Chapter 5 New Rings
new rings
LEXI
Clementine rode to the Billionaire Sanctuary club with us after the ordeal with the designer gowns and rifled through Nicolai’s closet, pronouncing a few of his suits marginally acceptable for the next few nights’ events but others would have to be accessorized or something to pass muster.
Ueli drove her back to her hotel while Nicolai and I stared at each other across his suite.
What are you supposed to say to a stranger you’d ended up married to?
Especially when you couldn’t say anything around the security guys who were trying but failing to blend in with the walls because they might narc on you?
So Nicolai glared at his phone, texting with his thumbs, and I stared at mine, not texting anyone because nobody from my former life was speaking to me.
When I’d been going to marry Jimmy, I’d thought I would never be lonely again, that I would cheerfully bound into his family ties with bridal-white ribbons and bows, and yet now I was trapped in a soundproof cage of my own making.
Everything was my fault for being too eager to do anything they asked, and nothing mattered now, anyway.
Nicolai snatched his ringing phone off the table, listened, and said into it, “Yes, they’re mine. Bring them up.”
“What’s that?”
“Hmmm? Oh, supper.”
And indeed, instantly, a waiter knocked and then wheeled in a room service cart with silver-domed plates. Nicolai had handed me a menu and ordered them about an hour before.
“Oh, great. Supper sounds great,” I said and hated my babbling.
Weirdly, another guy showed up right after the room service cart and handed Nicolai a shiny black gift bag with something short written in bold capitals on the side, but I didn’t get a good look at it before he whisked it into the bedroom and left it there.
“Ueli,” Nicolai announced to the head security guy who was sitting on our couch. “We’ll be dining alone. You can retire to the conference room headquarters downstairs.”
“Of course, Mr. Romanov.”
Ueli and his compatriots peeled themselves off the drywall and left, their strides almost a march as they crossed the room and shut the door gently behind themselves.
Now that the constant observation by the security guys was gone, I deflated. The stress of having to monitor everything I said, did, and even the way I moved was getting to me.
Nicolai saw how I wilted, his appraising glance sharp. “About tonight—”
Oh, I’d been thinking about that, too. “I don’t know how to act around your friends. I’m going to screw this up,” I blurted, which seemed as mortifying as if I’d barfed out those words with the security guys right there.
He shrugged and sat down at the table where the waiter had arranged our supper to eat before we went to the party.
“Considering our back story, it won’t matter.
If something goes awry, I’ll cover for you.
You should probably try to look pleased and happy but slightly stunned by everything around you. ”
“I can sure as heck do the stunned part, but I didn’t grow up like you. I feel like I’m standing wrong, like my posture sucks.”
Nicolai lifted the silver dome off his plate, revealing a steak flopped atop a salad, and then removed the cover from my chicken dinner with a potato and corn. “Come eat.”
“I’m going to mess it up—” I protested.
“Come, eat.”
“Okay, fine.” I walked over and tried to elegantly settle into the chair, but I knocked it sideways with my hip and dang-near fell off. “Ouch.”
“Have you ever ridden a horse?” Nicolai asked as he knifed a piece off his steak.
“Nebraska isn’t that backward. We have cars,” I grumbled at him.
Of course I’d ridden horses. Some of my friends grew up on farms. I could even rope cattle a little.
But I couldn’t have him thinking that about me.
Or about Nebraska.
He tilted his head sideways as he chewed, his sculpted jaw grinding, and examined me until he swallowed. “Nebraska is a US state, right? I thought my understanding of US geography was pretty solid. It’s a state? You grew up in Nebraska state? Or is that the town?”
“We know nothing about each other.” I almost let my head fall forward into my hands, but I stopped just before my palms and fingertips smeared the half-inch of makeup slathered on my face.
Clementine’s makeup artist had done wonders.
I didn’t want to mess it up. “Oh my God, I’m totally going to screw this up tonight. ”
“We won’t mess up. Just stay on my arm. I’ll do the talking.”
I must have looked dubious or terrified, because Nicolai leaned forward, his silverware still embedded in the steak on his plate. His lowered voice sounded as if he were commanding the future. “We will be fine.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing. Wouldn’t it be better if you just locked me in an attic for this year like Mr. Rochester did?”
