Page 78 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors

“Sorry to worry you.”

He didn’t sound worried. Indeed, Nico’s blasé was epic.

Ueli was frowning at him again. “In any case, we need to get you back to Billionaire Sanctuary or at least onto a private floor if you want to stay here at Caesars.”

Nico glanced up, and I followed his line of sight to a brown amoeba-blob stain in the corner of the ceiling, like the whole gaudy shtick of Caesars Palace was covered in rot. He wrinkled his nose. “The Sanctuary, I think.”

“Then if you could get dressed, perhaps.”

Conveniently, knocking sounded on the door again. “Mr. Romanov! Laundry service!”

“Now I can,” Nico said.

Ueli rolled his eyes, the white part barely different than his pale irises. “I’ll coordinate the transport.”

Someone else answered the door and then carried a plastic-wrapped suit on a hanger to the bathroom.

“Nico,” I whispered and ducked my head when Ueli and two other guys swiveled their heads at me. “Nico?—”

He stood, adjusting the towel around his hips to keep himself decent. “Not here. Come with me.”

CHAPTER 25

secretive

LEXI BYRNE

I followedhim 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 oftoothpaste. “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!”