Chapter 4 Clementine #2
Clementine looked at me and cocked her head to the side.
“You’re a bright autumn. You would look amazing in any of the warm metallics, as well as the garnet, merlot, or dark gem tones.
Sadly, we’ll have to make do with the samples in the shop.
No time to fly in a custom dress from New York or Milan. ”
I had no idea what all that meant, but I could figure out that I should be looking at gold-ish metallics and red wine colors.
All the models were a lot thinner than I was, though. The dresses looked great on them, but I had a bad feeling that I would look like a cocoon-swaddled caterpillar slowly turning to goo if I tried to wear one. They would never zip up.
Clementine gestured with her pen at three of the models who she’d told to remain standing over on one of the wings of the stage. “What do you think of those three over there?”
I whispered to her, “I don’t think I have the same body type as those women. I’m afraid of how those dresses would look on me.”
She swiveled her hand as if my worries were of no consequence. “The dresses will be altered so they will fit you properly.”
“Yeah, but they’re not going to fit me like that.”
Clementine inclined her head toward mine as if she were telling me a secret. “They’ll raise the sides of the dress or add structure as necessary. Plus, foundation garments do wonders.”
I suspected Clementine had never needed a foundation garment in her life. “The dress might not look right if they have to do all that to it, though. It’s not going to look good. I’m not going to look good.”
Clementine’s voice turned firm. “You are going to be on the arm of Nicolai Petrovich Romanov, previously one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, at one of the main social events leading up to the royal wedding of the year, definitely the most important royal wedding since Flicka von Hannover turned Paris upside down and shook it out a few years ago.
Any designer here will make sure their dress looks stunning on you. Are you walking the red carpet?”
I gasped, “There’s a red carpet?” just as Nicolai stated, “No.”
I sneaked a look at him, but Nicolai sipped his orange juice with one arm stretched out, resting on the back of the couch. His face stayed passive, like he was watching a game but not rooting for either team.
Clementine said, “So you won’t have to worry about that zoo, then. Still, we’ll ensure you’re properly attired for the rabble inside the ropes.”
“That’s why I commandeered you,” Nicolai told her.
I was so out of my league.
Jimmy had detested any sort of girlie shopping, even for our wedding.
At least Nicolai was sitting with amused interest, not flopping around and sneering in disdain.
“Which dress do you like?” I asked him, fishing for more information because I was so out of my league here that my league wasn’t even in the same state.
His fingers barely moved as he gestured at Clementine on my other side. “I’ve been told my taste is slutty, and that I should have no opinion about couture in polite company.”
Clementine glanced at Nicolai from the corners of her suspicion-squinted eyes. “We’ll look in your closet later to evaluate what you brought for tonight.”
She really was doing a lot for us, and on the spur of the moment, too. “Thanks for disrupting your whole day right before a big event to come look at dresses. I’m sorry that I’m not better at this. I’m a little lost right now.”
She tossed her straight-silk hair over the back of her shoulder. “Nicolai is throwing you into the maw of the beast, what with first keeping you quite the secret and then springing you as fait accompli during John’s party week.”
“Yeah. Everything happened so fast.”
“Evidently.”
“It was sudden and kind of accidental. I’m sorry we didn’t invite you to the ceremony.”
“No one was there, so I don’t feel particularly excluded. At least there was a livestream.”
My nylon-mesh veil and froufrou wedding dress seemed so low-class compared to the exquisite designer gowns at this private showing. “I probably would have messed up planning an important wedding, anyway. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get the chance to embarrass Nicolai and myself.”
Clementine continued staring at the models, though her expression didn’t change.
“Oh, darling. My cousin Nicolai has been my best friend since he beat the snot out of a boy bullying me at boarding school. I am devoted to him. I would have made sure your wedding was the absolute pinnacle of elegance.”
Regret stabbed me harder. “I’m sorry we didn’t do it right.”
She waved her hand, still not taking her eyes off the model swiveling on the little stage.
“It’s no matter. I don’t take offense. I’ve never seen Nico do anything so impetuous and romantic like an elopement, so you must be very special to him.
” She tucked her arm through my elbow without even glancing at me.
“We will be friends, but you must invite me to your baby shower.”
Uh-oh.
“I’m—I’m not pregnant, and we’re not planning to have kids for a while,” I assured her with a quick glance at Nicolai, who was lazily watching a woman on the stage model a bright red dress.
One of his dark eyebrows lowered like he didn’t like what he saw or, perhaps, what he was eavesdropping on.
“Kids aren’t in the plan. Not soon, anyway. ”
“Oh.” Her light reaction seemed uninterested, but I suspected I’d just been interrogated by a master. “Nico must be hopelessly in love, then.”
Without looking at us, he said, “Yes.”
Clementine leaned forward to look over me and scanned him with her proverbial laser-grid analytical clouds-and-ocean eyes, and then she settled back in her seat to watch the next model stomp down the runway like an angry flamingo. “I see.”
What did she see? What had I done wrong?
Staring at Nicolai and trying to telepathically insist that he fix whatever I’d done wrong didn’t seem to be working.
Clementine continued analyzing the models, not even glancing at him. “Lexi must love you, too, if she married you with those rings. Seriously, Nico. If you two wear those tonight, people will talk.”
The slightest pink flush stained Nicolai’s lightly tanned cheeks, but he still didn’t look at her.
Wow, they had a weird relationship.
Two more models strutted the catwalk, and then Nicolai casually lifted his phone, swiping and texting for several prolonged minutes.
