scent of his body around her, and things farther back that she didn’t want to think about but which rose like razor-sharp spirals of concertina wire that she couldn’t reach through.

  Elfie entered another RFID tag into the spreadsheet on the tablet and realized that she had no idea what she’d written.

  Damn it, concentrate, Elfie. People could get hurt.

  Behind her, the bass drum thrummed through the air, and Elfie packed pyrotechnics that would shoot up around Tryp and Xan and the rest of them during the climax of the second set.

  Desperate and Hollow

  Tryp was thumping on the bass drum, almost through with the sound check when Xan strolled onto the stage, holding his guitar and notebook.

  Xan sat down in the center of the stage and tugged a pen out of his notebook. “When you’re done there, Tryp, do you have a moment?”

  “Sure.” Tryp leaned to the mic. “Is that good?”

  A man’s voice echoed through the empty arena. “Yep, that’s good. Give me a roll on everything one more time?”

  Tryp rolled around the whole kit, playing one drum after another, so that Mitch could hear them all together to make sure they were balanced. Technicians on either side of the arena raised their thumbs.

  Over the speakers, Mitch said, “Thank you, Tryp. Mr. Valentine, are you ready for sound check?”

  Xan picked up the mic lying on the floor next to him. “Fifteen minutes, if you would be so kind?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” the disembodied voice confirmed.

  Tryp sat on the drum throne upstage near the scrim and watched Xan stare at the page, his face as smooth and expressionless as a calm English lake, which was how he looked when he was frustrated and furious with the music.

  Of course, because Xan was an Englishman, probably—or he sounded English at least—his current placid expression was probably exactly the same as when he was internally losing his shit with elation. He’d read too much Rudyard Kipling, Tryp suspected.

  Tryp asked, “How’re you doing there, Xan?”

  The blond ends of his hair swung around his face. “Splendid.”

  Yeah, and that could mean anything. “What’re you working on?”

  “Songs.”

  “Songs?”

  “Songs.” Xan sighed and pushed his hair back. “Actually, Tryp, I need a consult on this. Care to give it a go?”

  “Sure.” Tryp climbed down from his kit and ambled over, twirling his drumsticks between his fingers, a nervous habit that he wasn’t willing to even try to give up.

  “So I’ve got this hook,” Xan said, pointing to the paper, “but everything around it is utter rubbish.”

  “Utter rubbish, huh? Not your garden-variety rubbish?” He sat on the floor, his long legs crossing. His drumsticks clattered on the wood beside his leg. “Let’s see it, man.”

  Xan handed over the notebook. While Tryp read the lyrics—and they were beautiful, maybe epic, depending on what kind of melody line they put behind them—Xan checked the mic to make sure the switch was off.

  “We’ve only got a few more months of touring,” Xan said, “and then it’s back to the recording studio. I don’t know what the fuck to do, Tryp. I only have three songs that might be suitable. I need eighteen on the page before we enter the studio. We need to demo at least fifteen, to winnow those down to a dozen for the album.”

  A cold sweat misted the back of Tryp’s neck, and he picked up his drumsticks, spinning one around the fingers of his right hand. “You’re really freaking, huh?”

  “I assure you, I am not freaking.” Xan sneered a little on the American slang. “I am desperate for material and yet I am hollow inside. I’ve given it all for the first two albums, and Killer Valentine’s oeuvre should not include nihilism.”

  For all Tryp’s abbreviated schooling, it was a good thing he read a lot of books, because he understood what Xan had said. “We still have months, Xan.”

  “Jonas wants six demo files to send to record companies in two weeks.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Indeed.”

  Tryp spun the drumstick in his fingers and passed it to his left hand like a butterfly was flitting around his fingertips. “Cadell?”

  “That well is also dry, I’m afraid. Cadell is undergoing a personal crisis of his own and cannot wr
ite.”

  “Damn. Is he all right?”

  “As well as can be expected, but I dare not push him beyond performing.”

  Tryp slung his drumstick around his knuckles, caught it, and spun it like a satellite whipping around his hand. “I’ve got one that I’m sitting on, Xan, but it’s not ready, and I can’t sing it.”

  “We could transpose the key.”

