IN Austin, Texas, Peyton was lying in a hotel bed with Raji as they sipped stale room service coffee.
His shoulders ached, and his hands cramped. Brilliant afternoon sun shone through the wide window, heating the air even though it was only March and the air conditioning grated at full blast. The humid air in the room felt too warm, except for in the path of the air conditioner, where the cold, wet air chilled his skin.
The day and night before, he had performed a bruising three-show schedule that Xan Valentine had booked for the South By Southwest music festival.
Killer Valentine had started with a full performance at the Moody Theater in the early evening, their standard three-hour set with a short intermission and staggered breaks. The three thousand-seat venue was where they filmed the television show Austin City Limits, and the steep seats rose to the rafters many stories above the stage. It was like performing at the bottom of a hole of screaming fans.
After that show, the band had been rushed by SUVs to the YouTube at Coppertank venue for an hour-long private show that streamed live on the internet.
After that, after fucking that, they had played a pop-up concert, an unannounced hour-long set at the Victorian Room at the Driskill Hotel for less than two hundred shocked people.
A thousand festivalgoers thronged outside the hotel, trying to get into the surprise show.
Peyton was surprised that there wasn’t a riot or that people weren’t crushed in the melee outside.
That fucker Xan Valentine was insane.
After the last set had ended at three in the morning, Xan couldn’t even talk. He had croaked and grabbed his throat. Georgie had hustled him into the bedroom of a hastily rented hotel suite to have him do cool-downs, but he looked like he was having problems breathing.
The triple play was a stunt that might jolt Killer Valentine to freakish superstardom, sure, but Jesus, that Xan Valentine was in-fucking-sane.
The band had holed up in the suite for hours after that until the mob drifted away and they could go back to their own hotel at dawn. Peyton had thought for a while that they were going to have to call a police helicopter to get them out.
But when it was finally over, Peyton was left trembling with adrenaline and tossing with wild-eyed insomnia as he stared into the darkened hotel room.
He had dozed fitfully for a few hours until Raji had arrived, bumping into his hotel room with her weekend bag. She’d tumbled into the bed with him.
In an instant, her mild floral perfume, her pixie, perky black hair, and her bronze, silken skin decorated with gorgeous tattoos overwhelmed him. The crazed adrenaline of the stage that was making him twitch and clench his fists flowed away, leaving only hunger for her.
Afterward, Raji was lying on her stomach beside him, her leg thrown over his and nattering on about how she’d saved a woman’s life in the emergency room. The overworked ER resident had called cardiothoracic for a consult because he had just known that the fiftyish, overweight patient presenting with abdominal pain must be having a heart attack.
When Raji had shown up to evaluate the patient, the woman had insisted that the excruciating pain was not a heart attack. Something else was wrong.
All the other examining doctors had dismissed the woman’s elevated white blood cell count, which indicated infection, and her squeaky-clean EKG because she was over fifty and overweight, so it had to be a heart attack.
Raji had listened to the patient, palpated the woman’s abdomen, and sent her for an MRI to rule out appendicitis.
Yep, it was definitely appendicitis.
The gastro surgeon had told Raji later that the organ had been on the ragged edge of rupturing. An hour’s delay could have led to peritonitis and possibly the woman’s death.
“Doctors don’t listen enough,” Raji told Peyton. “The most important thing is to listen to the patient.”
Peyton had been running his palms and fingers over Raji’s naked ass while he listened to her, palpating the velvety skin on her butt.
The smoothness of her skin and slim curves of her ass fascinated him.
Everything about her fascinated him: her lithe curves, her intensity in her career, her sultry alto voice, her giggles when he made her happy, and her gasps when he made her come.
Every time she walked into a hotel room, coiled with tension and anger from her job, he held her down and fucked it all away until she was smiling.
Holding her down and fucking her did the same thing for him.
He ran his hand over her ass again, letting his fingers trail between her legs to stroke her pussy.
She gasped, and the bright intelligence in Dr. Raji Kannan’s eyes turned smoky with desire.
Something shifted in Peyton.
He liked seeing that, seeing her flush with desire for him.
He liked waking up with her in his bed, and he liked going to sleep with her cool body between the sheets with him. He liked drinking coffee with her and grousing about Xan’s insanity, and he liked hearing about her days and her work saving people’s lives.
He wished every day could be like this.
Every single day.
Every morning and every night.
His other hand inched over to where her hand lay on the sheets, and his fingers twined in hers.
“Raji-lee—” he started.
“So she was okay. She went home a few days later,” Raji said, moving her leg over his a little more, widening the space between her satiny thighs so his hand could slip there more easily.
Peyton knew what she wanted, and he gave it to her.