Escaped My Ex, Got Snatched by His Rival - Chapter 526

Chapter 526: Who changed you?
“Fuck off.”

“My, my… would you look at that,” Kayden looked at Nicolai with a smirk on his face. “You actually are keeping a secret. Is it had to do something with that woman for whom you cleaned and helped me clean the mess she made?”

“I am really curious, though. Do you have something going on with her?”

“Shove your curiosity up your arse.”

“Hmm? Is she one of your fuck buddies?”

“No, she is not.” She never would be; Nicolai was never going to treat Ariana in the same manner as he had done with others, but the thing was—he had no way to describe his relationship with Ariana.

He could not tell Kayden that they were lovers because if he did then Ariana would lose her shit, nor could he tell Kayden that she was one of his fuck buddies because then Kayden would lose his shit.

This man was not one with a filter, and Nicolai was smart enough to catch his interest in Ariana the very day Kayden saw her for the first time.

If he was to tell him that she was one of his fuck buddies, then Kayden would ask him to send Ariana to his bed. Something that the two of them had done it a lot of times. And he would skin Nico the Great before he sent Ariana to someone else’s bed.

So, here he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“Then why are you helping her so much?” Kayden asked with his eyes narrowed.

“Because I was trying to get into her pants, obviously I failed because she didn’t let me in,” Nicolai made an excuse while turning to walk towards the park. When he did not see Ariana, his eyes dimmed.

“Hmm,” Kayden looked at Nicolai before saying, “So did you finally decide to give a chance to Penelope?”

Nicolai choked on the breath that he had taken and turned to look at his cousin as if he had grown another head.

“Where did you get that conclusion from?”

“Where else? If you were with one of your fuck buddies, then you would have definitely flaunted them to me and even asked me to join. But you hadn’t done anything like that, not to mention that you have stopped visiting your side chicks; they told me when I visited them,” he added when Nicolai looked at him with confusion on his eyes. “Since they are not the ones whom you are visiting, then there could only be one option. You are dating someone.”

Fuck him.

Nicolai hated that it was Kayden who inherited the sharp mind of his dad and not Aiden. At least Aiden did not have the habit of prying into his matters, but Kayden was different than his brother in every way.

He was not only nosy, but he had to just poke his nose in things that had nothing to do with him.

Nicolai was already having a hard time convincing himself that he needed to be careful and slow with Ariana. That he could not go around calling her Pallas or princess. He wanted to tell the entire world that he was with her every time he went to see her. But he couldn’t.

Even when he was kissing her during her morning run, he had to do it so sneakily as if Ariana had a husband and a son waiting for her at home and he was the mistress.

It was simply blasphemous that Ariana wanted him to refrain from telling anyone about their entanglement; he was not the kind of person who would keep secrets.

You could ask him to punch someone in the gut, but asking him, who was all brawns and a little brain to keep a secret in his stomach? That was simply foolish.

Like he had said many times, he did not like to make things complicated.

Anyone who believed in him and told him to keep quiet with his loud mouth was a fool.

And his pallas was a real big one. She might be smarter than him about many things, but that woman was a fool when it came to trusting the wrong person. But Ariana wanted to keep there relationship hush hush, and he feared causing distress to her and making her spiral into another round of attack; thus, he could only keep quiet and not do anything that would make Ariana go loopy and jumpy.

Of course, if he was to call it a relationship, that woman was going to run for the hills.

Though he knew that it was a relationship, Ariana refused to admit it. And he could not admit it one-sidedly until she agreed to doing so.

Nicolai could not understand why she was so eager to refuse him and push him away when she clearly loves him. Okay, she didn’t exactly love him, but he was growing on her, and soon she will be all over him.

She was now more tolerant of his flirting and would let him touch and kiss her in public as long as there was no one around. Though it was not a big thing, it was indeed an improvement.

However, after she had that attack, she had been looking at him with a cryptic expression, and that sort of scared him, which was something as he never got scared of anything.

Sometimes she looked at him like she wanted to say something to him, but at other times she would simply stare in the horizon as if she were trying to think of a plausible explanation for his presence in her life.

She looked distraught and closed off sometimes, and of course, when Nicolai tried to ask her what she was hiding, she would look at him with a guarded expression and tell him that it was not his problem. At times when she was nice, she would tell him that she was alright.

She wasn’t.

She was anything but fine, but she refused to tell him anything. And no matter how he tried to make her talk, that woman would not listen to a thing and kept him at his distance, never letting him cross the line.

Ariana was trapped inside a vault, and no matter how much he hammered against it, that woman would not open up.

Kayden tapped him on the shoulders, and Nicolai raised his head to look at him after snapping out of his thoughts.

“What is it?”

“What?”

“Is it Penelope?” Kayden asked again. “Are you with her? Please tell me you aren’t, or else I will have to look for another place to stay.”

“Fuck off, Kay. I told you that its nothing like you have imagined.”

“Honestly, I can think of anyone else though. Because I can never imagine you chasing after any woman and pursuing her, which means that its definitely not that sexy one.”

Nicolai had to grit his teeth as hard as he could because he knew that he was going to hurl a myriad of curses at Kayden. He asked him, “Why can’t you? Is it so hard for me to pursue anyone?”

He paused and turned to look at him before raising a brow. “It was you who told me this; have you forgotten? Something about how you were above the charm of a woman and that there was no way you were going to pursue a woman. That you were too majestic to lower your head in front of a woman only to get your dick sucked off. remember?”

Right.

He did say that, and Nicolai did recall saying those words because he was being teased by his mother, and she kept asking him to marry someone. Tired of being teased, he told her that he was way above getting on his knees for a woman.

Fuck. he completely forgot about that; he really used to think like that once. Did he not? He used to believe that no woman was ever worth his attention. Than what was about Ariana that made him go down to his knees, if it meant to have her locked and trapped with him? He simply could not understand.

It was no longer a conquest and he knew that.

“So,” Kayden shoved his shoulder and asked him, “Mind telling me who was the one who changed that precious mind set of yours? I gotta talk with this woman; I mean, is she alright in the head? Because no one in their right mind would choose to go monogamous with you,”

Nicolai gritted his teeth when he heard Kayden say this. Last night he heard the same thing from Theodore, who looked down on him because he thought that he could not keep Ariana safe and protect her, and now his cousin was saying the same damn thing all over again.

It was too much. Was he that much of a manwhore? And even if he was, could he not change?

Nicolai raised his hand and slapped Kayden on the back of his head.

He said to him, “How long are you going to wait for your older cousin to get you a woman? Try to find one youself.”