The fact that Cairo was certain to destroy her had loomed so large inside of her from her first glimpse of him that even now, it was making it hard for her to breathe. It was clouding her judgment, confusing her, making her react to him rather than act in her own best interests the way she always had before.
The way she’d been doing all her life, or she’d never have made it this far.
“Pull yourself together, Brittany,” she ordered herself, her own voice loud in the quiet of her little studio, her own face much too big and exposed on the laptop screen before her, looking vulnerable and needy and entirely too aroused.
It horrified her to see that expression. Or it thrilled her, because she could still feel that kiss.
Or maybe she couldn’t tell the difference. “This is an opportunity. Since when do you turn down an opportunity?”
Destruction wasn’t a good enough excuse to avoid something. If it was, she’d never have left Gulfport at sixteen in the company of Darryl, whom she’d known perfectly well was nothing but trouble.
The kind of destruction Cairo was likely to cause, she understood in the wake of his kiss in a way she hadn’t before, was purely internal. He wouldn’t take a swing at her the way Darryl had. He might rip out her heart with his royal hands. He might tear it into pieces, mash it into a pulp beneath his feet. She didn’t understand why a man she should find laughable in any real sense instead posed such a risk for her neglected little heart, but there it was. She didn’t know why. She only knew it was an inescapable truth. She’d known it the moment she’d laid eyes on him.
“But so what?” she asked herself now, digging the heel of one palm into her chest as if that could make the feeling of immensity and inevitability go away.
Because other than the small issue of her inevitable ruin, Cairo Santa Domini was perfect for her purposes. More than perfect. He was Cairo Santa Domini—he was a dream come true. Richer than sin, possessed of more blue blood in the tip of one toe than her entire family tree put together and not in the least put off by her sad, tacky and deeply checkered past. Most of the wealthy European men Brittany had met after marrying Jean Pierre, including his own sons, had indicated that they would be happy to sully themselves with her in private of an afternoon, but would never allow anyone to see them in her gauche presence in public, lest their ancient claims to aristocracy collapse into so much deeply inferior dust.
Cairo was quite the opposite.
And if she still felt that strange pang at the fact he wanted her because of the image she’d crafted instead of despite it, to say nothing of her low-class upbringing, well...of course he did. Why else would a man like him notice a woman like her? That silly pang was between her and the heart he was going to break without even trying very hard, and the truth was, she could as easily live on her far-off island with a shattered heart as without it.
The point was the palm trees and the fruity drinks and the solitude. Who cared what happened to her heart?
So when her other mobile phone rang—the one she kept for paparazzi, tabloids and whoever else wanted to reach her yet didn’t know her personally—she answered it.
“Please hold for His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini,” the cultured voice on the other end of the line intoned.
Brittany didn’t hang up, despite that spike in her pulse. Because her own internal destruction was a small price to pay. Cairo Santa Domini might be as dangerous as he seemed. After last night, she knew he was.
But he was her only escape. He was the light at the end of the tunnel as much as he was also the train.
She had no choice.
“Darling,” she purred when he came on the line, that voice of his dark and sinful and good enough to eat. God, she was in so much trouble. But she told herself it would all be worth it. One day, all of this would be worth it. Vanuatu waited for her across the planet, white sand beaches, peace and anonymity at last. “I saw our engagement announcement in all the tabloids. You shouldn’t have.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CAIRO APPEARED IN so many tabloids with so many women that even when the woman in question was notorious in her own right, like Brittany, it could only cause so much comment. There was the initial carrying on and then it was on to the next set of celebrity shenanigans. Football players were forever embroiling themselves in bitter custody disputes with B-list actresses, politicians were ever hypocritical and blustery in turn and the papers never lacked for seedy stories to tell in their breathless, insinuating headlines.
“We appear to be less interesting than the custody tussles of a striker for Real Madrid,” Brittany said brightly when they met after the initial frenzy started to fade that first week, to plot out their next few moves. That sweet smile she could produce on cue did absolutely nothing to soften the edge in her voice—which was a good thing, Cairo thought, since he was a perverse creature who liked the edge better. “The entire world has been overexposed to Cairo Santa Domini scandals. A few pictures in a strip club are too run-of-the-mill to captivate the public interest after a steady diet of far worse. I’m afraid your shenanigans are good for a shudder, nothing more.”
“It’s usually more than a shudder,” Cairo assured her, because he couldn’t seem to help himself. “It’s really more of a drawn-out scream, with many a religious conversion along the way. Oh, God. Oh, Cairo. Oh, God.”
Brittany sighed as if he was a deep and enduring trial to her. A sound Cairo was certain no woman—no person—had made in his presence in all his life, except himself.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, as if placating a child having a tantrum.
“You do that,” he murmured, and then they discussed how best to prepare for the second phase of their plan.
Cairo very rarely appeared with any woman more than once. It was difficult to maintain a reputation as an inveterate playboy if he seemed interested in quality rather than quantity, so he’d never tied himself down to anyone for more than a long weekend. Sometimes he’d throw in a repeated date or weekend years later, just to keep people guessing, but that didn’t happen very often.
