16. Cotillion
cotillion
LEXI
“Do you feel like I suckered you into signing that post-nup contract?” I asked.
Nicolai and I were riding in the back of the SUV driven by security guys again, this time to some big fancy dance party, which seemed odd because it was a Sunday night.
Sunday always seemed like you should be recuperating from church and stuffing yourself stupid at Sunday family dinner, not that I had done either one of those when I was a kid. At the very least, it seemed like I should be resting up for the workweek ahead.
Instead, I was wearing a white formal evening gown and heading to a “cotillion” to dance with people who didn’t care whether they made it to work tomorrow or next week, or ever.
“Not at all,” Nicolai said, tugging at his white bow tie. “I’m more concerned that I accidentally used reverse psychology to trap you in an intrigue you might not understand.”
“I’ve seen James Bond movies and A Game of Thrones. I know what’s going on.”
“It’s a bit different when you’re living it in real life.”
“That Russian guy breaking into the hotel room was scary. Are you going to be okay at the cotillion tonight?”
“I always look like I’m all right. I’ve been training to be charming my whole life.”
Mordecai drove the SUV, Ueli riding shotgun as usual, and coasted to a stop in a large circular drive of the Skyview Casino and Resort. I waited for one of our guys to open the door because I didn’t want to get yelled at again.
Dusha was suddenly beside the SUV, and he looked inside and caught my eye before he opened the door.
Scalding outside air rushed into the vehicle, bringing with it the tang of chlorinated pool water and quiet strains of classical music.
Dusha held out his hand and steadied me on my strappy stiletto heels that made my ankles feel like ribbons as I stepped out, but Nicolai was right there beside me an instant later. He held out his arm, and I slipped my hand under his elbow.
The sidewalk to the event space wasn’t too long as I bobbled in my sandals, making sure not to catch my needle-heels in a sidewalk seam.
We circumnavigated the pool before climbing wide steps onto an enormous terrace.
As I turned, the sunset streaked the sky over the azure swimming pool like lightning spreading across scarlet silk.
Nicolai was already talking to his friend John. “Smart, getting both the indoor ballroom and the outdoor terrace. A few people might want to brave the desert heat at night, but holding the dancing indoors was an excellent idea.”
“Anna told me to. She’ll be here tonight, of course. She threatened to wear a red dress because all the other women should, in theory, be wearing white.”
“White tie, yes. You certainly specified it in the invite, and the text reminders, and a link to a tuxedo rental place here in Vegas that stocked them, if all else failed.”
“That was Anna.”
“I had to dig into the back of my closet and brush off the dust.”
John’s side glance at Nicolai was somewhere between dubious and an eyeroll as if Nico had said something absurd. “Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly what you did,” he drawled.
I was wearing a white dress, though if you looked at it in the right light, it shimmered a very pale gold. Clementine had picked it out and told me that stark white would wash me right out, and what had always looked wrong about my wedding dress suddenly made sense.
When we walked in, all the women were wearing floor-length, structured white gowns.
Every single one of them.
Clementine had told me that white tie for the men meant white gowns for the women, but I hadn’t expected absolutely everyone feminine to be wearing unrelieved white.
Lord, I was glad she’d told me what to wear. These people had dress codes that I didn’t know existed.
I did my best again that night at the party not to talk, except to be pleased to meet people for the first time or again.
It wasn’t too hard. With even the slightest provocation, people were more than happy to talk about themselves. Nicolai’s friends must have been hanging out together so long that they were dying to tell their core stories to someone new.
That’s how I survived the dinner, concentrating on not spilling the whiskey peppercorn sauce or dripping steak juices onto my white dress while I listened to everyone’s school stories.
And that’s how I learned Nicolai’s friends’ darkest secrets, just by smiling and nodding with wide eyes at everybody’s tales.
Some of their parents or friends were drug addicts they’d dragged to rehab. A few were still alive.
One guy had so many half-siblings around his age that they could form a polo team, and he pointed them out around the room but told me not to mention their paternity to them because they didn’t know.
One woman had almost been trafficked as a child until one of the would-be kidnappers figured out her uncle was a Camorra mafia boss in Naples who hunted people for sport, and they quietly faded away.
If she’d been anyone else, she would have been just one more of the missing, and I was morbidly aware that I would have been one of the trafficked and dead.
One had been the high school drug dealer, selling mostly coke and Adderall, and his organized crime boss father had been so proud that he’d bought him a superyacht for his graduation present.
But he was reformed, he’d assured me. He only used now and didn’t sell anything anymore.
He had concerns beyond being a sole distributor of direct-to-consumer recreational pharmaceuticals.
Clementine found us later. Her white dress was shimmery silver, and of course, it looked fantastic on her.
She looked Nicolai up and down. “Nice, Nico. William Westmancott is always a solid choice.”
He smirked at her. “I wore it just for you, Clemmy.”
“Yes, I thought it was custom. This year?”
“Two months ago.”
“Interesting, and very modern. It’s not like you to take a design risk.”
He shrugged. “I own eight white-tie tailed tuxedos, I think. Before I went over to William what’s his name, when I looked in my closet, I couldn’t tell them apart. So yes, I asked him to make me something a little different in cut.”
Clementine’s tiny head bob might have been approval. “The higher collar looks kind of antique military. It suits you. I heard the orchestra will be playing waltzes for the dancing part of the evening. Are you two going to dance?”
Her pointing finger swirled at both of us, both to include and to demand.
Uh-oh.
“I’m not sure,” Nicolai said. “Depends on my mood.”
“Oh, heavens forfend you not be in the mood to dance.” Clementine didn’t need to be able to move her face to make her sarcasm biting. “Lexi, make sure he dances with you. Everyone needs to see you two dance together.”
Clementine flounced off into the crowd of black-tailed tuxedos and white ball gowns.
“She sure is adamant about us showing everybody how couple-y we are,” I muttered.
“She’s very sensitive about social perception. Practically has antennae for it. The good thing is that she is a help, not a hindrance, with our odd Vladimir problem. And Volkov.”
Time to come clean. “She said we were supposed to do a waltz. I can’t dance a waltz. Or a foxtrot. Or anything like that.”
Nicolai’s slight head tilt seemed curious, which was good because if he had made fun of me, I might’ve started crying in the middle of that ballroom. “Would you like to learn?”
“That never works. I’ve seen so many movies where the prince or the duke or whatever takes the dumb, inexperienced plebeian girl off to a dark corner to teach her to waltz, and they just end up kissing.”
He chuckled. “Excellent. Shall I whisk you off to a dark corner to ‘teach you to waltz’?”
“Clementine said we’re supposed to be making an appearance. She was very firm.”
“No one will notice our absence for a few minutes. Waltzing is easy. I can literally teach you to waltz in a few minutes.”
“If you say so. This just sounds like a plot from The Ridgertons where somebody gets trapped in a marriage or else she’ll be ruined.”
“But I’ve already trapped you into marriage. I don’t need to do it again.”