Page 21 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

russian orthodox

LEXI BYRNE

There was no way on God’s green Earth that we were going to find a Russian Orthodox priest willing to marry us in Las Vegas at midnight, so I wasn’t worried. My plan was to drive Nico around until he passed out or forgot his plan, and then figure out what to do.

Once Nico had demanded that we had to be married by a Russian Orthodox priest and only a Russian Orthodox priest, I’d been fine with carting him around.

While we were driving around, I could pry information out of him to figure out where he was staying and dump him into bed after he collapsed.

And if I couldn’t figure out where his hotel was, then I would pilfer a little bit of that ridiculous wad of cash I’d stuffed back in his wallet and get us a roach motel room for the rest of the night to let him sleep it off.

In the morning, surely he would be absolutely mortified, and this strange adventure of ours would be over. But he was definitely buying me breakfast after all this.

I drove Nico around Las Vegas.

I drove him through the red taillight streams of stop-and-slow traffic down the Strip and then west on I-95 past the dark golf courses of Summerlin. I turned onto the 215 and was heading east for Henderson, wasting time until this drunk in my car passed out.

We passed a few darkened jewelry stores because he insisted on buying wedding rings, but I didn’t even stop because I was afraid he’d break his hand on the bulletproof glass windows, trying to bang his way inside.

Instead, we ended up at the very pawn shop where I’d ditched Jimmy’s engagement ring, though mercifully, a teenage clerk I’d never met was manning the cash register.

My ring from Jimmy was gone, but Nico insisted that we buy the best rings in the store, a wedding band for him and a double set for me, which were a whole lot prettier than the diamond-chip engagement ring Jimmy had proposed with.

I haggled with the clerk until he wrote Returnable for a full refund within forty-eight hours on the receipt, and then we were off in search of a church in the wee hours of the morning.

Nico was out of his ever-lovin’ mind, but okay.

“There has to be a Russian Orthodox church around here somewhere,” he muttered as I tipped the steering wheel to change lanes on the dark freeway under the wide night sky as a semi-truck barreled past us in the fast lane.

For a drunk, Nico was persistent.

He took out his phone and typed.

One quick internet search and his GPS app later, we were sitting in the parking lot of a Russian Orthodox Church, dammit.

It didn’t have enameled onion domes like a Moscow cathedral. It just looked like a small brown church, blocky, desert-colored. Arrow-slit windows made tall dashes on the walls.

We stood in front of the medieval, locked wooden door while Nico pounded on it.

The church was dark because it was past midnight and getting later.

His fervent knocking echoed like there was no one inside.

I kind of suggested to him, “I don’t think anybody’s in there. There aren’t any lights on.”

He pounded again. “Someone must be.”

“Since this is an actual church and not a Vegas Elvis chapel, they probably have rules about who can get married in there. Like, you probably have to be a church member, or they have to do counseling or something.”

“I’ll bet I can get them to marry us.”

“Awfully sure of yourself, are ya there, buddy?”

Nico might still be drunk, but the flick of his eyebrows was nothing but arrogance. “I’ll pull rank.”

Bad thoughts wafted into my brain. “You aren’t a priest or anything, are you?”

“Not at all,” he scoffed.

“But you said you’d ‘pull rank.’ Wouldn’t you have to be a priest in order to pull rank over another priest?”

“There are other kinds of rank. Besides, Orthodox priests can marry if they want to. Maybe he’s in the residence.”

Nico stumbled down the sidewalk that ran around the building toward the back.

The heat of the desert night settled on my arms, and I was sweating inside my enormous froufrou wedding dress. “Hey, Nico! Maybe we shouldn’t be waking priests up in the middle of the night? That has to be a sin, or at least bad luck or something.”

“It’ll be fine.”

I trudged along behind him, my hands full of fluffy white lace lifting my dress where it was sweeping dirt off the sidewalk. “If he yells at you, I’m going to let him. I am going to stand right there and nod and let him.”

“He won’t,” Nico said.

My pretend fiancé was marching ahead of me, but he turned back and held out his hand for me to hold. “Trust me.”

Jimmy never did that. When I was struggling and he forged ahead of me, he just kept going. I’d told myself it didn’t matter because he was going to have to wait for me one way or another.

But Nico had stopped on the walkway, and he was holding out his hand.

Even this stranger, whom I’d known for a couple of hours, was more thoughtful than Jimmy had been after six years in a relationship, including a four-year engagement.

Huh.

I slipped my fingers between Nico’s.

It felt awkward.

Jimmy wasn’t a hand-holder, and there hadn’t been anyone in my life before Jimmy, which meant I wasn’t really sure how to do the hand-holding thing.

I flipped my hand around so that my grip was underneath his because I was shorter by a mile. Otherwise, I was going to have to practically dislocate my shoulder because he was so much taller than I was.

But he somehow flipped his hand around underneath mine again so that he was holding just my fingers, and then he lifted my hand and bowed from his waist.

Absolute terror gripped my chest and rose through the veins in the sides of my throat. Too much.

His lips barely pressed against that highest peak of my knuckles where he held my fingers, and his gaze flicked up at me just as the softness of his mouth and warm breath touched my skin.

Holy maloney, Nicolai was gorgeous. The clear white illumination from the church’s security system made his teal-blue eyes almost glow where he was looking up at me, and dark shadows cut under his strong jaw and cheekbones.