  Because Tryp was a baritone, while Xan could reach the higher notes with his tenor range. “It’s not the key. I tried playing it for Elfie, and I choked up.”

  Xan’s brown eyes softened, just a little, as far as he ever let himself go when he wasn’t performing. “It’s that raw, is it?”

  “Yep.”

  “The music soothes the pain, in time. ‘Alwaysland’ sat in my notebook for six months before I could bring myself to play it for others. If it’s too soon for you, keep it for the fourth album.” He snapped his notebook closed and prepared to stand.

  “You could sing it.”

  “Could you do a duet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like lifting other band members’ work wholesale.”

  That was why Cadell sang some songs with Xan. Xan had tried to get Tryp out of his drum kit for some of the songs that Tryp had come up with the hooks for, but he cited Neil Peart as the consummate drummer/songwriter and stayed in his castle. “I can’t. If we’re going to use it, it’s yours.”

  “Do you have it with you?”

  He glanced back to Rade’s keyboards, plugged in and ready for his sound check. “I can play it for you.”

  “If you would be so good.”

  Tryp played it on the keyboards, which had a strange, plastic feel under his fingers because he was still used to the solid keys and hammer-thrum of a real piano, and sang it softly to Xan.

  Somehow, the second time wasn’t quite so damn hard, and his heart didn’t feel ripped out of his chest.

  Afterward, he swiveled on the stool, and Xan was watching him from a folding chair, sitting forward with his hands folded in front of him, his brown eyes so focused that he could have lasered through steel.

  Xan said, “Tryp, that’s a fucking hit.”

  Don't Kill the Musos

  Showtime.

  Elfie sat in the sound booth at mid-house center, watching the concert from the center of the boisterous crowd but insulated from them by banks of computers, monitors, and the cocoon of her fat over-ear headphones that she used to monitor the songs for her pyro effects. You never knew when one of the artistes down there was going to get all artsy-fartsy and deviate from the set list. Reprogramming the computer took longer than it should because they didn’t have the nifty-new latest stuff that the record companies provided and then charged rent for. The equipment was good enough. It just took a little more effort and time.

  No one dared say that in front of Rock, though. No one wanted a lecture about the good ol’ days of technical theatre, when he had crouched behind Metallica and set off the pyrotechnics with a match, dodging the fire as they blew, and they liked it that way just fine, thank you very much.

  Beside Elfie, Mitch used all ten fingers as he adjusted slider bars on the enormous soundboard, looking a little too much like the Phantom of the Opera playing his infernal pipe organ in the depths of the Paris Opera House.

  Hey, Erik the Phantom slipped unseen through the shadows, practiced stagecraft, and didn’t perform, so therefore he was a technician and one of the working class, even if he did fall in love with that muso, Christine Daae.

  Sucker.

  Erik had been horribly burned in a fire, and he blew up and burned down the Paris Opera House, a complication that Elfie prevented for her own musos daily.

  Elfie pressed the headphone against her left ear, which had been a little weaker ever since that gerb had gone off right beside her last year when she had been packing the next one, blasting her. Her eardrum had filled her head with a tinny whining for hours afterward, and she had been a hell of a lot more careful with the explosives ever since. No killing the musos or the technicians.

  Past the darkness where the tumultuous crowds bounced on the main floor of the auditorium, down on the lightbox of the stage, Xan Valentine strutted centerstage, lashing out with his arms as the Act II climax approached during “Standing on the Mountaintop,” one of the big stadium-rocking anthems. He sang the first line, same as the song title.

  She leaned forward. Two more lines.

  Over her earphones, she heard him sing, “Shout it from the mountaintop,” in his bright tenor.

  Damn, he was good.

  In the studio, anyone can be pitch-perfect with Auto-Tune manipulating the vocals, to the point where now absolutely every vocalist, lead or back-up, were all sloppy singers because they assumed the sound engineer would run the vocal track through the box, though the rumor was that Nelly Furtado was the last holdout.

  Hearing dead-center pitch in live concerts was something special.

  Elfie detected Tryp’s smoky baritone in the back-up vocals. Far below on the stage, within his drum kit, he was leaning into his mic and singing while his body pulsed with the effort of drumming. His sticks blurred into a long roll, his hard biceps flexing and his obliques torqueing his body as he reached. She reached absently over to her area of the soundboard and nudged Tryp’s dimmer switch higher, amplifying his voice in her headphones. She could hear the rhythm in his voice as his body bounced with the drum beat.

