Chapter 10
conference with clementine
LEXI
When the ladies’ room door closed behind Clementine and myself, the almost-painful volume of the stomping techno beats fell by several orders of magnitude.
I sucked in a deep breath because my lungs were no longer thumping in four-four time. “Wow, that music is loud out there, huh?”
Clementine was slapping open the stall doors and craning her neck, even shoving aside a plastic curtain to look into the small shower in the very back.
She must’ve been satisfied we were alone, because she stormed back, reaching for an earring in an upper piercing of her left ear.
“You met Nico literally yesterday and married him right off, didn’t you? ”
“Yeah,” I admitted. Clementine was not to be trifled with.
“Take off those ridiculous earrings. No one will believe you are who you say you are with those cheap hoops on. And let me see those halfway decent rings he finally got you.”
I complied. Quickly.
She held her hand out for my silver hoops, smacking them onto the sink counter beside us while she handed me her diamond earrings that were so large I felt their weight like a handful of rocks.
When I offered my left hand, she seized it and inspected the wedding ring set on my finger, turning the diamonds in the light. “Better. They’re Graff, right?”
Yeah, she would have detected white sapphires in a hot minute. “That was the name on the boxes.”
“Graff was probably the best he could do on short notice. Nico should have gotten you something bespoke or storied, but those will do.”
“Oh, but I don’t need something flashy—”
Clementine made that little chirping zip or nope sound she’d made in the car, the one that meant you were done talking.
“Put those earrings in, right now. If you had been dating Nico for years, he would have been buying you jewelry all this time, and you would have decent pieces to wear tonight. Otherwise, it means he never told you who he was all that time, which is impossible. If that had been the case, he would’ve crowed to us all these years about how he was deceiving an ignorant peasant woman, and we would’ve had quite the laugh about it. ”
I swiveled the posts of Clementine’s enormous earrings into my earlobe holes while she talked. “That doesn’t sound very nice. Would Nicolai have done something like that, dated someone for years without ever telling them about why he rides around with security guards?”
Clementine shrugged. “We’ve all been slumming at some point, pretending to be of the common people and looking for a ‘soulmate’ who would love us for our sparkling personalities and pure souls.
It turns out, we have neither of those. Either we find a gold digger who will love us for our money and then lord it over them until they can’t take it any longer, or else we marry each other.
At least we know what we’re getting into when we marry each other. ”
That was dark. “I’m not digging for dirt about Nicolai’s exes, but he mentioned that he dated someone kind of seriously a few years back. He didn’t lie to her about who he was, right?”
Clementine ducked her chin and looked up at me from under her lashes, essentially rolling her eyes at me.
“That was Hanna. The woman we all thought he was serious about was Lady Hannelore Morrit, the second daughter of the current Earl Savernake. It would’ve been quite a coup for either one of them, depending on who you asked.
They dated for years, well over two, nearly three, if I remember correctly. ”
I flinched. “Wow, that’s a while.”
“Hanna said she let it go on too long. She knew after a year that they weren’t right together. Too alike. But she said the D was so good that she just couldn’t let him go.”
“Oh. Wow.” I didn’t want to know what Nicolai’s previous conquests thought about his D. “TMI, maybe?”
“Hanna said Nico had a magic dick. She said she came so hard and so many times that she was worried about cumulative brain damage. He actually knocked her unconscious once, she screamed so hard.”
I literally took a step backward. “Oh, wow. We don’t need to specify—”
“She said it was like she had tetanus, every muscle in her body locked up so tight she couldn’t inhale.”
“Clementine, I am begging you—”
“After they broke up, I wished I weren’t quite so closely related to him. Might have been interesting to take that for a spin.”
Hearing all this sex stuff was more than I could handle. I might give myself a migraine if I heard any more, so I slapped my hands over my ears. “Please, stop!”
Clementine leaned back and looked me up and down like she was appraising my dress again. “Too much?”
“Maybe a little!”
“Fine. I’ll try to be a bit more cognizant of your middle-class sensibilities.”
Little did Clementine know that the middle class would be a promotion for me. I was pretty sure my single-mother mom had been solidly impoverished when I was a kid. “Anyway, my question was, he and Hanna broke up before this week, right?”
