AS he floated back, Peyton lowered his head to her shoulder, gently kissing her neck until he found her lips for one last kiss. So sweet.
Raji was breathing hard. Her cheeks flushed pink from rushing blood, and her black eyes still glistened.
Under her breath, she whispered, “Wow.”
“You good?” he whispered to her.
“Oh, hell, yes,” she said. “Now that was getting fucked by a rock star.”
Peyton rolled off of her and got rid of the condom. “Don’t call me a rock star.”
“But you are one, and damn, man. You are a rock star.”
“Rock stars and porn stars. The term ‘star’ is derogatory.”
“Shooting stars and star sapphires,” she laughed.
The white ceiling above him was a smooth, limitless expanse like Limbo must be. “Not the same thing.”
Raji struggled with the sheets and dragged them over her naked body. “It’s amazing that you’re a rock star! At least, I think it’s amazing.”
She sounded like a groupie.
“I hate being a ‘rock star.’” Peyton stared up at the bedroom’s ceiling. “I hate everything about it.”
She chuckled, and her laugh still sounded a little out of breath. “Yeah, it must suck to be you. Fucking a different groupie every night, getting wasted in public and no one cares, traveling and seeing the world.”
Peyton shook his head. “It’s not like that, not at all. There’s a standing Killer Valentine policy about groupies who manage to get backstage. I don’t touch them at all, ever. No one in the band does.”
“Why the hell not?”
Discomfort squirmed in his chest. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Oh, then you have to.” Raji was grinning, and the impish grin looked good on her. Her short hair was tousled like dark fire from being rubbed on the sheets.
But Peyton felt himself flinch. Just the thought of telling her those things freaked him out.
No one in the band told outsiders about this because fans shouldn’t see the sausage-making. Killer Valentine’s “hard-working rocker” public image would be tarnished, if not downright obliterated, if anyone knew about what was plastered to the underside of the touring stage.
He reached over Raji’s leg and pulled some of the sheets over his sticky groin. “Nobody ever thinks about how the groupies get backstage. In the arenas, you can’t just walk from the house to the backstage areas. There’s security and a bunch of roadies. Someone will stop you unless you have a backstage pass.”
She shrugged. “Oh, come on. Groupies always get backstage.”
“Yeah, but the roadies aren’t benevolent elves who guide groupies on their quest to fuck a musician. They are the trolls under the bridges. I mean, some of them are great. I hang out with them a lot. But they’re trolls. They’re gatekeepers, and they want to be paid, usually in flesh, to get past them.”
“Oh,” Raji said, her voice much lower.
“Don’t get me wrong. I like the tech guys. A lot of them have had hard lives and rough childhoods. They ended up on the road when they couldn’t handle a regular job or the usual social interactions. Most of them are generous to a fault, even to stupid newbie musicians, but I don’t want Two-Tooth Tommy’s sloppy seconds, either.”
Raji’s expression twisted to be more and more horrified. “I never thought about that.”
“Yeah, well, I do.”
“I’m glad you do. Jeez.”
“Yeah, and you might wonder how I know this.”
Her slim eyebrows rose in horror. “Come to think of it—”
He drew in a breath. “There are pictures, Polaroids, thousands of them, plastered to the underside of the US touring stage, all of them depicting what young women will do with roadies to get backstage to ‘meet a rock star.’”
Raji’s eyes widened, and her dark eyes were already so large and sweet on her face that she looked like a fawn to Peyton.
He said, “Yeah, so there’s no fucking the groupies who wander backstage. As for the rest of it, when I get drunk, I have just as bad of a hangover as the next guy, except that I’m usually in a hot, swaying bus or a crowded airplane getting slapped around by turbulence while I’m hurling. Not to mention that KV has a hard-line anti-substance-abuse policy written into the contracts now.”
Raji breathed, calming down a little. “You don’t think of rock bands as having a substance abuse policy. I mean, I’m drug-tested all the time for work. I was kind of worried that you might be covered with a fine film of cocaine that might light up my next whizz quiz.”
Peyton laughed. “I’ve never done coke. Or heroin, for that matter.”
She flopped back on the bed. “Yeah. Me, neither.”