“I become rather boring after three consecutive days,” he’d once told a smarmy journalist in Rome when questioned about this pattern of his, flashing a knowing smile as if he could already read the fan letters his secretary would be forced to wade through, each declaring him anything but boring. Some complete with enclosed panties, as punctuation. “It is less a pattern and more of a public service, you understand.”
The second time the paparazzi “caught” him and Brittany in the sort of restaurant famous people would only patronize if they were trying to avoid being seen, five days after that night in the strip club, it caused a buzz. It suggested that an actual relationship of some kind had survived both what was called Cairo’s Scandalous Lap Dance and the resultant tabloid screeching over the photos of the two of them kissing.
“Had I known this would cause such a commotion,” Brittany told the pack of cameramen who surrounded her when she emerged from an expertly timed trip to Cartier, flashing her megawatt gold digger’s smile and a sizeable cocktail ring on her right hand featuring a deep blue sapphire the approximate size of the Mediterranean Sea, “I would have asked for something a whole lot bigger.”
Then, days after that dinner, they were seen exiting Cairo’s private residence in the unfashionable morning light, suggesting they’d spent the night there. Or perhaps several days and nights, now that Brittany had finished her run at the strip club.
“Are you dating?” a clearly appalled television tabloid reporter asked Cairo as he made his way through the heaving mass of paparazzi outside a charity event in London a few days later. “You and the Queen of Tacky?”
“You will be the first to know.” He smiled, all teeth and noblesse oblige. “You and all of your viewers are foremost in my thoughts as I navigate my romantic life, I
assure you.”
“Why isn’t she with you tonight?” another reporter demanded. A bit too hotly, Cairo thought, as if these people had personal stakes in Cairo’s continuing bachelorhood. He supposed they did. And in that darkness in him he paraded around in so many fine clothes, calling it a man and letting them call him the worthless one he’d always known he was. “Did you already break up?”
“I cannot keep track of this relationship according to all your conflicting headlines,” he told them. “On, off. Playboy, gold digger. Maybe she and I are simply two people who enjoy each other’s company. But of course, that makes no snide headlines for you, so that will never be printed as a possibility.”
Cairo Calls Bad-news Britt a Gold Digger, screamed the papers the following day, right on cue.
After that, Cairo squired Brittany to the lavish wedding of an old boarding school friend of his, currently one of the richest men in Spain. The speculation about what they meant to each other surged into what could only be called a dull roar.
Had Cairo ever attended a wedding with a date before, therefore keeping him from finding several dates there? Answer: no. Did a man who was only after a bit of fun take that fun to a very old friend’s wedding in the first place? Answer: of course not, as there was nothing fun about a date with high expectations that a man was only going to dash cruelly. The papers were agog. Could Cairo Santa Domini possibly be getting serious about the most unsuitable woman in the world—even after she’d finished her stint in that horrible Parisian club?
Answers on that last varied, especially after “a wedding guest” released a photo of Cairo and Brittany in their wedding finery, clinging to each other on the dance floor in what was called “the would-be king at his most tender and affectionate—friends claim they’ve never seen playboy Cairo lose his head like this before!”
“I had no idea you could dance so well with your clothes on,” he’d murmured to her as they’d swayed to the wedding band.
“How many of the bridesmaids here have experienced what you do so well without your clothes?” she’d replied, not missing a step as she smiled up at him, and he was certain only he could see how razor-sharp that smile was.
After that, they took it to a new level and introduced a series of romantic holidays.
First a weekend in Dubai. Then a week in sun-drenched Rio, and an endless series of photographs of the happy couple on the famous beaches in very, very little. “The better,” one online gossip magazine asserted dryly beneath a photo of Brittany in a tiny bikini, “to remind you why Brittany Hollis is dating your husband Cairo Santa Domini and you aren’t.” Then, after a low-key week or so in Paris, they embarked on an elaborate fortnight in Sub-Saharan Africa, from the sweeping deserts of Namibia to the glory of Victoria Falls to an elegant, fully catered safari in Botswana.
All photographed extensively and then carefully curated to look like a sweepingly luxurious trip so epic it redefined romance. A love letter to all the world, from two of the least likely people to fall in love around. A masterpiece.
If Cairo said so himself.
“Oh, please,” Brittany replied when he actually did say it, sitting on one of the camp chairs in the spacious tent they shared, piled high with rugs and linens and tables laden with succulent foods, that had been set up for them a stone’s throw from the nearby river bristling with hippos and crocodiles. She was reading yet another book on her e-reader while he tracked their headlines on his mobile, and they were the only ones in the entire world who knew that they slept on opposite sides of that tent the same way they’d slept in different parts of all the hotel suites he’d booked. Night after torturous night, not that it was driving him mad. “Romance is not the word being used when people discuss us. I think you know that.”
He did know it. What he didn’t know, out there in the deep Botswanan night so thick with stars, was why he wanted to change the conversation. Or why some part of him hated it every time another tabloid skewered her. When that, of course, had been the whole point from the start.
