Hours went by.
God, that kind of passion was—her heart was pounding so hard she couldn’t think—was attractive.
At the end, during the last few songs, Georgie barely noticed the other band members ran past her, their sprinting footsteps thundering in the concrete tunnel. She only saw Xan with his guitar, singing in a shining pool of silver light in the center of the stage.
The backup singer, a petite, voluptuous redhead, sang the first verse with him, but he twitched his head toward the tunnel, telling her to go and leave him alone in the follow spotlight with thirty thousand people reaching for him.
That song ended, and he bowed his head for a moment.
The crowd still roared, almost rioting. Their voices shook the cement floor under her.
Xan strummed his guitar and played the intro chords for “Alwaysland.”
His hoarse voice was shredded from so many hours of singing, but he sang in a breathy tenor, “Because while I live, because while I breathe, because while my heart beats in my body, I will love you like we live in Alwaysland.”
The pain from his throat sounded like it emanated directly from his heart, and Georgie’s fingernails pressed into her palms. Her hands wanted to play the song with him, even though the thought of pressing the piano keys in front of all of those thousands of people made a horrified sweat sting her skin.
She wanted to be out there. She wanted to touch the music with him.
The song was over too soon, and Xan strode off the stage. As he hit the edge, the follow spot extinguished.
Darkness covered Georgie’s eyes, and Xan’s pale face emerged from the night, the green emergency lights just frosting his skin. He held her around the waist and whispered, “You’re still here.”
Georgie held back her tears and forced her voice through her clenched throat. “Yes. I’m here.”
Jonas, the stage manager, tugged Xan’s arm. “We have to go.”
Xan’s eyes—those long, exotic eyes that tempted her—never left her gaze, and he whispered to her, “Come on. We have to run.”
Georgie held his hand and followed him into the dark.
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Every night, Georgie stands offstage, watching rock star Xan Valentine and his band, Killer Valentine. The Russian Mafia is trying to kill her, and she’s hiding in Xan’s entourage because a moving target is harder to hit. Xan is holding the band together with the force of his will. This can’t go on. Something has to break.
A Sneak Peek at WILD THING
Georgie
The next day, Xan sneaked out of bed early in the morning, and Georgie hid under the sheets while Boris’s blow dryer whooshed in the bathroom. When she finally did stretch and crawl out from under the covers in the late morning sunlight, a note on the pillow beside her read, I’ll be back for lunch and gym.
Georgie needed to make her getaway to Atlanta soon, but not too soon. The luxury of the high-end hotel rooms, going to the gym, and seeing Xan perform at night was beginning to grow on her. Not having classes and homework and work was sheer laziness, and it felt great. She had been grinding for years.
Besides, Tatiana Butorin’s henchmen were out there somewhere.
Georgie’s phone vibrated beside the bed, and she disconnected the charger cord from the buzzing phone. The screen read, HRH Bossypants.
Missed call icons littered the top of the screen from most of her friends.
Oh, yeah. When Georgie had decided to save her hide, bolt from her university and all her friends, and create a new life for herself, she had set an email blast to go out, apologizing for disappearing from their lives and dumping their asses.
It must have sent itself.
And now Georgie was in deep shit with her friends. Her plan had been to deactivate this phone, but with Xan suddenly taking over her life, she had been letting his lawyers handle everything. It was easy to forget details like that.
Details like that could get her killed. The Russian bratva probably wouldn’t have the resources in the police to track her phone, especially not at the national level, but they sure as hell knew this number. God only knew what you could search for on the internet these days.
You might be able to search for a cell phone’s location.
Well, the band was moving on today to where the show would be tomorrow. She would be hundreds of miles away from this cell phone tower before the Russians could even catch a flight. Maybe being a nomad was safer for her.
It wouldn’t make any progress toward paying back the people she owed money to, but that was only her conscience and her immortal soul, not her ability to keep on breathing.
Her phone buzzed in her hand again.
Georgie flicked her thumb across the answer dot. “Hello? Flicka?”
“What the hell is this email?”
Flicka normally cultivated sweet, dulcet tones when she spoke, the essence of genteel, royal femininity, as befitted a young woman who was absolutely literally a princess and royal for more generations than the English royal family, whom she called cousins.
Georgie had not been aware that Flicka could shriek.
She said, “I’ve had some problems.”
“What the hell, Georgiana! I get back from my honeymoon and see this in my inbox? Why would you cut everyone out of your life and do such a thing again?”
Georgie had a sneaking suspicion that many of the voicemails on her phone were going to sound just like this. “I have to.”
“I just found you again. We’ve barely spoken, and now you’re disappearing into the mountains again. You can’t do this!”
“My father swindled money from the Russian mob, too. They want to kidnap me to blackmail my mother to pay them back.”
