A Billionaire for Christmas

Now that she thought about it, that song was ostensibly about breaking out of fear to find love, but it took on a whole lot of other meanings if Peyton and Xan had rescued Georgie from the Russian mafia. “The way you were prancing around and leering at the front row, it sure looked like you wanted to be in a rock band.”

“This feels weird. I hadn’t told anyone that before last night.”

“Yeah, it was probably the vodka talking. Vodka always tells me, ‘People love it when you dance. Dance some more. Dance in the middle. Trust me.’”

Peyton laughed as he drove.

She continued, “But the real question is, why do you keep telling me this?”

“Like I said, I keep liking you better and better.”

“Oh, bullshit. You’re never going to see me again after today.”

“You never know.”

“I think I do.” She hadn’t given him her number on purpose. “So the reason you joined Killer Valentine has something to do with the keyboard player, Georgie Johnson. Right?”

Peyton whipped through traffic to take an exit off the freeway. “When did I say that?”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Oh, God. I wasn’t looking at her with stupid googly eyes or something, was I? Xan accuses me of that all the time, but I swear to God that I’m not. I think I must have naturally googly eyes.”

Raji laughed. “You do not have googly eyes. You have the most gorgeous eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“I do?”

“Um, yeah.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Too much like she was looking at him or something.

He smirked as he turned the corner toward the hotel where Raji had her stuff.

Raji said, “And you know you do.”

Peyton laughed. “I know they’re a weird shade of green.” He turned the car into the hotel parking lot. The Mercedes screeched to a stop under the covered entrance area, and he jammed it into park.

He turned to her—his eyes darkening to teal in the morning sunlight—and he said, “Go.”

Raji ran to the stairwell and sprinted upstairs, which was faster than waiting for an elevator.

In her room, she grabbed the heap of laundry off of her bed—a pile of vibrant emerald silk woven with gold thread and encrusted with rhinestones, her bridesmaid lehenga choli dress—and stuffed it all in her suitcase. She grabbed her toothbrush and make-up bag but abandoned the rest of her toiletries. She would just buy new shampoo when she got back to Los Angeles. No time. No time.

When she got back to the car, her rollie bag bouncing over the sidewalk behind her, she found that Peyton had bought two large cappuccinos and had a bunch of pastries in a paper bag. The roasted smell of coffee and browned pastry filled his car.

She grabbed one and stuffed it into her mouth, the pastry turning to buttery flakes on her tongue. “Oh my God, the raspberry ones are my favorite. And coffee. Dear gods. You saved me. Thank you.”

Peyton chewed and swallowed some sort of doughnut with sliced almonds layered on the top. “There’s some yogurt in there if you want that.”

“So about the band, Georgie the keyboard player, Xan Valentine, and the Russian mafia—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Peyton crammed the transmission into gear. The tires screeched as the car roared out of the parking lot.

“Does this have something to do with why you became an accidental rock star?”

Peyton floored it, racing toward the parkway.

“Go ahead. Spill it. I assume that you were in love with Xan Valentine and stalking him, so that’s how you ended up in the band.” Or maybe Raji was projecting.

Peyton laughed. “Close. I was in love with Georgiana Johnson.”

“All right, let’s change that story around a little. You were a fan of the band, and you saw Georgie on the stage. She saw you, your eyes met, and she called you out of the audience to come up on the stage because she instantly fell in love with you, too.”

Peyton was laughing harder as he wheeled the car onto the entrance ramp headed for the Newark Airport. The sun, near the flat horizon and freeway overpasses, glared like a bomb blast over the front windshield.

He said, “Again, close. We grew up together, and she was my first real girlfriend.”

That’s right. Georgie had known about Peyton’s shingles outbreaks and his crunchy, anti-vaxx mom. “So you’re her stalker from childhood?”

“No. We competed against each other in piano competitions from the time we were kids. At Tanglewood, which is a highly competitive music program we both attended when we were sixteen, we fell in love, and we were each other’s first lovers.”

“How precious. I think I might barf. So did you guys live happily, all lovey-dovey for these years, until the big, bad, broody, glowery Xan Valentine took her away from you?”

“No, I fucked it up. I am the villain in this love story.”