“No threesomes, then?” he’d asked. Drawled, really. Entirely to watch her reaction—but she’d given him nothing but that glass exterior of hers, smooth and clear.
“You can have all the threesomes you like.” Her brows had arched and he’d felt skewered on that hard gaze of hers. “Unless, of course, a man of your appetites finds that number restrictive. Believe me when I tell you I couldn’t care less where you put your, ah, royal scepter. As long as it isn’t anywhere near me.”
“That’s hurtful.” He cocked his head to one side as he considered her. “My scepter is considered the toast of Europe, if not the entire world.”
A faint gleam in her dark eyes then. “I doubt that.”
“Naturally, the savage, rutting creature you seem to think I am will only view your denial of what we both feel as a great challenge.”
“I don’t feel anything.” Her voice then had been crisp, her gaze clear, but he still hadn’t believed her. Wishful thinking or the truth? How could he still not know? “Am I attracted to you? Of course. You’re a remarkably handsome man. I can’t imagine any woman alive wouldn’t react to you, especially when you decide to turn all of that smoldering on her to get your way.”
“Is that what I did? I thought I kissed you and you kissed me back and we very nearly broke a few decency laws right there in that strip club. It wouldn’t have bothered me if we had. I have an unofficial diplomatic immunity. You, of course, might not enjoy a stint in a French prison.”
“I don’t find it necessary to act on every attraction I might feel,” Brittany had said, again as if he hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t been able to think of any other person alive who’d ever treated him as if he was annoying. What was the matter with him that he found that as intriguing as anything else she did? How much must he hate himself? But, of course, he’d already known the answer to that. And she’d still been speaking, still fixing him with that stern glare of hers that he’d doubted she knew made him almost painfully hard. “And I feel certain that as time goes on, the attraction will fade anyway.”
“I’m told that never happens. Such is my charm.” Cairo had smiled when she’d shaken her head at that. “I’m only reporting what others have said.”
“How would they know?” she’d retorted, settling back in her chair as if its stuffy, hard back was comfortable so long after 2:00 a.m. “You never spend more than a weekend with anyone. I’m signing up for far more exposure to your...”
“My scepter?” he supplied.
Her smile in return had been that sharp, edgy thing he found far too fascinating. “Your charm. Such as it is.”
“I think you’re kidding yourself,” he’d said softly then, because he couldn’t seem to maintain his game with this woman. “Sex is inevitable.”
“I’m sure you believe that,” she’d replied, her tone crisp, as if she didn’t care either way, and he’d found that needled him far more than if she’d seemed horrified. “And I told you I don’t care who you have it with, so I certainly don’t need to hear about it.” Then she’d shrugged as if she’d never encountered a topic more tedious in all her life. “Have at, with my blessing.”
Except the most curious thing had happened since that conversation. Cairo had discovered that he hadn’t had the slightest urge to touch any woman but her. He told himself it was because she’d proven herself to be such an excellent partner. A perfect costar in this little bit of theater they were performing for the masses and for their own complementary ends.
He told himself a lot of things. But the only woman he saw was her.
“Why would you do this?” she’d asked him that first night when Ricardo had ushered her into the elegant salon that had stood more or less unchanged for centuries. “What can you possibly hope to gain?”
He’d only shrugged. “I need an infliction, as you said, for any number of shallow reasons. Why are you doing it?”
She’d sniffed. “I want to retire to Vanuatu and live on the beach, where no one can take a single photograph of me, ever.”
Cairo didn’t think they’d believed each other, but there it was. And here they were now, weeks into this thing. She dressed perfectly, reacted perfectly, gazed at him with the perfect mix of adoration and mystery whenever there was a camera near. She was tailor-made for her role.
That had to be why he’d lost his drive for his favorite vices, women and whiskey, in no particular order. He was too busy taking in the show.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked now.
She’d changed from her stunning ball gown the moment they’d boarded the plane, almost as if she couldn’t bear to be in all that couture a moment longer. She did it every time. The moment she could be certain no cameras would follow her, she threw off all the trappings of her larger-than-life presence and left nothing behind but a real, live woman.
Cairo was fascinated. He found he liked her in what he considered her backstage uniform. Low-slung, high-end athletic pants that clung to every lithe curve and long-sleeved T-shirts made of the light, remarkably soft cotton she preferred. Usually, like tonight, she also wore an oversized cashmere scarf she would wrap several times around her neck. He liked it. He liked her gleaming copper hair piled high on the top of her head, so he could see her delicate ears and the line of her neck and that sweet, soft nape he had every intention of getting his mouth on, one of these days.