Nicolai was a dark flutter at the very edge of my field of vision, just movement and shadows that distracted me from the women modeling flowing gowns on the stage, until he plucked my phone off the couch cushions between us.
I twisted myself toward him, eyes popping wide, jaw dropping that he’d grabbed my phone.
He held my own phone up to my eye-level and used my face to unlock it. “Nico!”
“One sec.” He tapped maybe a dozen quick tappity-taps and then handed it to me.
I snatched it back. “What’d you do?”
“Ordered flowers for myself on your wallet’s credit card,” he drawled.
Nuh-uh. Any credit card of mine would’ve been declined. When I’d checked that morning, the bank app had a red warning box on the top.
The phone screen was on texts, and the one at the top was now an unfamiliar phone number. The only message in the conversation was a blue bubble that read, “Your wife.”
As I gawked, a black bubble appeared. “It’s Nico. Put down your phone. Clemmy will pick up that I didn’t have your number.”
I dropped my phone like it had electrocuted me and snapped my head around to stare at the models still prancing down the runway.
For many minutes.
Or more.
While my heart thudded.
My phone screen lit again, and I picked it up.
Nicolai’s text read: Is there a particular metal or design you’d like for your wedding rings? Gold? Plat? And what diamond cut for the engage?
Oh, wow. He was really taking what Clementine had said to heart.
I texted back, You don’t have to get me anything else. I like the rings we were married with. I like that *these* rings were the ones we married each other with, even if it’s just for show.
Tell me what you actually like.
You don’t have to do this.
Lexi. Tell me.
The deep tone in his voice echoed even in his text.
So I thought about it.
Jimmy had picked out a rose gold wedding set to give me, the center stone-region a heart-shaped setting with three tiny diamond chips embedded in it, and I’d never really thought about what I would have picked out.
Except I had.
Somewhere deep inside, in all the romance novels I’d read, I knew what I liked to picture in my head when the dashing male main character flipped open a ring box.
I liked to imagine white gold rings with a round diamond solitaire, maybe something just a little bigger than the one-fifth carat total weight Jimmy had given me.
It was the love that mattered, right? Not the ring. The pretty rocks didn’t matter.
Love hadn’t mattered to Jimmy.
At least, mine hadn’t.
I guess white gold maybe? And round? Maybe? But don’t buy anything else. And don’t make a big deal about it.
Ring size? he texted.
I’d had my wedding ring from Jimmy sized at the local strip-mall jewelry shop last month in preparation for the ceremony, because I’d made all the preparations, because everything had needed to go perfectly, even the size of the ring, or else his family might change their mind and abandon me.
The perfectly sized ring hadn’t mattered, had it?
Seven, I texted Nico.
Good.
While my phone screen remained dark for the rest of the designer dress show, Nicolai sporadically tapped and swiped and pinched on his phone screen, though he glanced up as each new model strutted out onto the runway, striding and stomping.
He fixed each with a steady, analytical stare before going back to his phone.
At the end, Clementine informed me that I would try on three different dresses, each in a different color she described as bright autumn: a deep wine red, navy blue, and burnished copper.
The hostess lady and her minions scurried around, finding a size big enough for my boobs and hips, which felt like it was supposed to be an insult.
If the hostess’s scurrying was meant to be catty, Clementine didn’t seem to take it as such and merely told them to hurry up with finding the right size and then ordered snacks.
Snacks.
Clementine bossed them around without so much as a hair flip. She just casually told them what they were going to do, and they did it.
The snacks were little fruit-topped pastries, sweet and tart in my mouth that wafted sharp citrus into my nose, so Clementine must not have been concerned about putting me on a crash diet to wedge me into one of the dresses.
When the gowns were ready, the hostess lady hustled me into the back room where four new women wearing shapeless black dresses stripped me naked and trussed me up in the dresses Clementine had chosen, clamping the fabric down the back with binder clips and shoving me stumbling back onto the runway to parade around in front of Clementine and Nico.
Sweet baby Jesus, I was glad I’d shaved my legs and pits when I’d double-showered last night.
Clementine evaluated each dress on my body with the eye of a civil engineer auditing highway bridge construction.
First, her systematic gaze swept me from head to toe, and then she clambered up onto the runway to yank the dress tighter around my waist and the bustline up and the sleeves into different shapes, all the time conferring with the hostess lady in trilling French.
Nicolai watched, his phone lying face down on the couch beside him. He didn’t look uninterested, merely not insinuating himself into a conversation that Clementine had definitely excluded him from.
Right up until I tried on the burnished copper dress.
The deep red-gold satin was already a better fit than the other two dresses, though I don’t think that would have swayed Clementine’s ministrations in the slightest.
They were pinching and pinning the fabric, changing the drape of the skirt that swished like molten metal around my feet, when Nicolai spoke up. “That’s the one.”
The hostess lady startled and twitched like an anxious squirrel.
Clementine looked up at him and scowled. “While I told you that you do not have an opinion, you are also objectively correct in this particular case. It will be this one.” She suddenly looked at me, and her eyes widened. “You like this dress, do you not?”
A mirror had been set up in front of the runway.
The image of that woman in the mirror wearing the molten copper dress couldn’t have been me.
Rich-people clothes were so different, not just in the thickness and smoothness of the fabric, but also in the way the dress manipulated my body to look like a balanced hourglass.
Yet somehow, I could still breathe. “Yeah, I like this one.”
Clementine stood beside me and examined my reflection in that mirror, critically but not criticizing. “I’ll send my hairstylist and makeup girl over tonight.”