“Well, yes, I guess you always were rather private.” Johntilted his head, moving in like a snake hypnotizing its prey. “Wait, isshewhy you and Hanna broke it off?”
Nicolai’s face didn’t so much as twitch. “Ending things was entirely Hannelore’s idea. I met Lexi a bit later.”
“Okay, fine, but I thought you would mention something like you were in a serious relationship tome.I mean, I mean I thought we were—Seriously,two fucking years?”
When John said that, Clementine’s chin lifted, and her gaze locked onto John and Nicolai, alternating between the two of them like they were targets.
Nicolai grasped John’s shoulder again, and John finally met his eyes. “After Hannelore, I kept thingsveryprivate.”
The quick flicks of John’s widening eyes to Nicolai, to me, back to Nicolai, and then over the crowd looked like panic. “But—Poppy and Tejumade—and theothers—you haven’t seemed to beexclusivewith anyone, um,lately.”
So Nicolai did have a reputation as a player. That was funny.
Also, John hadn’t explicitly sold out Nicolai that he’d been fooling around with other women while I was standing right there, but he hadn’t been able to help himself with the questions, either.
Nicolai shrugged and looked over the crowd. “We weren’t exclusive, but now we’re monogamous.”
Were we?
Nicolai had said our platonic marriage contract would be for a year, but sexytimes with other people hadn’t come up in the negotiations.
Was he allowed to fool around?
Was I?
I looked way up at John Bourbon, who was tall, lean, and wore a gold watch that seemed just on the tasteful edge of flashy.
He was engaged, though, so I wasn’t interested.
I sure as hell wasn’tevergoing to be the girl who stole a groom from the altar.
The dozen-plus men standing in a tall fence around us were all gorgeous, chiseled jaws and cheekbones, broad shoulders and slim hips, a sepia rainbow of skin tones from porcelain-pale and athletically tanned European through the spectrum of buff-fawn-tawny bronze to the darkest ebony men. Most wore slim-cut suits. Three of the guys wore bright suit jacket-ish tunics buttoned from shoulder to hip, nipped at their slim waists to show off their muscular physiques.
And then there was the neck-tattoo hottie in the jewel-blue suit who kept eyeing me and who I did not eye back because, currently, I was with Nicolai.
But, I mean,wow.
Standing near all those preternaturally beautiful men was almost intoxicating, like the subtle wood and spice scents of their colognes were aerosolized opiates.
And then there were the women, slim and supple or zaftig and plush, dressed in silks clinging to their thighs and bosoms, all just right there, swaying to the music with the loose limbs of light intoxication, lips parted and eyes dewy.
The bouncing sculpture of a chandelier spun light over them, highlighting breast-pocket jewelry below handkerchief triangles and sparkling on martini glasses held in elegant fingertips, a flash of white teeth, sudden concealing darkness, then a burst of dancing spotlights like sunrise that revealed them all to be extraordinarily handsome or beautiful, all sophisticated, glamorous, and wielding tightly amused smiles at Nicolai and myself.
The absolute beauty of these people shocked me like an electric fence I couldn’t let go of.
I couldn’t speak anymore. I didn’t think I couldbreathe.
It was like I was on another planet, one inhabited by only gorgeous people.
Or another realm.
Maybe it was just the ethnic variety of people that discombobulated me.
Before that night, I’d literally seen more colors of corn than colors of people. For a white-girl virgin from Nebraska, this party wasa lot.
In my defense, corn came in a wide range of colors: white, yellow, red, blue, purple, and black, plus all the hybrids, and then there were the translucent glass gem corn types that looked like amethyst, aquamarine, topaz, and citrine.
Actually, humans were just cornstarch, brown, and browner.