“You know what happened to Rade Delcore, right?” he asked.
Raji said, “I know about Rade. I’m a Valentine Victim, remember?”
“Oh, jeez. You’re in the fan club. Well, Rade’s death is why I have a job, so I’m a walking reminder to the whole band, every day, of that horrific night.”
She frowned, a cute little moue and pucker of her slim eyebrows. “That sucks.”
“And as for seeing the world, I see the insides of buses, planes, and cars. I see the wings of stages and arenas, and I see hundreds of lookalike hotel rooms. Everywhere looks the same, no matter where my phone’s GPS says I am.”
“But the screaming crowds—” Raji said.
“—The ringing eardrums,” Peyton muttered.
“Making music—” she mused.
“—Not my music. Xan and Cadell are the primary songwriters. Tryp chips in a few songs.”
“So you don’t write music.”
Peyton looked over at the other wall. “Not since I joined the band. They had all the music they needed for the next album before I signed the contract, and I’m not really a band member. I’m an independent contractor, a hired musician for the next year with an option to extend.”
“But you’re a rock star.”
“A reluctant one.”
“But every guy wants to be a rock star!” Raji insisted.
“You keep saying that, ‘rock star.’ It’s losing its meaning.”
“Still!”
“I didn’t ever want to be a rock star.”
“Then why are you still in KV?”
Peyton’s hands tightened to fists on the bedsheets as he searched for an answer. “I don’t know.”
“Dude, you need to look at your life. Now, me? I’ve got everything worked out. I’ve worked my ass off to get stellar grades all my life, got into the best universities and a damn fine medical school and residency programs, and I’m right up there with the best residents in my year. I go into the hospital every day and every night and every waking minute of my life. I shank clogged arteries and malformed ventricles. I saw through bones and cut out hearts and sew them into other people. I battle the other residents to be the head of my class and make damn sure the attending physicians know it. I fight the God of Death every damn day and win. I’m within a few years of a magnificent job offer at a top hospital, as long as I keep fighting, every day. Then, I will save people’s lives and rake in a boatload of cash while doing it.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, you with your seductive tattoos and your beautiful, dark eyes.”
She laughed. “You betcha, you with your hot, shredded abs and your muscular arms.”
She had followed his lead. Nice. “Maybe I should have you organize my life for me.”
Her eyes lit up. “Give me an hour, a spreadsheet, and a bottle of tequila, and we’ll hash out a life plan for you that you won’t want to deviate from.”
“I don’t think we’d need to drink a bottle of tequila to do that.”
“The tequila isn’t for you, buddy. It’s payment. You don’t think I would do that for free, do you? I’ll need good tequila, too. Top shelf stuff.”
“Oh, as payment. I would have thought that bossing people around would be your idea of fun.”
“Ugh, I boss people around all day at work. I demand that my patients stop eating deep-fried sticks of butter smothered in mayonnaise. I design treatment regimens for the nurses and PAs to follow. I teach the poopy-butt, short-coated medical students which end of the needle to stick patient with. Hint: Stick them with the pointy end. They pay me to boss everyone around. You should pay me to boss you around, too.”
He laughed. “Sounds good. Plan my life. The next time the band tours Mexico, I’ll ship you a bottle of the finest, artesan tequila.”
“Okay, deal. What do you want to do with your life?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me.”
“Jesus Christ on a cracker, Peyton. You’ve got to give me something to start with. What did you want to be before you joined Killer Valentine?”
Peyton paused, thinking back those five months. “I wanted to be a classical pianist, I think.”
Raji sat up, pulling the white sheet around herself and over one shoulder like a superhero’s cape. “You think? You don’t know?”
That was a tough question. “When did you decide you wanted to be a heart surgeon?”
Raji shrugged, and the sheets slithered down her smooth shoulder to her arm. “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.”
“You didn’t want to be a ballerina or an astronaut?”
“Those are childish ambitions. I’ve always wanted a high-power, high-level surgical career.”
Which was specific and very un-childish. “And how did you know to want to do that?”
She shrugged. “My father is a psychiatrist. He always told me to go into hard medicine, not squishy science. Not that he was qualified to give anyone advice about how to live your fucking life.”
Interesting. “So, your parents told you to be a doctor.”
