Page 23 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

hangover

NICOLAI ROMANOV

Light was pain was suffering was my heart drumming in my head was bitter decay in my mouth.

Every joint ached.

My stomach roiled like a blowout tire flapping around the rim.

Sunlight on my face burned and pierced my eyes.

“Fuck me,” I whispered, and my throat hurt all the way to my ears.

And then, mortifying me further, a feminine alto voice murmured, “Are you awake already?”

What I tried to do was flip over and scramble backwards while demanding who the woman was and how she had ended up in my bed.

What actually happened was that I thrashed on the bed like a beached goldfish and moaned, “Whuuu ? —”

My boneless flop maneuvered my head around on the pillow, and I saw the woman who’d spoken.

She was pretty, though disheveled as we were in bed, her long blond hair tangled around her face and dark eyes soulful as she raised one eyebrow at me.

She asked in mercifully soft dulcet tones, “How are you doing there, Nico?”

Knowing my name meant she had the advantage. “Not too well.”

Her chuckle was as quiet as her words, and I thanked God and all the saints that she hadn’t broken out with a ringing laugh that would have blasted my skull open from the inside.

She slid off the bed, barely jiggling the mattress that dipped toward her.

My stomach tried to follow.

I watched her pad —all—the—way—around—the—bed on bare feet, staring, even though my eyeballs were dried-out husks, and squinted as she passed through a laser glare of sunlight from the wide window.

Her tee shirt and cotton shorts fluttered around her hourglass figure and shapely legs.

Despite an icepick hangover migraine and my mouth tasting like I’d been gargling paint stripper, my body responded, every ounce of flesh below my neck reacting to her fresh skin and the jiggle of her breasts and thighs under flimsy summer pajamas.

My cranium couldn’t keep up.

The nightstand on my side held a silver ice bucket with an opened champagne bottle sticking out.

The girl plunged her hand down into the ice bucket, clinking metal and glass and ice, and retrieved a can of ginger ale from under the surface.

A piece of paper that looked like ivory card stock lay on the nightstand on the other side of the champagne bucket.

The watery ice sluicing from the can and her arm back into the ice bucket roared like a waterfall. “I thought you might need some of this in the morning, although I figured you wouldn’t regain consciousness until at least noon.”

She stood in a nimbus of desert sunlight from the window.

“You’re an angel,” I whispered.

“Nope, not at all. Come on, Nico. Sit up and drink some ginger ale. I made you chug some water before you went to sleep last night, but I’ll bet you’ve still got one heckers of a hangover.”

I nodded, the stubble on my cheek and chin scraping over the pillowcase like screeching tires in my ear. “This headache can’t be from just one bottle of champagne.”

Her sympathetic smile was more than I deserved. “Oh, we barely touched the complimentary champagne. I wasn’t there for your pre-gaming, but you said something about vodka.”

Vodka? I never drank vodka.

The Russians ? —

Volkov, his henchmen, and my uncle stomped into my mind. “Oh, God.”

The ginger ale can cracked and hissed as she opened it. “Yeah, I think I’ll save my questions for later. Your explanations last night didn’t make much sense.”

I shoved the bed away, pushing with all my might to raise myself off the sheets. My feet found the floor, but I was hunched over in pain and humiliation.

The woman wrapped my fingers around the freezing-cold can of ginger ale and guided the straw she’d stuck in it to my lips.

The first sip absorbed into my desiccated tongue and gums, leaving me nothing to swallow.

I looked up at the woman, her pretty face angelic in the austere desert light. “I don’t usually get drunk like this.”

“I’m glad to hear that, my dude. If you did, I would suggest maybe you need a meeting.”

Fluttering sparks of recognition trickled through my brain, but I couldn’t quite grasp the memories to examine them.

A few sweet sips of ginger ale finally made it all the way down my parched throat, and I moved the can away from my mouth. “I deeply apologize for getting blotto last night.”

“You were already pretty blotto when I met you. And here’s a couple of aspirin. You look like you’re going to need it.”

I swallowed the tablets with more ginger ale despite them clinging to my sticky beef jerky tongue. “Then I thank you for taking me on and not dumping my murdered corpse in an alley.”

Again, her soft chuckle was sweet and did not hurt. “Don’t mention it. How are you feeling?”

The low tone of her question suggested that she understood vast extent of my hangover, rather than merely being standard American conversation. “I’ve been worse.”

