Chapter 4
i should’ve been a therapist
LEXI
The door slammed shut behind me as I trudged into the suite’s bedroom again. Shower steam and soap scent floated in the air because the hotel’s windows didn’t open.
I plodded toward the bed.
I didn’t need pity. I didn’t want pity.
“Were you living in your car?” Nicolai demanded from behind me.
I didn’t even turn and look at him. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Lexi!”
“I said, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
I clambered onto the bed, shoving the slipping sheets and blankets under my stockinged feet. “If some mafia guy threatening you with a lifelong marriage that you don’t want doesn’t matter, then me sleeping in my car for a few days is nothing. I would’ve figured it out.”
When I flipped around to sit on the mattress and glare at him for invading my privacy by even asking such a question, he was standing with one hand raking through his hair, his light eyes wide with horror.
Yeah, the genetic prince who might have inherited half the world had probably never been “between places” and had to sleep in his car for a night or two.
His outrage embarrassed me, even though it was totally normal to miss a meal or a couple, or to crash in your back seat or on a friend’s couch for a little while.
It happened. It was a thing that happened to people. “It’s not a big deal!”
“You were . . . unhoused, when we met?”
At least he had the decency to use an adjective to describe my temporary situation instead of slapping a “pathetic dirty homeless” noun-sticker on my forehead. “It’s none of your business.”
“It absolutely is my business if you’d been sleeping rough. You’re—you’re my wife.”
“Not for much longer though, huh?” I challenged him. “Those vows we said to each other—for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health—didn’t mean much to you, did they? You’re bailing the minute things get rough.”
“I’m not bailing on you, Lexi. You saw only some of what they did to that woman!”
“You can’t scare me. They can’t scare me.” I was scared. “I’m tough.”
Nicolai pointed to the bright bedroom windows overlooking noon in Las Vegas as if he knew the location where the crime had taken place. “They tortured and murdered her. I don’t care if you’re tough. I can’t drag you into this.”
“You knew what you were doing when you married me,” I told him.
He squeezed his eyes shut and paced the few steps over to the chair by the end of the bed. “I was very drunk, and very stupid, and desperate, and a selfish shit. I should have thrown myself in the river.”
“Las Vegas doesn’t have a river. The nearest one is the Colorado. You could throw yourself off of Hoover Dam, I suppose. There’s nothing but desert around the Strip.”
“A golf course water hazard, then. Or I should’ve flown home to Paris and drowned myself in the Seine, as would have been dignified and proper. Except then Volkov would’ve gone after Kostya.”
He closed his eyes, and I watched his throat bob as he swallowed like his chest hurt.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Nicolai.”
“I should never have gotten you nor anyone else involved. The vodka was whispering in my ear, telling me there was an easy way out, and it advanced a stupid, shallow answer that was destined to fail. There was simply no way my marrying someone else would have dissuaded Demyan Volkov. I don’t know why I thought it would, other than I was bladdered that night and ruined the next morning. ”
“You sure know a lot of words for dead-butt drunk.”
He kept staring at the carpet and shrugged one shoulder. “It’s British vernacular. And boarding school.” His deep sigh curled his shoulders in, and his voice cracked. “How did I not know you’d been in such extremis? That you were so vulnerable? I truly did take advantage of you.”
“It wasn’t your problem.” I wasn’t being overly kind. I just didn’t want to talk about how failing and pathetic I was. The embarrassment was worse than the poverty. “It didn’t come up in conversation.”
“I see why you were so worried about your car.”
“Yeah, I was worried you’d taken off with it. It’s not like you needed my old banger. It’s just all I have.”
Nicolai’s neck bent more, and his head drooped. “I did not think about what the car meant to you.”
“I don’t have anything else. I thought Jimmy loved me, and to pay him back for loving me, I changed myself to whatever he wanted and gave him everything I owned.” Shame weighed on me like thick chains. “We can stop talking about how poor and naive I am any freakin’ time now.”
He stood. The sun-drenched glare from the window turned his skin golden. “I did not mean to offend.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You really own nothing but that car.”
“I said we don’t have to talk about it.” And yet his sympathetic head tilt sucked the words out of my mouth because I had to explain.
“I saved up for years and poured all my money into the wedding. I was moving in with Jimmy when we went back to Scottsbluff afterward, so I sold or donated all my stuff and broke my lease. I’m an idiot, okay?
