Page 30 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

security arrives

LEXI BYRNE

The hotel room door rattled under hard-knocking fists. “Mr. Romanov! Nico!” men shouted from outside.

Terror seized my nerves and rattled them around. I was from a small town in Nebraska and not at all used to people pounding on doors. “Who’s that?” I demanded at Nico.

Nicolai had the grace to look chagrined, discomfort lowering his chin and lifting one side of his plush lips. “My security staff. I texted them a bit over an hour ago to come pick us up.”

He padded over to the door, his long, bare legs flexing under the white towel wrapped around his waist.

If he’d sauntered any more slowly, his feet might have left dragging tracks on the hotel room’s flat carpeting.

He rested his hand on the knob, sighing again, delaying, before he twisted it.

Six men swarmed into the room, taking up positions by the window and around the walls, which made the one-bed hotel room very crowded. They were all tall and strong-looking, and they scanned the room like robots.

Odd lumps bulged under their too-long suit jackets, especially under their arms or at their hips.

One black-suited guy stepped right into my personal space where I sat at the tiny table, glowering at me.

I jumped backwards out of my chair and plastered myself to the wall. “Nico!”

Nicolai was following them back into the bedroom area, and his disinterested hand-flap at the guy stalking me was like how you’d gesture to a stubborn toddler to climb down from the top of the monkey bars. “Ueli, don’t hover.”

The men’s body language changed as Nico strode through the area where they stood.

All six men were still scanning for threats, but his person drew them like a magnet, like if he waved a hand, they would sway.

Command, I thought. Nico was in command.

“I need to run a background check on this woman,” Ueli said, his throaty accent different than Nico’s. “We were not advised that you wouldn’t be alone.”

“It’s a little late for background checks,” Nico told them, back at the table and picking up his coffee cup. “I married her last night.”

“What?” the other guys demanded.

Hubbub ensued.

“Mr. Romanov, we were not advised?—”

“Shri Ram, I’m going to kill Sussex’s security. They said they had you covered.”

“Do you need a lawyer?”

“Do you need to be extricated?”

I smashed myself against the hotel room wall while the new guys kept looking around the really small space like a nefarious assassin was going to jump out of the narrow sliding-door closet or the tiny bathroom, both of which they’d checked already.

Nico sipped his coffee like he was ignoring their ongoing outburst, then held up one hand until their demands died away. Even wearing nothing but a hotel towel, authority radiated off him. “It was sudden, but it’s none of your concern.”

They all started talking again, arguing with him and each other.

Ueli, the one who’d been crowding me at the table, turned toward where I stood, snarling. His pale blond hair and gray eyes almost blended in with his plaster-light skin. “You trapped him, didn’t you?”

Oh, that was too darned much. “Hey, buddy! You’re the ones who didn’t take care of him,” I said, straightening as much as I could so that the top of my head was near his collarbone.

“He was wasted in public, falling-down ass drunk on the street and flashing huge amounts of money in the middle of a crowd, and I kept him from getting hurt. Where were you guys when it mattered?”

Nicolai laughed.

Ueli blinked, but he leaned back.

“Besides, what could I do to trap him? This isn’t the eighteen-hundreds.

I didn’t lure him to a dark corner of the pleasure garden and allow us to be discovered by the mama-chaperones, so they’d insist he marry me lest I be ruined.

Seriously, think before you talk. ‘Trapping someone into marriage.’ Get real. ”

Nicolai looked up at where I was trying to mash myself into the drywall, still grinning. “That’s my girl. Lexi, you haven’t finished your breakfast. Come eat.” His voice dropped. “Ueli, back the fuck away and let her move.”

Confusion dropped Ueli’s jaw, and he whipped around to stare at Nicolai. “Sir?”

Nico smiled at me, and it was sunlight and magic. “Lexi, angel, your coffee is getting cold. Come eat.”

I slithered around the brick column that was the security guy and settled back in my chair, trying to watch out of the corner of my eyes in case that Ueli dude moved to attack me.

“Lexi,” Nicolai said. “They work for me. They’re here to protect us. Don’t be afraid of them.”

“Okay.” I ate a bite of yogurt and fruit that tasted like school glue in my mouth because the heavily armed guys were still staring at me.

While the other security operators continued to stand, Ueli sat on the end of the bed and braced his hands on knees, a white bulldog of a man with legs akimbo. “Nicolai, we’re going to need an update.”

Nico didn’t look up from sprinkling more granola on his yogurt. “We met around two years ago in Italy. Verona, actually.”

