I leaned more on one leg as we faced his friends, shifting myself just slightly toward Nico.
His hand slipped farther around my waist, gently tugging me against his side.
I rested against his strength. His arm wrapping me felt calming, comforting.
His gesture was probably just for show.
John was frowning hard as he continued to examine Nicolai and cast furtive glances at me. “But you seemed distraught when you called me this morning. You said you’d fucked up your life on a goddamn whim,” he accused.
Clementine squinted, her focus like a dagger pointed at Nicolai. She’d even stopped jiggling her cut-crystal highball glass filled with clear carbonated something. It listed at a diagonal, frozen in her sudden stillness, but didn’t spill.
“But I was completely trolleyed last night,” Nicolai said, like he was explaining the facts of life to a confused teenager.
“Obviously.”
“And I awoke with a head full of wasps this morning, even though Lexi poured water down my throat last night in a desperate attempt to keep me alive.” He smiled down at me, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “She even had ginger ale and aspirin at the ready when we woke up, for I was desperately in need of them.”
Getting a can of ginger ale and a bottle of off-brand ibuprofen out of my car to take up to the room with us had impressed Nicolai a lot more than it should’ve.
John’s eyes flicked back and forth from Nicolai to where I stood. He gestured between us, obviously caring not at all about hangover cures. “You show up after a night of drunken carousingin Las Vegaswith awifewhom none of us have ever met before, and you don’t think it’s just a little weird? You don’t think I’m going to have a fewquestionsabout how youlost the ploton the phone with me this morning?”
“I may have changed some facts in my hungover state merely for the chaos of it,” Nicolai told him.
John rocked back on his heels.“Youdon’t do anythingfor the chaos of it.You’re the most orderly, lawful person of our generation. You’ve never met a rule you didn’t want to follow.”
Was he talking aboutmyNicolai? The one who’d proposed to a stranger on both knees, the one who’d dragged me to the county records office and then tohischurch, the one who’d kissed the stuffing out of me in front of a priest and thencarriedme out of said church?
I’d had no idea.
Nicolai shrugged. “Yes, but I was speaking with God on the great white phone this morning just before you called me back. Anything I said is entirely suspect.”
Clementine hadn’t taken her eyes off him, evaluating his every word and twitch of his broad shoulders under his suit.
His fingers flexed on my back, trailing up my spine and skimming my bare skin where a few of his fingertips rested above the backline of the silk copper dress.
He toyed with the ribbon of the spaghetti strap hanging over my shoulder blade.
My skin fluttered under his touch.
Everybody else clustered around us was frowning as theylooked back and forth between John and Nicolai, clearly confused about what to believe.
“I was just kidding around,” Nicolai told John, rolling his eyes and looking off toward the bar. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“You,makea joke?”John grabbed his elbow and stared, horrified, into Nicolai’s eyes. “Who are you, and what have you done with my friend Nico?”
Nicolai plucked a champagne flute off a passing waiter’s tray. “Allow me to be more clear, John. WouldI,Nicolai Petrovich Romanov, your school chum of over two decades, the person who petitioned Le Rosey to offer a fifth-year Latin elective,everdo something as impetuous and romantic as drunkenly marryinga strangerin Las Vegas?”
John Bourbon sucked a long sip out of his glass, scrutinizing Nicolai with squinted dark eyes the whole time.
Nicolai continued, “Or does it make more sense that I,of all people,was able to methodically, consistently,meticulouslykeep the secret of a covert girlfriend?”
John examined Nicolai for a few more seconds, evaluating whatever he saw in Nicolai’s clear blue eyes in the scintillating strobe lights from the whipping rings of the kinetic chandelier.
He turned and raised his glass. “To Nico’s secret wife!”
Just beyond where John stood, Clementine was still watching the three of us with narrowed eyes. When her gaze caught mine, she tilted her head and, I swear to God, laser-scanned me again like she was taking the measure of my heart.
“Lexi, let’s go to the ladies’ room,” she announced.