“That’s barbaric! Surely they wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“They’re the Russian Mafia, not the White Rose Cotillion,” Georgie said. “They told me to have her arrange for payment or else they would kidnap me and send bloody pieces of me to her until she paid.”
“Why doesn’t she just pay them?”
Georgie’s stomach twisted, a writhe of mortification, so she lied, “She doesn’t have the money.”
“I’ll pay them! How much money do you owe?”
“Talk about throwing good money after bad, Flicka. I can’t let you pay off my father’s debts to criminals.”
“I will. How much money do you owe them?”
“Eight million dollars.”
“That’s nothing! I mean, I’ll have to convince my brother to let me have it. He handles my money. But I’ll just pay them off and you’ll be fine.”
“That’s the sweetest, most generous offer I’ve ever heard. The problem is that it wouldn’t ever end. My dad stole a lot of money from a lot of people, and a good number of them would be fine with using my body parts as currency to get their money back. I looked into his books at the lawyer’s office, and that’s why I disappeared the first time. He stole money from New Jersey and Chicago politicians, the yakuza, and drug cartels. It runs to hundreds of millions of dollars. These guys are all going to be after me until I can pay them back.”
Flicka’s sigh echoed through the phone. “My brother won’t let me dip that far into my trust funds.”
“And he shouldn’t. Flicka, you’re the kindest, most generous person on Earth, and I would be just as bad as he was if I took your money. I mean, when you think about it, I set some bait and made you call me in a highly emotional state. I said that a certain amount of money would get me out of trouble, and now I’m asking for more. This is a classic con. I know how these things work.”
“I know you. You would never.”
“You never know what people will do.”
“You thought
you were doing me a favor.”
“I gave you the same spiel that my father gave every one of his investors, from them having to be a sophisticated investor, to his hedge fund being closed, to maybe he has a small opening just for you. I just believed what I was saying, instead of snorting the money and running the pyramid scheme.”
“Are you safe now? I can call my brother. Wulfram can send someone. His security guys are really good.”
“I’m okay right now. I’m kind of hiding. I’m nowhere near home.”
“So you’re safe.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“It’s been going on a while, a couple weeks. Even at Wulfram’s wedding, some mobster guy grabbed me.”
“Is that why you disappeared from the reception for a while? I was looking for you.”
“Oh, well, no. I hooked up with somebody.”
“Hooked up? You hooked up with somebody at his wedding?”
“Well, yeah.” Georgie was just a little pleased with herself.
“You? Virginal little I’m-saving-myself Georgiana Oelrichs, The Ice Princess?”
Georgie laughed. “It’s your fault. You introduced me to him.”
“I introduced you to everyone, darling. Be more specific.”
“You remember Alex Grimaldi, um, Alexandre de Valentinois?
“You went to bed with him? Well, you obviously survived, so all’s well that ends well.”
Georgie asked, “You know who he is here in the US, right?”
“Yes, he turned to the dark side, popular music.” Flicka sounded distracted by something over there.
“He came to see me at school the next week, and that’s when the Russians found me. They tried to grab me again, and he whisked me off. I was planning to disappear, but I’ve been staying with him ever since.”
“Holy shit, Georgiana! You’re with Alexandre Grimaldi?” Her Royal Serenity was shrieking again.
Georgie smiled and shrugged, even though she was talking on the phone and Flicka wouldn’t see either. “He and I kind of hit it off, in our own way.”
“Is he there with you right now?” Panic rang in Flicka’s voice.
“Um, no. He had an appearance to do.”
“Jesus Christ! You need to get away from him. I set you up to sing with him because I figured nothing would happen in the middle of a crowd, but you can’t be alone with him. You can’t be going places with him where no one knows where you are.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“He is not. He killed one man and damn near killed another one.”
“What, did they set a soda can on his violin or something?”
“He beat them to death with his bare hands. The only reason that he didn’t kill the second guy was because his security guy pulled him off.”
Alex? Slightly music-obsessed Alex? The man who wrote “Alwaysland?”
Georgie couldn’t picture that at all. Alex-who-was-Xan might storm around and glower, but then he’d have his assistants rectify the situation and play the violin for a while to cool off. “Then why isn’t he in jail?”
“It happened when he was fifteen and again when he was sixteen. For the first one, the courts went with counseling rather than prison. The European system is different than in the U.S., especially for minors. The second guy wouldn’t press charges and refused to testify.”
“I just can’t believe it. There must be a misunderstanding.”
“I was there for one of them.”
The door to the suite clicked open, and Xan strode in, followed by Boris and Yvonne. The blond woman was shoving an iPad at him and pointing to it, telling him that he had two hours for lunch and the gym before the tour busses pulled out for the next location so he had better move his ass.
Xan glanced up at Georgie, his dark eyes fathomless and his face, expressionless.
Georgie said into the phone, “I have to go.”