“Oh God, yes. Hanna married Lewis Isaacs, the Earl of Zetland, last summer. Nico went to their wedding. It looked amicable, but he always looks amicable. So terribly civilized. Did he really get so wasted last night that he proposed and married you in one breath?”
Clementine had obviously figured out which story was the real one. Lying to her face when she had saved our butts at least three times that day felt immoral. “It wasn’t quite like that. Have you heard about what’s going on with this guy Volkov?”
Clementine’s face went even more blank, and she stepped back, looking down at my shoes and then back up to my eyes. “You’re connected with Demyan Volkov?”
“No. No, of course not. I am literally an unemployed HR admin from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. I am nobody.”
Her sharp gray-blue eyes scrutinized me. “You’re sure?”
“I worked at a construction company since I graduated from high school. In Nebraska. There’s no way I’ve ever met a Russian mobster.
Or any Russians, ever, come to think of it.
The town is literally called Scottsbluff.
Everyone is descended from Scottish and English people.
I was kind of exotic with my Irish last name. ”
Clementine seemed to be a little less freaked out after my denials. “So why did Nico marry, and I’m sorry to phrase it quite like this, but why would Nicolai marry someone who was literally a stranger off the street?”
Yeah, it wasn’t like he’d actually wanted me. “Because if Nicolai is married already, he can’t marry someone else. Volkov wouldn’t leave him alone about marrying his daughter because he wanted to use Nicolai’s connections, like in a Jane Austen book.”
Clementine’s blue-gray eyes stayed wide, though she kept blinking and staring at the sinks off to the side. “And he thought that would dissuade Demyan Volkov?”
“I didn’t know what’s going on between him and this Volkov guy.
My plan was to keep Nicolai from walking into traffic last night, because he almost did that, and to humor him until he sobered up.
I refused to even sign that marriage license until he was in his right mind this morning.
I didn’t legally marry him while he was drunk. ”
One of Clementine’s eyebrows pressed down a fraction of an inch as she finally looked up and into my eyes. “Yes, but I saw the video. You married him in a Russian Orthodox church.”
“That was his idea. I would’ve gone for an Elvis because I thought it was all a lark.
I did not understand the importance of that church to him.
I would never have guessed that he was so religious, though the fact that he was so insistent about the church being Russian Orthodox should have clued me in,” I grumbled.
Clementine gaped at me. Yes, actually gaped. “Nico wanted the ceremony to be Russian Ortho?”
“I was baptized an evangelical Christian, so the Orthodox priest had to re-baptize me and put the chrism oil on me and everything before he’d even do the wedding.”
She turned away, leaning her backside against the sink countertop and staring off into the distance beyond the toilet stalls, and covered her mouth with her hand. “You converted. My God. Nico really fucked up.”
“I guess Nicolai was slumming like you said last night, because he didn’t even mention that he had family connections to Russia until this morning.”
Her lips parted slightly as she spun to stare at me, her eyes incrementally wider than before. Clementine expressed her emotions through her body language, rather than her face. “He didn’t tell you that he is the hereditary tsar of Russia until after you’d married him?”
“He mentioned it this morning before we signed the license to make it official. He wasn’t in any shape last night to check things off a list, or really this morning, either. I mean, last night, I was just trying to keep a thoroughly drunk guy from getting robbed and left in the desert for dead.”
Clementine stared at me like my life was the weird one. “But he was a stranger. A drunken stranger.”
“And he made a complete drunken spectacle of himself,” I laughed.
“A lot of the people on that street wanted to take advantage of him and, I mean, they wanted to do awful things to him. They would’ve dragged him to an ATM and emptied his bank accounts.
They would’ve stolen his credit cards and run up a crazy balance.
And worse. He might’ve woken up with baby mamas or a gay OnlyFans this morning. I couldn’t let that happen to someone.”
“And you took care of him, made sure no one did something awful to him, and married him to keep him from being taken advantage of. You married a drunk stranger for his sake.”
“I humored a drunk smokeshow to keep him safe.”
“Yes, well, I guess Nico is rather good-looking,” Clementine muttered, half to herself. “That could explain some of it.”
“I thought we’d tear up the unsigned marriage license this morning, and I’d never see him again. I didn’t think I was going to get stuck with him.”