Verona, and my mind went to Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet had taken place in Verona, as had Two Gentlemen of Verona, of course. It had always been on my dream list of places I would regret never going to.

“We’ve been dating for months,” Nicolai continued. “We were planning to marry within the next year, anyway. Just couldn’t decide on the time and place. So we eloped.”

Shock ripples fluttered through my system.

“Then why haven’t I seen her?” the sort-of in-charge guy, Ueli, growled.

Nico looked over his coffee cup at him. “As I proved last night, you’re irritatingly easy to slip away from.”

Ueli’s eyes widened, and his chin dropped when Nico said that. “Do you always turn your location services off when you are ditching us?”

“Only sometimes. Other times, I don’t have to do even that.”

It almost sounded like they were Nicolai’s jailers, not his employees. I knew they had to do their jobs and their jobs were probably difficult, but undertones filled this conversation that I didn’t understand.

Ueli rubbed his eyes. “And then?”

“Our decision to marry was sudden. When John decided on this impromptu bachelor party week in Las Vegas, I called Lexi to meet me here instead of planning an extravaganza.”

Ueli shook his head. “Something is very off. There’s no way you met her years ago. We would have known.”

Nicolai spooned yogurt from his bowl. “What can I say? You didn’t.”

“I think you’ve never seen this girl before in your life, Nicolai.”

Adding details to this totally fabricated conversation seemed like my responsibility. “We’ve been planning to get married for months. I’d already bought the dress. It’s lying on that chair over there. You can’t buy a wedding dress on the spur of the moment.”

Ueli glanced at me, his eyes narrowed. “This is Las Vegas. Every pawn shop has a dozen wedding dresses.”

Dang, too true. “Okay, f ine. Check the seams. That dress was fitted for me by the bridal shop. It takes months to order and tailor a wedding gown like that, which is why I went ahead and bought the dress, because we were planning a wedding but hadn’t fixed a date.

My name is embroidered where the tag should be. ”

The darned thing had finally come in handy as something other than a street performer costume.

Ueli squinted at Nicolai. “Look, you’re the principal. If this is what you want, I’m not going to question you, but an elopement is wildly out of character for you, Nicolai. We haven’t had any requests for background checks for a woman for a long-term entanglement.”

Nico set down his coffee, the cup clinking on the saucer. “I didn’t need a background check for her.”

“You do more research than this when looking at a lunch menu. You study car models for six months before you buy one, and you own twenty-seven cars.”

Twenty-seven cars? Dang. Who needed twenty-seven cars?

Somebody who also owned two airplanes, obviously.

Nico set his coffee cup on its saucer with a glassy click. “My security is your job. My personal life is none of your concern.”

“Your well-being is my business. If this is a problem, say the word, and we will extricate you.”

Nico looked over at me. “What do you say, angel? Do I need to be extricated? Are you dangerous?”

Angel.

Gee, he was laying it on thick.

Okay, so I was obviously playing a character.

What would my character say in the situation?

Would she be a villainess badass who’d trapped him?

Or was I the sweet little ingénue who was prudishly embarrassed about being caught in a hotel room with a man, even though she was married to him?

No use trying to play against type. “I—I don’t know, Nicolai. What do you think?”

Vapid. I was vapid.

Jeez, how cringe was I going for here?

Nico smiled at me, hopefully picking up that I was acting. “Let’s go to the video, shall we?”

Ueli was still scrutinizing Nico and glaring at me.

Considering the weird lumps under the armpits of his suit jacket, having that heavily armed guy glare at me was a little disconcerting.

Nicolai cued up the video on his phone and held it out for Ueli to see.

I hadn’t seen our wedding video that Nicolai had watched earlier because he’d been sitting on the ground and his phone had been angled away from me, so I leaned out to see what we’d looked like.

The priest’s apprentice-guy who’d been our witness had also been holding Nico’s phone to film the ceremony. The moving pictures on the phone screen jittered.

Yep, there we were, getting married, just like I remembered.

I’d wiped most of the mime makeup off my face with the baby wipes in the car, but a little bit of white pancake still smudged in my hairline.

Somehow, the residual black greasepaint around my eyes formed almost perfect smoky eyes, like I’d meant it to look like that.

That was ridiculously lucky. I should have looked like a tweaking panda.

The ceremony was short and entirely unlike the wedding I’d seen at friends’ Catholic masses. The Orthodox priest kept shifting from Russian to English and back again.