“He doesn’t work alone. I need to understand the threat fully before I can remove it.”
He drops a featherlight kiss on my cheek then pulls away, that familiar diplomatic smile on his face.
He didn’t mean it as a slight, I am certain, but I feel a burn of embarrassment despite myself. Too hot headed, too impulsive, too quick to react. He’s strategic, where my impulse is to deftly dispose of any problems we might have before the threat can balloon to something bigger.
“I might prefer a watch,” he says. “For a wedding present.”
The flash goes off again as we smile at each other. “To each their own, I guess.”
By the endof the night my face is long past sore from smiling so much and is, instead, numb. When I let my face rest at any point, Willa was behind me, appearing from thin air, to tell me to not look so evil.
I did my best.
I’m not used to having so much attention on me—in fact, it’s most ideal if the attention is on anyone else. Vanessa and Willa, for instance, are incredibly good at being in the spotlight. My father was also very good at this.
I was not. I suppose it’s why they called me Shadow when he was alive.
At least during the ceremony, no one was drunk enough to ask incessant, prying questions about my fast and passionate love affair with Maxim while offering their sincerest congratulations. I saw through them, though. They are all shocked out of their minds that I could be with someone, that someone would want to marryme.
Whatever. I’m likable. And hot. And frequently pleasant.
I told Maxim a list of shortcomings in December, and he still said “I do” today.
After the ceremony, everyone stood up and Maxim’s side of the crowd yelled something in Russian that made me wish I’d spent literally any time on Duolingo in the last three months. He has never once made me feel like a child, but after enough pointed comments from nosy busy bodies about my age today, I wonder if he feels like I am. Like twenty-six isn’t old enough to be a full adult.
My favorite thing of the day, by far, was the cake; chocolate with blackberry jam and little pears cut on top. I don’t know what strings Willa had to pull to get such fresh-tasting fruit in the middle of March, but I would trust her with anything.
I yawn into my fist then roll my shoulders back. Maxim, seeing this, bows his head close to my ear.
“It’s time,” he says. “We’ve done enough.”
I offer one last sweet-ish smile. I can feel a dozen eyes in the room on us, as they’ve been all night, so I lean forward and press my lips against Maxim’s, forcing myself not to overthink it. It’s just a kiss between a husband and wife who do not love each other. In fact, we hardly know each other.
I am a great kisser. I know this. For some reason, though, kissing Maxim makes me very certain that I’ve never actually kissed someone correctly and we’ve all just been pretending.
Maxim nods at the DJ, giving the signal to wrap it up, and the man does so with ease, cutting off the Black Eyed Peas song early to usher people to where they should start gathering for our send-off in fifteen minutes.
This is our cue, and Maxim follows behind me out of the hall until we’re back in the bridal suite upstairs, now vacant of all the light that poured through the windows earlier.
Maxim shrugs off his suit coat and undoes his black tie, leaving him only in his black shirt, now unbuttoned at the collar slightly. The effect is devastating.
Maxim Orlov isexceptionallyhandsome.
I clear my throat and he looks over at me, still standing in my puffy white gown. I point behind me with my thumb.
“Tiny buttons,” I explain.
Willa or Vanessa would’ve come in to help me out of my dress, but Vanessa is stuck in conversations with some of the old heads, and Willa is resting her heavily swollen ankles. I wouldn’t dare disrupt that, she might go into labor.
This leaves my options to cutting the expensive gown off of my body (Willa would murder me) or ask my newly wedded for help.
Maxim holds his breath as he processes the request. I think he might say no when he nods and closes the distance between us in two strides. Now standing very close to me, he has to crouch to reach the buttons that start halfway down my back, and I watch his face in the mirror while he works. He’s focused on his task, his attention entirely on the row of three million buttons as his big fingers work over them.
“Why haven’t you been married before?” I can’t help but ask. “You were engaged, right?”
His hands pause on their work, just the briefest hesitation before they resume.
“When my father was alive, he wanted me to be married. Bothered me incessantly about it. But I didn’t want to subject anyone to him.” His eyes remain fastidiously on my dress, but I watch his fingers work through the reflection. “He was horrible to everyone, and worse to family.”
