She stalked off down the hall.
Raji was smiling tiredly when Peyton came back and wrapped his arms around her and the baby again. “She likes you.”
“How do you know?” he asked, settling his arms and staring at their little girl. Her tiny mouth worked, and her chin bobbled.
“She’s cooking for you,” Raji said. “It’s an Indian mother thing. When Indian mothers are mad at you, they withhold their cooking. When they like you, they cook special things for you.”
“And that works?” he asked.
“Oh, you haven’t tasted my mother’s cooking yet. Once you taste her masala dosa, you’ll be wrapped around her little finger. Her masala dosa should be a Schedule One Controlled Substance. It’s as addictive as heroin. The next exposé article will have pics of you lying in a corner, bloated, with coconut chutney running down your chin.”Chapter Forty-NineXan Hits BackRaji lay in the hospital bed, recovering.
Dr. Nyima had winked when she had injected something into Raji’s I.V. that ran into the back of her hand, whispering, “This is the good stuff we don’t let the civilians have.”
Within minutes, the pain receded.
A pleasant narcotic glow had risen up around her.
Peyton and the baby and the nurses were all so pretty.
Raji held their baby girl in her arms while the baby slept. Their baby girl was beautiful, with her pale caramel skin and light brown eyes. Black hair topped her head, and she had the most lush eyelashes that Raji had ever seen on a baby.
The baby didn’t have a name yet. Raji hadn’t thought about names at all.
Raji also had no crib, no car seat, no diapers, no baby clothes, and no bottles or whatever, but the very nice stuff that Tashi Nyima had injected into her I.V. kept Raji from panicking or worrying or even thinking about it too much.
It would all work out.
Everything would be fine.
The nurse who checked on Raji and cooed over the sleeping baby for a minute was pretty, too.
Even Peyton was pretty, there with his thick, blond hair bound back in a bun and his neat beard trimmed and handsome, but he was behaving like a daddy Viking. He snarled at the nurses and doctors until Raji told him to let them do their jobs. He hovered over Raji, pacing around her bed, until she finally suggested they turn on the television for a few minutes.
Peyton shook his head. “Screen time is bad for children.”
Raji laughed. “They aren’t talking about watching a TV around an infant who is just a few hours old, Peys. They’re talking about plunking toddlers in front of the computer to play first-person-shooter games for hours at a time. It’s fine.”
“No good can come of it.”
“The lactation consultant said that I need to relax and take my mind off the birth and the breastfeeding thing. Let’s turn on the news or something.”
“Not the news,” Peyton said. “The news is the worst.”
Raji narrowed her eyes at him as much as she was able. “Why?”
“Let’s just not watch the news for a day or two.”
“Why?”
Peyton sat on the side of her bed and leaned over to peek at their baby again. “At least not the entertainment news.”
Light dawned through the narcotic haze. Something else was published? “I will kill Beth.”
“She didn’t do anything. Xan Valentine gave an interview. He’s obsessive about publicity. He had to control the narrative. It’s why Killer Valentine has done so well. Xan has micro-managed every drip to the media for years.”
“So they’re concentrating on him now? That’s good, right? They’ll leave us alone.”
Peyton shook his head. “He said some things. I’m surprised Georgie didn’t talk him out of doing it, but she’s his wife, not a miracle worker. When Xan gets locked onto something, it’s hard to pry him loose.”
Raji tightened her arms around the baby. She lied, “I knew I never liked that guy.”
Peyton shook his head. “A lot of it was directed at me, thankfully. We have a few options.”
The baby in Raji’s arms wiggled a little in her swaddle but went back to sleep. “Like what?”
“It depends on what I will do next,” Peyton said, “since I quit Killer Valentine.”
Tears rose in Raji’s eyes. She wiped them on her shoulders. Dammit. Pregnancy hormones are supposed to go the hell away after the pregnancy is over with, right? “You shouldn’t have quit.”
“It was time. It was past time. If I had been thinking long-term about my career, I should have quit after a year or two with them.”
“You didn’t want to quit being a rock star,” Raji said.
“For years, I didn’t quit because you liked that I was a rock star. We had hammered out an odd lifestyle of me touring and us meeting each other. The busyness was so crazy that I didn’t stop and analyze what I should have been doing. I’ve been ready to go my own way for a long time.”