Expecting A Royal Scandal
CAITLIN CREWS
A marriage to steal the headlines!Royal scoundrel Felipe Cairo is the least likely king in Europe and avoids the crown with a passion! To uphold his reckless image and avoid the shackles of duty, Cairo must choose a most inappropriate wife…Media sensation Brittany Hollis has a reputation outrageous enough to rival Cairo’s. Yet with each scorching kiss, she reveals more of her secrets than she’s ever shown the world.But there’s a twist in their tabloid fairy-tale that shocks them both…Brittany might not be queen material but she’s carrying a royal heir!
“A marriage like this is nothing but a game.”
Brittany made herself pout at Cairo when he only continued to stare down at her, as if he really was trying to see inside of her.
“Why not take it into bed as well?”
“You told me there was to be no sex in this marriage.”
His gaze was on her mouth. Her heart pounded hard, like a sledgehammer.
“You told me that wasn’t your style,” she countered.
She didn’t know when she’d noticed that he’d angled his torso toward her. That he was holding her there against the wall so easily. Brittany knew she should have hated it. She should have felt caught. Captured. Compromised.
She didn’t.
His eyes glowed the dark amber that made her chest feel tight, and she couldn’t seem to pull in a full breath to save her life. His palm was surprisingly hard and warm against her cheek. She could feel it in her toes. His chest pressed against hers and made her breasts ache. And that beautiful mouth of his was set in a stern, resolute line that made something giddy and wild race through her, then coil tight, low in her belly.
“I already told you I want you, Brittany,” he told her.
It had the ring of a vow. Of something stitched together. Need and command as one. And a red-hot punch straight to that place that already melted for him.
“That hasn’t changed.”
Wedlocked! (#ulink_b59b5bbb-0316-56de-8369-0e527cb80e33)
Conveniently wedded, passionately bedded!
Whether there’s a debt to be paid, a will to be obeyed or a business to be saved …
She’s got no choice but to say, ‘I do!’
But these billionaire bridegrooms have got another think coming if they think marriage will be easy …
Soon their convenient brides become the object of an inconvenient desire!
Find out what happens after the vows in
The Billionaire’s Defiant Acquisition by Sharon Kendrick
One Night to Wedding Vows by Kim Lawrence
Wedded, Bedded, Betrayed by Michelle Smart
Look out for more Wedlocked! stories coming soon!
Expecting a Royal Scandal
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
USA TODAY bestseller and RITA® Award-nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://caitlincrews.com).
To Maisey, who fixed the book once when it had all turned a bit grim, listened to a lot of ranting on street corners with very broad hand gestures, and then loved it when it was done.
Contents
Cover (#u48d58745-70ef-5a15-b53f-4b3d316499d0)
Introduction (#u59289704-253f-5563-b5e6-06bd05a6f35b)
Wedlocked! (#ulink_8e3a1816-b3b2-50cf-963e-ee6ac60187fb)
Title Page (#udf7bd5de-6ecf-55c6-af56-62e4e0573a32)
About the Author (#uafc129ac-dbf7-556c-b201-865dc6a9a5cd)
Dedication (#u5fcf3aad-c101-5729-979e-eee506401912)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_4cf1aebf-c902-5c6d-bb2c-77e8265c74f4)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_ce925dcf-2e67-53bb-b217-867452639a52)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_987e65c1-1f81-51e4-b875-a30ea8d9834b)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpage (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_5d0ca7f3-f9f2-5b6a-b87f-6bd61c69ccfd)
THERE WERE SOME invitations a wise woman did not refuse.
The invitation in question tonight had been handwritten by one of the most famous men on earth on luxuriously heavy card stock and then hand-delivered to her door by a servant. The message itself had been intriguingly mysterious, asking her only to... Meet me in Monte Carlo.
And Brittany Hollis was many things by the ripe old age of twenty-three—including widely reviled on at least two continents thanks to her collection of strategic marriages, a reality show appearance in which she’d played the widely loathed villain and her trademark refusal to confirm or deny any and all scandalous rumors she heard about herself—but she’d always considered herself wise enough.
Too wise for her own good, in fact, or so she’d always thought. That was how an untouched virgin let herself be known across the planet as one of the most shameless women alive. Yet all the while, she stayed in control and above the snide remarks—because she, and maybe only she, knew the truth.
And no matter what names others called her, like mercenary when they were being polite, her ability to keep her eyes on the prize as if none of that bothered her was the best way she knew to propel her toward the tropical island paradise of her dreams.
She’d get there one day. She knew she would. She’d spend the rest of her life in a flowing caftan sipping pitchers of mai tais with cheerful flowers in her hair, and she’d never spare a single thought for these harsh days of hustling or the cruel tabloid stories in which she was always cast as the evil villain.
Not one stray thought. Not ever again.
Brittany could hardly wait. She’d spent years sending half the money she earned back home to the family members who proclaimed her lost to the devil in public, cashed her sinner’s checks in private and then shamelessly asked her for more. Again and again. Her beloved grandmother would have expected Brittany to do her part after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out what little Brittany’s single mother had possessed over ten years ago, leaving them all wretched and destitute and close enough to homeless in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Brittany had done her best. Year after year, the only way she knew how, with the only weapons she possessed—her looks and her body and the wits she’d inherited straight from Grandmama, though most people assumed she was entirely witless. Her youngest half sibling was ten this year. Brittany figured that meant she had eight years left before she could suggest her family members support themselves for a change.
Though maybe she’d use stronger words.
Meanwhile, the other half of the money she made she hoarded, because one of these days she was headed for a remote Pacific Island to take up residence beneath a palm tree and the deep blue sky on a deserted white sand beach. She’d seen pictures of the archipelago of Vanuatu while still in high school, and she’d decided then and there that she needed to live in that kind of paradise. Once she made it to those perfect islands west of Fiji, she wasn’t coming back to the mess of the world or her place in it.
Ever.
First, however, there was all the elegant splendor of Monaco and the man who had summoned her here to meet with him in the spectacularly iconic Monte Carlo casino where blue-blooded men like him whiled away casual evenings at gaming tables that had been specifically designed to part Europe’s wealthiest from their vast, multigenerational fortunes. To discuss a proposition that would benefit us both, the message he’d had delivered by hand had said, though Brittany hadn’t been able to think of a single thing that could possibly do that. Or anything they had in common, come to that, except a certain international notoriety—and his, unlike hers, was based on documented fact.
Documented and streamed live on the internet more than once.
Still, Brittany entered the casino that evening right on time. She’d dressed her part. Monte Carlo’s achingly civilized sins were draped in the veneer of a certain old-world elegance and therefore so was Brittany. A girl liked to match. Her gown shimmered a discreet, burnished gold, sweeping from a knot on one shoulder all the way down to flirt with the gleam of her sleek heels. She was aware the dress made her look edible and expensive at once, as befitted a woman whose own mother called her a whore to her face. But it also suggested a bone-deep sophistication with every step she took, which helped a white-trash girl from Mississippi blend in with the gold-leaf and marble glory surrounding her in all directions.
Brittany was very, very good at blending.
She felt the impact of the man she’d come to Monaco to meet long before she saw him, tucked away at one of the more high risk tables in the usual throng of lackeys and admirers who cavorted about in his shadow. Even without his selection of courtiers circling him like well-heeled satellites, she would have found him without any trouble. The whispers, the humming excitement whipping through the crowd, the not precisely subtle craning of necks to get a better view of him—it all marked him with a bright red X. He might as well have sent up a flare.
Then the crowd parted, and there he was, sitting at a table in a desultory manner, though his attention was on the crowd—broadcasting the fact that the man formally known as His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini was so supremely wealthy and jaded he need not pay attention to his own gambling endeavors even while he was undertaking them.
Cairo Santa Domini. The exiled hereditary king of the tiny alpine country that bore his surname and the only surviving member of an august and revered family line stretching back some five hundred years. The scourge of Europe’s morally compromised women, the papers liked to call him—though it was also said that a woman of impeccable reputation became compromised merely by standing too close to him at an otherwise staid and boring function. The living, breathing, epic scandal-causing justification for the military coup that had overturned his father’s monarchy and was widely held to have assassinated the rest of his family years later, leaving only Cairo the sybaritic degenerate in their wake, like a profligate grave marker.
