Chapter 5 New Rings #2
“Yes, it’s a sacrament. Sacraments fundamentally change one’s soul.”
“Okay, I guess.” I tried not to sound disappointed about the rings.
“I ordered new rings while we were with Clemmy, and they arrived. If it hadn’t been so sudden, I would have had you pick out something you liked. I’d always thought about designing a ring for my wife when I married, if I ever married. Nevertheless, circumstances dictated a change in strategy.”
“Kostya said you didn’t want to get married.”
He shrugged. “One should always consider alternative avenues in life. Keeps one on one’s toes.”
Defeat made my whole body sag downward. “I don’t want you to spend a lot of money when this isn’t even real.”
“We must make it look real.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be a real diamond, at least. White sapphires look just as good. A friend of mine got white sapphires for her set, and the whole thing was only a couple of hundred dollars instead of diamond prices.”
Nicolai paused, holding his fork with a bite of steak on it. “The people we will be interacting with tonight can grade a diamond from ten feet away. If I provided anything less than an absolutely exquisite ring for my wife, they would know something was amiss.”
“Do you really care what people like that say?”
“For the sake of cattiness? Not at all. I’ve given them plenty to talk about over the years.” His mouth may have smirked in a rueful half-smile, but his blue eyes flicked up with a touch of mischief. “However, the point of this ruse is to divert Demyan Volkov.”
Demyan Volkov’s threat to marry his mafia-princess daughter to Nicolai was the whole reason Nicolai had fallen at my feet last night and bribed me to sign the marriage license that morning. “Yeah, that guy.”
“If people start whispering that our marriage doesn’t look real, it isn’t going to work.”
“Yeah, but you can’t marry anyone else until you get a divorce and that annulment, right?
” I forked some potatoes into my mouth and swallowed them because the creamy mash didn’t need chewing.
“I mean, that’s the law of the state and church.
Actually, we can just pretend for a few months before we divorce and go our separate ways and live separate lives, and then you can delay the annulment for as long as you want.
It’s fine with me. Heck, you can delay the annulment for years, until you find someone else to marry, if you want.
I think I’m done with men and marriage.”
His face didn’t move when I said that, like I’d missed something.
Oh, jeez. I was screwing it up. He was going to annul our marriage right away and kick me out, and then I’d be living in my car again.
My heart seized like a dry engine, which was dumb of me because I’d known this guy for less than twenty-four hours. He wasn’t even my friend, let alone anything more.
“Unless there’s someone else you’d rather be married to right now?” I ventured.
The quick compression of his eyelids and lips as he shook his head spoke volumes about how stupid I was being. “There’s no one else in my life. I dated a woman for a few years, but we separated about two years ago. I never felt there was a rush to be married, if ever.”
Hey, let’s imagine I said something stupid. What do you think it would be?
And what do you think would be worse than that?
Oh, yeah. I didn’t even think, and I asked him, “Yeah, but you’re almost thirty, right?”
His sharp glance nearly lasered me to death and left nothing but burned ashes. “And?”
Oh, but I didn’t stop there. Not me, nope. “Well, you know, you don’t want to have kids too late in life. You want to be able to chase them around and stuff.”
His head tilted like he’d clicked one notch on a flywheel. “I’m not fifty. Or sixty.”
And that, that, was when I realized I’d called him old.
“Never mind!” I choked out. “My head sometimes comes up with weird stuff that my mouth doesn’t filter right. I didn’t mean anything by it. Nothing at all. Let’s pretend I didn’t say it.”
Oh my God, I wanted to crawl under my chair and rock myself.
“Perfectly fine.” Nicolai was staring at a bite of steak on the end of his fork like it might lodge in his arteries. “No offense taken.”
I ate the rest of my supper while he ate his wide, shallow dish of salad, leaving the remaining red meat on the side.
He announced he should shave and get ready for the party, and then asked, his words slightly delayed as if he was hesitating, “Would you like to see the rings?”
“It’s really important to switch them out, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Okay, then. Thanks? I’m sure they’re nice.”
I followed him into the suite’s bedroom, where the shiny black bag stood on the bed. Nicolai upended it. Two black leather boxes tumbled out like blocks.
He opened one, checked it, and presented the other box to me. “Here’s yours.”
