Chapter 4 Clementine
clementine
LEXI
Clementine, an astonishingly waify-slim, moonlight-blond woman with tilted gray-blue eyes, was already sitting in the rear seat of the SUV when Ueli (I’d finally figured out the security boss-guy’s name) picked us up from the Billionaire Sanctuary private club/hotel.
She was sitting in the middle of the rear seat with her knees tightly pressed together and her feet delicately perched on the axle hump in the vehicle’s floor.
Her dusty-pink houndstooth suit jacket and pencil skirt fit so snugly that they must have been custom-made for her, and she must not have gained or lost a freakin’ ounce since the tailor had stretched them around her reed-like form.
She looked me up and down, an unreadable expression in her eyes.
Nicolai held the door for me as I clambered into the tall SUV. The floor was almost as high as my knees, and crawling into the back seat elegantly was dang-near impossible.
So I crawled in.
The lightness in Nicolai’s voice seemed unbothered. “Lexi, may I introduce my cousin, Clementine Kaas. We were also at boarding school together in Switzerland. Clemmy, this is Lexi Romanov, my wife.”
My. Wife.
Again.
And he’d said it to yet someone else, and she was his cousin.
Man, he just threw that my-wife stuff around like it was the truth or something.
When I’d been lying alone in my twin bed back in my Scottsbluff apartment, I’d fantasized about Jimmy calling me my wife, even though he rarely even introduced me as his fiancée because “everyone already knew.”
I stuck out my hand at Clementine to shake as Nicolai shut the car door behind me, rocking the SUV a little on its struts. “Hi! Great to meetcha!”
Her fingers in my hand were as cool as the haughty reserve in her pale eyes. Her lips pressed together primly as her slim hand wafted away from my sweaty one. “Charmed.”
Yeah, she hated me on sight. As she should. I wasn’t one of these hoity-toity royalties and never would be. I was almost glad Nicolai’s cousin seemed like a gatekeeper to keep him safe from riffraff like me.
Oh, sweet baby Jesus. Konstantin was right. I was a wreck. An embarrassing, mongrel-puppy wreck.
Nicolai stepped through the door on the other side of the SUV, his long legs and tall frame making settling onto the seat as easy for him as if he’d stepped into a low-slung car.
If I got any shorter, I was going to need someone to boost me into SUVs, like holding a kid’s foot to given them a leg up onto the back of a horse.
As Nicolai slammed his door, the musclebound dark-haired guy who’d walked around the back of the SUV with him slapped the back quarter panel with a resounding thunk, and we pulled away from the rear door of the Billionaire Sanctuary private club into Las Vegas’s grid of black-hot streets.
The long row of windows around the vehicle glared with bright desert sunlight even though they were tinted dark gray. A huge engine, probably eight smoothly firing cylinders, snarled under the hood, tunneling vibrations under my feet and legs.
Without even a backward glance at Nicolai sitting beside her, Clementine tilted her head to look me up and down yet again. “Well, there are going to be dozens of broken hearts at Omnia tonight, when that video of your marriage is confirmed as not AI-generated.”
“Oh?” I asked, trying not to give off anything desperate. “Why, was Nicolai a man-slut?”
Clementine swiveled her whole body around to stare at Nicolai on the other side of her and then whipped back with an exaggerated shoulder turn to stare back at me like her neck was frozen with astonishment at what I’d said. Twisting back again to Nicolai, she asked him, “Is she serious?”
Nicolai rolled his eyes. “Clementine, do have some propriety.”
Crawling under the car seat sounded like a great option just then. A really, really great option. “Oh, that’s okay. I didn’t mean to ask. And it doesn’t matter now, right?”
“Oh, this poor sparrow,” Clementine muttered to Nicolai, settling herself to look out the front windshield. “You’re a beast, setting her up like this.”
Nicolai frowned and glanced aside at her. “I’m not setting her up.”
Clementine chirped a sound that could have been “Zip” or “Nope” twice at Nicolai, who raised his eyebrows and looked out his side window but didn’t answer.
I settled back, trying not to look like the class theater nerd who’d suddenly been shoved into a car with the top popular girl.
Don’t be weird, don’t be weird, don’t be weird.
Ueli drove us over to a casino-resort called the Aria on the Strip and let us out in a traffic circle that was way bigger than the kiss-and-fly at the Western Nebraska Regional Airport.