Largely because there was no point in targeting him, the pundits had agreed for years. He redefined disgrace. He did an excellent job of reminding the world why the excesses of ancient monarchies should never be tolerated, simply by continuing to draw his pampered and ill-behaved breath and cavorting about the scandal sheets like a one-man bacchanal.
Cairo Santa Domini, right there before her in the sleek, superbly fit, astonishingly handsome flesh.
His had been the name on the invitation she’d received, of course. She’d expected she’d see him here. Yet she was somehow unprepared for him all the same.
Brittany realized she’d stopped walking and had, in fact, stopped dead in the middle of the casino. She knew better than that. Hers was a game of mirrors and sighs, of soft suggestion and affected disinterest. She did not stand about staring in shock like the yokel she hadn’t been in years. That wasn’t the impression she liked to give off. Yet she couldn’t quite make herself move.
And then Cairo glanced over and met her gaze, bold and lazy at once, and she wasn’t certain she’d ever move of her own volition again. She felt bolted to the floor—and painfully, at that.
She’d seen a thousand pictures of this man. Everyone had, and of significantly more of him than necessary. She already knew he was beautiful. Many celebrated things were from a distance, she’d found, only to prove a bit more grimy and weathered and unfortunate up close. Hollywood, for example, and many of its best-known denizens.
But not Cairo.
He had one of those full, captivating, startlingly European mouths that made her feel edgy and hollow down deep inside. That mouth of his made her imagine hot, desperate kisses in cold, unfamiliar cities bristling with baroque architecture and laden with strange pastries, when she hadn’t thought about kissing anyone in years. He had a full head of shaggy dark hair that was obviously left mussed and careless on purpose, yet still managed to make him appear as if it had happened to him on the way to Monte Carlo.
And his eyes! They looked pretty enough in photographs. More than pretty. This close, a mere stone’s throw across the casino floor, they were nothing short of marvelous. There was no other word to describe them. They were the color of exultantly wicked caramel and made her feel like spun sugar all the way to her toes. Her mouth watered despite herself, and she felt the heat of him in a bright blaze down deep in her belly.
This had never happened to her before. Not ever.
Brittany had been more or less immune to men since her mother’s early, appalling boyfriends had raged drunkenly through their miserable trailer during Brittany’s formative years. The fact she’d married three men of her own volition and for her own very practical reasons hadn’t altered her opinion on the drawbacks of the male sex one bit—and not one of her husbands had affected her blood pressure like this.
Or at all, if she was honest.
It didn’t make sense. She jerked her gaze from Cairo Santa Domini’s too aware, slightly arrested one to take in the rest of him, not surprised to find he wore the usual uniform of all the very wealthy European men she’d ever seen out at night in this city or that, clogging up the nightclubs and restaurants and boulevard cafés. Though his version was...better.
Much better.
His dark, exquisitely tailored shirt clung to that expected glorious male torso of his that no doubt looked equally delicious framed by various Italian coasts or the yacht-choked harbors lining the French Riviera outside. His gorgeously cut dark jacket somehow made his masculine chin, with just a bit more than five o’clock shadow, seem that much more decadent and attractive. His legs, athletic and muscled and longer than most, were packed into the sort of bespoke black trousers that cost more than some people’s mortgages. His shoes whispered with the quiet confidence of Milan as he stretched out his legs, continuing to lounge there, awash in his followers, as if the famed Monte Carlo tables were but a prop for a man like him.
As was she, she understood, when one of his dark brows arched high in some mixture of weary boredom and very royal command. A prop for a game she didn’t yet understand—but she would. That was why she’d come.
That and she’d never before met a man who would have been an actual king, barring all that unfortunate civil unrest when he’d been a child.
Cairo crooked an imperious finger, beckoning her near, and Brittany really, truly didn’t want to go to him. Every instinct inside her screamed at her to turn on her heel and run in the opposite direction. To walk all the way back up north to her efficient little flat in Paris if that was what it took.
Anything to get the hell away from him before he destroyed her.
That thought shivered over her like some kind of prophecy, bone and blood. He will destroy you.
She tried to shake off the feeling. She told herself she was being fanciful. Silly. Two things she’d never been in her entire life, but maybe the sight of a would-be king in a place like Monte Carlo was too much for all the broken shards of the Cinderella fantasies she knew she had rattling around inside her somewhere, scraping at her with their jagged edges when she least expected it. Making it hard to breathe in strange little moments like this one.
She started toward Cairo, affecting a faintly quizzical expression as if she hadn’t recognized him. As if she’d stopped in the middle of the casino floor because she’d been uncertain where to go, not because she’d seen him and been struck by the sight. As if their gazes hadn’t clashed like that, in a tangle of caramel breathlessness that was still scraping through her and making her feel almost...raw.
Brittany ignored all those inconvenient feelings, whatever the hell they were. She sauntered toward her doom, and no amount of shouting at herself to stop being so fanciful convinced her that the dissolute aristocrat who watched her approach was anything but that: her sure destruction packed into a recklessly masculine form.
“Are you Cairo Santa Domini?” she asked brightly as she drew near, letting a little more Mississippi flavor her words than usual. For dramatic effect—because people drew all sorts of conclusions about folks with drawls like the one she’d grown up using. Mostly that they were as dumb as a pile of rocks, which she’d always enjoyed using to her advantage.
As expected, her feigned inability to identify one of the most recognizable men alive was met with gasps, outraged sniffs and muttered condemnations from his entourage. Cairo’s mouth, a study in carved sensuality that seemed to be wired directly into an echoing heat deep her belly, curved in appreciation.
“I regret that I am.” His voice was like melted dark chocolate. Rich. Deep. Faintly, intriguingly accented, as if his use of English was an afterthought or perhaps a gift. He didn’t move from his languid position, though she had the strangest notion that his decadent caramel gaze had sharpened as she approached. “But only because no one else has stepped up to take the position, no matter how I try to give it away.”
“A pity.” She stopped when she was just inside the span of his carelessly outthrust legs. She felt certain he’d appreciate the symbolism. Sure enough, that arrested, aware gleam in his gaze intensified. It told her she was right. And that he wasn’t as bored as he was pretending to be. “Then again, no one else in all the world can boast of your indefatigable penis and its many salacious conquests, can they? What’s a lost kingdom next to that?”
Brittany was aware of the ripple that deliberate slap caused all around them, ruffling the feathers of his courtiers and his more distant admirers alike. She’d meant it to do just that. And yet she couldn’t seem to jerk her gaze away from the man who stood there before her—smiling, though she noticed it went nowhere near his deceptively warm eyes or the cool, calculating gleam there.
“Ms. Hollis, I presume?” he asked.
Brittany was certain he’d known her at a glance. But this was the game. So she merely nodded, all gracious condescension, as if it had been a true inquiry.
“I’ve been in exile most of my life,” he said after a moment, his mild tone at odds with the way he was studying her. “Only the revolutionaries call me any kind of king these days. Best not to invoke their brand of fealty. It comes with toppled governments and ruined cities, generally speaking.” He inclined his head, reminding her with that single, simple gesture that whatever he was now, however far he’d fallen, he’d been raised to rule. “I do hope you found your way here tonight without incident. Monte Carlo is not quite the burlesque halls of the Paris sewers—that is what we call such places in polite company, is it not? I trust you do not find yourself too far out of your accustomed, ah, depths.”
Brittany had misjudged him. She hadn’t expected a playboy royal, draped in well-dressed tarts and trailing scandal behind him wherever he roamed like some kind of acrid scent, to be anything like sharp. It hadn’t crossed her mind that he could possibly insult her with any dexterity.
Or at all, honestly.
Some part of her shifted, deep inside, in what she told herself was grudging admiration. Nothing more.
“Water seeks its own level, I’m told,” she said, and smiled all the brighter as she switched up her tactics on the fly. “And so here I am.”
