A Billionaire for Christmas

“I did not know that about the rock star. Doesn’t he have a working-class British accent?”

Peyton snorted. “He used to pretend to have one, but he gave that up and speaks with his French and Monegasque accents most of the time now, at least in private.”

Raji fought to keep her jaw from dropping. Monegasque. “He’s from Monaco? The tax shelter of the billionaires?”

Peyton turned and slid his arms around her, holding her against his cool skin. “Maybe someday, if we ever decide that we can tell people that we’re seeing each other instead of keeping all this a secret, you can ride in one of Xan’s several airplanes, maybe the jumbo jet with his family’s noble crest on the tail.”Chapter Twenty-FourSxswIn 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.