Chapter 9 #2
My skin felt every stitch of the dress I was wearing, and the bustline seemed tight all of a sudden.
My horizons were expanding like a nuclear blast front.
The women were right there, so close they were almost rubbing up against me.
One astoundingly beautiful woman in an aqua-beaded gown ran her finger over my hand that held my champagne glass and looked me in the eyes, her dark eyes limpid as she watched me. “You’re Nicolai’s wife, are you?”
“Yeah,” I said, entranced.
“Pity,” and she moved into the crowd.
I didn’t know whether it was a pity that he was married or I was, but I was kind of hoping it was the latter.
There were a lot of stunningly gorgeous guys standing around me, Nicolai’s friends from school.
A why-choose number of men.
Okay, I would never. I’d never even thought about guys, multiple guys, at one time. Or even serially, like dating a gaggle of boyfriends.
Preferably, who were also boyfriends.
I read a lot of spicy books. Like, a lot of them. Sometimes my brain pattern-matched those spicy books with circumstances in the real world, but that was silly.
Jimmy had asked me out for the first time when I’d been fifteen.
That had been the end of my choices.
And my spicy times.
But Nicolai had every intention of divorcing and annulling me within a year.
Why shouldn’t I look around for another relationship in this cohort of extraordinarily wealthy people? My mother had always told me it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it was a poor one.
Not that she’d ever been in a relationship with a rich man, just my deadbeat dad and then Gerry, who at least had a job.
There was no reason that I shouldn’t look around and examine my options.
My fake marriage to Nicolai didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered.
Nicolai reached over and gently placed his hand on my lower back, steadying me, because I hadn’t even realized that I had begun to sway on the tan-leather high-heeled sandals squeezing my toes.
I settled like a dove ceasing its fluttering.
His hand warmed my back, holding me, and a soft smile curved his lips higher on one side, like he had a secret.
His shoulders relaxed as his fingertips touched the silk of my dress, caressing my skin through the material.
His posture was casual, yet he turned toward me, as if something about me drew him in.
When he glanced down at me, his smile lifted just a little more.
Nicolai was more relaxed than when he’d been arguing with his brother or the security guys, but he still wasn’t the buoyant man who’d locked his eyes on mine last night in the church. His steely posture was still wary, a rigidity deep in his muscles.
I leaned more on one leg as we faced his friends, shifting myself just slightly toward Nico.
His hand slipped farther around my waist, gently tugging me against his side.
I rested against his strength. His arm wrapping me felt calming, comforting.
His gesture was probably just for show.
John was frowning hard as he continued to examine Nicolai and cast furtive glances at me. “But you seemed distraught when you called me this morning. You said you’d fucked up your life on a goddamn whim,” he accused.
Clementine squinted, her focus like a dagger pointed at Nicolai. She’d even stopped jiggling her cut-crystal highball glass filled with clear carbonated something. It listed at a diagonal, frozen in her sudden stillness, but didn’t spill.
“But I was completely trolleyed last night,” Nicolai said, like he was explaining the facts of life to a confused teenager.
“Obviously.”
“And I awoke with a head full of wasps this morning, even though Lexi poured water down my throat last night in a desperate attempt to keep me alive.” He smiled down at me, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“She even had ginger ale and aspirin at the ready when we woke up, for I was desperately in need of them.”
Getting a can of ginger ale and a bottle of off-brand ibuprofen out of my car to take up to the room with us had impressed Nicolai a lot more than it should’ve.
John’s eyes flicked back and forth from Nicolai to where I stood.
He gestured between us, obviously caring not at all about hangover cures.
“You show up after a night of drunken carousing in Las Vegas with a wife whom none of us have ever met before, and you don’t think it’s just a little weird?
You don’t think I’m going to have a few questions about how you lost the plot on the phone with me this morning? ”
“I may have changed some facts in my hungover state merely for the chaos of it,” Nicolai told him.
John rocked back on his heels. “You don’t do anything for the chaos of it. You’re the most orderly, lawful person of our generation. You’ve never met a rule you didn’t want to follow.”
Was he talking about my Nicolai? The one who’d proposed to a stranger on both knees, the one who’d dragged me to the county records office and then to his church, the one who’d kissed the stuffing out of me in front of a priest and then carried me out of said church?
I’d had no idea.
Nicolai shrugged. “Yes, but I was speaking with God on the great white phone this morning just before you called me back. Anything I said is entirely suspect.”
Clementine hadn’t taken her eyes off him, evaluating his every word and twitch of his broad shoulders under his suit.
His fingers flexed on my back, trailing up my spine and skimming my bare skin where a few of his fingertips rested above the backline of the silk copper dress.
He toyed with the ribbon of the spaghetti strap hanging over my shoulder blade.
My skin fluttered under his touch.
Everybody else clustered around us was frowning as they looked back and forth between John and Nicolai, clearly confused about what to believe.
“I was just kidding around,” Nicolai told John, rolling his eyes and looking off toward the bar. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“You, make a joke?” John grabbed his elbow and stared, horrified, into Nicolai’s eyes. “Who are you, and what have you done with my friend Nico?”
Nicolai plucked a champagne flute off a passing waiter’s tray.
“Allow me to be more clear, John. Would I, Nicolai Petrovich Romanov, your school chum of over two decades, the person who petitioned Le Rosey to offer a fifth-year Latin elective, ever do something as impetuous and romantic as drunkenly marrying a stranger in Las Vegas?”
John Bourbon sucked a long sip out of his glass, scrutinizing Nicolai with squinted dark eyes the whole time.
Nicolai continued, “Or does it make more sense that I, of all people, was able to methodically, consistently, meticulously keep the secret of a covert girlfriend?”
John examined Nicolai for a few more seconds, evaluating whatever he saw in Nicolai’s clear blue eyes in the scintillating strobe lights from the whipping rings of the kinetic chandelier.
He turned and raised his glass. “To Nico’s secret wife!”
Just beyond where John stood, Clementine was still watching the three of us with narrowed eyes. When her gaze caught mine, she tilted her head and, I swear to God, laser-scanned me again like she was taking the measure of my heart.
“Lexi, let’s go to the ladies’ room,” she announced.
She didn’t believe Nicolai’s story in the slightest. I started to turn to warn him.
Clementine snatched my hand from my side and tugged me after her, my white beaded reception bag dangling from my wrist.
I lost my grip on Nicolai’s arm. He grabbed after me but missed, and then he peered over the crowd, trying to watch us, but Clementine dodged and wove through clusters and knots of people, towing me in her wake like I was waterskiing out of control.
I waved him off.
If I couldn’t handle questions from someone I knew and liked like Clementine, this ruse wasn’t going to work for a whole year.