His impossibly carnal mouth curved again, deeper this time, and she felt it tug at her, low in her belly, where there was nothing but fire and an edgy need she didn’t really understand. It seemed to intensify by the second. With every breath.
“You should, of course, feel elevated by my notice in the first place. To say nothing of my invitation.” He shifted against the table at his back, propping himself up on an elbow. It only drew attention to the fact that he had to look down at her, though she stood in three-inch heels that made her nearly six feet tall. “You do not appear to be glorying in your good fortune tonight, cara.”
“I feel very fortunate, of course,” she said in an insultingly overpolite tone, as if attempting to pacify a dimwitted child. “Truly. So lucky.”
Brittany was used to reading rooms, the better to contribute to her own tarnished legend by playing it up whenever possible. A wink here, a smile there and another rumor spread like wildfire and ended up a tabloid headline. But this was different. It wasn’t only that there were no cameras allowed in this place, which made playing to them difficult. She should have been cataloguing bystander reactions to this meeting and gathering information the way she usually did—but instead, the whole of the casino seemed cast in shadow with Cairo the unlikely sun at its center, a streak of glaring brightness she found unaccountably mesmerizing.
As if he was powerful beyond measure when she knew—when everybody knew—he was at best a modern-day wastrel. He shouldn’t exude anything but the latest party-boy cologne. She told herself he was a snake charmer, nothing more. Why she couldn’t seem to hold on to that thought was a question she’d have to investigate in depth when she was somewhere far, far away from all this insane magnetism of his, which was far too riveting for comfort.
Cairo watched her in his oddly intent way, though every other inch of him shouted out his pure indolence. It gave her the distinct sensation of whiplash.
“I saw your act,” he said after a long, tensely glimmering moment dragged by, and Brittany found she was holding her breath. Again.
He’d been there? In the audience in that grimy little club that Europe’s most pampered imagined was a walk on the wild side of their indulged little lives? Brittany couldn’t believe she hadn’t felt this intensity of his, somehow.
She hated that she felt it now. She caught herself in the act of scowling at him and softened her expression—but she was sure he’d seen it anyway.
She was certain, somehow, that Cairo Santa Domini saw a great deal more than he should.
“You have a very interesting approach to the art of the burlesque, Ms. Hollis. All that stalking about the stage, baring your teeth in such a terrifying manner at the punters. Effectively daring them to deny you their pallid offerings of a few measly bills for a glance at your frilly underthings. You’d be better off cracking a whip and dispensing with the fiction that you are at all interested in appealing to the usual fantasies, I think.”
Brittany tucked her bright gold clutch beneath her arm, as languid as he was, though something in her shook at his horrifyingly accurate picture of the side gig she’d taken to make a few more scandalized headlines, and let her smile flirt with a bit of an edge.
“Are you reviewing my performance?”
“Consider it the studied reaction of a rather ardent fan of the art form.”
“I don’t know what’s more astounding. That you sullied your aristocratic self in a burlesque club in ‘the sewers of Paris,’ as you call them, or that you would admit to such shocking behavior in the glare of all this fussy Monte Carlo elegance. Your desperate acolytes can hear you, you know.” She leaned closer and dropped her voice to a stage whisper she was fairly certain carried all the way across the Italian border less than ten miles to the east. “You’d better be careful, Your Exiled Highness. The chandeliers themselves might shatter at the notion that a man of your known proclivities attended something so prosaic and tedious as a nightclub.”
“I was under the impression my behavior no longer shocked a soul, or so the wearisome British papers would have me believe. In any case, do you really feel as if a return to the dance halls of your storied past are a good investment in your future? I’d thought your latest marriage was a step in a different direction. A pity about the will.” That half smile of his was—she understood as it sliced through her and reminded her of the very public way her most recent husband’s heirs had announced that Brittany had been excluded from the bulk his estate—an understated weapon. “I ask as a friend.”
“I would be quite surprised if you truly had any friends at all.” She eyed him and amped up her own smile. Polite and charming fangs. Her specialty. “But I digress. In some circles a glance at my frilly underthings is considered something of a generous gift. You’re welcome.”
“Ah, Ms. Hollis, let us not play these games.” Something not quite a smile any longer played with that stunning mouth of his, marking him significantly more formidable than a mere playboy. “You did not strip, as widely advertised. You hardly performed at all, and meanwhile the chance to get a glimpse of Jean Pierre Archambault’s disgraced widow in the nude was the primary attraction of the entire exercise. The whole thing was a regrettable tease.”
She shrugged delicately, fully aware it made the gold fabric of her gown gleam and shimmer as if she herself was lit from within. “That must have been a novel experience for a man of your well-documented depravities.”
His head tilted slightly to one side and his gaze was not particularly friendly. Somehow, this made him more beautiful. “You were a high school dropout.”
Brittany knew better than to show any sort of reaction to the shift in topic. Or to what was likely meant to be a hard slap to shove her back into her place. Trouble was, she’d never much cared for her place, or she’d still be in Gulfport scraping out a miserable existence with the rest of her relatives. No, thank you.
“Did they call it something different when you failed to finish one private boarding school after the next?” she asked sweetly. His Royal Jackass wasn’t the only one with access to the internet. “There were how many in a row? Six? I know the obscenely rich make their own rules, but I was under the impression your numerous expulsions meant you and I are both somehow making it through the big, bad world without a high school diploma. Maybe we’ll be best friends after all.”
Cairo ignored her, though she thought there was a certain appreciative gleam in those deceptively sweet-looking eyes of his. “A runaway at sixteen, in the company of your first husband. And what a prime choice he was. He was what we might call...”
He paused, as if in deference to her feelings. Or as if he’d suddenly recalled his manners. Brittany laughed.
“We called Darryl a way to get out of Gulfport, Mississippi,” she replied. She let a little more twang into her voice, as emphasis. “Believe me, you make that choice when it comes along, no matter the drug-addled loser that may or may not come with it. Not the sort of choice you had to make, I imagine, while growing up coddled and adored on one of your family’s numerous foreign properties.”
The word exile called to mind something a bit more perilous than the Santa Domini royal family’s collection of luxury estates; here a ranch, there an island, everywhere a sprawling penthouse in the best neighborhood of any given city. It was hard to muster up any sympathy, Brittany found, especially when her own choices had been to live wherever she could make it work or end up back in her mother’s trailer.
“Your second husband was far more in the style to which you would soon become accustomed. You and he became rather well known on that dreadful television program of yours, did you not?”
“Hollywood Hustle ran for two seasons and is considered one of the less appalling reality shows out there,” Brittany said, as if in agreement. “If we’re tallying them all up.”
“That’s a rather low bar.”
“Said the pot to the kettle.” She eyed him. “Most viewers were obsessed with the heartwarming love story of Chaz and Mariella, not Carlos and me.”
“The tattoo artist.” Cairo didn’t actually crook his fingers around the word artist, but it was very strongly implied. And, as Brittany recalled, deserved. “And the sad church secretary who wanted him to follow his heart and become a derivative landscape painter, or some such drivel.”
“Pulse-pounding, riveting stuff,” Brittany agreed dryly. “As you clearly already know, if you feel you’re in a good place to judge the behavior of others despite every cautionary tale ever told about glass houses.”
It had all been entirely faked, of course. Carlos had been told the gay character he’d auditioned for had already been cast, but there was an opening for a bad-girl villain and her hapless husband—as long as they were legally married. Brittany was the only woman Carlos had known who’d wanted to get out of Texas as much as he did, so the whole thing was a no-brainer. The truth was that after Darryl, Brittany didn’t think too highly of the institution of marriage anyway. She and Carlos had been together long enough to get reality-show famous—which wasn’t really famous at all, despite what so many people in her family seemed to think—and then, when the show’s ratings started to fade and their name recognition went with them, Brittany had dramatically “left” Carlos for Jean Pierre, so Carlos could complain about it in the tabloids and land himself a new gig.
But to the greater public, of course, she was that low-class slut who had ruined a poor, sweet, good man. A tale as old as time, blah blah blah.
