Chapter Seven
Airport Ride
Raji awoke on the cold beige carpeting with her arms and legs wrapped around Peyton. Warmth rolled off his flesh and thick muscles, the only warm thing near her. She huddled closer to him, but her back and legs were so cold that she was shivering. He was still breathing the deep, slow breaths of the sleeping or the heavily anesthetized.
Considering the vodka shots they had both been doing last night before collapsing on the living room floor, maybe both.
The other members of Killer Valentine spilled limply over the couches and chairs, snoring.
The television was silently playing some morning news show, and sunlight beams shot flat from the window and drew long shadows of the furniture on the beige carpet.
Wait, sunbeams?
Oh, shit. It was morning.
And the sun was up.
Raji grabbed her phone out of her jeans’ hip pocket.
The screen read 6:19 AM. The battery icon was a thin, red line.
“Fuck!” She pushed off of Peyton and leaped to her feet.
The other guys stirred. Xan Valentine rolled to sitting and shoved Georgie down on the couch behind him. From behind Xan, Raji heard Georgie holler, “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
Panic shot up Raji’s back and pushed alcoholic sweat out of her skin. “Oh, my God. My plane leaves in an hour and a half, and my stuff is all at my hotel. Shit. I’ll never make it in time. I’m calling a ride right now. I have to go.” She tapped the ride-calling icon on the phone screen, and her phone instantly died. “Fuck!”
Peyton stumbled to his feet. “My car’s outside. I can drive you. It’s faster.”
“I’ll never make it. Shit. I have rounds at the hospital tonight.”
“Let’s go.” Peyton was already walking toward the car.
“I can’t. My teeth. My breath. I need a toothbrush.”
Peyton already had the front door open. “Cadell, open the front gate for us. Raji, I have gum in the car. Come on.”
Raji grabbed her purse that had been lying on the table and sprinted after him.
He had his key fob out and was thumbing it as they stumbled down the inclined lawn toward the driveway packed with cars. The dark gray sedan parked in the last slot flashed its lights as he reached it. Peyton jerked open the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel.
Raji noted the car as she ran around the hood: a newish top-of-the-line Mercedes S-Class, a six-figure car.
If she hadn’t quite believed Peyton when he’d said he was loaded last night, she did now. Not only was the car expensive as all heck, something a cardiothoracic surgeon wouldn’t be able to buy until they’d practiced for at least a decade, but it was also refined and understated, a quietly ostentatious, Old Money car. New money bought BMWs and flashy sports cars. The hospital parking structure was full of them.
She grabbed the freezing door handle and yanked. As she tumbled into the seat, she told him the name of the hotel where she was staying.
“I know where that is,” Peyton said, cranking around in the seat to watch out the rear window.
Raji wrapped her seat belt around herself as the car reversed out of the parking spot, and then Peyton jammed the car into gear and took off down the long and winding driveway. “Gum in the glove compartment. Hand me a slice?”
She found it, gave him a stick, and crammed one piece into her own mouth, too. Spearmint filled her sinuses, much better than the burp-up of last night’s booze.
The gate at the end of the long driveway slid aside as they neared it.
“Cadell came through,” Peyton said. “Even though I grew up with gates like this, they give me the heebie-jeebies.”
“And why is that?” Raji hung on to the handle on the door and the soft leather of the seat as the car careened around a corner. The wan November sunrise filtered through gauzy clouds, turning them pale salmon and gold.
Peyton said, “Had some problems last summer.”
“What, stuck inside your Old Money compound and the foie gras delivery guy couldn’t get in?”
Peyton laughed. “No, some weird stuff went down.”
“Like what?” She was in that kind of mood.
“I shouldn’t say.”
“You brought it up, buddy.”
Peyton zipped the car around another tight corner. The turn’s force shoved Raji against the door.
He said, “That was the time when Xan and I rescued Georgie from the Russian Mafia who had taken her hostage.”
Raji laughed and held on more tightly as Peyton sped out into the city streets. “Fine, don’t tell me then.”
Peyton yanked the car steering wheel sideways and sped up the on-ramp to the Garden State Parkway. Even at that time in the early morning, other cars raced around them. “That’s pretty much what happened.”
“The Russian mafia.”
“Yep.”
If the Russian mafia didn’t like Peyton, maybe Raji shouldn’t hang around him anymore.
She wasn’t planning to hang around him anymore, anyway, but she asked, “Are you somehow involved with the Russian mafia?”
Peyton said, “Nope. Not at all. Not even a little bit.”
“So, Georgie seems okay now.”
“Yep, we saved her.”
“Is that why you and Xan Valentine have that alpha-male pissing-contest thing going on?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Raji laughed. “Every time you say something, Xan Valentine has to assert his dominant-male, bull-elephant status, like last night, when you said that you would hire Andy to be your doctor. Xan Valentine jumped in and announced that he was hiring Andy, that she was his.”
“Shingles hurt. If she could stop that from happening to me again, I’d gladly pay her salary.”
“But then he snagged her, and you didn’t do anything.”
“Oh, Raji. I come from a wealthy family. We didn’t keep our wealth for centuries by leaping to pay the bill when someone else is perfectly willing to do it. And really, she should be the doctor for the whole band, not my private physician on tour. It sounds like she’s going to give me a shot, slap me on the ass, and that’s it.”
Raji wasn’t sure how she felt about her friend Andy slapping Peyton’s ass.
She shook her head. Andy wouldn’t slap his ass, anyway. She was far too reserved.
And yet, Andy had eloped with a rock star. Raji would have to keep an eye on that little pindi.
She said to Peyton, “And you swell up but you don’t challenge him, even though I think you could.”
Peyton shrugged, a quick movement of his burly shoulder while he changed lanes to dodge a slower car. “It’s Xan’s band. He started the band with Cadell when they were at Juilliard, and he hunted down the other founding members and lured them away from college.”
Raji laughed and hung on for dear life as he rounded another corner. Peyton’s car might look like a sedate Old Money sedan, but some serious horses lurked under that hood. He was racing through traffic. “So why did you join Killer Valentine and become a rock star?”
“I’m not a rock star.”
“You keep saying that, but being in a rock band kind of means that you are. I’ve watched videos of you playing the demos in those clubs, you know. You’re hot.”