As soon as we stepped out of the SUV into the withering desert gusts funneled by the stone and steel entryway, Clementine glared at my body, looking me up and down again like she was laser-scanning my measurements into the computer in her head, and then she strode away, leading us to the mall doors.
Inside, we walked past luxury-brand stores that I had again only seen on social media: Dolce & Gabbana, Tiffany & Co., Tom Ford, and a couple more that I had to sound out to figure out what they were.
Bal-en-ci-a-ga.
Fer-ra-gam-o.
Liveried guards stood outside jewelry stores.
Display windows held a single starched purse on a Lucite stand with its very long price tag discreetly turned away from scrutiny.
We didn’t enter any of the glass and granite stores on the mall’s two lower levels. Clementine didn’t even pause but turned sharply away from the main floor, strutting through the nearly empty mall like she owned the place.
I followed, eyeing Nico, and I couldn’t quite tell if his easy but unsmiling expression meant he was pissed at her, or at me, or if he was just along for the ride.
Clementine whisked us to an elevator tucked into a nondescript hallway and then to an upper floor, where she marched out as soon as the doors parted into an area with no commercialized shop signs braying flashy capitalism for the masses, and then through unmarked glass doors into a lobby.
The smooth-coiffed woman at the front desk startled at our entrance and abandoned her computer, smiling at Clementine. She hurried to get ahead of us, leading our group without breaking stride to a large room with a hardwood runway stage smack-dab in the middle.
A hostess popped open a champagne bottle and set tall flutes on the coffee table before the white leather couch where we and Clementine sat.
I felt like I shouldn’t waste the champagne by allowing them to give it to me, because I wouldn’t appreciate it and didn’t need anything so extravagant.
Besides, it was early afternoon, which some old-fashioned part of my brain considered really-really early for alcohol, but Clementine was already holding a second flute for them to fill.
They poured pale gold sparkling wine into the slim flute she held, and then she swiveled, extending her arm and the glass toward me.
It would just go to waste if I didn’t accept it.
What the heck. “Yes, please.”
The hostess or head designer or whoever she was shot me a tight-lipped smile as I sat on her white couch in my denim shorts.
And then, not that it was any of my business, because how Nicolai lived his life was really not any of my business and I didn’t need to be mothering or smothering him at all because this was a contracted fake marriage for show and not an actual relationship, but I was glad when he waved off the champagne and asked for a glass of orange juice instead.
If nothing else, he would probably feel better if he got some vitamins in him and pumped up his blood sugar, because there was no way he could’ve completely recovered from that kind of hangover so fast.
So, I sipped the sparkling champagne while I sat on the luxurious fuzzy couch, and that’s when the models started strutting down the stage, one after the other, spinning with practiced pivots and death glares, probably because they must be hungry.
The models wore gorgeous evening gowns, rippling over their bony shoulders and jutting pelvises in all the right ways, and they minced down the short runway and back, showing off how the material clung to their flat butts.
The hostess lady slipped Clementine a notebook and a pen.
I watched the bubbles soar through the golden wine in my glass because the hostess probably knew that Clementine would understand what we were looking at there on those models, because I totally didn’t.
Clementine glanced between the two of us and must have noted that the hostess lady didn’t provide a second notebook, so she scooted over next to me until her thin thigh pressed against mine.
She laid one side of the three-ring binder on my lap as the lady started announcing the designers’ names and describing the dresses and years and collections they were from.
The notebook held laminated pages of other models wearing the same clothes, some in different colors. Clementine flipped the pages as the models rotated on the stage.
Okay, look. I didn’t attend my high school prom.
I’d already been dating Jimmy for two years at that point, and he was away at his freshman year of college. I’d thought about going stag, but all my friends were either coupled up or else their older boyfriends had traveled home for their prom.
I hadn’t wanted to be the only one without a date and not dancing.
Besides, my mom was married to Gerry at that point.
Rogan and Jake were barely toddlers. They’d had no extra money to give me, and I hadn’t been working much yet because I was still in high school.
I didn’t have the cash for a nice dress or to go out to dinner or chip in for a limo, so I stayed home.
But I’d dreamed about the dress I would’ve worn.
And these dresses were way, way better.
I mean, light-years better. I didn’t even know how to dream about dresses like this.
These dresses were made from “hand-loomed silk” and had “signature Venetian crystals” and were “bespoke couture brands,” the hostess announced.
I’d dreamed in rayon.