She raised her brows at Cairo Santa Domini now. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a fan of the show. Or any reality show, for that matter. I thought inhabitants of your social strata wafted about pretending to read Proust.”
“I spend a lot of my time on airplanes, not in glass houses and very rarely with Proust,” Cairo replied, a glint in the caramel depths of his gaze as he waved a careless hand. “Your show was such a gripping drama, was it not? You, the heartless stripper who wouldn’t give up your tawdry dancing for the good of your marriage. Carlos, the loving husband who tried so desperately to stay true to you despite the way you betrayed him on those poles every night. The path of true love, et cetera.”
Brittany felt the flash of her own smile as she aimed it at him, and concentrated on making it brighter. Bolder. It was amazing what people failed to see in the glare of a great smile.
“I’m a terrible person,” she agreed merrily. “If a television show says so, it must be true. Speaking of which, didn’t I see you featured on one of those tabloid programs just last week? Something about a hapless heiress, a weekend in the Maldives and the corrosive nature of your company?”
“Remind me,” Cairo murmured, sounding somewhat less amused—she was almost certain. “Were you still married to Carlos when you met Jean Pierre?”
Brittany laughed. A sparkling, effortless, absolutely false laugh. “You appear to be confusing my résumé with yours.”
“And speaking of Jean Pierre, may he rest in peace, what was it that drew you together? He, the elderly man confined to a wheelchair with a scant few months to live. You...”
Cairo let his gaze travel over her form, as hot and buttery as a touch. He didn’t finish that sentence.
“We had a shared interest in applied sciences, of course,” Brittany replied, deadpan and dry. “What else?”
“An interest that his children did not share, given they wasted no time in ejecting you from the old man’s chateau the moment he died and then crowing about it to the press. A shame.”
“Your invitation didn’t mention that we’d be playing biography games,” Brittany said brightly, as if it didn’t bother her in the least to be so publically eviscerated. “I feel so woefully underprepared. Let’s see.” She held her bag beneath her elbow and ticked things off on her fingers. “Royal blood. No throne. Always naked. Eight thousand women. So many sex tapes. So scandalous the word no longer really applies because it’s really more, ‘there’s Cairo Santa Domini somewhere he shouldn’t be with someone he shouldn’t have touched and blurred out bits in a national newspaper. La la la, must be Tuesday.’”
“Ms. Hollis,” Cairo said in that drawling way only extremely upper-crust people could manage to make sound so condescending. When it was only her name. He reached over as if nothing had ever been more inevitable and then he traced a very lazy, very delicate path from the gold knot at her shoulder to the very top of that shadow between her breasts. Sensation detonated inside of her. She flashed white hot. She saw red. She felt him, everywhere, and that voice of his, too, all dark chocolate and stupendously bad decisions melted into something that shivered through her, dessert and desire and destruction all at once. “You flatter me.”
Brittany didn’t like the way her heart catapulted itself against the wall of her chest. She didn’t like the way her skin prickled, hot and cold, as if she was sunburned from so small and meaningless a touch. Since when had she reacted at all to a man? No matter what he did?
She didn’t like the fact that she’d completely lost sight of the fact that they were in public, even if the public in question was mostly his circle of pseudosubjects she knew trotted around with him everywhere he went—or that all she’d really seen since she walked in here was Cairo. As if she’d come here to compete for his attention, like one of his usual horde of panting women.
She liked that part least of all, and she didn’t care to ask herself why that was. It didn’t matter. None of what had happened here mattered. This spectacularly messy and inappropriate man wasn’t in any way a part of her grand plan, and would do nothing but delay her dreams of a getaway to her solitary tropical island paradise in Vanuatu. He had that kind of total disaster written all over him, and too much exposure to him made her worry it was written on her, too. She’d accepted his invitation because she was curious and he was Cairo Santa Domini, and now she knew.
He was her ruin made flesh. Nothing less than that. At least she knew it now, she told herself. That meant she had the chance to avoid it. To avoid him.
“Your Almost Highness,” she breathed, in exaggerated shock.
She wanted to snatch his lazy finger away from her overheated skin, which was why she leaned into it instead. His finger slipped into the valley between her breasts, just there beneath the edge of her angled bodice, but neither one of them looked down to see what both of them could feel. Their gazes were locked together, tangled up hot and a little bit wild, and Brittany was slightly mollified to see she wasn’t the only one affected by...whatever the hell this was. She raised her voice so they could hear her everywhere in Monaco, the trashy American that she was, every inch of her offensive to each and every highbrow European eye that tried its best not to see her.
But Brittany wasn’t any good at being invisible. “Are you flirting with me?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_0cbae071-edfa-5b02-b3f9-0b7855e62593)
A SHORT WHILE LATER, Cairo stood with his back to the disconcerting American, his brooding gaze fixed on the seductive glitter of Monaco’s harbor out there in the sweet summer dark. The night pressed in on the glass windows of his penthouse suite the way that woman seemed to hammer against his composure, even when all she was doing was sitting quietly on his sofa. He could see her reflection in the glass and it irritated him that she looked so calm while he had to fight to collect himself.
That he had to do any such thing was nothing short of extraordinary for a man who was alive today precisely because he could so expertly manage himself in all situations.
But then, nothing tonight was going according to plan.
Brittany Hollis wasn’t at all what he’d expected. When he’d watched that cringe-worthy television program of hers she’d been all plumped-up breasts and an endless Southern drawl, punctuated with supple flips and melting slides on the nearest stripper pole. All the advance research he’d done on her before selecting her for the dubious honor of his proposal had suggested she might possess the particular cunning native to the sort of women whose life revolved around strategic relationships with much wealthier men, but he hadn’t expected any great intellect.
Cairo had been delighted at the prospect that she’d be exactly as gauche as her tawdry history suggested she was. Someone capable of injecting the embarrassing spectacle of her risqué burlesque appearances into everyday life and making certain the whole world found her deeply embarrassing and epically shameless at all times.
The perfect woman for him, in other words. A man so famously without honor or country deserved a shameful match, he’d told himself bitterly the night he’d seen her dance. Brittany Hollis seemed crafted to order.
Instead, the woman who had walked up to him tonight was a vision, from the pale copper fire of her hair to the hint of hot steel in her dark hazel eyes, and there wasn’t a single thing the least bit dumb or plastic about her. He didn’t understand it. Meeting her gaze had been like being thrown from the saddle of a very large horse and having to lie there on the hard ground for a few excruciating moments, wondering with no little panic if he’d ever draw breath to fill his lungs again.
He still didn’t know the answer to that.
His long-term head of security, Ricardo, who’d suggested this tabloid sensation of a woman in the first place, had a lot to answer for. But here, now, Cairo had to navigate what he’d expected to be a very straightforward business conversation despite the fact he felt so...unsettled.
“Have you lured me back to your hotel suite to show me your etchings, Your Usually Far More Naked Grace?” Brittany’s voice was so dry it swept over him like a brush fire, igniting a longing in him he’d never imagined he’d feel for anyone or anything aside from his lost kingdom and its people. He didn’t understand what this was—what was happening to him, when he’d felt absolutely nothing since the day he’d lost his family and had understood what waited for him if he wasn’t careful. What General Estes, the self-appointed Grand Regent of Santa Domini, had made clear was Cairo’s destiny if he ever so much as glanced longingly at the throne that should have been his. “What a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to join such a vast and well-populated parade of royal paramours.”
That the girl was perfect for his purposes wasn’t in doubt, dry tone or not.
Cairo had known it the moment Ricardo had handed him her picture. Even before Ricardo had told him anything about the pretty redhead who wore so little and stared into the camera with so much distance and mystery in her dark eyes. He’d felt something scratch at him, and he’d told himself that was reason enough to conceal himself and sneak into one of her scandalous performances in Paris. He’d been far more intrigued than he should have been as he’d watched her command the stage, challenging the audience with every sinuous move of her famously lithe and supple figure.
