Page 28 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

some more negotiations

LEXI BYRNE

“Yes, about that contract.” Nico practically growled as he glared at his breakfast. “Let’s return to the contract. ”

My heart was pounding in my throat. The shaking wasn’t fear like hyenas were chasing me, but an eeriness filled the room that the world wasn’t working right.

Waiters didn’t bow.

Priests didn’t get up in the middle of the night to perform a baptism-chrismation-wedding in a half-hour blitz.

Men didn’t fall to their knees and insta-propose to girls like me.

Gorgeous, handsome, giant-tall men didn’t gaze down at me during our sudden wedding and say heartbreakingly beautiful things that made me believe they loved me after just meeting me.

It was all so unserious.

“After the London season, we’ll have a few suppers in public for social media posts,” Nico continued.

“The last one will be at Christmas. After that, we’ll divorce in the late spring with a doctor confirming you are still virgo intacta, and you’ll desert me.

Desertion is also grounds for an annulment. So, that’s two reasons. That’s good.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I pointed at the door. “ That was weird. That guy bowed at you.”

“I didn’t see.” He adjusted his towel and his top leg where they were crossed. “After the official desertion, you’ll be free to live your life as you wish, wherever you wish, with the exception of appearing in court for the divorce and answering any questions the annulment tribunal will have.”

“No, seriously. That waiter-guy bowed and backed out of the room.”

“Waiters do that sometimes. We’ll file for the annulment directly afterward, August at the latest. Now, what is your offer for the settlement of such a contract?”

He was not going to derail me. “You showed up at that Billionaire Sanctuary club in the same car as Prince Harry, the his-royal-highness dude from England, and then that waiter guy bowed at you. What is going on?”

Then, finally, Nico looked up from his breakfast at me and stared straight into my eyeballs, the blue of his eyes practically glowing in the white and greige hotel room. “You’re right. Full disclosure, or the contract won’t be valid.”

Where was the guy who’d said all those heart-deep things last night that made my panties damp? “Yeah, ‘full disclosure.’ That’s hot.”

He waved his hand at my chair. “This will take a minute. Sit down and eat.”

“No. I want to know?—”

“Sit, and eat.”

I sat. “Okay.”

Damn, that low, measured voice of his. It just— calmed me down to do what he said.

He chewed a raspberry with yogurt, staring into the middle distance over my shoulder, and swallowed. “All right. Let’s do this. My name is Nicolai Petrovich Romanov.”

His English accent disappeared on those last three words, his name. Darker, more guttural notes surfaced.

“Yeah, that’s what the priest called you during our wedding vows last night, and then you called me Mrs. Romanov.”

He blinked his clear blue eyes at me twice then shook his head as if flinging wrong thoughts out of it. “Damn, I wish I could remember the ceremony.”

“So? That’s your name, and now it’s kind of my name. Sort of. For a while. So what?”

“The problem is that if Russia still had a tsar, an emperor, I would be the tsar of Russia. I would be Tsar Nicolai the Third.”

I’d never been to college like Jimmy, but I read books. I knew what a tsar was. “Like a king?”

“Except Russia was more than a kingdom.” He turned his head toward the tall windows beside the table overlooking the desert dust and dirt of Las Vegas.

The sun suffused his face with golden light, but he didn’t seem to really be looking at anything.

“We conquered an empire. We were emperors, though we called ourselves tsars, a word descended from the title of Caesar.” He sighed and vibrated his head in a small shake. “Such pathetic self-importance.”

“But—” I wracked my brain, practically turning it over and shaking it out. “But Russia doesn’t have an emperor anymore.”

“Correct. The House of Romanov was deposed in 1917 in a rather bloody manner.”

The Communist Revolution. “Yeah, I heard about that one.”

“However, under strict male-primogeniture Pauline laws, which is the order of succession instituted by Tsar Paul the First, if the royal family were ever restored, I would likely be the one on the throne.”

“Okay, so, like—” I wasn’t even sure what I should say to that. “But you aren’t. On a throne, I mean.”

He looked back at me, that wistful moment gone.

Only a downward twitch of his eyebrows broke his expressionless mask of casual interest. “No tsar has been anointed and crowned in Russia for generations, so no, I’m definitely not the tsar.

Maybe more like an honorary heir or a claimant prince, perhaps. ”

“Okay, well, that’s cool. I mean, it’s cool that you could be the one.”

He looked back to his phone, sitting face-up by his breakfast. His frown turned into a scowl at the screen.

