Page 32 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

secretive

LEXI BYRNE

I followed him as he strode for the bathroom, and he locked the door and turned on the fan. “Quietly. What do you need?”

Somehow, being secreted in the tiny bathroom with this ninety-percent naked man was more scandalous than staying in the hotel with him all night.

No one had been standing right outside the door of the hotel room.

Maybe listening.

I gestured to the hallway outside the room because I had no sense of direction when I was inside a building. “My car is in the hotel garage here. I can’t just leave it there.”

The hotel charged a hefty fee every day for parking that I could not afford, even with the nebulous promise of crazy-money somewhere in the future.

Nico poked around in a small bag hanging from the suit hanger, coming up with a toothbrush and a tiny tube of toothpaste. “I’ll have someone bring it around. Don’t worry about it in the slightest.”

“That’s too much trouble, isn’t it? I don’t want to be any trouble.”

Nico looked up from where he was already brushing his teeth, his mouth full of foam, and stared at me through the mirror.

When he was bending over the sink, his abdominals contracted like a crunch, crenellating into muscular ripples.

He spat foam and said, “It’s no trouble. The effort is not our problem when something needs to be done. We identify the problem and assign someone to it, and that’s all.”

And then he went back to brushing his teeth.

Looking either directly at the broad expanse of Nico’s muscled, tattooed back or through the mirror at his ridged abs where he was bent over both felt really intrusive, so I stared at the popcorn ceiling, finding a line of black mold in one seam. Yucko.

Nico stood, wiping his mouth with a hand towel, and untucked the bath sheet he’d cinched around his waist.

The towel drooped around his hips, exposing more taut flesh of his lower abs below his belly button, and then it slackened further.

I gasped and spun around, covering my face with my hands. “Dude!”

His voice behind me sounded confused. “What? Oh, you Americans and your delicate sensibilities. I apologize.” He pointed at the door. “You can wait out there, if you like.”

Where the big ol’ guys with the dead eyes were hanging out in the bedroom.

The hotel room bedroom.

Where they’d just caught us, together, and Nicolai was unclothed.

Shame caught me in a firestorm and burned my face as I stood with my back to him, staring at the slightly grayed paint on the wall behind the toilet of the cheapest room in this hotel. “They know that we were alone together in a hotel room all night. They must think we did it.”

“We’re married. It’s not immoral.”

It still felt immoral.

Very immoral.

They thought we smashed.

“Are you sure you don’t want to leave while I dress?” Nico asked.

So my choices were staying in here while Nicolai got naked and changed clothes or waiting out there with the judgy security guys.

Who would stand there and judge me more and more while I wilted into a shame puddle.

Nope, I would just avert my gaze. “I’ll stay.”

And I did avert. I totally averted my gaze as much as I could avert, shielding my eyes so that I could only see downward and staring at the flat slabs of black tile cold under my bare feet.

At least I’d had a good mani-pedi before I’d almost married Jimmy. My pink-tipped toes looked nice.

Plastic crackled like Nico was wrestling a giant wad of cling wrap.

“It’s not that you’re naked.” It was totally that. Indeed, peeking at his sculpted, tatted-up torso was becoming more and more of a temptation. I pressed my palms and fingers tightly over my face. “I’m just not—comfortable—or something?—”

“Don’t be embarrassed. It’s rather cute.”

“Oh, fantastic. I’m a sweet prude,” I grumbled. Embarrassment roiled through me. “I was in the theatre, back in high school and as a kid. Dressing rooms are free-for-alls. I shouldn’t be weird about it.”

“Nudity isn’t unnatural. We’re all quite naked under our clothes. Besides, I’m Scandinavian. Clothing-optional beaches, saunas, and so forth. Scandinavians are a naked people, especially the Danes.”

I didn’t take my hands away from my face, but where the light leaked between my fingers, I could see a silver slash of mirror. “Scandinavian? I thought you were Russian because of the whole ‘tsar’ thing. And you speak Russian, like to the priest last night.”

