Nicolai had turned to the priest and said something in Russian, and the priest had shrugged and nodded.
He turned back to me. “I asked him if we could just say a few words to each other on the occasion of our marriage.”
Dear Lord, I’d been so upset, but his words had calmed me down. “Is that okay?”
“It’s allowable to speak to each other during our wedding, yes.”
So, it was with freaking out and ice-crackling fear in my heart that I’d looked up at Nicolai, who’d been gazing kindly down at me, and I inhaled to recite the scripted vows I had written to marry Jimmy Johnson, that asshole, just a few days before.
The words stuck in my throat.
I’d been so careful writing those vows to say to Jimmy, editing and restructuring and rethinking every word, every pause, every emphasis, trying to make sure that I got it right and I didn’t say or do or sound like anything that would embarrass myself or offend his family.
His family talked a lot about people behind their backs. I hadn’t wanted to give them any ammunition to use on me.
I’d been so desperately afraid that I would screw it all up, that even then at that last minute, they would reject me and throw me out of their family.
Evidently, that fear had been well-founded.
And so I couldn’t just recite those watered-down, mealy-mouthed vows to Nicolai, who was holding both my hands in his and pressing the backs of my knuckles to his heart, watching me with a faint smile and intense warmth in his bright eyes.
And Lord, that smile. That sweet, joyous smile like he was really happy.
ThatImade him happy.
I hadn’t even had even one drink yet that night. I was probably exhausted from nights of half-sleeping in my car and walking the streets as if I had somewhere to go during the day when my car became too hot, so half-formed vows tumbled out of me from somewhere deeper, somewhere afraid. “I, Alexandra Faith Byrne, take you, Nicolai Pet—Pet?—”
“Nicolai Petrovich Romanov.”
“—PetrovichRomanov, to be my lawfully wedded husband. I’m begging you to love me because I’ve emptied myself out and I don’t know who I am anymore. I want to be with you, to beloved and to love you, to be together and not be alone anymore. I don’t know how you found me or why I believe it, but I do. I do, Nicolai. I takeyouto be my husband.”
Pathetic.
I’d known then that my stupid spewed vows were absolutely pathetic, so I stared down at the heat-wilted purple hydrangeas I’d been carrying since seven o’clock that night when I’d started busking outside the Billionaire Sanctuary place.
On the video, Nicolai touched my chin with his knuckle, slowly raising my face so he could look into my eyes. The guy who’d been recording the video raised the camera angle, capturing the expression on Nico’s face.
The stutter of his breath, the way his teeth caught his lower lip, and the glisten in his eyes looked more like love than anything I’d been able to practice in the mirror for my wedding to Jimmy.
The shine was far more,somuch more, than I’d ever seen in Jimmy’s eyes.
How did the gentle dewiness in Nicolai’s ice-teal eyes look like he actually loved me?
Sitting there in the hotel room, watching Nico’s close-up on the tiny phone screen, one thing became horrifying obvious.
Nicolai Romanov was a better actor than I was.
I’d studied theater all four years in high school, taking acting classes plus technical theater and directing, performed in every community theatre production I could find, and somehow,this random guywas a better actor than I’d ever been.
Rude.
Nicolai whispered to me, his gaze steady and locked on, as my eyes searched his. “I, Nicolai Petrovich Romanov, take you, Alexandra Faith Byrne, as my lawfully wedded and much beloved wife. I have been searching for you my whole life. I have been so alone until you took my hand, and I’ve never wantedanything in my life until I wanted you. I have fallen in love with you with my whole being, my heart and my soul and everything alive in me. I give you the world and my soul. I will conquer the world so I can lay it at your feet. I will love you my whole life, my whole life and beyond.”
The way his eyes glistened almost looked like real emotion, but he’d just been wasted.
Even now, sitting in the crowded hotel room and watching it, Nicolai barely blinked, and his breathing lightly lifted his bare chest like the wind had been knocked out of him.
He didn’t remember the ceremony, and if his words had ever been true, they weren’t anymore.
