Page 18 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

a proposal

LEXI BYRNE

Dammit, you have got to be frickin’ kidding me.

Busking on crowded sidewalks wasn’t a risk-free way to survive in Las Vegas, and in just a few days, creepers of all kinds had accosted me, molested me, and mocked me. I didn’t care as long as I made enough money to eat that day and to occasionally sleep and shower in a bed at a cheap motel.

But no drunk had yet tried to upstage me by falling to their knees and proposing, even if he was a tall, buff, movie-star handsome drunk.

The drunk wearing a slim-fitting suit stared up at me from just beyond my voluminous skirt, his teal-blue eyes imploring like he was the one begging for money on the street. His straight black hair fell neatly across his forehead, recently barbered, and a good cut at that.

And he sounded like he might have an English accent, or maybe the booze had an English accent.

As a living statue, I couldn’t improv and play along.

Living statues didn’t move. At all. That was the whole shtick.

So I stacked my bones and locked my muscles and stood there, immobile, while the drunk guy at my feet expounded on his proposal from his knees. “I mean it, I do. Miss, Madam, Mistress Bride, I need you to marry me right now. Let’s get married.”

He was kneeling right in front of my danged money hat, blocking it.

Dang it, I had seen a woman reaching into her purse for her wallet, but now she was watching us, her purse dangling at her side, forgotten.

Everyone was watching us side-eyed, not sure how the scene was supposed to go and not reaching for their cash.

Geez, I’d only made maybe twenty bucks so far that night. The last thing I needed was a big ol’ distraction.

They’d probably be throwing money at him next. From the tailoring of that suit and expensive haircut and the fact that he was the same guy who’d stepped out of the same SUV as Prince frickin’ Harry and Meghan earlier, this drunk didn’t need the dough.

I did.

I tried not to move my lips. “Hey, buddy. I’m working here. Get lost.”

“I need a bride.” His voice was loud, like he was announcing that he was taking auditions. “I need to be married right now.”

Yeah, he definitely sounded like he’d escaped from the upstairs of Downton Abbey. His jaw barely moved when he spoke. He would have made a pretty good living statue, too, except for the drunken flailing.

A sigh escaped my lips, moving my chest more than I usually did. I spoke through barely parted lips like a ventriloquist. “My guy, I’m sympathetic. Really, I am. But I need the money, so please stand up so people will put some money in my hat there.”

“Hat?” His head swiveled, mussing his dark hair further. “Where?”

“You’re kneeling on it.”

He looked down. The shops’ neon lights reflected lines on his healthy hair. “This hat?”

“Yeah. That one.”

“How much do you generally make?” He took his wallet out of the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. “Like, ten?”

I sighed without moving even my chest. At least ten bucks could buy a burger. “Sure. Ten would be good.”

He reached into his wallet, grabbed a huge handful of cash with all his fingers like he was ripping deep weeds out of compacted soil, and dropped it all in my hat. “There. I think that’s ten or so.”

I couldn’t help myself. I leaned over and looked, but I made it look like a pose and froze there, bent at the waist.

The top bill was a C-note, and the bills underneath had double-zeros in their green corners, too. “Is that—is that ten thousand dollars?”

Somebody’d won big at the Texas Hold ‘Em tables that night.

My voice came out between my unmoving lips like a harsh stage whisper. “Why are you doing this?”

He looked up at me from where he still kneeled, his slightly dazed blue eyes staring straight into mine. “You said ten thousand. Do you want more? Is it usually more?”

“No, I— what are you doing?”

He dropped his floppy wallet into the hat, too, and spread his long arms wide again. “Proposing. I want to marry you.”

My hands were braced on my hips, still holding onto my bouquet of heat-wilted purple hydrangeas in one fist. “Seriously, my dude, you’re drunk.

You’re very drunk.” I was still bending over him from where I stood on the suitcase, and I could detect alcohol from my perch.

“Put that back in your wallet. Can I call someone for you?”

“No.” He shook his head violently like only a drunk would.

“I can’t trust anyone. Come on, marry me.

We’ll go right over to Van Cleef and Arpels and pick out a ring.

” He leaned forward a little over his knee.

“Las Vegas has a Van Cleef, right? Or at least a Cartier? Or we can buy any ring for the ceremony, and I’ll have one made for you later. I just need you to marry me.”

Everyone in the crowd surrounding us had pulled back, watching the chaos.

Except for one other guy, who was also drunk but was wearing the merchandise of a southern-state basketball team. He’d been leering at me and guffawing with his equally drunk, sportsball-clad friends.

Basketball Drunk had five o’clock stubble sprouting on his shaved head, and he staggered over and reached toward me while the gorgeous drunk guy kneeled on the sidewalk.

I watched the new guy out of the corner of my eye but didn’t move. Living statues don’t flinch at feints, or else we’d be twitching all the time.

The drunk basketball fan flopped against me, grabbed my waist, groped my ass and my boob, and slurped a moist kiss on my white-painted cheek.

I turned to shove him off, but he was already falling backward, eyes flipped open wide in fright, as the hot guy who had been kneeling over there just an instant ago peeled Basketball Drunk off my side and flung him to the ground, yelling, “Get away from my wife!”

His what?

Basketball Drunk stared up at him and stammered an apology.

And he was apologizing to the other man but not to me, the woman he’d assaulted, the typical dickhead. I rolled my eyes and turned away, resuming a pose with one hand held aloft like a ballerina bride.

The blue-eyed hottie held his fist near his shoulder, his back foot planted firmly on the cement. “Get the fuck up. I wish you would.”

When the guy was flat on the sidewalk where the crowd had drawn back, gaping stupidly, Blue Eyes in the suit reached down and hauled him off the ground by his shirt, shook him like a wet towel, and held him out toward me, snarling, “Apologize to my wife.”