Has Brittany Stripped Her Way into Cairo’s Heart? howled one New York gossip rag.
Will Cairo Be Lucky Number Four for Much-wed Brittany? asked a British paper, pretending to be slightly less salacious.
Another British paper was far less circumspect: Brittany’s Big-game Hunt in Botswana—Will She Nab Herself a Crown?
And more starkly by far, in the most popular Santa Domini paper over a picture of the two of them gazing adoringly at each other: Queen Brittany?
He should have been pleased, Cairo told himself. Everything was going according to plan. He should have been exultant.
But he didn’t sleep much on that holiday, and he told himself it had nothing to do with the fact she was in that tent with him, yet a world away. He told himself it was for the best, and he should exult in the fact this woman seemed so immune to him.
Exult, he told himself as they smiled and laughed and pretended so well the whole world gasped and carried on over every new photograph.
Exult, he ordered himself when they were in private and she held herself so far away, all cool smiles and distance and her face forever in a book.
He shouldn’t find her a mystery and he shouldn’t want so badly to solve that mystery that he was up half the night. If this was exulting, Cairo thought as the safari wrapped up and they returned to their regularly scheduled lives in Europe, he was going to require a whole lot more caffeine to survive all the nights he spent asking himself if she really was the only woman he’d ever met who saw only the darkness in him.
That and why, if she was, he was masochistic enough to find that attractive.
“I’m getting the sense that the world is not so much rejoicing in our relationship or even avidly watching it unfold so much as they’re craning their necks at us, the way people do at a terrible accident,” Brittany said as they flew back to Paris from an exceptionally glorious charity ball in Vienna one night.
She set aside the paper she’d been reading and eyed Cairo as he lounged on the sofa across from her in his preferred position: lying flat on the white leather sectional with his feet propped up on the far arm, his dark suit in disheveled disarray all around him because the more rumpled he looked, the more the papers speculated about his sexual prowess and giddily imagined he performed sex acts behind every potted plant in Europe.
Who was he to deny his public?
He waved a negligent hand and let the ice cubes rattle around in the drink he held. The more noise the ice cubes made, he’d discovered long ago, the drunker people assumed he was. And it was astonishing, the things people said and did when they assumed another person was too drunk to remember, respond or protest.
Cairo wondered if he’d ever simply live through a moment, without mounting any kind of performance to survive it. Or if he even knew how to do that, when there was nothing in him but lies atop lies.
Then he wondered why, when it had been this way since he was a young man, he found the realities of his life and all its necessary untruths so terribly constricting now.
“We are a delicious accident, cara,” he told her, and experimented with a faint, fake slurring of his words. “That’s the whole point.”
“My mistake,” Brittany replied. “I was starting to think the point was you cavorting about the globe so you could better rub your wealth and careless lifestyle in the face of every last person alive.”
“That is a mere side benefit. One I greatly enjoy.”
Cairo swung around to sit up, raking his hair back from his forehead as he did. He put his drink down on the coffee table in the expansive jet cabin that better resembled a hotel suite, and he told himself there was no reason in the world for this gnawing thing inside him.
She’d agreed to everything after that night in the strip club. After that kiss he’d been torturing himself with ever since, as if it h
ad been his first. She’d come to his residence in the car he’d sent for her in the middle of the night that week, to keep the meeting a secret. All the hints he’d seen of some kind of vulnerability in the strip club had been gone by then. Long gone, leaving her as smooth as glass. She’d merely discussed their strategy with him, offered her own thoughts and ideas and then signed all the papers. No theatrics. No hint of any emotion at all, as if everything between them was strictly business.
Brittany had insisted that was how it should remain.
“You must be joking,” Cairo had protested after she’d dropped that little bomb. It had been well into the wee hours that night in Paris, and she’d sat there across from him in one of his ecstatically baroque salons as if she’d been carved from stone.
“I rarely joke at all,” she’d replied, deadpan. “And never about sex.”
“But sex is one of the great joys of life. Surely you must know this.”
“No wonder you are widely held to be such a bright beacon of happiness. Oh, wait. Laziness is more your style, isn’t it, Your Indolent Majesty?”
He hadn’t known quite what to make of such a strange, stilted conversation about sex with a woman whose taste was still tearing him apart. A woman who, even then, had that same high color on her cheeks that told him she wanted him as badly as he wanted her, no matter what cold, repressive things she said to deny it.
“I know you want me,” Cairo had said, baldly. As if he’d never finessed a situation in his life. As if he didn’t know how. As if he couldn’t help himself or keep himself from being more alarmingly honest with this woman than he was with anyone else alive. “Do you imagine you’re hiding it?”
“I don’t care who you sleep with, of course,” Brittany had continued as if he hadn’t said a word. She’d waved a negligent hand in the air, but he’d seen the way her eyes glittered. He’d been certain that meant something. Or he’d wanted, desperately, for that to mean something. “I only ask that you keep it discreet, so as not to distract from what we’re trying to accomplish, and that you make certain to keep it far away from me. That’s only courteous.”
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