Her fingers in my hand were as cool as the haughty reserve in her pale eyes. Her lips pressed together primly as her slim hand wafted away from my sweaty one. “Charmed.”
Yeah, she hated me on sight. As she should. I wasn’t one of these hoity-toity royalties and never would be. I was almost glad Nicolai’s cousin seemed like a gatekeeper to keep him safe from riffraff like me.
Oh, sweet baby Jesus. Konstantin was right. Iwasa wreck. An embarrassing, mongrel-puppy wreck.
Nicolai stepped through the door on the other side of the SUV, his long legs and tall frame making settling onto the seat as easy for him as if he’d stepped into a low-slung car. If I got any shorter, I was going to need someone to boost me into SUVs, like holding a kid’s foot to given them a leg up onto the back of a horse.
As Nicolai slammed his door, the musclebound dark-haired guy who’d walked around the back of the SUV with him slapped the back quarter panel with a resoundingthunk,and we pulled away from the rear door of the Billionaire Sanctuary private club into Las Vegas’s grid of black-hot streets.
The long row of windows around the vehicle glared with bright desert sunlight even though they were tinted dark gray. A huge engine, probably eight smoothly firing cylinders, snarled under the hood, tunneling vibrations under my feet and legs.
Without even a backward glance at Nicolai sitting beside her, Clementine tilted her head to look me up and down yet again. “Well, there are going to be dozens of broken hearts at Omnia tonight, when that video of your marriage is confirmed asnotAI-generated.”
“Oh?” I asked, trying not to give off anything desperate. “Why, was Nicolai a man-slut?”
Clementine swiveled her whole body around to stare at Nicolai on the other side of her and then whipped back with an exaggerated shoulder turn to stare back at me like her neck was frozen with astonishment at what I’d said. Twisting back again to Nicolai, she asked him, “Is she serious?”
Nicolai rolled his eyes. “Clementine, do have some propriety.”
Crawling under the car seat sounded like a great option just then. A really, really great option. “Oh, that’s okay. I didn’t mean to ask. And it doesn’t matter now, right?”
“Oh, this poor sparrow,” Clementine muttered to Nicolai, settling herself to look out the front windshield. “You’re a beast, setting her up like this.”
Nicolai frowned and glanced aside at her. “I’m not setting her up.”
Clementine chirped a sound that could have been“Zip”or“Nope”twice at Nicolai, who raised his eyebrows and looked out his side window but didn’t answer.
I settled back, trying not to look like the class theater nerd who’d suddenly been shoved into a car with the top popular girl.
Don’t be weird, don’t be weird, don’t be weird.
Ueli drove us over to a casino-resort called the Aria on the Strip and let us out in a traffic circle that was way bigger than the kiss-and-fly at the Western Nebraska Regional Airport.
As soon as we stepped out of the SUV into the withering desert gusts funneled by the stone and steel entryway, Clementine glared at my body, looking me up and down again like she was laser-scanning my measurements into the computer in her head, and then she strode away, leading us to the mall doors.
Inside, we walked past luxury-brand stores that I hadagainonly seen on social media: Dolce & Gabbana, Tiffany & Co., Tom Ford, and a couple more that I had to sound out to figure out what they were.
Bal-en-ci-a-ga.
Fer-ra-gam-o.
Liveried guards stood outside jewelry stores.
Display windows held a single starched purse on a Lucite stand with its very long price tag discreetly turned away from scrutiny.
We didn’t enter any of the glass and granite stores on the mall’s two lower levels. Clementine didn’t even pause but turned sharply away from the main floor, strutting through the nearly empty mall like she owned the place.
I followed, eyeing Nico, and I couldn’t quite tell if his easy but unsmiling expression meant he was pissed at her, or at me, or if he was just along for the ride.
Clementine whisked us to an elevator tucked into a nondescript hallway and then to an upper floor, where she marched out as soon as the doors parted into an area with no commercialized shop signs braying flashy capitalism for the masses, and then through unmarked glass doors into a lobby.
The smooth-coiffed woman at the front desk startled at our entrance and abandoned her computer, smiling at Clementine. She hurried to get ahead of us, leading our groupwithout breaking stride to a large room with a hardwood runway stage smack-dab in the middle.
A hostess popped open a champagne bottle and set tall flutes on the coffee table before the white leather couch where we and Clementine sat.
I felt like I shouldn’t waste the champagne by allowing them to give it to me, because I wouldn’t appreciate it and didn’t need anything so extravagant.
Besides, it was early afternoon, which some old-fashioned part of my brain considered really-reallyearly for alcohol, but Clementine was already holding a second flute for them to fill.