He scalpeled another precise cube off his steak. “We won’t be reenacting Jane Eyre, Lexi. My point about horses is that, when one is riding a horse, one wants quiet hands. You don’t want to oversteer the horse. It makes them anxious if you’re always tugging on the reins and bit.”
That auburn dress wouldn’t last ten seconds on horseback. “Wait, do I need boots or jeans for tonight?”
“No horses. Tonight, I want you to direct yourself with quiet hands. I’ll be with you the whole time. Defer to me, and it’ll look like we’re in love or something. No one will question us.”
I decided to take Nicolai’s word for it even though I was sure he was vastly overestimating my ability to remain silent.
“Okay.” I choked down my supper because I didn’t want to go into this trial by fire hungry, of all things. “Okay, fine.”
I ate carefully, making sure that I didn’t mess up my makeup or hair because Clementine had obviously gone to a bunch of trouble to send those people over, and I didn’t want to look ungrateful or like I didn’t care.
Because I was grateful, and I did care.
My bleached-blond hair and makeup looked better than they had for my own wedding.
Clementine’s people had given me a “purifying facial” that had sucked-closed all my pores until my skin looked like pale tan porcelain, and then they’d done Michelangelo-level airbrushing that made my eyes look enormous and liquid like an anime character.
The hairstylist had tutted over my bleach-job as she’d applied products and curled, sighing as if her soul were troubled, and left her card with the words “complete color and structure restoration” written in spiky letters.
I didn’t want to mess up their hard work, so I was careful while I ate the room service supper with Nico.
Nicolai used his silverware differently than I’d been taught my whole life, not switching hands after he’d cut a bite of steak with the knife and somehow maneuvering his fork so that the tines always curved downward. His ease made it look elegant.
I looked like I was juggling a machete and a pitchfork while chomping down my chicken breast and baked potato drenched in ranch dressing.
His lack of concern concerned me. Shouldn’t he be quizzing me or stuffing information into my head?
Shouldn’t there be elocution lessons?
But he knew these people. He’d probably be able to predict what was going to happen because he knew them and how they behaved at events like this.
I was probably being paranoid, overthinking and spiraling about the wrong things again.
I should just go along with whatever he said.
See? It was going to be fine.
Just like he said.
Fine.
Nicolai set down his fork. “One more thing.”
Panic. “Oh, God, no! What?”
His quick glance up at me from under his eyebrows might as well have been telling me to calm the heck down.
“I understand you have an emotional attachment to the wedding rings we used for our ceremony last night, but Clementine made a good point. Given even a few hours’ notice during business hours or not being dreadfully away with the fairies last night, those are not the rings I would’ve bought my wife. ”
Away with the fairies.
That was a weird saying. Must be British, because Nicolai always sounded so British, except when he’d been speaking Russian to the priest last night.
I dropped my silverware on the plate and waved my hands in the air, negating his worries, because I didn’t want him to think I was just after him for his money, like his brother had said.
I mean, his offer that morning of all that money for a few months of acting was crazy.
The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I was. “They’re fine. Please don’t—”
“I already did.”
I turned my hand, looking at the pretty little solitaire and the gold band below it, sparkling a little with wan, straw-colored fire inside where it caught the light. “Oh.”
“You sound disappointed.”
I drew cross-hatches with my fork in the baked potato, super-creamy with the whole ramekin of ranch and a piped spiral of butter I’d dumped in. “These rings are the ones the priest blessed when we got married.”
“They’re just rings. Just a symbol.”
“But they aren’t just a symbol, really. Our vows weren’t even part of the ceremony. The priest just let us say them to each other afterward. The rings were part of it. They seem really important.”
He swallowed a bite of salad. “The rings are the betrothal part of the ceremony, the intent to marry. The part that actually married us was the crowning, when the other priest placed the crowns upon us, and the priest blessed us, and then we followed him around the altar. The crowns are remnants of the royal wedding service from the court of Byzantium and symbolize martyrdom, each of us dying to the self for the sake of the spouse, and we are reborn together as the king and queen of the church of our home.”
Nicolai’s voice had softened as he spoke, becoming more thoughtful, almost wistful, and he blinked a few times.
“That’s—that’s really beautiful,” I blurted. Jimmy’s church had made marriage sound more like buying the cow to get the milk, usually with a diatribe about “predatory males” who stalked young women and ruined them.