“So what?” Poppy grumbled. “It’s not like he’s a dog or anything.”
My heart fell for Nicolai, my hot, ripped stranger-husband with sad eyes who, when stumbling around seeking someone to insta-marry, had walked outside to look for a stranger.
Clementine sighedatthem. Like, I could tell, her sigh was directed toward their tiresome proximity. “All right, you bitches. Get out. Go fuck your bodyguards or horse grooms if you need to scratch an itch. Bodyguards and grooms are all sluts.”
Whoa,way to talk about the men of the working class, Clementine.
But Clementine was staring the three of them down again. “You shouldn’t have been using the Tsesarevich Nicolai Romanov like a warm sybian.”
I didn’t know what that word meant, but I kept my face in its outrage-emotion setting andglaredat them for treating Nicolai like a warm sybian. A warm sybian, dang it!Unreal.
“I was never on top,” Ottalie said. “Were you two ever on top?”
Poppy’s over-mascaraed eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Once. For about thirty seconds. Then he flipped me and fucked my ass as punishment. Still came so hard I saw stars, though.”
Clementine slammed her hands over her ears, and her long hair swayed.“Oh, Lord.I don’t want to hear another word.Not one.Get out. Go!” She flicked her thin hands at them, dismissing all three of them and making that hissingtskthat could have beengitor zip.“Go!”
Ottalie, Charlotte, and Poppy slunk out of the bathroom.
The door swung shut behind them.
Clementine sighed with a groan and braced her arms on the sink counter. “One of these days, those bitches will go too far, and I will spill their secrets to the men.”
I leaned on the counter, too. “If we were still in high school, I’d say the mean girls had found us.”
Clementine swung her long, moonlight hair back over her shoulder and peered at me. “No, darling. They are not the mean girls.Iam the mean girls. When I say ‘Whatever, bitches,’ the bitcheswhatever.Come, people will wonder why we’ve been gone so long.”
CHAPTER 11
nicolai’s magic trick
NICOLAI
Ifooled them all.
John was laughing and slapping me on the back in congratulations as Clementine steered Lexi through the crowd, their two blond heads bobbing through the undulating field of multicolored dandelions toward the ladies’ room, set in a dark alcove along the rear of the balcony.
When I’d performed my magic trick and flipped over that line about how I, and probably I alone, could have kept a covert girlfriend secret for two entire years, the tight-knit group of eight of my closest friends plus other hangers-on had simultaneously achieved enlightenment, metaphorical stage lights glowing on their heads. Their postures had relaxed as the world became orderly to them again, and they’d believed my fantastic tale ofmebeing able to keep the secret of a clandestine love affair.
It was just crazy enough to be true.
But Clemmyknew.
That lift of her gray-blue eyes to the light-swirling ceiling had not been the relief of believing my tall tale. She’d placedthe final piece of a puzzle, saw the truth laid out before her, and was ready to take a sword to my story.
And now she was surely interrogating Lexi in that ladies’ room with the skill of an FBI homicide detective.
John clapped me on the shoulder again, jolting me down to my shoes.
That smack wasn’t John’s usual friendly back-slapping blow. The intensity of it warned me that he wasn’t quite as mollified by my magic trick as I’d hoped, and then he announced, “Nico, I need one of those fruity drinks or else my blood sugar will crash. Surely, your scotch reservoirs are low.” His tone was threaded with steel.“Come to the bar with me.”
Shit.“I could use a scotch.”
John led the way, navigating toward the bar in the crowded dark club filled with flashing lights, and I followed him, watching the back of his dark-haired head as I pushed through the sea of bobbing scalps, their shoulders poking my arms and back, their hips brushing my legs.
My face portrayed my usual unbothered, sardonically bored persona.
I wasn’t sure John believed that version of me anymore. Our friendship had been too long.
