Why not live a little?
Raji asked, “So are you going to stay with Killer Valentine long-term or start your own band someday?”
“I’m signed for a year’s contract,” he said. When he looked over her head, Xan and Georgie were inching into the crowd, leaving him alone with Raji. “After that, we’ll see what everyone wants to do.”
She asked him, “You wanna dance?”
“Fuck, yeah,” he said, lowering his voice to a growl.
He wrapped one arm around her waist and pulled her slim form against himself.
Raji grinned up at him and bit one side of her full, sensual lower lip.
Chapter Two
Toast
Raji was sitting with Peyton Cabot, an honest-to-Shiva fucking rock star in Killer Valentine, her all-time favorite band, at the kitchen table inside the house of Cadell Glynn, the lead guitarist for Killer Valentine.
Sur-fucking-real.
They were both glaring at a blank scrap of paper.
Peyton Cabot’s arm pressed against her shoulder.
She couldn’t stop thinking of him as Peyton-Cabot, his name all one word, kind of like if someone had introduced her to Elton-John or Jon-Bon-Jovi or Taylor-Swift or Lady-Gaga. She wouldn’t be sitting next to her casual buddy Jon or Lady. She’d have their full names in her head.
And so Raji was sitting next to Peyton-Cabot.
She was practically leaning on him.
Which was good, because writing a wedding toast felt stupid and awful. Marriage was for suckers.
Not that Raji would say that to Andy, ever. Somebody had to have a dream.
Thick muscles wrapped around Peyton’s arm, bulging at his shoulder and biceps. When they had been dancing, Raji had molested him subtly, brushing her fingers over his broad shoulders and flat, corrugated stomach. The cologne on his neck smelled like rosemary and lemon, maybe a little like black pepper, like he would taste delicious. In the darkness of the back yard, she could see that his hair was blond, but she hadn’t noticed his startling blue-green eyes until they had sat down in the brightly lit kitchen to write her toast.
When he looked away from her, musing about the words they were writing, his eyes looked aquamarine, a pale green-blue that seemed translucent.
But when he turned back, smiling because he had found the words, they turned soothing sea blue-green, shading towards teal.
Gorgeous.
Raji was trying really hard not to stare at Peyton-Cabot, the ripped and handsome Killer Valentine rock star, but every time he walked like a stalking tiger or brushed his hair out of his eyes like a Nordic god, not-staring got harder.
Plus, his sunny personality seemed to find the good humor in everything, even how stupid she was being about writing a toast for Cadell and Andy.
Raji held a pen poised over the paper. “I don’t know what to say.”
It was true. She couldn’t think of words at all. Her estrogen-fogged brain kept gibbering fuck me, fuck me hard, fuck me like a rock star.
“Say what’s in your heart,” Peyton-Cabot said. “Say what you feel in your heart.”
“I don’t feel anything. I’m a surgeon. Your first surgery is to rip out your own heart and throw it away so that you can cut other people open and do what needs to be done to make them well.”
“Really?” Peyton asked. “You’re a surgeon like Andy?”
“Not like Andy. She’s gastro. I’m in cardiothoracic surgery and transplantation. I rip hearts out of warm, dead bodies and sew them into warm, live ones, and then I electrocute them to jump-start everything again.”
“Sounds brutal,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know. I have no feelings. That’s why I can’t write this.”
“Come on, now. Let’s get this toast done. How did you meet Andy?”
“We were two Indian girls in a private school. Us couple of pindis hung out together.”
“Okay. That’s not exciting. What do you admire about her?”
Raji could run with that one. “I admire the hell out of the way she married Cadell instead of that other guy.” Man, the cultural ramifications for Andy were going to be harsh. Raji wasn’t sure she could have done it.
“Good,” Peyton said. “We’ll start with that.”
She fretted, “Andy is going to remember this toast for the rest of her life. This is her wedding, and I’m going to fuck it up if I say something stupid. I mean, if I say the wrong thing, I could fuck up her whole marriage.” The chance of Raji saying something stupid increased exponentially because she was excruciatingly aware of Peyton-Cabot’s rock-hard arms and the deep chasm of his spine between the thick muscles on his back that she had felt when she had had wrapped her arms around him, dancing.
Damn, Peyton-Cabot was a smokin’ hot rock star.
Peyton-Cabot’s long, strong fingers closed over her skinny brown ones, holding her hand. “We’ll make sure it’s good. Write what you just said to begin with.”
Raji sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. I can do this.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said. “You cut people open all day. This is just a few sentences to string together. You’ll be fine.”
“I’d rather crack a chest and sew veins on a heart that’s flipping around like a trout than stand up in front of everyone and say something stupid.”
He squeezed her hand. “We’ll work on it. You’ll be fine.”
His low, strong voice soothed Raji, and she wrote her first line on the scrap of paper.
Chapter Three
Raji and Andy
Andy asked Raji, “So how are you liking California, yeah?”
The two women were sitting in a corner of the deck, huddled together because the warmth from the heating towers and bonfires didn’t quite reach that corner. They were both giggly and getting more drunk as the night went on.
As Peyton walked by, he handed Raji another red plastic cup filled with the dry white wine that she liked and winked at her.
Raji nearly flippin’ melted. Damn.
She said to Andy, “California is fine. It seems like everyone is getting married but me, though. I’ve had to fly back here three times this year for weddings. Not that I want to get married. I’m not cut out for that.” For the heartbreak. For the desperate pleading and sobbing that came at the end. “But everyone else is dropping like flies.”
Andy asked, “How’s Aarthi doing?”
Raji flinched. Her cousin, Aarthi, had chosen to let her parents arrange her marriage to a stranger rather than run away with the white guy who was the love of her life and get cut off. “She’s been getting along fine with the boy’s family, but now she says they’re having trouble having a baby.”
Andy’s eyes widened. “Oh, no. That’s too bad. What is her mother-in-law saying?”
“You know how those traditional families are. Her mother-in-law is talking about buyer’s remorse.”
“It’s ridiculous that we’re even having this conversation. Is she going to divorce him? Or are they going to force her out?”
Divorce. Even the word made Raji nauseated. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen. It’s a good thing you dodged the arranged-marriage bullet, huh?”