“I can’t believe I spoke Russian to the priest.” The grumble in his voice sounded like anger. “And on a damn video, nevertheless.”

“Yeah. That’s how you convinced him to marry us right away, plus the baptizing and stuff. Why shouldn’t you be able to speak Russian?”

“I can speak Russian. I just don’t.”

“Oh. Well, he seemed to understand you fine.”

He shook his head. “I’d thought my conversational Russian is adequate at best.”

“Didn’t sound like it last night. Sounded fluent.”

“Maybe the alcohol stirred it up, or at least made me believe I was more fluent than I am.”

“So, you aren’t Russian.”

“Not particularly. Swedish, as I mentioned. Thus, the driver’s license, being born in Stockholm, and such.”

“But you might sort of be the tsar of Russia. So, you’re Russian.”

“No one is the tsar of Russia, and that’s a very important fact we need to make sure everyone around us adheres to. Do you understand?”

Nico hadn’t raised his voice. He might have been talking about the fabric of his suit for all the emotion he’d expressed, but command shimmered in his voice again.

“Yes, of course, but you said?—”

“I am not the tsar of Russia. No one is the tsar of Russia. No one will be the tsar of Russia. That is my family’s final position on the matter.”

“Okay.”

“As far as your question about being Russian by blood, royal houses are rarely biologically related to the people they rule. Everyone is ruled by conquerors who married other conquerors from other countries. The British royal family was ancestrally German until the last few generations. Then again, most royal houses are German by descent. It’s those damned Hannovers again, marrying their daughters to everyone in power until they had more Russian ancestry than I do.

All four of his grandparents were descended from the House of Romanov. ”

“I didn’t know Prince Phillip was Russian.”

Fabric rustled like he was shaking the suit to death. “He was a prince of Denmark and Greece, and the heir to the Greek throne before Greece overthrew their monarchy, yet another prince without a country.” His voice was wry but not sad. “Such a sad lot, we are.”

My fingers shifted a little, and my left eye could see the mirror.

Where I could see Nicolai, in the mirror.

He’d pulled up his boxer briefs, the cotton knit a bright teal blue the same color as his eyes. The waistband was snug around his midsection, but the elastic didn’t dent his hard muscle and lightly tanned skin.

And below that was—bulgy.

A whole lot of bulgy.

Oh, dear Lord, I was staring at Nicolai’s bulgy.

Creeper, I admonished myself and tightened up my fingers on my face so I could see less.

But I could still see a little.

Nico juggled the fabric of his suit’s slacks and stuffed one long, muscular leg into his pants. “And your background?”

His perfunctory words suggested he was making conversation, asking what he’d been asked, and also distracting us both from the fact that he was still mostly naked and I had my back to him and my hands over my face.

Even though I was still watching every supple move he made, from the way his muscles rippled over his broad back as he reached for the hanger hooked on the shower rod to the way his weight left his back leg as he leaned, the heavy muscles on his back contracting and shifting upward under the deep blue-black tattoo that spread down his back, too.

Dang.

Oh, I was supposed to answer him. “My mom’s family is from the upper Midwest. We’re probably mixed-up American mutts for the most part.”

He stood, yanking his trousers to his waist and hooking the top before zipping his fly and glancing at the mirror.

His gaze caught mine in the glass where I was peeking between my fingers, and he smiled. “Lexi?”

I snapped my fingers closed. “Um, yeah?”

“You don’t have to pretend you weren’t looking, you know.”

“I wasn’t looking.”

“Lexi.”

“Okay a little, but not a lot, not really. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak, or to peep, or violate you.”

“You can look.”

“But I really didn’t mean to look if you didn’t want me to.”

“Come here.”

I stepped one pace closer, and the bathroom was so small that even that little step took me too close to him. “I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-mean-to-but-you-were-just-right-there-and-there’s-really-no-where-else-to-even-look.”