“Worse than this? I’m surprised you aren’t dead.”

“Boarding school toughens your liver. I should be embarrassed to be assassinated by mere alcohol.”

“Are you still a little drunk?”

Assessing the spin of the room and condition of my muddled thoughts suggested I had not metabolized all the alcohol in my system. “While I am a bit worse the wear, I am not currently leathered.”

She blinked twice. “So, a little?”

“I’ll be all right in a few hours.”

A furtive peek under the covers assured me that I appeared to still be mostly dressed, decently clad in my suit pants and dress shirt, although my suit jacket, shoes, and socks seemed to have wandered off somewhere.

Odd.

In college when I’d achieved blackout drunk and woken up with a woman I didn’t remember, I was always stripped naked and so was she, and I was just praying there was a used condom in the room somewhere.

Waking up fully clothed with a woman in the bed after a bender was—yeah— odd.

I wasn’t even thirty, for God’s sake.

I set the ginger ale on the nightstand and experimented with the stability of my legs, feeling phantom shockwaves roll from my ankles to my hips. “I’ll be right back.”

After I used the very small hotel bathroom, truly a shockingly small closet of a room with a mixing bowl-sized tub and a brittle plastic shower curtain, I twisted the water faucets to start the shower running and then stared at my haggard reflection in the mirror.

Dark bruises stained the skin under my eyes.

I peeled off yesterday’s clothes, inspecting myself for clues about the night before.

A few light bruises on my left-side ribs under my swirled black tattoo ink suggested a bit of a brawl, probably nothing I was going to be sued over. Americans and their lawsuits after proper pub brawls were annoying.

I rolled my shoulders, feeling for strain. Yes, my whole left side was a little battered, from the whorls of black ink cresting over my shoulder and draining down my torso to the full sleeve that nearly reached my wrist.

The stench fuming from my pores did indeed suggest vodka, wine, and probably something more.

Damn, why had I been drinking like I was fifteen?

The Russians, Volkov, his unimaginable offer?—

I dragged my left hand through my hair.

In the mirror, metallic gold glinted on my ring finger between my dark curls.

The fuck?

I yanked my hand out of my hair, pulling out a few strands that had caught in the plain gold band encircling my finger.

The finger that one wears a wedding ring on.

No, no, no. What had I done?

There was no robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, so I tucked a scratchy towel around my hips and yanked the door open. “What the hell happened last night?”

The woman peeked out from under the sheets where she had crawled back into the bed. Her eyes ran down and up my abused, mostly naked body like she’d never seen it before. “We’ll discuss it after you shower.”

I splayed my left hand and pointed to my own damned finger. “Is this a wedding ring?”

“Yeah.” Her left hand jutted out from under the covers, and she waggled her fingers. “Mine’s prettier.”

“Look, um— um—” Half-baked memories rolled in my head, but none took shape. “Miss.”

“Miss?”

“Yes, well?—”

She propped herself up on one elbow and stared straight at me. “You don’t remember my name, do you?”

“Of course I do.” I did not. “I’m not quite sure what transpired last night, but I assure you, I’m not the sort of person who spontaneously gets married. I’m not the kind of person who does anything spontaneously.”

“Oh, my gosh. You don’t remember my name. This is a story for the ages.”

“I do apologize?—”

“Lexi,” she said, still watching me with lovely, deep, dark eyes.

Her pink tongue licking her front teeth as she said the word Lexi was fascinating. “I beg your pardon?”

“Lexi. That’s my name.”

Oh, thank God. I’d thought she was never going to tell me. “I knew that.”

“Right. Nico, sweetie, you just get showered and a little more sober, and then I’ll bring you up to speed.”

Flashes of the previous evening slapped me around as they appeared in my head. “Are you Volkov’s daughter? Did he get me wasted and trick me into marrying you last night?”

Lexi, for that is what she had said her name was, Lexi, rolled in the bed, her mouth rounded into an O. “Were you trying to escape a shotgun wedding? Is that what last night was about, you knocked up some poor girl and then ran out on her?”

“No one is pregnant, and I was not running from a wedding.” An impending wedding, in any case. “So you are not Demyan Volkov’s daughter, correct?”

“I am Lexi Byrne, not Volkov anything, and I don’t know who Damian Volvo is.”

The tiny bit of strength lent to me by panic evaporated, and I turned and slid down the door frame to the thin carpeting. “All right, but we’re not really married, of course. Surely, one can’t do that even here.”