I’m just a stupid idiot who got scammed because I believed someone who told me they loved me for six years. ”
Nicolai nodded slowly. “That is a very long con, six years. Anyone would have believed it. I had made arrangements for Hannalore to move in, and that relationship lasted less than three.”
I pressed on because I was the dumb one, and the thick coating of shame concealed righteous anger. “Yeah, but did she have a side piece who she was living with, who she had a dog with, and you were too stupid to figure it out?”
Nicolai angled himself away from me. The yellow-beige glare from the sunny window cast a golden light over his face and shirt like he was walking away into the light.
“If she did, I never suspected. I didn’t know much about Hanna’s life other than what she told me, so I probably wouldn’t have known.
One doesn’t suspect a lover of betrayal, and surely, this Jimmy wanker should never have used you so egregiously.
” He shook his head with a sad huff. “If we ever do see him again, I can’t be held responsible for my actions. ”
“We aren’t going to see him again. You’re throwing me out, remember?”
Yeah, I was an idiot. Why in the heck was I challenging Nico to do what I didn’t want him to?
Nicolai flashed one frustrated frown at me, then walked over to the landline phone on his side of the bed and lifted the handset. He spoke into it. “I need cash brought up. Twenty American ought to do it.”
My ribs hurt like I’d gotten jumped in the high school parking lot and beaten to a pulp.
Nicolai hung up the phone and walked over with his wallet, holding out a black credit card. “I’ll get you one in your own name. The bills will come to me. It has no monthly limit.”
“I don’t need that or your money.” Not that twenty bucks would go far, but sure. Twenty bucks was three meals if I was going to be on the street again.
He was still holding out the credit card. “I want you to take it. Please, my honor is wounded.”
“‘Your honor.’ Oh, my word, Nicolai. Puh-lease.”
“I must know you’re safe.” Moisture lined his lower eyelids. “I need to know you are out in the world, free and safe. Whatever happens to me, however this ends up, you must escape. I don’t care if you use that credit card for all your expenses for the rest of your life. Take the damned money.”
At least he cared enough about me to make sure I wasn’t sleeping in the back of my car. With a working credit card, I get a motel room for a few nights while I figured things out.
It was a small comfort.
I took the card.
As soon as my fingers touched it, a tremble started in the plastic, and the card was vibrating as I found my stupid little white-beaded bucket bag and tucked it inside.
“Thank you,” I said, staring into the dark hollowness of my cheap bridal purse. “I won’t abuse it. I’ll get a job as soon as I can find something.”
“I don’t care if you use it for every expense forever,” he said. “Let me watch you live your life through the statements. Let me see you eat good food, live in nice places, buy good clothes, and go on trips to see the world. Let me see you find love, and have children, and have a good life.”
My heart crushed more. A tiny little piece of me had been planning to leave breadcrumbs for him on the credit card statements so he could find me if he wanted to, so that he could walk into where I was working and smile at me, even if he never spoke to me again.
He wasn’t going to come find me, though, just watch me through the numbers. “Only until I get on my feet. Then I’ll be okay. But thanks.”
His whispered voice was closer behind me, like he’d stolen across the room, his footsteps muffled by the carpeting. “Let me be clear: I don’t care if you put your college tuition and a Lambo on that credit card.”
“I wouldn’t.”
The warmth of his breath brushed over the top of my head. “I abused your good nature. Someone should pay for that.”
Maybe I should’ve ducked away from him, but I already missed him. “You didn’t do anything bad to me. I agreed to it all. I said yes.”
This really was the end for us. These words felt like the final things you said before you walk out on someone.
I didn’t want to leave him.
I swallowed the chalky taste in my throat. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“But I do.”
His fingertips traced down my arm below the puff sleeve of my blouse to my elbow.
I leaned back, resting against his crisp clothes, the strength of his body, the clean, masculine scent of his subtle cologne.
His arms curled around me. I would have called it a spoon-style hug, but his fingers ran up my neck into my hair.
Staying still or pushing away would have been smarter. That would have protected my heart.
I would’ve given anything for a few more hours with him.
Preferably in his bed and in his arms, but anything.
Talking, sipping coffee, watching the sun and shadows travel over the desert outside the window, anything.