His dark hair flopped over his forehead, silky smooth and blunt cut in front, tapered to velvet and a sharp line on the back of his neck above his crisp white shirt.

Everything about him was groomed and polished and expensive.

The terrified clench moved down my stomach and shook my knees.

He was just some guy I was taking care of until he sobered up. This wasn’t real.

I didn’t want to like him.

Nicolai looked up at me, which meant that his eyes were just an inch below mine because he was bending over a lot. “Why such big eyes, my bride?”

The clenching had filled my throat, so I had to make stupid growling and choking sounds to force it to open up. “Just never had anybody do that before. Or at least I’ve never had anybody do it like that.”

He straightened up, but then he covered the place where he’d kissed with his other hand like he was sealing it. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

His tiny lean backward suggested that I’d said the wrong answer, but he kept a hold on my hand. “Of course, I knew you must have been at least eighteen because the clerk accepted your identification for the license, but I thought you were a little older than twenty-one.”

“Why? How old are you?”

His blue eyes, almost green in the yellow streetlights, were steady as he seemed to examine me. “Twenty-eight.”

Relief washed some of the shaking away. “Oh, okay. After that buildup, I thought you were going to say you were forty or something.”

Nico smiled and shook his head. “Merely twenty-eight.”

The silliness of this conversation washed over me, and all that freaking-out feeling rinsed away.

The fact that we didn’t even know each other’s ages didn’t matter because we weren’t really getting married because I wasn’t going to sign the marriage license.

“Sure, that’s fine. I mean it’s fine with me. Are you okay with it?”

His slow nod felt like he was taking this whole marriage thing way more seriously than I was.

“Are you still drunk?” I asked him.

“Absolutely mortal.”

“I do not know what that means, but I’ll take your word for it that you’re wasted.”

His soft laugh in the night felt cozy, like we’d laughed together often, and he spun on his heel and strode a little slower this time toward a low building that looked like a rectory behind the church, still holding my hand and towing me after him. “Let’s find a priest.”

“I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see us.” I didn’t mean my tone to be quite so dry.

I traipsed beside him, not quite swinging his arm, but I was hanging back a little bit. Bothering a priest at this ungodly hour seemed so mean.

Heh. Ungodly. But it was.

At the dark ranch-style house behind the arid courtyard covered in pebbled granite and cacti, Nico again pounded on the door.

This time, a light switched on in the back bedroom and, after a minute, a portly man rattled the locks and opened the door. His charcoal beard was streaked with gray, and he asked with a thick guttural accent, “Yes, my child? How can I help you in the middle of the damn night?”

Nico started speaking some other language like a machine-gun barrage.

When the priest’s eyes widened and he started speaking back in the same language, I decided this was none of my business and stepped backwards. If they wanted me to be included in the conversation, they would’ve spoken a language I knew. Obviously, they both could speak English.

At one point, Nico showed him his Swedish driver’s license.

The guy’s eyes widened even more under his wiry brows.

Then he stepped back from the front door and motioned us inside, settling us in his brown and green living room before retreating to the bedroom.

“What’s going on?” I muttered to Nico.

Nico’s sly smile and one eyebrow-rise should have tipped me off. “He is readying himself to perform the rite.”

“What rite?”

“Marriage. It’s a sacrament.”

Shock billowed through me like a bomb blast. “Wait, what? He’s actually going to do it?”

“I told you I could arrange it. He asked whether you’ve been baptized.”

My baptism was not my happiest memory just then. “Sure, a few years ago.”

“Denomination?” Nico asked.

In Jimmy’s family’s church. “Evangelical.”

His head tilted to the side. “Is that Christian?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s Protestant, correct? Not even Roman Catholic.”

“Yeah, Protestant, I guess. It’s not Catholic.”

“He’ll have to baptize you before we do the marriage rite.”

“I don’t want to get dunked in a pool of water tonight.” Even though I was sticky-sweaty under my wedding gown. “Getting my dress wet will ruin it. I don’t have a baptism shift. I can’t do that.”

Nico dropped one eyebrow. “He’ll touch your forehead with holy water and blessed olive oil. There will be no dunking.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. We don’t do that. Do protestant churches have some sort of a fish tank for that?”

“Some of them have a baptismal pool, yes. Some of them use a swimming pool or a river.”

Nico’s blue eyes were open as far as he could get them, the embodiment of aghast. “We don’t do that. We aren’t literal in our rituals. Our sacraments are symbolic and civilized. And he’ll have to perform your chrismation before the marriage rite, too.”

“What’s a chrismation?” I asked, worried.

“It’s a sealing of the dedication. In the religion, it’s the bestowal of the Holy Ghost, along with the attending gifts of the Spirit that are given to all who have been chrismated, plus any unique or special gifts that God gives one, to enable them to realize their intended potential as a child of God and as a unique member of Christ’s Body, the Church. ”

Words flowed out of him, one after another, no pauses, like a hard-memorized soliloquy. “Okay.”

“It’s just a little olive oil with sweet herbs and such touched on your hands and feet,” he continued. “He said he can do the baptism and chrismation in ten minutes, and then the wedding will be another twenty or so.”

“That’s— quick. That’s really quick.” All this religious stuff was piling on like I was being buried by heavy brocade sacramental garments. “Does he know you’re wasted?”

“I think he suspects.”

“And he’s willing to perform a binding religious rite even though you’re hammered?”

Nico waggled his dark eyebrows at me. “I said I would convince him.”