Chapter 25 #2
And then he cracked up laughing so hard that he grabbed his stomach and rolled out from under my head, away from me, onto his side. “No!”
“Well, it’s not impossible you meant that,” I defended myself.
“That’s not what I—” He gasped for air through his guffaws. “Dear God, Lexi! No! I swear to God, I was not suggesting that you skip all the delights of lovemaking and go straight to—to—I can’t even say it.” He contracted, wringing another peal of laughter from his gut. “No, I didn’t mean anal!”
It wasn’t that funny. “Well, some of the girls in my church youth group said that their virginity was sacred, and that’s why they only took it in the behind.”
Nicolai laughed harder, his head curled almost to his chest as he wrapped his arms around his ribs, sucking air and giggling while he laughed.
“No, really. It’s, like, a thing.” I cringed. “And then there was the outbreak of butt chlamydia last year.”
Nicolai lost it.
He threw his head back and laughed so hard, so long, that his abs were contracted so tightly that they looked painful, and when he finally gasped, he snorted.
Hard.
And then he looked at me over his thick shoulder, his eyes still crinkled with mirth but his hand over his mouth in chagrin. “Oh, how uncultured. I apolo—”
But he couldn’t even finish the word before his giggles broke through and he cracked right back up.
“Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny,” I snarked at him.
“It’s only funny because it can be cured with antibiotics, but it is funny.” Nicolai braced both his hands on the bed and panted through his mouth like he’d sprinted so hard he’d fallen to his hands and knees. “Sometimes I forget how deeply weird Americans are.”
“Oh, so, your European teenagers are so sophisticated that head-memes never take root and run through a population?”
“Evidently, not like an epidemic of butt chlamydia.” He got the giggles again.
“Dude, they were idiots.”
“Well, I don’t believe any of my boarding school friends would have believed that limiting oneself to anal sex maintains one’s moral purity.
” He was still panting a little. “Our health education system is better than that. Some people consider their unbreached ass to be their second virginity, but no one thinks only anal keeps one as pure as the driven snow.” His shoulders and stomach twitched, like something had shaken him.
His glance at me held straight-up fear. “You didn’t think that, did you? ”
“No!”
I hadn’t. I wouldn’t’ve. I’d tried to talk them out of it. And my vehemence must have convinced him.
“All right. Good,” he said. “Not that it would have been a problem. Not that it’s any of my business. I just wouldn’t want you to have been hurt, or abused, or so sadly misinformed.”
“They were just trying to balance their values with what their boyfriends were pressuring them for.”
His head dropped to the side, and his ribs ballooned and collapsed with a sigh. “And that’s where it becomes tragic.” He turned to look out the window, probably checking for dawn.
Outside, the Strip still sparkled beneath an ink-poured sky.
Nicolai glanced at the silvery-metal watch still on his wrist, even though he was shirtless. “It’s late. Let’s get you cleaned up and perhaps salvage some sleep before Clemmy swans in like the Duchess of Do-My-Bidding.”
Nicolai rolled off the bed with a muscular movement like a martial arts master pivoting under an attack, graceful and yet strong.
And then I nakedly flopped and flailed over to the edge and slithered off the mattress with the poise of an octopus falling out of a tree.
Nicolai was right there, holding out his hand.
“But we haven’t even negotiated the contract,” I wheedled.
“Lexi, come.”
“Okay.” I grabbed his fingers.
The iron rail of his arm steadied me, and I didn’t fall. Fatigue drifted in sunset-tinged clouds in my head.
When I looked up at him, he was smiling down at me. “Let’s go.”
I padded into the bathroom after Nicolai, where he was already tapping a screen embedded in the marble-clad wall outside the shower stall that was as big as the whole bathroom in our tiny hotel room at Caesars the night before.
He was still wearing pants. And a belt. Like a normal adult.
I, however, was buff-naked.
I grabbed a towel from the folded pile and shook it out so I could kind of hang it over my swimsuit parts in front.
Water roared out of the showerhead in a solid torrent, and steam rose toward the ceiling and hung there. Nicolai tapped a few buttons on the screen and adjusted some sliders that moved like volume controls.
Just before I grabbed the shower door handle to open it up, Nikolai clasped my hand, raised it above my head, and spun me like a ballroom dancer.
I ended up with my bare backside pressed against the cold marble, and Nicolai pinning my hand above me to the wall while leaning in to stare down at me. “It’s been quite a day, hasn’t it?”
I clutched that towel. “Do you mean because I woke up this morning married to a guy I fully intended to ditch, but then somehow ended up with all this going on? Because, yeah, it’s been a heck of a day.”
A bit of a smile ghosted across his mouth, and he leaned down and kissed me, a slow, succulent kiss that tingled and soothed me all the way to the tips of my toes.
My fingers snarled in the loosened towel.
Then he kissed me more lightly, and then lighter still, then at the top of my forehead, and then he straightened. “Then go shower, little angel. We’ll save some things for tomorrow.”
I was way, way too interested in what those other things were. “But not the contract. We need to talk about the contract tonight.”
“Shower. Now.”
As I trembled under his arm, I was so absolutely exhausted that my legs were filled with noodles. With his massive, muscular body looming over me, I yawned.
It was a surprise yawn that snuck up on me, and I over-yawned with my whole face. I must’ve looked like a snake dislocating its jaw to eat something much bigger than its head, like a goat.
When my nose and upper lip got out of the way so I could see again, Nicolai’s gentle smile had turned into something more amused. “We can end evenings earlier if you’re tired.”
“Oh, no. I’m okay. I’ve been staying up late at night a lot lately.” Because sleeping in my car when it was dark outside had been too dangerous. “Hey, we finished the wedding ceremony right about three a.m. last night. We’ve been married for a whole day.”
Nicolai took my left hand in his and lifted it. The brush of his lips over my knuckles near our wedding rings was gentle, but his bright blue eyes were trained on mine the whole time. “Well then, happy twenty-four-hour anniversary, Mrs. Romanov.”
After what had happened in the car, and in the bed, standing in the misty steam with him kissing my knuckles seemed too serious. “One down, three hundred sixty-four days to go, huh?”
He turned my hand over and kissed the underside of my wrist, then looked up at me with those crystal-blue eyes of his. “That’s the plan. Three hundred sixty-four to go.”