He’d sent one of his aides with his invitation and he’d continued interviewing the other candidates for his very special position, but his heart wasn’t in it once he’d seen Brittany. And that was before he’d read all the unsavory details of her life story, which, of course, rendered her an utterly appalling if not outright ruinous choice for a man some people still dreamed would be king one day. General Estes might have routed Cairo’s father from the throne of Santa Domini when Cairo was still a small child, but the passing of time only ever seemed to make the loyalists more shrill and focused. And that made no one safe—neither Cairo nor the Santa Dominian people, who didn’t deserve another bloody coup in a thirty-year span, much less the empty-headed playboy prince Cairo played for the papers as its figurehead.
Besides, Cairo knew what the loyalists refused to see—there was nothing good in him. He’d seen to that. There was only shame and darkness and more of the same. Play a role long enough and it ate a man alive. The desperate American stripper who’d made an international game out of her shameless gold digging was an inspired choice to make certain that even if no one listened to Cairo about who he’d become, no coup could ever happen and his people would be spared a broken, damaged king.
And then she’d walked up to him in a dress of spun gold and pretended not to know him, and he’d forgotten he’d ever so much as considered another woman for this role at all.
“Was it a lure?” he asked now. He turned to see her rolling her glass of wine between her palms, an action he shouldn’t have found even remotely erotic. And yet... “I asked you to accompany me to my hotel suite and you agreed. A lure is rather less straightforward.”
“If you say so, Your Semantic Highness.”
Cairo had expected to find her attractive. He’d expected a hint of the usual fire deep within him and the lick of it in his sex, because he was a man, after all. Despite what he needed to do here. He’d been less prepared for the sheer wallop of her. Of how the sight of her made his breath a complication in his chest.
And he certainly hadn’t imagined she’d be...entertaining.
The pictures and even the stage hadn’t done her any justice at all, and the tidy little marriage of convenience he’d imagined shifted and re-formed in his head the longer he looked at her. Cairo knew he should call it off. The last thing he needed in his life was one more situation he couldn’t control, and the blazing thing raging inside of him now was the very definition of uncontrollable.
And she was something more than a gorgeous redhead who’d looked edible in a down-market burlesque ensemble, or even a former American television star in a shiny dress that made her look far more sophisticated than she should have been. Brittany Hollis should have been little more than a jumped-up tart. Laughable in the midst of so much old-world splendor here in Monaco.
But instead, she was fascinating.
Cairo was finding it exceedingly difficult to keep his cool, which had never happened to him before in all the years since he’d lost his family. He hardly knew whether to give in to the sensation, unleashing God knew what manner of hell upon himself, or view it as an assault. Both, perhaps.
“Is this the part where we stare at each other for ages?” Brittany asked from her position on the crisp white sofa where she perched with all the boneless elegance of a pampered cat. “I had no idea royal intrigue was so tedious.”
It was time to handle this. To handle himself, for God’s sake. This wasn’t about him, after all, or whatever odd need he felt licking at him, tempting him to forget the dark truths about himself in earnest for the first time in some twenty years.
“Of course it’s tedious,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He brushed a nonexistent speck of lint from one sleeve. “That’s why kings are forced to start wars or institute terror regimes and inquisitions, you understand. To relieve the boredom.”
“And your family was drummed out of your country. I can’t think why.”
Cairo had long since ceased to allow himself to feel anything at all when it came to his lost kingdom and the often vicious comments people made about it to his face. He’d made an art out of seeming not to care about his birthright, his blood, his people. He’d locked it all up and shoved it deep inside, where none of it could slip out and torture him any longer, much less trip him up in the glare of the public eye.
No stray memories of graceful white walls cluttered with priceless art, the dizzy blue sky outside his window in that particular bright shade he’d never seen replicated anywhere else, the murmur of the mountain winds against the fortified walls of his childhood bedroom in the castle heights. No recollections of the night they’d all been spirited away in the dark before General Estes could get his butcher’s hands on them, hidden in the back of a loyalist’s truck across the sharp spine of the snowcapped mountains that ringed the capital city, never to return.
He didn’t let himself think of his father’s roar of laughter or his mother’s soft hands, lost forever. He never permitted himself any stray thoughts about his younger sister, Magdalena, a bright and gleaming little girl snatched away so easily and so unfairly.
He didn’t have the slightest idea why the usual barbed comments from yet another stranger should lodge in him tonight like a mortal blow, as if the fact this woman had surprised him meant she could slip beneath his defenses, too. No one could do that. Not if he didn’t let them.
And he was well aware that even if he’d wanted someone close to him, to that tarnished thing inside of him he called his soul, he couldn’t allow it to happen. He couldn’t let anyone close to him or they’d be rendered so much more collateral damage. One more weapon the general would find a way to use against Cairo and then destroy.
Why was Brittany Hollis making him consider such things?
He studied her. Her coppery hair was caught up in a complicated twist, catching the light as she moved. Her neck was long and elegant, and made him long for a taste of her. More than a taste. Her skin looked as if it was dusted a fainter gold than the dress she wore, which on any other woman might have been a trick of cosmetics, but on this one, he thought, was actually her. She was far prettier than her photographs and infinitely more captivating than her coarse appearances on that stupid show. She was all impossibly long legs, those lovely curves shimmering beneath the expert cling of the gown and that enticing intelligence simmering there in her dark eyes.
That same thing scratched at him, the way it had in Paris when Ricardo had given him her picture, and he knew better than to let it. This was already a mess. A problem, and he had enough of those already. He needed a clear path and a solution, or what was the point of this game? He might as well hand himself over to the general for the execution that had already been meted out to the rest of his bloodline and call it a day.
Some part of him—a part that grew larger all the time—wished he’d done just that, years ago. Some part of him wished he’d been in that car with the rest of his family when it had been run off the road. Some part of him wished he’d never lived long enough to make these choices.
But that was nothing but craven self-pity. The least of his sins, but a sin nonetheless.
“You are very pretty,” he told her now. Sternly.
“I would thank you, but somehow I doubt it was a compliment.”
“It is surprising. I expected you to be attractive, of course, in the way all women of your particular profession are.” He waved a hand.
She smiled, managing to convey an icy disdain that would do a royal proud. “My profession?”
Cairo shrugged. “Dancer. Television personality. Expensive trophy wife, ever open to the appropriate upgrades. Whatever you call yourself.”
Her smile took on that edge that fascinated him, but she didn’t look away.
“I do like an upgrade.” She fingered the rim of her glass and he remembered the feel of her skin under his hand, hot and soft at once. Touching her had been a serious miscalculation, he was aware. One that pounded in him still, kicking up dark yearnings and desperate longings he knew he needed to ignore. “Are you going to tell me why I’m here?”
“No insulting version of my title this time? I’m wounded.”
“I find my creativity wanes along with my interest.” She leaned forward and set her glass down on the table before her with a decisive click. “Monte Carlo is wasted on me, I’m afraid, as I’m not much of a gambler.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “I prefer the comfort of a sure thing. And I loathe being bored.”
“Is this what boredom looks like on you? My mistake. I rather thought you looked a bit...flushed.”
“I find myself ever so slightly nauseated.” He knew she was lying. The glitter in her bright eyes told him so, if he’d had the slightest doubt. “I can’t think why.”
He thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Perhaps you dislike penthouses with extraordinary views.” He smiled. “The coast or me. Take your pick. Both views, and I say this with no false modesty at all, are stunning.”
“Maybe I dislike spoiled rich men who waste my time and think far too highly of their overexposed charms.” The edge to her smile and that glittering thing in her gaze grew harder. Hotter. “I’ve seen it all in the pages of every tabloid magazine every week for the last twenty years. It’s about as thrilling as oatmeal.”
“I must have misheard you. I thought you compared me to a revoltingly warm and cloying breakfast cereal.”
“The similarities are striking.”
“A man with less confidence than I have—and no access to a mirror—might find that hurtful, Ms. Hollis.”
“I feel certain you find whatever you need in all the reflective surfaces available to you.” She eyed him. “I suppose that almost qualifies as a skill. But while that confirms my opinion of your conceit, it doesn’t tell me what I’m doing here.”
