A Billionaire for Christmas

“I swear to God,” Beth said. “I will make that asshole curse the day he was born. I will obliterate him.”Chapter Thirty-SevenColdPeyton lay in the chilly sheets of a cold hotel room somewhere in Brazil.

Killer Valentine’s first tour of South America was progressing splendidly, each venue overflowing with new fans.

That night’s show had dragged on longer than normal. Xan had added songs into the second set until his voice nearly gave out.

Exhaustion weighed on Peyton’s arms and legs, pinning him to the cold mattress.

No, he wasn’t going to do it tonight.

It was a stupid form of self-torture, and he wasn’t going to do it anymore.

His future started now. It started tonight.

It started in the same way as his past: alone, with the woman he loved somewhere else.

His eyes closed.

Just as he drifted off, his flesh warming the bed around him, the image of Raji lying with her head on the other pillow came to him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light leaking in the window, and her soft hand stole over the sheets and twined in his fingers.

God, he missed her.

When he awoke the next morning, her absence sliced through him again.Chapter Thirty-EightDaydreamingLizard people don’t daydream about impossible things.

Raji was standing in front of her locker, touching her teal-blue scrubs that she was going to change into and thinking about Peyton’s eyes.

His sea-green eyes were only a little greener than her surgeon’s scrubs, but they shined from within with humor and earnestness and definitely when he smiled.

One time after they’d had sex in some hotel bed, somewhere, she had been trailing her fingers over the ink newly tattooed under his skin. Nordic knotwork marked with Viking runes formed both armbands and most of a dark breastplate covering his pectorals and shoulders. A chain ran between the ridges of his abs.

His hair had been growing out, and he hadn’t shaved that day.

Raji said, “You should grow a beard, too, a short and scruffy one. Then you’d really look like a Viking.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Peyton said. “I thought you didn’t like beards.”

She scratched his chin. “I like beards. They look all rough and scary, like you’re in a motorcycle gang or something.”

He laughed and twisted his head to look at where she was lying against his shoulder. “Must have been someone else. Okay, I’ll grow a beard.”

She snuggled down in his arm. “It’ll look so manly.”

“Just not sure how to take that.”

She laughed and drifted off to sleep.

That had been last year.

It had been four months since she had last seen Peyton.

Maybe he had gotten more tattoos in the months since she’d seen him. Maybe he’d done that back piece they’d talked about, and maybe his beard had grown out to a golden brown scruff. It had grown out a little by the time they went to the hospital’s masquerade ball, and it had looked great on him. If anything, his eyes had been more striking.

Raji drifted back to that halcyon morning when Peyton had played his songs for her, when she had lain on the couch and listened until she’d had to leave to catch her plane. If only there were videos of those songs somewhere, she might have been able to hear his voice, but she hadn’t ever found any. Those songs were gone.

No new Killer Valentine videos had surfaced lately. They really had taken a sabbatical somewhere in France.

Maybe Peyton was writing some more songs during his time off.

Behind her, a woman’s voice said, “Hey, Raji!”

She looked up, so tired she could barely move her head.

Beth tossed a tennis shoe at her. “This fell out of your locker when you weren’t looking.”

Raji bent to retrieve the shoe. Her stomach jutted out from her body, her swelling pregnancy becoming more evident every day. “Thanks.”

Four more months of this, and then she could resume her normal life as an ambitious lizard person.

She crossed her arms over her belly like ropes.

Her life, just like before, just work and surgeries, and her cousin Aarthi would have a child.

She would have all the time in the world for work and becoming the best cardiothoracic surgeon on the face of the planet. She and her mother wouldn’t have to ever worry about saving ramen noodles for the other one to eat ever again.

Raji’s arms tightened over her belly.Chapter Thirty-NineKiller Valentine’s YokoPeyton was wiping stage make-up onto his face with a cosmetic sponge in a tiny dressing room backstage at a French nightclub. Xan’s wardrobe guy, Boris, had taught him how to do his own stage make-up because Peyton didn’t like being fussed over.

Plastic holly wreaths had been stapled to the wall around the mirror in some lazy attempt at holiday cheer. A Santa hat sat on the make-up counter beside Peyton’s elbow. He had every intention of wearing it on stage that night.