Her head bobbled from side to side. “Sort of.”

Dread gripped me. “That’s a joke we used to tell each other in high school. Being sort-of-married was like being a-little-pregnant or kind-of-dead. Either you are, or you aren’t.”

One side of her mouth bent up. “Welcome to the gray zone.”

“I cannot wait to hear this.”

She flopped on her back on the bed where I couldn’t see her face anymore.

“Okay, I guess we’re doing this before you even shower and eat.

The long and the short of it is that we got married because you really wanted to and I couldn’t figure out any other way to keep you from getting yourself in even worse trouble. ”

“There was worse trouble?”

“Oh yeah, but the good news is that we did not sign the marriage license. You kept going for it with a pen, but I played keep-away and literally jingled my car keys in front of your pretty blue eyes to distract you.”

That didn’t sound like me at all. “And that worked?”

“I’m as surprised as you are. Anyway, we didn’t sign the marriage license and there wasn’t a notary public around after we got back to the hotel, so it isn’t legally binding. All we have to do is tear up the marriage license and walk away.”

Relief flushed through my entire body. This little sprite hadn’t taken advantage of me while I’d been deranged. “Lexi, you are a goddess in earthly clothing.”

From the bedclothes somewhere above me, a chuckle emanated. “Oh, a promotion from an angel to a goddess. If you keep talking like that, I might let you sign that stupid piece of paper.”

“So we aren’t legally married?”

“Of course not. I absolutely refused to sign the license last night because you have to be thinking better this morning, right? Last night was just some drunken escapade that’s going to make a great story to tell your buddies, but surely you didn’t mean to propose to and immediately marry a perfect stranger you met on a sidewalk in Las Vegas. No one is that impulsive and reckless.”

No one had described me as impulsive or reckless since I was a toddler.

Maybe not even then.

I struggled to my feet, using both sides of the bathroom doorframe to wedge myself until I was standing up.

“All right, so it’s not legally binding.

Excellent. And then I imagine we found some Protestant priest to perform a quickie ceremony, an Elvis or something.

” I chuckled to myself. “An Elvis. God, I hope it was an Elvis. My friends will never let me live it down. How absolutely mortifying.”

Lexi wiggled over to the other side of the bed and grabbed the neck of the champagne bottle out of the ice bath.

She took a long swig of what I imagined to be rather flat champagne and then said, “Nope. You were being really weird about how we had to have a Russian Orthodox priest, so we went on a side quest and found one.”

Oh, no.

She continued, “And then we wrassled a Russian Orthodox priest out of bed, and he unlocked his Russian Orthodox Church and performed the ceremony.”

Cold sweat popped out of every single pore on my body from my scalp to my ankles, and the hotel room’s air was suddenly freezing. “Surely we didn’t.”

“Yeah, he even insisted on baptizing me again even though I was baptized a few years ago. And then he slathered olive oil on my hands and feet before he would marry us.”

Disbelief slammed through me so hard I could barely force the words out. “You were baptized and chrismated in the Russian Orthodox faith, and then we were joined in the sacrament of holy matrimony by a Russian Orthodox priest in a Russian Orthodox Church? Are you certain?”

“I think so. You and the priest were talking in some other language, which I assume was Russian. I was just along for the ride at that point. What did you call the oil part again?”

“That’s the chrismation. It’s a separate sacrament specific to the Orthodox Church. It seals the baptism. Roman Catholics call it a confirmation and do it differently and later, but chrismation is very important to Orthodox Christians. I insisted that all this be done?”

I was so damn thorough.

“I didn’t know any of it existed,” she said.

“When I was baptized in an evangelical Christian church, it was a full-immersion dunk in a chlorinated water tank. Your bearded guy just flicked some water on me and chanted for a while and then did the oil thing. That probably doesn’t even count, right? ”

My throat strangled my words. “Oh, it counts.”

“And you guys were speaking a language I don’t even know. I assumed it was Russian. It sounded kind of menacing. Was it Russian?”

A window in my prison appeared. “It could’ve been any one of several languages. The church might have been a Syrian Orthodox church, or of course Greek Orthodox. Are you sure it wasn’t one of those?”

“We could check the video,” she said.

Lexi said. I should try to remember my wife’s name because it was becoming more and more apparent that’s what she was: my wife.

Her voice resolved into words in my mind, and horror struck through me. “There’s a video?”