She frowned again. Peyton liked the way her pretty little nose wrinkled. “Sort of. I picked the cardiothoracic specialty.”
“The what?” he laughed. “Sounds like you teach exercise classes.”
“Cardiothoracic! The cardio part means the heart, and the thoracic part means the thorax, the rest of the chest including the lungs.”
“I’m just a musician. I don’t even know if I could pronounce that.” He smiled at her, wide enough that he knew the dimple on his left cheek would dent in.
She giggled. “Oh, my God, you’re cute. Cardio, like exercise. Thor, like that hot blond guy in the movie. Acic, like if you eat something that tastes like buttcrack. Ass! Ick!”
“All right. Cardio. Thor. Ass! Ick!” he half-shouted, waving his hands. “Was that right?”
She laughed out loud at him. Her throaty, jubilant laugh enticed him even more. “Close enough. We’ll have to work on it.”
“Why did you choose such an unpronounceable specialty?”
“Because it was the hardest of the hard sciences, I guess.”
“And I chose piano performance at Juilliard, the most elite of the classical music conservatories. I finished my Master’s in June, just weeks before I joined KV.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. So, you have a Master’s degree. That opens up some interesting paths you could take. Damn, I wish I had my computer and a nice, blank spreadsheet right now. What is your degree in? How long does it take to get a Master’s degree in music?”
“Piano performance, minors in composition and voice. One year past one’s bachelor’s degree.”
She rolled away from him a little. “Wait, you just finished your bachelor’s one year ago? You’re how old?”
“I’m twenty-three.”
Her dark eyes widened a little. “Oh. Huh.”
One of her legs reached for the edge of the bed.
Peyton raised one eyebrow at her. “Is that a problem?”
“Uh, no?” She stared at the ceiling. “I mean, you fuck like you’re older.”
He cracked up. “I’m afraid to ask what that means.”
“Oh, don’t be. It means better. Longer, you know, stamina-wise. Good technique. Gives a damn about the woman. That sort of thing.”
“Have you had a lot of older lovers?” He laughed a little, letting the smile sparkle at her. He knew what he was doing, being charming, being sexy. He’d had a lot of practice.
“Not a lot. Just, you know, the normal amount. Since I’ve done my bachelor’s and four years of medical school and three years into my residency.” She said the next part slowly, enunciating clearly. “Because I’m twenty-nine.”
“Oh. Okay.” Peyton shrugged. He didn’t see why this was any sort of a revelation.
“That’s okay with you?”
“Why, were you going to change it if I wasn’t?”
She chuckled. “Okay, good point. So, back to your career and life plan. Your dad must have been a classical musician,” Raji said, her voice lingering over the words like she was trying to restart the conversation.
“No. He’s a lawyer.” Peyton settled back on his pillow.
“So, shouldn’t you have become a lawyer, then?”
“God forbid.”
She was grinning again. “Oh, did you break your daddy’s heart by becoming a musician?”
“My father was devastated for at least fifteen minutes when I told him that I wanted to be a concert pianist and would not be attending Yale Law. Four buildings at Yale bear the Cabot name, mostly because several of my underachieving ancestors needed to grease Yale’s gears to be admitted. But New Englanders don’t express such undignified emotions longer than is absolutely necessary—”
Raji said, “They sound like my kind of lizard people.”
“—so that was the end of it. But that’s not what I meant. My father is not a real lawyer who takes cases for money. I meant he’s rich. We’re rich.”
Raji laughed. “Must be nice.”
“I’m not complaining about it. I can do anything I want in life, or nothing, and not worry about money.”
“So this life plan is a waste of time. You can just float around on your family’s money. Don’t you want to have your own money, though?”
“My grandfather left me millions in a trust fund. A lot of millions. More than millions.”
She frowned. “But your grandfather should have left his money to your father, right?”
“Oh, no. Inheritance in wealthy families skips generations. My grandfather left me his money, and then my father will leave his money to my theoretical kids someday. That way, the family trust pays half the inheritance taxes instead of paying them every generation, plus everybody gets the bulk of their money earlier in their lives.”
Raji’s jaw dropped. “That’s shady.”
