Chapter 16 Jimmy in the Casino
jimmy in the casino
LEXI
Nicolai and I worked the balcony VIP area of the nightclub one more time, glad-handing a quick circuit to inform his childhood friends we were leaving for the night.
The circuit took over an hour as I hung on his arm. He flinched away from every group several times before they let him go.
History shaded Nicolai’s conversations with them. Most of the people he talked to, way over half of them, saw him and relaxed their shoulders, leaned in, faces softened in an unforced smile or a grin, a step toward him with their hand extended for his hand, arm, or shoulder.
Yet he seemed cool to everyone, almost aloof, nearly alone in the crowd.
Except his arm stayed around my waist, gently securing me against his side.
The press of his body against mine for hours was almost overwhelming. I liked it.
Heckers, I loved it. I could come to crave it.
But I wasn’t used to a man’s body in constant contact with mine, even through the fine fabric of his suit, even through the thick silk of my dress.
His touch didn’t feel gross. It didn’t feel like having sex in public.
That restrained public display of affection wasn’t crass.
The weight of his hand resting near my waist comforted me, standing in this crowd where I knew no one, where everyone we met examined me, where people might be talking about me behind my back.
His unwavering physical support steadied my ankles in my strappy high-heeled shoes, protected me from the hands or even too-close gazes of other men, included me in his circles of friends, warmed me when the air conditioning vents blasted arctic-dry wind onto my neck, and reminded me of his strength and presence every second of every minute in that loud, crowded nightclub.
Ottalie, Charlotte, and Poppy seemed to be hiding somewhere else, which was fine. If they’d tried to rub themselves on Nicolai like stray cats to mark their territory or peed on his foot, I’m not sure how grown-up I could have reacted.
I might have been a little jealous, if I’d known him longer than a day, of those beautiful, slim women leading with their chins to kiss both his cheeks, who’d obviously kissed him hello for decades, until he tilted his head to the side to catch their eye and told them he was on his way out.
Nicolai was still a little reserved and quiet, watching. That ebullient man who’d spilled his heart in the church to me, or wherever those vows had come from, was so different from how he seemed with other people, even his friends, even his brother.
He was a little more sarcastic, a bit more jaded, a shark streak of bored worldliness running through everything he said.
And he watched.
When questions rose in their eyes and reaching hands, he brushed them off and drew me in to acquaint me with his friends.
His hands swept over my palms and bare arms as he included me in conversations and told people that they would see both of us later in the month at the races in London and at John’s wedding at the Royal Palace of Madrid.
His assurances sounded like I was a permanent fixture, not just a wife for a year, but the plan was to make us look real.
Nicolai looked very real.
I stayed at his side, smiling and telling people how great it had been to meet them while his hand casually rested on my waist.
No more talk of fae lords or shadow daddies. I was done being the paranoid weirdo.
It was a lot, though. It had been a day.
For that matter, it had been a week.
Just one week ago, I’d been packing up the last of my kitchen utensils and the airbed in my apartment in Scottsbluff and moving them to Jimmy’s house or to storage for after our wedding.
I’d been happy and excited and settled on the rest of my life, maybe someday teaching Sunday school at Jimmy’s family’s evangelical church.
And now I was a small fish swimming in dangerous waters, smiling and making small talk with the hammerheads and tiger sharks.
Finally, Nicolai tapped his phone screen a few times, whispered into it, and then frowned, turning to me. “Ueli says the cars will wait for us at the front entrance. He doesn’t like the look of the underground garage.”
Unease soured my stomach. “What does that mean?”
He flexed his shoulders and looked over the heads of the crowd like he was searching for something.
“Usually, it means someone else’s security team are being assholes and blocking escape routes.
It’s not altogether unusual.” He spoke into his phone.
“Don’t send a team. We’ll meet you at the front entrance. ”
“I don’t think Ueli’s going to like that.”
“Being led through the casino by a security team parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea is more conspicuous than the two of us calmly walking out the main entrance. Anyone with intent would watch for a commotion and a team, not the two of us unobtrusively moving through the crowd.”
His phone in his hand lit up again and again.
Nicolai smiled at me. “It’ll be fine. It’s been a decade since I walked through the main floor of a Las Vegas casino. This should be trashy.”
