“Or Clementine?”
“She’s our friend, but she’s rather distantly related, genetically. Quite a few horizontal branches between us on the family pedigree. If we needed a kidney or some bone marrow, it’s unlikely she’d match.”
“Well, then. The two of you must stay on good terms. In case one of you needs a kidney.”
The lines around Kostya’s eyes lightened, and his lips parted for a second before he smiled just a little. “Yes, we both want what’s best for him.” He leaned down and whispered, “According to what Nico said, you might be here for a good time but not a long time, but I am glad we can be friends.”
Dagger to my heart, but okay. “Yeah, we can be friends.”
And with that, we waltzed the rest of the song.
Kostya gently led me through the steps and even managed to hold my hand above me, letting me spin once before clasping me securely in his arms again, as we muttered, “Back-side-together, forward-side-together,” and got to laughing about it. We danced between the other swaying couples and through the crowd, having a perfectly lovely time because we could become friends.
I felt like he believed me. I felt like, even though my marriage to Nicolai was doomed from the start, maybe I could at least have some friends at the end of this.
Maybe when we signed the divorce and annulment paperwork at the end, the friendships wouldn’t dissolve, too, I hoped.
After all, if we were all in this together, since we were on the same side, we were allies.
Friends.
And I danced with Nicolai’s brother, swooping and spinning, laughing as we figured it out.
At the end of the song, he backed off and bowed, and I fluttered into a ridiculously elaborate courtesy like something out ofSwan Lake, which made Kostya laugh again.
His laugh was like Nicolai’s, but a little freer, at least out here in the open.
We stood side by side and looked around for Nicolai.
We both saw him at the same time, far away on the other side of the packed ballroom, his head and shoulders sticking up from the bobbing surface of people’s heads, and waltzing with a slim, beautiful blond woman in a palest pink gown who leaned in and drew him down, angling to kiss him.
A second metaphorical dagger stabbed me in the heart, but this one made memad.
We were stillmarried.If anything came of this floozy trying to kiss Nicolai, if hecheated,I would be in the quintuple money-or-nothing zone of the contract.
I tried to be happy about the massive amounts of life-changing money, but rage surged through me. I wanted to rip that watered-down pink dress right off of her and strangle her with it. I wanted to wrap her up like a rose-colored mummy and throw her in the aquamarine pool just past the balcony.
I could probably hoist her over my shoulder and carry her that far. When I was doing technical theatre in high school, I schlepped around sandbag counterweights to fly the sets all the time.
The floozy was still aiming for Nicolai’s mouth, and his hands moved around her waist toward the front, toward her ribs, toward herboobs.
My whole body flushed with fire.
“Oh,” Kostya said. “I’m sure that’s not what it looks like. She’s probably just someone we knew from school, maybe. There’s a lot of platonic social kissing in Europe. Cheek-cheek, bisous-bisous. It’s all very French.”
The woman smashed her face onto Nicolai’s mouth.
I stumbled back a step, shocked as heck that he hadn’t shoved her off.
Kostya glanced down at me, worry creasing between his eyebrows. “Well, that’s quite French.”
I wondered whether that post-nup contract would be invalidated if I murdered my husband.
CHAPTER 20
alina
NICOLAI
