I willed down the sickness in my throat.
Bright glares reflecting from the cars on the street below striped the ceiling.
Firm. Quick. Like a cleaver.“I’m divorcing you. Get out.”
“What?”Her pitiful keen held kittenish notes of panic.
“We’re done.” Quick and clean. Drawing it out was sadistic. “Pack and get out.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I lied. I hated lying to her.
“Nicolai!”
God, I wished I’d never come to Las Vegas for John’s bachelor weekend. I should have stayed in Paris, critiquing Clemmy’s texted pictures from the other side of the Atlantic.
It would have been better if I had never met her.
But I held every minute of yesterday in my heart. Every glance, every breath?—
Every taste.
One more terse statement from me should be enough. Lexi would run out of the hotel room crying, and I could have divorce papers served to her wherever she ended up.
She would curse me for the rest of her life, posting cruel diatribes on social media with old Taylor Swift songs in the background.
I was counting on it.
My breath shuddered in my chest where my hand clenched my damned phone, its screen down and dark against my tee shirt.
I didn’t trust myself to look at her.
“Baloney.” The mattress bent under my hips as Lexi maneuvered herself to sitting, her legs crossed. “Bull-hockin’-loney.”
The steel in her lilting voice was unexpected.
No, Lexi must adhere to the script. She needs must run out of the room and the hotel, preferably sobbing, in full view of everyone in the lobby and bar.
Because I didn’t know who’d recorded that video, but it must have been someone trusted in our small group, someone with the proverbial keys to the castle.
If she made a spectacle in the lobby of this private hotel, the Billionaire Sanctuary, word would get around. Someone would be indulging in a morning cocktail in the lobby bar, or security personnel would be chatting with the always-amiable staff at the front desk.
Everyone would hear about it, somehow.
They’d know she’d left me.
So, I needed to inflict more cruelty to make sure she did it right.
My fucking heart.
“Your bag is on the luggage cart,” I told her.
“I’m not leaving.” She snatched at the bedsheet and blanket, dragging them to cover her curvy bare legs, thin pyjama shirt, and utter lack of a bra, and I envied the blankets stroking up her skin. “At the very least, we’retalkingabout it.”
God, what I would give to wrap my palms and fingers around her calves and thighs, lick and bite her smooth skin and drag her through a gamut of emotions from desire, to uncertainty, to fear, to submission, to absolute ecstasy, just to watch them flicker across her pretty face. “I said,get out.”
Her voice snapped like a retort to an impertinent query from the press. “Absolutely not.”
