Chapter 29
the next morning
LEXI
The bedroom in the Billionaire Sanctuary hotel room drifted in and out focus as my eyelids dropped darkness over the blazing white paint and swaths of royal blue carpet.
I squinted, trying to wake up.
The open bathroom door resolved into lines and then a dark gap in the sunlit wall.
The bedsheets brushed softly against my legs and arms as I struggled in the tangles. The chandelier’s unlit candelabra bulbs and limp crystals wandered across the ceiling as I rolled over.
Nicolai was lying on his back, his head elevated on the pillow, staring at the blank expanse of ceiling above the bed.
“Hey,” I said, still sleepy, my whole body languid and flowing over the sheets like molasses.
His masculine voice was lower, rough with sleep but as flat a dial tone. “I’m divorcing you. Get out.”
Sharp shock scraped the fuzz of sleep off my skin. “What?”
“We’re done,” he said. “Pack and get out.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nicolai!” My throat squeezed the cry into a soft wail, as pitiful and stupid a sound as when I’d been weeping in front of the altar at my wedding.
But I stopped, choking the begging and sadness right back down my throat into my chest and my stomach.
Nothing mattered.
Yeah, I’d almost crawled out of the friendless, destitute spider hole I was in, but Nicolai changed his mind.
Of all the capricious, cruel things he could have done, Nicolai had chosen to chuck me out first thing in the morning, after—
Yeah, after.
Figured.
He hadn’t even looked at me, just announced that it was over.
I struggled harder in the sheets, pushing with my arms until I was sitting up.
Nicolai still stared at the ceiling where the morning’s desert sunlight reflected from the wide windows, blasting the room like a screen that was watching us.
His body under the covers was straight and still, his arms folded over the sheet and furry blanket, pressing his phone face-down to his chest.
The wrongness of every single thing he’d said, the stillness of his body under the sheets like a corpse in a too-tight coffin, the way he stared at the ceiling like ghosts swarmed in the morning sun, clicked in my head.
“Baloney,” I said, putting real vehemence into it while I struggled, snarling my legs in the sheets as I maneuvered myself into criss-cross applesauce. “Bull-hockin’-loney.”
His quick glance at where I was sitting up was still robotic, like something had wiped away everything that made him, him, behind his clear blue eyes. “Your bag is on the luggage cart.”
I was not being abandoned without so much as a word again. “I’m not leaving. At the very least, we’re talking about it.”
His ice-blue eyes narrowed, and his voice was absolutely calm. “I said, get out.”