Cairo hadn’t decided precisely how he would do this. Somewhere in his murky, battered soul he’d imagined this might prove a rare opportunity to be honest. Or as near enough to honest as he was capable of being, anyway. He’d imagined that might make purchasing a wife to ward off a revolution a little less seedy and sad, no matter his reasons. A little self-deprecating humor and a few hard truths, he’d imagined, and the whole thing would be easily sorted.
But he hadn’t expected to want her this badly.
“I have a proposition for you,” he forced himself to say, before he made the unfortunate decision to simply seduce her instead and see what happened. He already knew what would happen—didn’t he?—and the pleasures of the moment couldn’t outweigh the realities of the future bearing down on him. He knew that.
He couldn’t believe he was even considering it.
“I’d say I’m flattered,” Brittany was saying coolly, “but I’m not. I’m not interested in being any man’s mistress. And not to put too fine a point on it, but your charms are a bit...” She raised her brows. “Overused.”
He blinked, and took his time with it. “I beg your pardon. Did you just call me a whore?”
“I’d never use that word,” Brittany demurred, and though her voice was smooth he was sure there was something edgy and sharp lurking just beneath it. “But the phrase rode hard and put away wet comes to mind.” She waved a hand at him. “It’s all a bit boring, if I’m honest.”
“Do not kid yourself, Ms. Hollis,” Cairo advised her quietly. “I’ve had a lot of sex with a great many partners, it’s true.”
“That’s a bit like the ocean confessing it’s slightly damp.”
He smiled. “The media coverage of my sex life might indeed be boring. I wouldn’t know as I make a point never to follow it. But the act itself? Never.”
“You’d be the last to know, of course. Even a man as conceited as you are must realize that.”
“I suppose the first hundred or so could simply be interested in my dramatic personal history,” Cairo said, as if considering her point, though he kept his gaze trained on the increasing color high up on her cheeks. Interesting. “And the second two hundred could be in it for my personal wealth. But all of them? The law of averages suggests not all of them would come apart like that, screaming and wailing and crying beneath me. The same reasoning applies if you suggest they were faking it. Some, I imagine, because there are always some. But all?”
“I’m sure you saw whatever it is you wanted to see.” He could have sworn there was a huskiness in her voice and a deeper shade to the red of her cheeks, and he didn’t care what she said. He knew passion when he saw it. She was as affected as he was. “Ninety times a day, or whatever the horrifying number is. The mind boggles.”
Cairo was no saint, by design or inclination. But he was also not quite the epic sinner he’d played all his life. And in all the years he’d performed his role in the circus that was his life, he’d never felt the slightest urge to tell a woman that. What the hell was happening to him tonight?
“I’m only good at one thing,” he told her, the way he’d have told anyone else. He pretended he couldn’t hear the intensity in his own voice. He pretended he had no idea how little in control of himself he was just then. “And as it happens, I’m very, very good at it.”
She swallowed, which he shouldn’t have found even remotely fascinating, no matter how elegant her neck. “Is that your proposition? My answer is an emphatic no, as I said. But also, your pitch needs some work.”
“That I’m an excellent lover is a fact, not a pitch,” Cairo said with a small shrug. He found he was enjoying himself, which was almost as unusual as the claws of need that still raked through him. “The proposition is far less exciting, I’m afraid. I’m not in the market for a mistress, Ms. Hollis. Why would I bother with such a confining arrangement? I rarely meet a woman who wouldn’t do anything I ask for free, no need to provide room, board or baubles on demand.”
“I’m overcome by the romance of it all.”
“Then this will delight you.” Cairo eyed her, a column of gold tipped in all that sweet copper he wanted to bury his hands in, and he found his blood was pumping much too hard through his body then, as if he was out on a long, hard run in a harsh winter. He ignored it. “I find myself in need of a wife. I’ve been considering a number of candidates for the position, but you are far and away my first choice.”
He expected her to say something scathing. Perhaps let out a scandalized laugh. He even braced himself for the lash of it, and damned if he didn’t enjoy the anticipation of that, too. But she only considered him for a moment, her dark hazel gaze unreadable, and he found he had no idea what she might say.
That, like everything else with this woman, was a new experience. He told himself he hated it. Because he should have. He needed an employee of sorts, at minimum. A partner if at all possible. What he did not need was any more trouble, and Brittany Hollis had that stamped deep on every inch of her lovely skin.
God knew he had enough trouble. It lived inside him. It was his world.
“Who’s your second choice?” she asked when the silence had drawn out almost too long.
“My second choice?”
Brittany didn’t quite roll her eyes. “I can hardly determine whether to be insulted or complimented if I don’t know the field, can I?”
Cairo named a famously orphaned Italian socialite, primarily well-known for her bouts of sulky nudity on board the superyachts of her questionable Russian oligarch boyfriends.
Brittany sighed. “Insulted it is.”
“She’s a far second, if that helps. Far too much work for too little return.”
This surprising American, who he’d expected would fall at his feet in an instant and who cared if that was as much about his credit line and his title as the charms she’d called overused to his face, only gazed at him a moment, her dark eyes narrow. He thought he could see her thinking and he didn’t understand why or how he could find that the sexiest thing he’d seen in years. It was that glint in her hazel gaze. It was moving through him like something alcoholic.
“You don’t actually want to get married, then. You want to inflict your wife on someone—the world, perhaps? As any girl would be, I’m of course delighted to be considered an infliction. It’s all my dearest fairy-tale fantasies made real, thank you.”
He couldn’t help but smile at her dry tone, though the curve of his own mouth felt as hard as granite. “I’m sorry, did you expect protestations of love? I could do that, if you like. You can even believe them, if it helps. But the offer is for a job. A position. Not a romantic interlude.”
Those too-dark eyes held his for a moment that stretched on a little too long for comfort. Then even longer. And Cairo had never wanted to read another person’s mind as much as he did then.
“I feel certain there’s a middle ground.” She stood, running an unnecessary hand over the sleek fall of her gown as she did, and Cairo found he wanted her with a raw fervor that shook through him, making him a total stranger to himself. Making him a traitor to his cause. Making her nothing less than a calamity—which only made the wanting worse. “I’d suggest you find it before you approach the socialite. I’ve heard she bites.”
And then Brittany Hollis—so far beneath him that she should have been prostrate with gratitude at his attention to her and appreciative of the faintest bare crumb of his interest—actually turned on her heel, showed him her back as if he really did bore her silly and walked out.
* * *
Halfway through her burlesque performance a few nights later, Brittany felt an electric ripple go through the crowd. And seconds later, through her.
She told herself she was imagining things as she strode across the stage to the pulsing beat, but she knew better. She knew that feeling, like being lit on fire and forced to stand still in the crackling flames. That was exactly how she’d felt in Monte Carlo, burnt to a crisp where she stood on the casino floor.
Brittany concentrated on the pounding music and on the lazy choreography she could perform by rote. Something she was even happier about than usual, because she could hardly pay attention to this kick or that shimmy when she could feel Cairo’s presence like some kind of tsunami, washing through the club. She didn’t have to squint to see him past the swirling lights the club owner went a little overboard with during her number. She didn’t have to try to make out his features as he moved through the dark.
She could track him by the murmur and shift in the crowd as they swiveled around in their chairs to watch him pass. She could feel the way that deceptively lush gaze of his settled on her and stayed there. It was a little too much like the dreams she kept having, the ones that spun out different, far more erotic endings to that night in his hotel suite in Monaco—when she’d never wanted a man’s touch in her life. She felt that same great rush of complicated, messy feelings, the way she did each time she woke up with her heart pounding and her breath tangled in her throat, her body too warm and somehow no longer her own.
And suddenly the crimson corset she wore seemed a good deal tighter across her breasts and the black lace choker at her neck lived up to its name with a vengeance. She was aware of the creamy expanse of her upper thighs that peeked out above her garters, and the way the sleek sleeves that hooked over her pointer fingers, but covered her forearms to her elbows, left her upper arms bare. The frilly, puffy shrug she wore that made her look one step away from steampunk seemed insubstantial, suddenly, and she understood what Cairo had called “the art of the burlesque” in a different way than she ever had before.
