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“My cousin tried this one, based on my recommendations, of course.”
The plastic smile on her face was not wavering as she glanced over her shoulder, pointing to the large screen on the wall. With a click on the remote, the slides made a smooth transition, replacing the previous text-filled page with a picture of a happy man and woman bathed in a cloud of pink color. “They had a baby girl.”
She—the professional event planner, Ms. Alex Barnett—looked back to us with that same darn plastic smile, her porcelain skin glowing under the faint illumination from the screen as her arms moved, gesturing as she spoke.
“They opted for the fog machine, which turned out to be a much safer alternative than the smoke bombs, and also triedTaking a Swing. You know, that’s the one where you can decide to fill up plastic baseballs or golf balls with color. So, um, when you take a swing, the balls break, and—”
“Yeah, we get it,” came the impressed voice on my right. My brother’s.
Beside me, Niko’s eyes didn’t leave hers. His gaze coasted her skin-tight black dress that hugged her little figure. Her brown hair in waves over her shoulder,not as long as Freya’s,includingher dark eyes and red lipstick. He ogled everything, thoroughly assessing like some examiner ready to award marks.
With one leg hoisted up over the other, he gave a carefree shrug with his shoulder and tucked his hands into the oversized pockets shielding his torso, and the seriousness on his face faded when he smirked—at her.
And although he was draped in an old black Scooby-Doo hoodie and a pair of jeans, she worshipped him—or, more accurately, eye-fucked him like he was a celestial being descending from open skies with golden wings and a halo.
This was no matter of green lights or red lights. The lights were level-one shit for amateurs. What these two had was a fuck-me fire alarm going off in the room. And it had been going off for one long hour now.
“Why don’t we try something else?” he offered.
Mrs. Barnett pursed her lips and blinked her big brown doe eyes like she’d been drawn out from a trance. “Something else?”
The immediate rush of red heat that crept up her cheeks indicated that she didn’t intend to sound thatraw.So, to save herself, including the shred of dignity she had left, she cleared her throat and returned en route to sounding more learned.
“I mean, of course, the client or family of the client can make suggestions, as well, and in some cases, helpful recommendations. I’m here to do whatever pleases you. Youall.”
On my left, Anatoly quirked an intrigued brow, and I thought I heard her mumble“shit”under her breath. You’d have expected the professional to handle these kinds of advancesprofessionally.
Nikolai laughed and carded his fingers through his hair, the sound sending warmer signals, obviously to ease her nerves.
“Lingerie.” A smothering look settled in his eyes when he lowered his voice. “I was thinking lingerie. Let’s say,hypothetically speaking,you are the wife, and I, the husband. For this…thing, you, the wife, couldhypotheticallydecide to wear the color as the lingerie, and I’dhypotheticallypeel off that gown of yours for the big reveal.”
If I’d thought porcelain skin couldn’t turn red before, I stood to be corrected. She licked her lips, her eyes cautiously darting across the room.
“But…but we can’t do that sort of reveal in public.”
“That’s the point.”
Okay, that’s it.
My last thread of patience had officially snapped. A strange, hybrid sound, both growl and bark, ripped from my throat. “Remind me again why the fuck we’re doing this?”
Two pairs of eyes, brown and dark, snapped to me, and I watched their small little bubble dissolve around them until they were back and alert. They finally remembered that I was in the room.
Niko comported his features and straightened on his chair, his dark brows forming an uneven knot on his forehead when he raised one.
“What do you mean?Youasked formyhelp. I’m helping.”
He was right. I had called him for help.Literally. The night after we returned to the house. The night after the big scare. I’d replayed everything Dr. Millie told us about taking care of her health: her diet, the environment, ensuring she washappy.That part stuck. For the sake of our baby, or so I had convinced myself, I needed her to be stress-free. That was why I called the one person I believed knew more about women’s shit than I did.
My brother, Nikolai.
Since we were both younger, we had been that way. While I was more invested in hard work, actual business, and throwing myself into the physical and psychological toll our type of life offered, he preferred things smoother, smarter, and less greasy, although he knew how to get his hands dirty when he needed to. A few times, I’d believed he consciously tried to top the charts by being more ferocious than I could be, especially when hewas mad. If Freya thought I was a monster, she wouldn’t have wanted to see my brother when he got upset. All that charm was nothing but a façade, a mask hiding the real Niko. The one with all the pent-up fury I was sure the world could not handle.
Regardless, he always had been the ladies’ man, with the smooth lines, charisma, and everything else that could pull them on their knees and between his legs in less than sixty seconds. And when any one of them bothered to look deeper, after they discovered there was more to meet the eyes than pearly white teeth, rogue tattoos, and Yamaha superbikes, they grew clingier than grass seeds.
Fast forward to the present moment. From outside, bass thumps reverberated through the thick coffee-brown walls, and muffled echoes of music sliced through the momentary quiet.
My call for help was why we sat in this private meeting room inSkyline,his nightclub, in West Hollywood, LA.