“Of course. We’re wealthy. Everything we do is shady.”
The look in her dark, sultry eyes was nothing short of aghast. “Dude, you are getting less and less sympathetic by the second.”
Peyton worked hard not to laugh. Damn, she was cute. “Really? Most of the time, when I mention that I’m a rock star and I’m loaded, women seem to like it.”
“Fuck you. I’m a fucking cardiothoracic surgeon.” She grinned. “If I do one surgery per week, I’ll make buttloads more money than you earn off the interest on your millions, and I’ll do way more than one surgery a week. But you’re cute when you’re full of yourself, there with your eight-pack of abs and big, strong biceps and shockingly green eyes.”
Peyton laughed and propped himself up on his elbow to look down at her. The sheet rose where she was still breathing hard. He said, “I like you better and better, the more we talk.”
She smirked. “You didn’t like me before? Could have fooled me.”
“I liked you a lot before, and now I like you better and better,” he clarified. He traced the curve of her shoulder with one finger. “You, there, with your pretty, little face and your huge, dark eyes and your fascinating tattoos on your skin that I want to lick every time I look at them.”
Every brain cell in his head screamed out at Peyton to stop talking, that he might say too much and get caught up in an unwise relationship. His father never screwed a woman unless a non-disclosure agreement and settlement document had already been signed.
But sometimes, the truth is unwise, and sometimes, you have to leap.
If anyone in Killer Valentine had cared about Peyton’s music, that might have made a good song.
It was true, though. All during the night, through the dancing and writing the toast and fucking her, Peyton had liked Raji more and more.
A cute little crease appeared between Raji’s slim eyebrows again. “Well, you shouldn’t like me at all. I’m going to be a heart surgeon because I don’t have a heart. It takes a stone cold bitch to literally rip a person’s beating heart out of their body and let them die.”
“Is it still beating when you rip it out?” he asked, grinning at her. “Sounds like it would be tough to grab onto, flopping around like that.”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “We stop both the hearts, and we use a bypass machine on the recipient.”
He laughed.
“But I still rip it out! And, you know, donors don’t need a bypass machine. They die on the table.”
“Of course.” Peyton gathered her under one arm. “Come back to my hotel with me tonight.”
“Oh, hell, no. I have an early flight back to California tomorrow.”
“Then let me grab my phone to get your number. It’s in my pants on the floor. I could call you sometime.”
“That’s another ‘oh, hell, no,’” she said. “I don’t need rock stars phoning me at all hours of the day and night when I’m in the on-call room or wrist-deep in someone’s chest.”
“I could get you comp tickets when Killer Valentine is playing in Los Angeles.”
“As tempting as that is, I can buy my own tickets, Peyton. I’m a goddamn heart surgeon. I could buy a box seat if I wanted to.”
“I thought you said you were still doing your residency.” It was Peyton’s turn to grin. He was a wealthy guy, and a lot of his friends had ended up in medicine. He knew residents were paid meager stipends.
Raji frowned. “Well, I will be able to, and I can afford nosebleed seats now.”
He laughed again. “You are the oddest little person.”
“Why, because I’m not impressed with your money?”
“All my life, I’ve been warned about gold diggers who will try to get knocked up to get money out of me, to only date women whose families I knew, and all that rot.”
“So it’s because I’m not impressed with your money or your rock star fame.”
“That’s pretty much it, and because you’re impressive in your own right.”
Raji shoved his shoulder, and he fell back laughing. She said, “That’s right, buddy. I could rip out your heart and sew it right back in, and maybe I’d sew it in backwards just to make things interesting. Come on. We’d better get out there before people start whispering that the heart surgeon has snuck off to shag the rock star.”
“You go ahead,” Peyton said. “It would look better if we didn’t both reappear at the same time.”
“Good point!” She availed herself of the facilities and waved at him as she slipped out the door, not too noticeably tousled.
Peyton cleaned himself up and then stripped the sheets off of the bed, balling them up to carry them upstairs. He had crashed at Cadell’s house a couple of times when the band had stopped in New Jersey to record demos, so he knew where the laundry room was. It seemed impolite to leave a sticky bed in their wake.
Peyton Cabot of the Connecticut Cabots was unflaggingly polite.