  Elfie listened to Tryp singing the whoa-whoas back there, enjoying his voice right in her ears, almost like she was stealing a moment with him. She swayed in the chair, listening to him sing to her.

  She glanced down at the computer screen that showed the graphic for the stage. The next effect, the 1/2x10 gerbs ringing the stage that would pulse ten feet of white-hot sparks for one-half of a second, should have been red dots glowing on the monitor with about a ten-second countdown left, ready for her to hit the spacebar on the computer to send the spark to ignite them.

  The gerb line was still clear.

  On the stage diagram on the screen, the flame projectors for the fire arch were painted red, and when she looked over the dark audience at the stage, Xan was right between the projectors, directly in the path of the flames.

  Elfie reached to the main soundboard, slapped a button, and yanked the long snake of the mic toward herself. She spoke directly into Xan Valentine’s ear. “Walk upstage at least ten feet. Now.”

  She tagged two more buttons for Cadell and Grayson while she confirmed that Xan was backpedaling toward the rear of the stage while he inhaled and Tryp filled the end of the line with a roll.

  She said to the guitarists, “Move at least eight feet toward the wings. Now.” They walked toward the sides of the stage, still playing the riffs and dragging their cords behind them.

  Through her headphones, Xan sang, “Sing it from the mountaintop.” His voice sounded just like normal, perfectly clear, not at all like he had just been told to move his ass by the person responsible for the exploding things.

  Mitch asked, “What’s up?”

  She bent the mic aside. “I fucked up.”

  “Michael Jackson or The Station?”

  He was asking if the performers were going to get burned or whether the thousands of people in the audience were in danger from a fire. In Rhode Island, pyrotechnic effects at a rock club called The Station had caught the insulation on fire, and the inferno had swept through the club in five and a half minutes, killing hundreds.

  Mitch was tapping buttons to activate all the monitors, and he pulled the mic to his mouth, getting ready to tell the musicians to run for it or to cut the music and bring up the house lights to full for the crowd.

  “Jackson, but I’ve got it.”

  “You sure?” His finger was on the switch. This venue had plenty of exits and adequate evacuation routes. Elfie and Rock had evaluated that before they decided which pyros to set off that night.

  “Yeah. Everybody’s fine
. They’re already out of the way.” She half-stood and looked over the board down to the stage, but the musos were indeed all away from the arch that was about to ignite. Xan stood on his upstage mark, well behind the flame arch.

  Xan began to sing the line, “Shout it from the mountaintop,” his voice ringing near the top of his range and marching in place, readying himself for the big move. He should have been striding downstage for the gerbs to blow around him.

  Elfie confirmed that Xan was at his mark one more time and that the other musicians were out of any danger zones, and she lit the electric match in the flame projectors, sending the spark.

  Electric blue flames blasted from the metal tubes screwed to the stage, framing Xan with azure fire, tinted by a sprinkle of copper salts in the mix.

  Xan whipped his head to the side and fell into a crouch, growling, “My life is a beacon and I will shine.”

  The audience shouted the line anyway.

  Elfie grabbed her walkie-talkie off her hip and clicked it on. “Stage? Is Xan hurt? Did he get hit?”

  “He was on his mark, behind the pyro,” Bill whispered back to her.

  When the flames died down, Xan stood and prowled downstage, ending up crouched and singing to the front row. The girls lost their minds, and the guys standing behind them settled their hands more firmly on the girls’ shoulders.

  Bill whispered through the earphones, “The flames looked normal. He was out of range. Everyone else, too. Why’d you change it?”

  Elfie didn’t answer but set about scrolling through the rest of the pyro cues on the computer, seeing what else she had screwed up.

  The rest of them looked all right. She had just swapped the flame projector cannons and the gerb line. She flopped back in her chair, her hands over her face.

  Tryp, coddled up on the drum throne, was far enough upstage that even the worst accident shouldn’t touch him, and all the effects around his kit were focused outward or up, but Elfie’s heart was still flipping hard.

  “Is everything okay?” Mitch asked, still watching her.

  “I could have fucking killed him.”