“Clementine, I ambegging you?—”
“After they broke up, I wished I weren’tquiteso closely related to him. Might have been interesting to takethatfor a spin.”
Hearing all this sex stuff was more than I could handle. I might give myself a migraine if I heard any more, so I slapped my hands over my ears. “Please,stop!”
Clementine leaned back and looked me up and down like she was appraising my dress again. “Too much?”
“Maybe a little!”
“Fine.I’lltryto be a bit more cognizant of your middle-class sensibilities.”
Little did Clementine know that the middle class would be a promotion for me. I was pretty sure my single-mother mom had been solidly impoverished when I was a kid. “Anyway, my question was, he and Hanna broke upbeforethis week, right?”
“Oh God, yes. Hanna married Lewis Isaacs, the Earl of Zetland, last summer. Nico went to their wedding. It looked amicable, but he always looks amicable. So terribly civilized. Did he really get so wasted last night that he proposed and married you in one breath?”
Clementine had obviously figured out which story was the real one. Lying to her face when she had saved our butts at least three times that day felt immoral. “It wasn’tquitelike that. Have you heard about what’s going on with this guy Volkov?”
Clementine’s face went even more blank, and she stepped back, looking down at my shoes and then back up to my eyes. “You’re connected with Demyan Volkov?”
“No.No, of course not. I am literally an unemployed HR admin from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. I amnobody.”
Her sharp gray-blue eyes scrutinized me. “You’re sure?”
“I worked at a construction company since I graduated from high school.InNebraska.There’s no way I’ve ever met a Russian mobster. Or any Russians, ever, come to think of it. The town is literally calledScottsbluff.Everyoneis descended from Scottish and English people. I was kind of exotic with my Irish last name.”
Clementine seemed to be a little less freaked out after my denials. “So why did Nico marry, and I’m sorry to phrase it quite like this, but why would Nicolai marry someone who wasliterallya strangeroff the street?”
Yeah, it wasn’t like he’d actually wantedme.“Because if Nicolai is married already, he can’t marry someone else. Volkov wouldn’t leave him alone about marrying his daughter because he wanted to use Nicolai’s connections, like in a Jane Austen book.”
Clementine’s blue-gray eyes stayed wide, though she kept blinking and staring at the sinks off to the side. “And he thoughtthatwould dissuadeDemyan Volkov?”
“I didn’t know what’s going on between him and this Volkov guy. My plan was to keep Nicolai from walking into traffic last night,because he almost did that,and to humor him until he sobered up. I refused to even sign that marriage license until he was in his right mind this morning. I didn’tlegallymarry him while he was drunk.”
One of Clementine’s eyebrows pressed down a fraction of an inch as she finally looked up and into my eyes. “Yes, but I saw the video. You married him ina Russian Orthodox church.”
“That washisidea. I would’ve gone for an Elvis because I thought it was all a lark. I didnotunderstand the importance of that church to him. I would never have guessed that he was so religious, though the fact that he was soinsistentabout the church beingRussianOrthodox should have clued me in,” I grumbled.
Clementine gaped at me. Yes, actuallygaped.“Nicowanted the ceremony to be Russian Ortho?”
“I was baptized an evangelical Christian, so the Orthodox priest had to re-baptize me and put the chrism oil on me and everything before he’d even do the wedding.”
She turned away, leaning her backside against the sink countertop and staring off into the distance beyond the toilet stalls, and covered her mouth with her hand. “You converted. MyGod.Nicoreallyfucked up.”
“I guess Nicolai was slumming like you said last night,because he didn’t even mention that he had family connections to Russia until this morning.”
Her lips parted slightly as she spun to stare at me, her eyes incrementally wider than before. Clementine expressed her emotions through her body language, rather than her face. “He didn’ttell youthat he is the hereditary tsar of Russia untilafteryou’d married him?”
“He mentioned it this morningbeforewe signed the license to make it official. He wasn’t in any shape last night to check things off a list, or really this morning, either. I mean, last night, I was just trying to keep a thoroughly drunk guy from getting robbed and left in the desert for dead.”
Clementine stared at me likemylife was the weird one. “But he wasa stranger.Adrunkenstranger.”
“And he made a complete drunken spectacle of himself,” I laughed. “A lot of the people on that street wanted to take advantage of him and, I mean, they wanted to doawfulthings to him. They would’ve dragged him to an ATM and emptied his bank accounts. They would’ve stolen his credit cards and run up a crazy balance. Andworse.He might’ve woken up with baby mamas or a gay OnlyFans this morning. I couldn’t let that happen to someone.”
“And you took care of him, made sure no one did something awful to him, andmarriedhim to keep him from being taken advantage of. You marrieda drunk strangerforhissake.”
“I humored a drunk smokeshow to keep him safe.”
“Yes, well, I guess Nico is rather good-looking,” Clementine muttered, half to herself. “That could explain some of it.”
