“Okay, that sounds suitably awful,” I admitted. “If you tell me to go, I’ll go. But I might try to send people to rescue you, too.”
“Butyoudon’t come back.Youdon’t put yourself in danger.”
“Okay,” I said. “Deal.”
“Deal,” he sighed.
Cool. I’d successfully negotiated with someone who could have been the Emperor of All the Russias, if history had been different, and I’d sort of won.
Neat.
I stalked away from him and hunted through the shopping bags that had been delivered from the cars while Clementine and I had been at the Lazuli spa until I found the burnt orange bags with the horse and buggy and a dude printed on them.
There were boxes of shoes matching the dresses, too.
Peeking inside the Hermès boxes, I found the one containing the dark red leather purse.
Okay, the oxblood was pretty. I could see why Victoria liked it.
“And now, I need to talk to my lawyer in private, Nicolai. Skedaddle, and ask Victoria to come in here and confer with me.”
Nicolai shook his head and started to walk out of the room, but he paused with his hand on the doorknob and then turned back.
I lifted my head. “Nico?”
He strolled across the room and grabbed me with one arm around my waist and the other digging into my freshly dyed curls. “What the hell is this?”
“I thought you said it was okay if I went back to my real color?” Panic rose. He didn’t like it. He wouldn’t likeme.“Is it not okay?”
He kissed the dark brown curls wrapping around his finger. “It’s fucking fantastic. Do you like it?”
“I wanted to try it to see if I like it. I think I like it. I think I like that I look more like I should instead of trying to be something else.”
“Good. You’ll be the most beautiful woman at the ball tonight. I won’t be able to take my eyes off you.”
He dropped my hair and my body and strode away, and I had to catch myself because my flippin’ knees had given out.
“Wait’ll you see the dresses Clementine picked out,” I yelled after him. “I should have waited to have this argument until I was all dressed up.”
“You would have had me on my knees,” Nicolai said as he walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 15
the post-nuptial contract
LEXI
The lawyers slapped five thick paper copies of the post-nuptial contract on the coffee table.
Paper. Wow. How . . .conventional.
The closely spaced text was forty-seven pages long, and I read every word, even though I understood maybe half.
Victoria explained all the clauses to me, and that’s when I discovered that I had understood far less than I had thought I did.
Because Nicolai had emailed the lawyers before Volkov made his initial threats, the whole contract was centered on how much money Nicolai was going to pay me and the very few legal ways I could break the contract if something happened.
And the almost-zero ways that Nicolai could break the contract without paying me an obscene amount of money.