Basketball Drunk’s shoes scraped the cement sidewalk as Blue Eyes shook him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

I braced one hand on my hip because the living statue illusion was shattered anyway. “You didn’t mean to? That’s the stupidest apology I’ve ever heard.”

The hot drunk guy, who was still inexplicably attractive even though his eyes burned blue-hot with drunk rage, growled near the guy’s face, “Again. Better.”

Basketball Drunk gibbered, “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I’m wasted. I didn’t think. I won’t do it again.”

“Marginally better,” I announced. “You can let him go.”

Blue Eyes released Basketball Drunk, who collapsed into a puddle of soggy humanity on the ground.

Blue Eyes stood over him and waved at the air. “Get the fuck out.”

Basketball Drunk scrambled away on the cement like a pudgy land crab.

The hot drunk in the suit watched him go, his jaw clenched.

Okay, that just happened. I— wow.

Blue Eyes turned back to me, flicking the hand that he’d held the guy with like it had slime on it. “Where was I?”

“You’re in Las Vegas,” I ventured, because he seemed very drunk. That question might have meant his actual location.

“Yes, I remember that. I was doing something. I was—” He rubbed the side of his head and then looked down at me, because even though I was perched on a slightly wobbly hard-sided suitcase, his eyes were still inches above mine.

His hand clenched his dark (Black? Hard to tell in the yellow light from the streetlamp.) hair, and he perused me, scanning down my wedding dress to the tips of my shoes and the roller suitcase and back up to my eyes. “Oh, yeah.”

Oh no, he was going back to proposing. “Look, buddy, I appreciate the gallantry, saving me from that gross drunk dude?—”

Blue Eyes dropped to one knee again, bobbling to the side and catching himself with his fingertips on the sidewalk so that his posture was more like a superhero landing after flight than a guy proposing. “Damn, I’m drunk.”

“Yeah, that’s obvious. Look, sweetie?—”

He looked up at me from where he kneeled just past the hem of my wedding gown. “Nico. My name is Nicolai, but everyone calls me Nico.”

The crowd was reforming after they’d pulled back during the fight, tightening around where the drunk was proposing to a random woman on the street, and gawking.

I needed to stop this. “Nico, my brother in Christ, you are wasted.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m doing the wrong thing.”

“It sure as heck increases the probability of it, though. Come on, Nico. You don’t want to do this.”

“Yes, I do. I really do. I want to marry you.” His voice lowered, and his breath caught in his chest like pain. “I want to get married right now.”

Oh.

Oh, honey.

My heart cracked a little where the love used to be.

There were only a few reasons why Mr. Blue Eyes, Nicolai, might be dressed in a nice suit, distraught, and hammered out of his mind in Las Vegas.

Oh, the poor guy. “Did somebody leave you at the altar? Is that why you’re so, um, upset?”

I didn’t want to keep harping on the fact that he was wasted. It seemed impolite, especially if he’d deserved a few drinks to lighten the load of getting jilted at the altar.

“It doesn’t matter.” Emotion, maybe despair, caught in his deep voice, and my heart broke a little more for him. “Nothing matters. I just want to get married.”

Oh, I’d bet that’s just what happened to him.

My heart cracked open wider. Las Vegas might be the town of quickie marriages, but it was also a town of heartbreak because some people bolted. That damned Jimmy. “Marrying someone else isn’t going to fix things.”

His dazed glance up at me was heartbreaking. “It will for me.”

Sympathy got the better of me, and I reached a little toward him. I didn’t touch him, though. “Is it for a green card or something?”

He shook his head and looked down, and he looked so sad. “What is a green card?”

“You know, US permanent residency? Because otherwise they’ll throw you out of the country?”

He snorted. “They wouldn’t dare.”

From the crowd, a woman’s voice yelled, “I’ll marry him if you don’t want him!”

I straightened, looking at the vast crowd that had gathered around us on the nighttime street corner, stretching all four ways through the intersection and blocking traffic.

Honks blared.

A man with a lilting tenor voice yelled, “I’ll take him to be my wedded husband. I’ll take him hard.”

Oh, someone was offering to sexually assault this guy who was definitely too drunk to consent. Ugh.

The crowd laughed, but an evil undertone of enjoying pain rumbled under it.

I crouched again to whisper to Blue Eyes and fished my phone out of the pocket I’d sewn into my swishing skirt. “Hey, I think I need to call someone for you. Do you have a friend in town who can make sure you get back to your hotel safely?”

He shook his head, his mussed hair swaying in the hot breeze. “No one. There is no one who can help me.”

Another female voice in the crowd called out, “If he’s carrying around ten-G in cash, I’ll take him, all right. I’ll take him for half of everything he owns.”

The crowd’s snarling laugh was turning ugly.

Every crowd had some assholes in it, but Blue Eyes’ distress had called the predators in human form like they were scenting blood.

They wanted to take advantage of him.

Nicolai was in no condition to make life-altering decisions that night. Someone needed to protect him.

Maybe the vulnerability and hurt in his clear teal eyes (how did that color exist in nature?) echoed my own just a few days before, but I couldn’t throw this guy to the wolves.

I stepped off my stupid empty suitcase and stomped on its foot to flip it vertical, catching the handle, and scooped up my top hat full of his money.

Juggling all that into one arm, I grabbed Nico’s large, warm hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Are you marrying me?” Nico asked, his eyebrows rising.

Absolutely not.

But I could get sad, pretty Nicolai away from this crowd, sober him up, and talk some sense into him.

He didn’t have to ruin his life just because someone had left him at the altar.

“Please,” he begged.

“Okay. Come on, Nico. Let’s get hitched.”

He chuckled as he strolled behind me. “That’s my girl.”