Chapter 26
billionaire sanctuary, verona, italy
LEXI
By the time we landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on the East Coast, Nicolai and I had showered on the airplane (Showered! On an airplane!) and were dressed in regular clothes from our luggage, decorously sipping coffee that I had made in the airplane’s galley.
Nevertheless, the two pilots who shuffled out of the cockpit to shake our hands before leaving did not meet our eyes, and I did not want to know why.
Dear God, I did not want to know why.
Even though we’d slept in the twin beds for several hours, I was still dragging when the new flight crew and cabin stewardess or whatever they called them came and greeted us. Nicolai told them to leave the beds installed because we would probably nap on our way to Italy at least for a while.
The time changes made my head spin.
We’d taken off from Las Vegas at three in the morning, and five hours later, we landed in New York at eleven in the morning in the noontime sunlight, not the red-tinged morning like my brain thought it should be.
Then, after an hour on the ground as a layover, we flew for eight hours to Verona, Italy, and yet somehow, instead of it being late-afternoon going-home-from-work time like it was in Nebraska, my phone showed it was two o’clock the next morning.
Like, it was Tuesday.
It felt like we had been on the plane for two working day-long flights, but a week had passed. Monday hadn’t existed.
Three hundred sixty-one more days to go.
“My brain doesn’t understand why it’s so dark,” I said, watching the mostly abandoned streets of Verona as the plane flew low for its landing.
Nicolai yawned and stretched in his seat on the other side of the conference table. “Verona is in the same time zone as Paris, so it feels like home to me.”
As it was two o’clock in the midnight-morning when we touched down, cars were waiting for us on the airport tarmac to take us to yet another Billionaire Sanctuary club.
“Don’t we need security here?” I asked Nicolai as we walked down the boarding stairs to the tarmac and the SUVs waiting for us. “None of your security guys came with us on the airplane. We didn’t ditch them, did we?”
“I couldn’t manage to keep my hands off you even until the plane reached cruising altitude. Did you want them to watch?” he whispered into my hair.
Mortification nearly killed me. “No! We could’ve been good and gone to sleep or something.”
He chuckled. “The travel teams will follow in a day or two. A smaller team of my security staff, whom I left in Paris, will meet us here tomorrow morning.”
“My God, there are more of them?”
He chuckled. “Ueli made arrangements to fly them here from Paris to attend to us. We have a driver and a guard for tonight. They have our schedule already. It’s ridiculous that I live this way, isn’t it?”
“But you must’ve lived with security guards your whole life. It must not seem too weird to you.”
“I had much reduced security until my father died when I was twelve, and I inherited.”
I grabbed his hand and held it, and he gave me a little squeeze but didn’t let go, even after we were in the back of the SUV, driving through the single-lane streets in Verona.
The passenger-side guy kept his eyes on the buildings we passed, but he had a friendly grin and a French accent. “Bonjour! Aymeric Denaiu, I am pleased to meet you.”
He’d pronounced his first name ay-mer-eek, which was a neat name. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m Lexi.”
Aymeric grinned back at me. “So I heard. It is good to meet the notorious Lexi Romanov, finally.”
“I got here as fast as I could.”
He laughed, but his dark eyes never stopped moving, his gaze roving the streets around us.
His constant surveillance was kind of scary in how instinctively he didn’t stop looking for something horrible coming at us.
A tiny car with its headlights off poked its nose into the street ahead of us, nearly invisible except for the movement. Aymeric clocked it and pointed it out to the driver, who pulled us into the other lane.
The driver didn’t turn his head as he spoke. “I am Konrad Blom, driver.”
Nicolai leaned over to me. “Konrad is an old friend from Stockholm.”
His head bobbed, light brown hair yellowed in the streetlights striping the car’s hood. “Old, definitely. Friends, only when I’m drunk.”
Aymeric laughed. “Every night, then.”
Nicolai chuckled. “How did Jacob do at the trials?”
Konrad puffed his chest but didn’t take his eyes off the road. “He is starting at left wing in his university’s varsity team next year, we have just heard. He will audition for Sweden’s national team for the next winter Olympics.”
“He made it! Congratulations.”
“Yes. We are pleased.”
Nicolai squeezed my hand again.
The Billionaire Sanctuary club in Verona was not a sleek, modern black-glass building, but a slice of a historical city block, renovated and redecorated inside with top-notch marble, granite, and other status-conveying rock.
Our suite was on the top floor, a spacious expanse with high ceilings and tall windows that overlooked the medieval city of curving streets. “Wow!”
Nicolai chuckled. “Ryan came through. It’s amazing what a little blackmail can accomplish.”
“You didn’t really?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “No. I merely asked if he could make room for us. I’d kick a hot celebrity out of my real estate to allow him to stay there, too.”
We slept in the wide, sumptuous bed for a few hours, but I was so jet-lagged that I woke up at right about six o’clock, just after dawn.
I stretched in the fantastic sheets, smooth and crisp against my bare legs and feet, luxuriating in my third night in a row of flopping into a bed and zonking out.
Trying to sleep in the reclined seat of my sweltering hot car had traumatized me a little.
That, and every minute of trying to figure out how to survive the rest of my life.
I gathered my hair and twisted it into a rope to get it off the back of my neck, and just for a second, the dark brunette hair coiling around my wrist surprised me, like I’d jumped into someone else’s body because I bleached my hair blond, spending two Saturdays a month dabbing at my roots.
The Lazuli spa and Clementine’s approval floated into my head.
Because I was a brunette.
I was reclaiming brunette.
And I felt a little more like me again.
Things change.
There is always a corner you can turn.
Everything had changed for me.
When I rolled over, Nicolai’s eyes were open, and he was watching me from where he’d been sleeping on his stomach, his arms crunching up the pillow under his face. His midnight black hair was tousled from sleep.
His voice was rough, and he half-smiled groggily. “Good morning, my wife.”
I snuggled farther under the covers even though sunlight was peeking around the dark shades. “Good morning, my husband.”
His slow smile reached his bright blue eyes, and he reached with one strong arm, locked it around my waist, and dragged me across the sheets to nestle next to him.
He whispered, “I rented out the Juliet House before operating hours begin to reenact our purported meeting. We should probably rise to meet the day.”
But he didn’t release my waist from his grasp, and I didn’t want to move, either.