Uh-oh.
“I’m not sure,” Nicolai said. “Depends on my mood.”
“Oh, heavens forfend you not bein the moodto dance.” Clementine didn’t need to be able to move her face to make her sarcasm biting. “Lexi, make sure he dances with you. Everyone needs to see you two dance together.”
Clementine flounced off into the crowd of black-tailed tuxedos and white ball gowns.
“She sure is adamant about us showing everybody how couple-y we are,” I muttered.
“She’s very sensitive about social perception. Practically has antennae for it. The good thing is that she is a help, not a hindrance, with our odd Vladimir problem. And Volkov.”
Time to come clean. “She said we were supposed to do a waltz. I can’t dance a waltz. Or a foxtrot. Or anything like that.”
Nicolai’s slight head tilt seemed curious, which was good because if he had made fun of me, I might’ve started crying in the middle of that ballroom. “Would you like to learn?”
“That never works. I’ve seen so many movies where the prince or the duke or whatever takes the dumb, inexperienced plebeian girl off to a dark corner to teach her to waltz, and they just end up kissing.”
He chuckled. “Excellent. Shall I whisk you off to a dark corner to ‘teach you to waltz’?”
“Clementine said we’re supposed to be making an appearance. She was very firm.”
“No one will notice our absence for a few minutes. Waltzing is easy. I can literally teach you to waltz in a few minutes.”
“If you say so. This just sounds like a plot from The Ridgertons where somebody gets trapped in a marriage or else she’ll be ruined.”
“But I’ve already trapped you into marriage. I don’t need to do it again.”
CHAPTER 17
learning to waltz
LEXI
Nicolai tugged on my hand, drawing me away from the crowd.
Long silk opera gloves covered my arms well past my elbows. I shoved one drooping glove back up my biceps as he led me toward the dark terrace overlooking the shimmering swimming pool, lit from below like a giant aquamarine set into the ground.
Clementine’s delicate little clutch with the decorative knot on the clasp swung from a necklace-weight chain around my wrist. I’d tucked Nicolai’s credit card and a few documents and my driver’s license from my wallet in there.
Only a few other couples were out there in the night, most of them standing close together with their hands clasped and arms wrapped around each other, not dancing but swaying to the music.
“Seriously, you think you’re going to teach me how to waltz?” I fretted.
“In Europe, they teach us ballroom starting in grade school, when we are eight years old or so, at least on the continent. A friend of mine who attended Le Rosey for high school was from Edinburgh. He said that in Scotland, they taught them Highland country dances in physical education instead of to waltz.”
“Now that sounds like fun. I can only assume anything the Scots do is a riot.”
“Americans don’t learn to dance, though. Interesting.”
“They taught us American folk dances like the Virginia Reel, which was mostly boys swinging the girls around by our elbows until we went flying off into the corners of the gym. Zero out of ten stars. Do not recommend.”
“I promise not to fling you into the corners of the terrace.” Nicolai lifted my left arm and rested it on his shoulder, the thick, rounded muscle of his shoulder, even through the layers of his black-tailed tuxedo jacket, a white vest under that, and then a dress shirt, and then an undershirt, and thenhim.
I tried not to think about his warm flesh, only fractions of an inch from my palm.
Wow, I was just seriously a horndog. Like, some switch had been flipped on in the last few days, and so then I was just a cat in heat who wanted to climb Nicolai Romanov and lick his ear with my fishhook-sharp tongue.
If I were, you know, a cat. They have rough tongues.
