“I’m in. I’ll do it. We can talk about the terms or whatever, but Iaccept. Right now.”Before he wised up and changed his mind.
Nico wasn’t drunk anymore. I didn’t have any scruples about taking an entirely sober man up on an offer, however dumb of him it was.
“That’s refreshing. Making a deal usually requires negotiation.” He leaned backward, his stacked-brick abdominals stretching under his skin that I watched with way too much ogling, to a small desk where he snagged a landline phone. “We need a notary public to witness a document signing.”
Squeaks issued from the phone’s receiver as he hung it up.
“How much money are we talking about here?” I asked him.
He steepled his fingers together. “You need to know one more thing. The reason I sought to get married so quickly last night is that there is a Russian mafia boss who wants me to marry his daughter. I can’t be forced to marry her if I’m already married to someone else.”
Arranged weddings? How seventeen-hundreds. “Oh,that’swhat you were talking about. I thought you’d knocked someone up.”
“I’ve never met her.”
“You could just tell him no.”
Nicolai ate his breakfast with impeccable manners, precisely forking food into his mouth while he sat ramrod straight in his chair. Absolutely nothing dripped. “Demyan Volkov wants access to my social and business networks because he wrongly believes a mere familial relation would facilitate that. I believe my uncle has been offered a tidy sum to convince me to go through with it. They got me drunk last night and tried to coerce me.”
“Just say no to booze, buddy,” I suggested.
He scoffed. “It’s impolite to refuse a drink from a Russian. Anyway, already being married to you would take me off the proverbial marriage market and thus solve my problem.”
I tried not to visually molest him and probably failed miserably. “Yeah, you must be quite an eligible bachelor.”
His next remark was mortifying in its offhandedness. “The gossip column ofThe London Weekly Chatcertainly thought so. I was number four on their list of the world’s most eligible bachelors.”
Oh, wow.“In the whole world?”
He smirked. “In the opinion of an absolute rag of a newspaper, which can only be taken at face value.”
Yeah, part of their criteria had probably been his face’s value, with cheekbones and a jawline as sharp as my daddy issues. “So someone saw your listing and thought they’d buy themselves a rich, pretty husband.”
“A rich,connectedhusband. Now, let us negotiate our settlement. Eat.” He gestured with his fork. “You’ve hardly touched your food.”
The fruit and yogurt on my breakfast plate looked astonishingly healthy after the convenience store cracker-based crap and greasy fast food I’d been surviving on. Vitamins and fiber might send my system into shock. “I don’t know what the going rate is for a year of wifing these days. What do you want me to do?”
“We’re at the beginning of the social season. I’ll need platonic companionship at perhaps twenty events over the next few months.”
“Platoniccompanionship?” He wasn’t even going totryto get me into bed? I was both insulted and disappointed in everything Jimmy’s church had sermoned at me for the past six years about the carnal instincts of men and my responsibility to be so modest that I wouldn’t arouse their predatory nature.
Nico looked up at me, a strawberry speared on his fork. “Contractually, yes. We must keep it platonic.”
Oh, that was firm.
My soul shriveled.
But yeah, why would a shockingly gorgeous man like Nico, who was ripped and stacked, with a face like fine art, wealthy enough to hang out with royal people at private clubs, why would a man likethateven want to sully his dick with a homeless loser nobody like me?
The only reason he’d noticed me yesterday was because he’d been grossly drunk.
My voice caught in my throat, coming out small. “Oh, I see.”
“Lexi?”
I dumped raspberries onto my yogurt and stirred it. The berries mashed into purple-red paste.
His voice was lower. “Lexi, look at me.”
