“My God, there aremoreof them?”
He chuckled. “Ueli made arrangements to fly them here from Paris to attend to us. We have a driver and a guard for tonight. They have our schedule already. It’s ridiculous that I live this way, isn’t it?”
“But you must’ve lived with security guards your whole life. It must not seem too weird to you.”
“I had much reduced security until my father died when I was twelve, and I inherited.”
I grabbed his hand and held it, and he gave me a little squeeze but didn’t let go, even after we were in the back of the SUV, driving through the single-lane streets in Verona.
The passenger-side guy kept his eyes on the buildings we passed, but he had a friendly grin and a French accent. “Bonjour! Aymeric Denaiu, I am pleased to meet you.”
He’d pronounced his first nameay-mer-eek,which was a neat name. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m Lexi.”
Aymeric grinned back at me. “So I heard. It is good to meet the notorious Lexi Romanov,finally.”
“I got here as fast as I could.”
He laughed, but his dark eyes never stopped moving, his gaze roving the streets around us.
His constant surveillance was kind of scary in how instinctively he didn’t stop looking for something horrible coming at us.
A tiny car with its headlights off poked its nose into the street ahead of us, nearly invisible except for the movement. Aymeric clocked it and pointed it out to the driver, who pulled us into the other lane.
The driver didn’t turn his head as he spoke. “I am Konrad Blom, driver.”
Nicolai leaned over to me. “Konrad is an old friend from Stockholm.”
His head bobbed, light brown hair yellowed in the streetlights striping the car’s hood. “Old, definitely. Friends, only when I’m drunk.”
Aymeric laughed. “Every night, then.”
Nicolai chuckled. “How did Jacob do at the trials?”
Konrad puffed his chest but didn’t take his eyes off the road. “He is starting at left wing in his university’s varsity team next year, we have just heard. He will audition for Sweden’s national team for the next winter Olympics.”
“He made it! Congratulations.”
“Yes. We are pleased.”
Nicolai squeezed my hand again.
The Billionaire Sanctuary club in Verona was not a sleek, modern black-glass building, but a slice of a historical city block, renovated and redecorated inside with top-notch marble, granite, and other status-conveying rock.
Our suite was on the top floor, a spacious expanse with high ceilings and tall windows that overlooked the medieval city of curving streets. “Wow!”
Nicolai chuckled. “Ryan came through. It’s amazing what a little blackmail can accomplish.”
“You didn’t really?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “No. I merely asked if he could make room for us. I’d kick a hot celebrity out of my real estate to allow him to stay there, too.”
We slept in the wide, sumptuous bed for a few hours, but I was so jet-lagged that I woke up at right about six o’clock, just after dawn.
I stretched in the fantastic sheets, smooth and crisp against my bare legs and feet, luxuriating in my third night in a row of flopping into a bed and zonking out.
Trying to sleep in the reclined seat of my sweltering hot car had traumatized me a little.
That, and every minute of trying to figure out how to survive the rest of my life.