He touched my fingers covering my eyes, gently prying them off my stupid face. “I’m wearing more than I was earlier, when I had only a towel. At least my trousers aren’t going to come untucked and fall off.”

My imagination took off before I could catch it, giving me a sharply detailed image of his chiseled muscles, lean abdomen and sharp slanted diagonal obliques, and the striations I’d seen demarcating the strong muscles of his thighs, all meeting at his pelvis and?—

Visual! Visual!

I stared at my feet, but upon seeing his clean bare toes right in front of mine, his trouser hems covering his ankles, I squeezed my eyes shut again. “Yeah, and I couldn’t stop sneaking peeks then, either. You shouldn’t go around all Scandinavian-naked around me. I might not behave properly.”

“That’s my warning, is it?” I could hear his smile.

“Yeah, that’s your warning,” I muttered.

“You can look at me. We’re married.”

“I mean, no, we’re not. Not really. We have a contract for ‘platonic companionship’ at events. The events we’re going to, probably. I assume we’re going to. We still haven’t finished writing or signed that pre-nup.”

“When you said you’re a virgin?—”

Shame flooded me as yet more proof that no one had ever wanted me flopped out. “You don’t have to make fun of me for it. I thought I was doing something important. It seemed important. Or it seemed like Jimmy wanted me to and I did.”

“I’m not making fun of you. Have you ever done anything with a man? Or a woman?”

“I—there was kissing and some stuff in high school. Mostly with my ex. But I didn’t like it much.”

His voice flattened. “Oh.”

“Not, ‘oh.’ I just didn’t. When I pulled away, he thought I was being a good Christian.”

And I hadn’t known Jimmy had found kisses elsewhere.

“Why didn’t you like it?” Nico asked.

Because it was like Frenching a sloppy sea alien with mouth tentacles. “I just didn’t.”

“Did you like it when I kissed you at our wedding?”

A lump filled my throat, and I swallowed, choking, and managed to answer, “Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

Sweet longing filled me again, and my mouth went dry. “I’m sure. I didn’t want you to stop.”

He was still holding my hands, his thumbs pressed in the centers of my palms. “Have you even touched anyone?”

My throat was completely closed up with anxiety that threatened to whip me around like a dog with a floppy rope toy, so I shook my head no.

“Do you want to touch me?”

Yes. Yes, I did want to touch him.

His question was humiliating, driving me to admit that wanted to wrap my arms and legs around him and rub myself against the muscular crenelations of his body like a python trying to strangle him.

Despite all the sermonizing that Jimmy’s church had thrown at me over the years, I was not demure and gentle. I was not sweet and modest. I wanted to lick the indentation between Nico’s heavy pecs and down between his abs and see if I could make him squirm.

So I nodded.

Vigorously.

“That’s my girl.” He drew my hands toward his light tan skin and the black ink of his glorious tattoo.

My fingers neared his abs as Nico pulled me closer.

The heat of his body warmed my palms first, an inch before I touched him.

I stumbled a step toward him, my feet almost numb because my whole brain had slithered down my arms into my hands, reaching for his skin.

I touched him, first with my fingertips, and then Nico pressed my palms onto the ridges of his stomach.

His skin was nearly hot under my cold hands, and hard in a way my own body wasn’t.

Coarse hair softened the valley between his chest muscles and trickled down to his waistband.

His body was foreign but magnetic, flattening my palms against him, drawing me closer.

My hands descended, exploring the way his skin clung to his thick, deep muscles, feeling his warm flesh under my fingertips with no tactile demarcation where the black tattoo ink stained his skin.

The ink was under his epidermis, of course. I couldn’t feel the ink, just the slight suede of his skin.

His breaths came shallower, but quicker.

What was I doing? I was luring him into doing something to me.

I lifted my hands, looking up at him.

Nico was watching me, his eyes half-hooded. “Don’t stop.”