It was trashy.
Lights strobed over the banks upon banks of slot machines, crowds milling around in their nylon shorts, tee shirts, and baseball caps while rattling plastic cups holding their poker chips.
Nicolai grasped one of my hands and kept his other palm firmly on my back as we paced through the crowd, wending through the tall hedges of noisy slot machines.
People and more people flooded the cavernous space, roiling between the banks of slot machines that broke football field-sized rooms into rabbit-warren mazes.
We followed rope-bounded paths marked on the carpeting designed to confuse us, to lead us into other gambling hells instead of the exit, while crowds chattered and cheered and lost their clanking money over the constant jangling, flashing, ringing, blinking, blaring, glaring, honking, strobing, trilling, blazing, screaming slot machines.
Nicolai hurried us through the crowd, both his hands still on me, watching the people scurrying around us, alert, while I tried to hold my ankles firm lest I fall off my wobbly high heels and sprawl on the ground-down carpet.
We broke out of a slot machine cave into a high-ceilinged main room packed with roulette and craps tables. The fire hose of people crowding from the main aisle splashed against the grid of gambling tables and eddied to trickle through the rows between them.
As Nicolai shepherded me through the crowd of people’s backs turned toward us, as I skimmed past clattering dice and spinning wheels and money flowing toward the dealers and scanned the gamblers and watchers, a too-familiar male face popped out of the crowd as if it were a spring-loaded mask.
Oh, no.
At a craps table, more faces resolved around Jimmy my-freakin’-ex-fiancé Johnson.
His sisters, his mom, and my previous friends clustered around where he held two dice and leaned over the hopscotch tree marked on the table’s green felt.
And her.
The flywheels of my brain crashed together.
Acid scoured my throat.
I dragged the toe of my new strappy sandal on the carpeting and nearly flopped to the floor on my face. Only my hand tucked through Nicolai’s elbow saved me from an instant flailing swan dive.
Nicolai caught me around my waist and set me on my feet. The crowd parted and flowed around us, but Nicolai’s strong arms kept me from being bobbled.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” I choked out, but I couldn’t look away from them.
I was gaping.
I knew I was gaping like I was being strangled, but my mouth dropped open as I gasped for air.
Nicolai’s voice softened. “Lexi, what’s going on?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Nothing. Let’s go.”
He followed my line of sight to where Jimmy stood at the end of a craps table fidgeting with a very short stack of poker chips in his palm, standing with her and surrounded and supported by his whole family, everyone I’d loved.
Jimmy’s plaid cargo shorts matched her plaid cargo shorts, and their shirts had something to do with a university engineering club.
“Is that—is that the fool?” Nicolai whispered near my ear.
My lungs were full of razor blades as I tried to breathe. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even croak.
“That’s the fool, isn’t it?” Nicolai demanded.
Shakes started in my ankles and then rattled my whole body. “His name is Jimmy.”
“That’s what left you at the altar?” he muttered to me.
Terrified shakes rattled my body and flopped my head as if I were nodding.
“Seems like you traded up,” Nicolai whispered.
My pathetic attempt at laughing turned into a snort and a sniffle. “Let’s just go.”
But my feet didn’t pull up from where the soles of my shoes seemed gum-stuck to the flat carpeting.
“They don’t look particularly fashionable,” Nicolai said, his voice low like he was musing about it.
That was a hell of an understatement. “They’re engineers.”
“How industrious of them. Perhaps I’ll buy the company he works for and fire him.”
Nicolai’s snark broke the horror logjam in my head, and I snickered a little.
Before I could even figure out what Nicolai was doing, he reversed his hold on my hand and turned my wrist, spinning me to face him.
I was instantly off-balance, falling sideways as my weight went over the side of my high-heeled sandal, but Nicolai’s strong forearm behind my back gathered me against his chest before my ankle even tweaked.
As close as he’d held me all evening, this full-frontal embrace from toes to nose, my thighs pressing against his legs, my chest smushed against his suit, was more.
Jimmy looked up from his poker chips in his palm, twisting his head to look for the motion that had caught his eye, and he saw me.
Nicolai’s gaze dropped to my lips and then back up to pour into my eyes. He announced to everyone around us, “Have I told you this hour how much I absolutely adore you, Mrs. Romanov?”