Brittany didn’t want to investigate that—much less the great swirl of feelings that nearly knocked her sideways on the main stage. She simply danced toward it.
Toward him.
Toward Cairo as he moved to the reserved table that had been kept empty right there in the front all night, so there was no pretending she didn’t see him when—at last—he stopped showing off for the goggle-eyed audience and settled himself in the chair closest to the stage as if he owned this place and everything in it. The dancers before him, most of all.
It was Brittany’s turn then, and she took it.
He’d been right about her previous performances. She’d been phoning it in, having promised the club owner eight weeks of shows and not caring too much about it after the first rash of appalled tabloid headlines. Tonight, however, seven weeks into her run, it turned out she had something to prove.
To him, a little voice clarified.
She didn’t ask herself what she was doing, just as she didn’t question why the things he’d said to her and the proposition he’d made—far less offensive than most of the things she’d been called and a huge percentage of the offers she’d fielded in her time—had needled her ever since. Brittany simply danced.
For him, something inside her whispered.
Up there on the stage, dressed in bright red, frilly almost underthings, she didn’t care if he knew it. She danced as if there was no one else in the room. She danced as if they had long been lovers, a cheap, trashy girl like her and a man who could have had a throne. She danced as if this whole cavernous club was a king’s harem, and she had no goal in all the world but to please him.
Because he wasn’t the only one who was good at what he did.
The truth was, the only thing in her life Brittany had ever really loved besides her grandmother was dancing. It had gotten lost there, in the brutal reality of her first marriage and the Hollywood fakery of her second. She’d turned it into pole tricks and barely there G-strings and all manner of mugging for the camera to pay her bills. She’d used it to inform the way she moved and breathed and insinuated herself in the path of tabloid reporters and future husbands alike. But deep down inside of her was the sheer love of movement and music and the fusion of the two that, once upon a time, had been her only way out of the grim realities of her life in Mississippi.
Brittany drew on all of that now.
She danced to him, for him. She wound herself around the poles and she strutted across the stage, until she felt as if she was flying. She’d gone completely electric by the time she skidded to her dramatic finish—sliding across the stage on her knees with her hands stretched out in front of her, ending up face-to-face with Cairo as the music ended.
And it was as if she’d tipped off the side of the world, straight into that hot caramel gaze of his. Spun sugar and hot sex.
The crowd made noise all around them. She could hear the DJ on the microphone as if from a great distance. She was aware of the stage beneath her knees and the hands she’d stretched out toward Cairo in some or other form of supplication—
All feigned, she reminded herself sternly. All part of her performance, no matter how oddly right and real it felt to be stretched out before Cairo Santa Domini as if he was the only man in the whole club. Or perhaps the world.
As if nothing could possibly matter but him.
That should have set off all kinds of alarms inside of her, especially when she knew exactly what he wanted from her and, more than that, what he must think of her in the first place to offer it. That it was what she’d gone to excessive lengths to make sure everyone already thought of her didn’t seem to matter.
The world didn’t hurt her feelings any longer. Yet somehow, Cairo had.
Did you expect protestations of love? he’d asked, his voice scathingly amused. It had cut her. Deep.
She told herself she didn’t know why.
Yet here, now, at the end of a silly dance in a stupid costume that had never affected her one bit before, all Brittany could see was Cairo. Caramel eyes burning bright and hot and that intoxicating mouth set to something far too edgy for her peace of mind. She could feel it move in her, from the breasts that wanted to break free of her constricting corset, to that low, odd ache in her belly that she tried her hardest to ignore.
“That was perfectly adequate,” Cairo said, his voice pitched to slice through the clamor pressing in around them, his mouth set in a little crook.
It went straight through her all over again, little as she wanted to admit it.
Brittany shifted, rolling back so she kneeled upright on the stage above him, no longer at eye level. That felt safer, no matter that her heart clapped wildly against her ribs. She forced herself to gaze down at him coolly. Challenging and wholly unbothered, as he’d accused her of being in Monte Carlo. How she wished it was true, the way it always had been before, with every man she’d ever met in all her life. Except this one.
“Are you slumming, Your Most Graceless?” She raised her brows as she swung her legs around in front of her and then slid from the stage to stand before the chair where, once again, he lounged as if he’d presented himself for a study in aristocratic laziness. “Maybe you don’t know the rules this far from the golden embrace of the Champs-Élysées. If you want a private chat, you need to pay for the privilege.”
He didn’t quite smile. And his eyes seemed to darken the more his mouth curved.
“Let me hasten to assure you I know my way around establishments of ill repute.” He tilted his head to one side and that gaze of his went very nearly lethal. She felt it like his hand wrapped tight around her throat, rendering her choker superfluous. Or maybe that was her heart, pounding so hard she thought it might tip her over. He indicated his lap with a jerk of his chin, never shifting his gaze from hers. “Come, Brittany. Show me what you’ve got. I promise, I can pay.”
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a1fe651f-4d66-5852-adaa-649417d2d2a4)
HER NAME IN Cairo’s decadent mouth, instead of that drawled Ms. Hollis, was like a lick against the hottest, sweetest part of her. It jolted through her, lightning need and the same dancing fire, making her melt. Everywhere.
Brittany couldn’t seem to jerk her gaze away from his, and even knowing how dangerous that was didn’t make it any easier. Her heart was a hammer against every pulse point, slamming into her again and again, but she made herself smile as she shifted position into something more pinup worthy, as was expected of a woman wearing as little as she was.
She told herself it was the game. What the costume demanded.
And so what if she’d never given an audience member the time of day after a performance before? This is different, she told herself, with starch. This is our own little war, him and me, and I’ll win it.
“Was I unclear in Monaco?” she asked him. She was aware that they were attracting all kinds of stares as the music cued up the next act, but she couldn’t bring herself to pay attention to that the way she knew she should. She couldn’t break away from the tractor beam of his arrogant gaze long enough to read the room and react accordingly, and she didn’t want to think about the implications of the situation. “I thought my walking off without a backward glance was a fairly straightforward message.”
“I assumed that was a ploy,” he replied in that same deceptively mild way of his that really shouldn’t tear through her the way it did, making her feel hollow and needy and too many other raw things to name. “I thought I’d come here and speak to you in the language you understand.”
“Rather than in Pompous Ass, the language of rich men? Don’t worry, I’m fluent.”
He didn’t answer that directly. Still holding her gaze with his, he reached into the inside pocket of the sleek coat he wore and pulled out a leather billfold fat with euros. Very, very fat. He didn’t so much as glance at it, he simply peeled a purple note from inside and slapped it on the table. Then another. And another.
“You appear to be suggesting I’m motivated by five-hundred euro notes,” Brittany said. Through her teeth. “Surely not.”
Cairo didn’t say a word. He merely added another note to the pile. Then another. One after the next.
“I’m sure I’m mistaken,” she bit out, as the pile continued to grow. “You can’t possibly be calling me a prostitute, can you?”
He didn’t quite laugh. Not quite.
“Of course not,” he replied, in a scrupulously innocent voice that made the lie of it feel like a slap. “Your prices are much higher and you require legal vows, if your matrimonial history is any guide. Hardly a rendezvous in a back alley, is it?”
“True,” Brittany replied, her voice a different sort of slap that her palms itched to replicate against that dark-shadowed jaw of his. “But I have no intention or interest in making vows of any kind with you.”
That sharp smile of his edged over into something feral.
“So you say.” He threw another few bills onto the tabletop, carelessly and insultingly. Deliberately so, she imagined. “Then a lap dance it is.”
Brittany jerked her attention away from him for a moment to see the club owner over by the bar, furiously gesturing for her to sit down. To stop blocking access to the stage, she realized, now that the next act had started. And it was simple, of course. She should merely walk away from Cairo again the way she’d done once already. She should pretend she’d never met him. She wanted nothing more than to do exactly that.
So she had no idea why instead, she settled herself on the arm of his chair and gazed down into his face as if she really was the hardened stripper she’d played on TV instead of the innocent sometimes even she forgot she really was.