The box felt, in my hand, like the soft leather of the chair with the lamp and reading table where Konstantin had been sitting. The clasp and edging of the box were gold.
When I opened it, the blazing diamond rings inside threw spangles over the room like a glitter bomb. “Wow.”
A clear central diamond the size of my thumbnail was ringed with yet more diamonds, and the bands of the engagement ring and the wedding ring were encased in diamonds that were each a quarter-inch tall all the way around. “Holy cow! Nicolai!”
My words trailed away.
He was standing in front of me, holding another ring box. “Do you not like them?”
“They’re beautiful, but you really didn’t need to buy new rings, let alone anything like these. It’s silly that I’m sentimental, but just swapping them out and trashing the old rings like they mean nothing seems wrong.”
“We’re not merely exchanging the rings. The only bad decision I made last night was buying pawn shop wedding rings for you.” His eyebrows flinched downward. “You deserve better.”
“They’re just sparkly rocks with metal hammered around them.
The price doesn’t matter, not for these amazing, gorgeous, astounding, blindingly beautiful ones and not for these ones that we got from the pawn shop last night.
” I wrenched the pawned wedding set from my hand and held it out to him in my palm.
“What matters is that these are the rings the priest blessed. These are the rings we married each other with. These are the ones you put on my finger when you said—” My nose felt like I’d sniffed paint thinner. “You said—”
Nicolai stepped toward me and lifted my chin with one knuckle, his smile crinkling the corners of his true-blue eyes. “Oh, that’s it.”
“I’m sorry. I guess it’s sentimental. I don’t mean to cause a fuss.”
“I have an idea. Get dressed for John’s party. We’ll make a quick stop on the way.”
Considering that my makeup and hair had already been done by someone else, shimmying into the foundation garments and copper dress should have taken me only a few minutes.
When I thought of foundation garments, like Clementine had said, I thought of my grandmother’s support bra, a mechanical marvel to rival a circus tent’s steel cables and pulleys, made of white elastic straps and thick canvas panels.
But the black satin bustier, tucked into the garment bag’s side pocket, was delicately whaleboned all the way from under my bustline to over my hips, and included matching panties.
It wasn’t like my grandma’s at all.
It was . . . kinda sexy, in a black-lingerie way, but not trashy.
Maybe Clementine was trying to do Nicolai a solid.
Just sayin’.
I wiggled and hooked my way into the lingerie and then the dress, still surprised at how much better expensive clothes looked on my lumpy torso than my usual Johnson Construction company-logo shirts and cheap wrinkly chinos.
The dress had been retrofitted with spaghetti straps that tied at my shoulders, an easy way to tailor the dress to my exact shoulder height, I supposed.
I tied the spaghetti-strap ribbons into pretty little bows.
The garment bag even produced matching strappy sandals in my correct size.
That luggage piece was like a magic chest that produced whatever I needed.
LOL, a magic garment bag. That would be awesome.
The thick-fabric garment bag had nothing else in its pockets except the ironclad underwear, the custom designer dress, and the shoes.
No jewelry. No purse.
I was aware that I needed those.
So it wasn’t magic. Too bad.
Luckily, I still had the big hoop earrings I’d been wearing for my wedding and busking, so I poked those through my lobes. They were silver-plated, so they would be fine.
The purse was more of a problem.
The fake pleather on my saddle-stitched everyday handbag was flaking from use, the underlying threads showing through.
My frayed backpack was just totally wrong in every single way.
My reception bag, a white-beaded satchel with a wrist strap for the checks and cash that people were supposed to have given me at my wedding reception, just happened to be in my gym bag, thank all the heavens and the stars.
I dumped my phone and wallet into the silly little white bucket bag.
Good enough.
At least my wedding mani-pedi still looked decent. At any other time in my life, if a prince had swept me off my feet, my hands and toes would’ve looked so rough that there would be no way I could pass at a high-society party.
Or a ball.
But this wasn’t a ball.
Was it?
When I came out of the bathroom, tugging the dress’s minutely tailored seams over my boobs and hips, Nicolai looked up from where one of the housekeeping staff ladies was inserting his cufflinks for him.
His gaze scanning down my body didn’t feel like Clementine’s laser beam taking measurements, but a caress, and his slow blink before he met my eyes looked too much like desire.
He cleared his throat before muttering, “You look amazing.”