“But it won’t ever happen, and it shouldn’t.

I’m not a king. There should be no kings because heredity rulers and nepotism should be abolished.

Royal blood is nothing but an illusion, a magic trick we played on the world. I’m the prince of smoke and mirrors.”

“Heh. Prince of smoke and mirrors. That sounds like you’re a fae high lord or something. What’s your wingspan, batboy?”

When he looked back up at me, his face didn’t move in the slightest, like he was tanned porcelain, like he was solid sandstone, for two whole buh-dump, buh-dump, heartbeats while I died and turned to dust inside, but then he tilted his head and asked, “I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Never mind. So, you’re, like, rich?”

“Oh no, not at all.” He waved a hand in front of his face as he looked down at his feet. “Rich. Heavens, no. Probably upper-middle class, I’d guess. I don’t want for anything. I’m comfortable.”

Oh, jeez. Comfortable?

All those disclaimers and then comfortable?

That meant he was rich-rich-rich.

That meant that Nico probably had so much wealth that he hung around the wealthiest kind of wealthy people, like being driven around with Prince Harry, so Nico probably thought he wasn’t wealthy because he wasn’t in the top ten wealthiest people in the whole wide world.

Merely number twelve or something. “Okay.”

“My family left Russia with the jewels they could carry in their pockets and sewn into their corsets. We’ve parlayed that into a bit more. Mostly by investments and marriage to heiresses, the traditional methods of improving one’s situation for impoverished royals.”

I leaned my elbows on the table and watched him. “But you could be the king. Or the tsar. If they restored it.”

“But I don’t want to. I have no desire to claim the throne or crown. If they tried such a thing, I would abdicate immediately.”

“But that’s why that waiter was bowing and scraping all over the place, and how come our breakfast arrived in ten minutes flat. They don’t do that for normal people. You know, peasants.”

Nico shrugged, the gesture rippling down the heavy muscles of his tattooed naked pectorals. “Their reaction was more likely because I usually travel with security and staff, and thus my entourage requires renting out entire floors of hotels. My reward accounts accrue a lot of points.”

Yep, rich. “Oh, so like, you always get bumped up to first class.”

Nico looked down, almost like he was embarrassed. “It’s more secure to fly private.”

“No way. You have a private plane?”

He shrugged again, the creases in his face looking pained. “Private is not environmentally friendly in the slightest, but it’s necessary. And I have two. Just in case one is in the hangar for maintenance. Security is an important consideration in my life.”

“Security? But you didn’t have any bodyguards with you when we met. You still don’t.”

Except that he’d driven up to the Billionaire Sanctuary in a caravan of black SUVs with security goons glaring at the crowd from behind their sunglasses.

Nico grimaced, lifted his phone to look at it, and swiped something off the screen. “I was inside Harry’s security bubble, and I ditched them inside the Sanctuary club. I’m not usually so reckless as to slip away from my detail, but I was truly bladdered last night. I’m still embarrassed.”

“Yeah, okay.” Yet, this all seemed so overblown. “Is being the guy who might be the tsar of Russia, if history were different, even important?”

He squinched his eyes up like my question pained him. “Some people think so.”

Maybe an explanation was needed. “Okay, so, look, I’m obviously an American. We’re only somewhat impressed with the British royal family, and some people not even that. All the other royals are kind of meh.”

He looked straight at me, a smile tugging a corner of his mouth. “I’ve never been described as meh.”

Considering how preternaturally attractive and ripped Nico was sitting in that chair across the teeny, tiny breakfast table from me, shirtless so that his whole tattooed chest and shoulder and thick arms were on display, pantsless except for a terrycloth towel, close enough that I could launch myself over the table and jump his bones, yeah, that tracked.

If someone had asked me about how Nico looked, his bare broad shoulders and strong arms relaxed, his muscular torso flexing into ripples every time he twisted even a little, by turns smiling or dropping one eyebrow like a flippin’ movie star, I would have said he was stunning, gorgeous, and astonishingly impressive.

A demigod settled to Earth.

An idealized artistic triumph.

An absolute unit of a smokeshow.

But definitely not meh.

But he was telling me how royal and important he was, so I started listening again.

“—and that’s the history of it.”

What was I supposed to do with that? “I’m not going to bow to you or anything.”

“That’s not the point,” Nico said, chuckling. “Assuming we come to an agreement and we present ourselves as married, people will bow to you.”

Oh, that was his point.

Oh, wow. “Oh.”