“I don’t give lap dances,” she told him loftily, pretending she hadn’t surrendered something critical in sitting down like this. As if that blaze in his caramel gaze didn’t show sheer male victory and something edgier besides. As if she didn’t recognize she’d lost what little ground she’d gained by denying him in Monaco. “Though I’m happy to take your money, of course. You appear to have far too much of it.”
Cairo shrugged as if it was nothing to him, the thousands of euros in a purple pile on the table. What were mere thousands to a man who had untold billions in property alone?
“All I want is a dance,” he told her, and he was so much closer now than he had been in Monaco. Too close.
The arms of the seats were made deliberately wide and comfortable, all the better for the girls to perch upon, so she wasn’t touching him—because Brittany didn’t do touching. Especially not with men. And she told herself she didn’t recognize that craving in her for what it was, elemental and obvious, so close to that magnificent body of his as he lounged there that she could feel the heat he generated in the space between them.
Then he made everything that much more mad and wild when he reached over and started to trace a lazy little pattern against the skin of the thigh nearest him, right at the top of her stocking and below the ruffled red-and-black underwear she wore.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
She wanted to leap up. She wanted to slap his hand away. She wanted to slap him like the offended virgin she actually was, but she didn’t dare give herself away like that. And the more she sat there and let Cairo touch her, the more she seemed to forget why allowing this to happen was such a terrible idea.
They both watched his idle finger for a while. Maybe entire years—decades—while inside, everything Brittany had ever been and everything she knew about herself crumbled into dust and shivered away until there was nothing left of her but that pulsing heat between her legs.
Her worst fear come true.
But she still didn’t move.
“Or perhaps you prefer a private room after all,” Cairo said, the low rumble of his insinuating voice adding to the spell he cast with that impossibly elegant finger against her thigh rather than breaking it. “Is this how you upsell the punters, Ms. Hollis?”
Brittany jerked her attention away from that mesmerizing, addictive pattern he kept drawing against her flesh, and told herself it was the insult of what he’d said—not that he’d reverted back to Ms. Hollis. But his gaze was worse than his touch. Too bright, too hot.
And the last thing in the world she wanted was to be locked away in some private room with this man. She knew she couldn’t trust him, of course. He’d made the fact he couldn’t be trusted something that practically required a celebration. But she was suddenly so much more afraid she couldn’t trust herself.
“I think not,” she managed to say, but she didn’t sound like herself. She sounded as thrown as she felt.
Something flashed over his famous, beautiful face. She felt it echo inside of her like a roll of thunder and then, suddenly, he wasn’t lounging there idly any longer. She hardly saw him move. All she knew was that one moment she sat there on the arm of his chair, barely clinging to the pretense of some civility and everything she’d ever known about herself, and the next she was sprawled across his lap.
She wanted to scream. To fight. She wanted that more than anything—so she had no idea why she simply melted against him, as if she’d lost all control of the body that had done her bidding the whole of her life.
She had never been tempted, by anyone. She had never melted, ever.
Cairo was hard beneath her, hot and perfect, his legs so strong they marked his studied laziness as yet another lie. His arms closed around her, holding her against his sculpted chest and she couldn’t seem to breathe. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t speak and she had no idea why she was letting any of this happen.
Especially when he bent and brought his face so close to hers.
So. Damned. Close.
“You’d better brace yourself,” she managed to tell him, though she sounded far more thrown by this than she would have liked. And still it was nowhere near as thrown as she felt. “The security guards take a dim view of unauthorized touching in the main room.”
“When will you learn that the rules do not apply to me?” Cairo’s mouth was a breath away from hers, and the thick, glossy fall of his shaggy hair brushed her cheek as he bent over her, his dark eyes gleaming. “And that sooner or later, all mere mortals do exactly as I ask?”
“I’m not giving you a lap dance,” she told him, though her heart was drumming at her again, so hard she was glad she wore that lace choker so there was no chance he could see it there in the hollow of her throat. “And I’m not marrying you, either. I don’t even like you.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Cairo muttered, sounding less like a king and more like a man than she’d heard him yet. “This has nothing to do with like.”
And then he yanked her mouth to his.
* * *
He never should have tasted her.
It was a terrible mistake in a night brimming with too many of them already. He should not have come to this crass place in a temper. He should not have indulged in that temper in the first place, for that matter. He should have laughed at the absurdity of a woman of so little breeding declining his offer to better herself so spectacularly and then moved on. Hell, he should have forgotten she existed at all the moment the door of his suite in Monaco had shut behind her.
Instead, he’d brooded over it. Over her.
“The world is full of inappropriate women, Sire,” Ricardo had pointed out earlier this evening. “It’s one of its few charms.”
“It seems I require a particular blend of inappropriate and interesting,” Cairo had replied, having spent the days since Monaco convincing himself of precisely that. It wasn’t that only Brittany Hollis would do. It wasn’t that he was unused to rejection. Both of those things were true. But what mattered more, he’d assured himself, was that his very requirements had changed. “If there are more who fit the bill, by all means, present them to me.”
But Ricardo had wisely said nothing, and here Cairo was.
And this inarguably terrible mistake he was making felt like sweet, hot glory and all manner of dark and lovely sins besides. He wanted nothing more than to commit every last one of those sins, with impunity, and with her. Cairo was only a man, after all, and he knew better than most what a terrible one he was, straight through to his core. And Brittany was sprawled across his lap, dressed in a sleek red corset and very little else, tasting of mint and longing.
He shifted, opening his mouth against hers, and he lost himself in the fire of it. The sheer, exultant perfection of the scrape of her tongue against his, the press of her breasts against his chest, the way she clung to his shirt as if she wanted him even a small fraction as much as he wanted her.
Cairo could work with a fraction.
He poured everything he had into the kiss, taking her mouth again and again. Lust and need. All the dark longings that had haunted him since she’d walked away from him in Monaco. All the sweet, hot desire that had flashed through him as he’d watched her performance here tonight.
All the fire in his twisted, haunted soul.
He wasn’t surprised when she tore her mouth from his, and his arms tightened around her as if he expected her to twist out of his hold. She didn’t—and it was a measure of how out of control he’d become that he counted that as a victory.
“I don’t want anything to do with you,” she hissed at him.
Cairo couldn’t blame her. Neither did he. But that was beside the point.
“Of course not,” he agreed, their lips practically touching, his hands full of her sweetness. “I can tell by the way you kiss me.”
And then he set his mouth to hers once more.
Because kissing Brittany, he discovered quickly, was fast becoming his favorite vice in a life fairly overflowing with them.
This time when she pulled away, he discovered his hands had found their way to her thick hair in its tempting copper twist, and he’d pulled the fragrant curtain of it down around them. Her lips were sweet and full, her breath came as fast as his did, and her eyes had gone wide and dark.
Cairo thought he might never get enough of her, and it was a measure of how obsessed he was already that the notion failed to alarm him.
“You can’t do this,” she told him, and he had the strange thought that this was the real Brittany, after all her edge and flair. She sounded a little bit shaken. She looked a little bit fragile. He should have felt a surge of triumph at that, but instead, the thing that turned over inside him felt a good deal more like regret. He knew all about regret. “You know you can’t.”
“I don’t think you’ve been paying attention, cara,” he told her, and he shifted one hand from her thick, gorgeous hair to drag his thumb over the plump seduction that was her lower lip. He ached to taste her again. He didn’t know how he refrained. “I am the last of the Santa Dominis. Some still call me a king. I can do as I wish.”
“Not with me, you can’t.” She jerked her mouth back from his touch and shoved her way to a more vertical sitting position on his lap, and the sweet agony of it all threatened to unman him where he sat. “I want nothing to do with your little game of lost thrones, thank you. My life is complicated enough.”
“Marrying me would uncomplicate it.”
“Right. Because that’s exactly what you are. Uncomplicated.”
He could see the moment it occurred to her that despite the hard tone she’d used, what she’d said might as well be a compliment. Little did she know. He could teach darkness to the night, and that was on his good days.
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