Flicka asked, “Is he there? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Flicka lowered her voice. “You need to get out of there. Just walk out, get somewhere safe, and call me. I’ll pay for anything you need, just get away from him before he goes nuts and kills you.”
“I’ll talk to you later.” Georgie tapped the screen to hang up.
Xan walked by her on his way to the bedroom. “Who was that?”
“Flicka.” She followed, watching the way his body moved. He was strong, yes. His muscles flowed under his clothes, but he worked out now. He had been to that Utahn shock gym to bulk up for the Rolling Stone shoot a few months ago.
She tried to imagine him as a teenager, a fifteen-year-old, probably lanky and scrawny from growing so much because he was six-feet-four, and that skinny kid beating a man to death with his fists.
And then nearly doing it again a year later.
She couldn’t even put it together in her head.
Yet, when that man had grabbed her in Paris, Xan had pulled the guy off, shook him, and then drawn back his fist, ready to punch the guy.
Anger had steeled his face.
He had looked comfortable with his hard fist by his shoulder, a powerful position to punch from.
Preparing to defend her from someone who had grabbed her was entirely different than beating a man to death.
And he hadn’t even punched the guy.
The sun shining through the hotel window lit Xan from the side as he unbuttoned his shirt, tossing his hair behind his shoulders. “Is Flicka back from her honeymoon?”
Georgie cleared her throat, which was unaccountably clenched. “Yeah, I guess. She only had time to talk for a minute.”
Xan glanced at her from the side as he peeled his shirt off his arms. His chest and biceps bulged, stretching his undershirt as he shrugged off the dress shirt and dropped it on the bed. “Something wrong?”
Georgie swallowed a lump in her throat. “No.”
“Do I have something on my face?”
“No.”
“Have I grown an extra head?”
Georgie smiled and shook her head.
He dragged his white tee shirt off over his head, baring the teal and blue tattoo that covered his back in a watercolor wash with musical notes and staves bobbing the cool water. He asked, “Shall we order room service before we hit the gym?”
Could Xan have almost killed two people before he graduated from high school?
Can anyone claim it was an accident if it had happened twice?
No matter what Georgie did in the next few hours before the buses pulled out, if she stayed or if she walked out of the hotel and away from him forever, her answer right now would have to be the same.
She smiled. “I could eat lunch.”
Georgie had been on the run before. You always eat, sleep, shower, and use a clean bathroom when you can.
Later, while Xan was eating lunch, she sneaked away to the hotel room’s bathroom with her new laptop computer and searched for “Alexandre Grimaldi murder.”
The only results were reviews of concerts where the young violin prodigy had murdered a piece of classical music, destroying it for all future violinists, and pictures of an impossibly young child, dark-haired and dark-eyed, already stunningly beautiful, glowering at the camera lens over his violin.
She wiped the cookies and the browser cache.
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Wild Thing
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Every night, Georgie stands offstage, watching rock star Xan Valentine and his band, Killer Valentine. The Russian Mafia is trying to kill her, and she’s hiding in Xan’s entourage because a moving target is harder to hit. Xan is holding the band together with the force of his will. This can’t go on. Something has to break.
More Billionaires and Rock Stars in Disguise
BILLIONAIRES IN DISGUISE SERIES
READING ORDER
Working Stiff (Runaway Billionaires #1, Casimir)
Stiff Drink (Runaway Billionaires #
2, Arthur Duet, Part 1)
Hard Liquor (Runaway Billionaires #3, Arthur Duet, Part 2)
Rae Falling (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae) (The first, free part of Billionaires in Disguise: Rae) ~FREE!
Billionaires in Disguise: Rae, Complete Omnibus Edition (includes “Rae Falling”)
An Extravagant Proposal (Billionaires in Disguise: Charley) (A Side Story for Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise, Lizzy #1) - FREE!
Playing Rough (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #2)
Breaking Rules (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #3)
Burning Bright (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #4)
“Alwaysland” (A Prequel to Rock Stars in Disguise:Xan)
What A Girl Wants (Rock Stars in Disguise: Rhiannon)
Somebody to Love (Rock Stars in Disguise: Tryp)
Every Breath You Take (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie / Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #1) - FREE!
Wild Thing (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #2)
“Skiing in June, A Rae and Wulf Epilogue #1” (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
“Kidnapped, A Rae and Wulf Epilogue #2” (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
“Rae and Wulf: At the Hospital”
Lay Your Hands On Me (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #3)
Nothing Else Matters (Billionaires in Disguise: Georgie and Rock Stars in Disguise: Xan, #4)
“Montreux, A Rae and Wulf Epilogue #3” (Billionaires in Disguise: Rae)
The Rock Star’s Secret Baby (Rock Stars in Disguise: Cadell)
[Billionaires in Disguise 01.0] Every Breath You Take Page 22