“You might have to wait months or years for him to understand the seriousness of our offer,” I told her, because my daughter was not known for her patience.
“I’m willing to be strategic,” Alina said, tear tracks still streaking her black and pink makeup down her face. “If I marry him, it would open doors to you that there is no other way to open.”
Maybe my daughter was more like me than I thought. “This is interesting to me.”
“So maybe at one of these events here over the next few days, Lexi Romanov walks too close to a window. That’s how we do it back in Russia.”
I smiled, because now I could help my daughter form her plan. “But they will not be here in America for next few days. They are going to Verona, Italy, to play at being Romeo and Juliet.”
Alina smiled, the first smile I had seen from her this day, and an expression that looked so much like my beloved wife. “Well, then, let’s make sure Lexi Romanov ends up just like Juliet.”
Ah, the apple of my eye did not fall far from tree after all. “I will call my associates in Rome to meet them in Verona.”
PART FIVE
verona
LEXI
CHAPTER 26
billionaire sanctuary, verona, italy
LEXI
By the time we landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on the East Coast, Nicolai and I had showered on the airplane(Showered! On an airplane!)and were dressed in regular clothes from our luggage, decorously sipping coffee that I had made in the airplane’s galley.
Nevertheless, the two pilots who shuffled out of the cockpit to shake our hands before leaving did not meet our eyes, and I didnotwant to know why.
Dear God, I did not want to know why.
Even though we’d slept in the twin beds for several hours, I was still dragging when the new flight crew and cabin stewardess or whatever they called them came and greeted us. Nicolai told them to leave the beds installed because we would probably nap on our way to Italy at least for a while.
The time changes made my head spin.
We’d taken off from Las Vegas at three in the morning, and five hours later, we landed in New York at eleven in the morningin the noontime sunlight, not the red-tinged morning like my brain thought it should be.
Then, after an hour on the ground as a layover, we flew for eight hours to Verona, Italy, and yet somehow, instead of it being late-afternoon going-home-from-work time like it was in Nebraska, my phone showed it was two o’clock the next morning.
Like, it wasTuesday.
It felt like we had been on the plane for two working day-long flights, but a week had passed. Monday hadn’t existed.
Three hundred sixty-one more days to go.
“My brain doesn’t understand why it’s so dark,” I said, watching the mostly abandoned streets of Verona as the plane flew low for its landing.
Nicolai yawned and stretched in his seat on the other side of the conference table. “Verona is in the same time zone as Paris, so it feels like home to me.”
As it was two o’clock in the midnight-morning when we touched down, cars were waiting for us on the airport tarmac to take us to yet another Billionaire Sanctuary club.
“Don’t we need security here?” I asked Nicolai as we walked down the boarding stairs to the tarmac and the SUVs waiting for us. “None of your security guys came with us on the airplane. We didn’t ditch them, did we?”
“I couldn’t manage to keep my hands off you even until the plane reached cruising altitude. Did you want them to watch?” he whispered into my hair.
Mortification nearly killed me.“No!We could’ve been good and gone to sleep or something.”
He chuckled. “The travel teams will follow in a day or two. A smaller team of my security staff, whom I left in Paris, will meet us here tomorrow morning.”