“Forgive me,” he said when moments dragged by and he was still staring. “It occurred to me that you’re the only woman I’ve ever seen in casual clothes.” He smiled, and had no idea why it seemed to come less easily than usual. “My lifestyle has never really leant itself to such intimacies.”
Brittany blinked. Then again. Her expression shifted from that bulletproof cool he despised and admired in turn to something else. Something that made that gnawing thing in him dig deeper and start to actually hurt.
“You work so hard to pretend otherwise,” she said after a moment that dragged on far too long and made his chest hurt. “But beneath all the smoke and mirrors, beneath the Cairo Santa Domini spectacle, you’re a completely different man. Aren’t you?”
Cairo didn’t like that at all. He’d worked too hard for too long to make certain no one ever bothered to take him at anything but face value, because he knew exactly how black and cold it was beneath. Why was this woman the only person on earth who never seemed to do that?
“There is no ‘beneath the spectacle.’” His voice was too grim. Too gritty. Too damned revealing. “There is only spectacle. The spectacle is how I survive, Brittany. Believe that, if nothing else.”
It was possibly the most honest thing he’d ever said to her. Or to anyone.
“Sometimes I think you’re a monster,” she told him. “I think you want me to think it. And then other times...” Her voice softened, and everything inside him ran hot and wild, terror and need. “I think you’re possibly the loneliest man I’ve ever met.”
His heart kicked at him. Cairo wanted to kick back. At her, and this situation, at his whole wasted, twisted life.
“I don’t know an orphan or refugee who is ever anything else,” he said quietly. He knew he shouldn’t have said it. He should have made a joke, laughed it off. Said something appalling or shallow, as expected. But he couldn’t seem to look away from her. He couldn’t seem to breathe. He didn’t understand what was happening to him or why he couldn’t stop it. There was nothing in all the world but her lovely face and that searing gleam of recognition in her dark hazel eyes, and the words coming out of his mouth, filled with a truth he knew he shouldn’t tell. “I am both. All I have—all I will ever have—is the spectacle.”
He slumped back down after that, pretending to lapse off instantly into sleep like the lazy ass he was so good at playing would.
But he felt the weight of her dark gaze on him for a long time after.
&n
bsp; * * *
“The general is rumored to be in ill health,” Ricardo told him some days later. “It has been widely suggested that this ill-conceived fling of yours at a time the kingdom might actually need you may finally have put you beyond the pale, even in the eyes of your most die-hard supporters.”
Cairo did not look up from his laptop, where he was managing his investment portfolio with a shrewdness he knew most would not believe he possessed, but then, he had worked hard to live down to any and all expectations. He sat at the gleaming, polished table in his Parisian residence that had welcomed all manner of European royalty in its time. It, like everything else in this house he’d inherited from his late family and got to rule over like the high king of ghosts, was a monument to nostalgia.
He included himself in that tally.
“I would have thought that I was so many shades lighter than pale that I’d gone entirely translucent before my eighteenth birthday,” he said, more to the screen than to Ricardo. “That was certainly the goal.” He sat back then and eyed the closest thing he had in the world to a friend, this man who had been at his side since before his family had died and who would support him to the bitter end. “What will it take? A murder conviction?”
“The loyalists would only claim you’d been framed, Sire. And then you’d simply be in prison, a situation that I doubt would suit you.”
Cairo did not state the obvious: that he was already in prison. That he had been born into one sort of prison and then, after the revolution that had sent his family into exile, thrust into an entirely different one. And that the way he’d lived since he’d survived his adolescence was yet another jail cell, all things considered, no matter how elegantly appointed.
No one had any sympathy for a man like Cairo Santa Domini. Cairo, least of all. He knew he deserved it.
“You are correct,” he said instead. “A life sentence would not suit me at all.”
Ricardo smiled slightly, as if he knew exactly what Cairo hadn’t said. “The scandal sheets are having a field day and there appear to be more than the usual number of appalled citizens registering their dismay at your antics, but I’m afraid the rumblings from the most deluded of your followers grow ever louder. It’s as if they think they must act before you commit an unthinkable crime.”
“Not an actual murder, I assume. A marriage.” Ricardo nodded and Cairo rubbed a hand over his face. “But the general is unwell?”
His murderous heart, one of the many reasons he would never be a good man, wanted that evil man dead, as painfully as possible. It would be a good start.
“The palace is trying to keep it quiet, but my sources tell me it is serious,” Ricardo said quietly. He aimed a swift, dark look from Cairo. “The loyalists think this relationship of yours is a distraction. Merely a game you play as you bide your time and wait for the usurper to die.”
Cairo thought of the loyalists, true believers who had opposed the general’s coup thirty years ago and had only grown stronger and louder in the years since. The more the general hunted them down and attempted to silence them, the louder they got and the more furiously they agitated for Cairo to return and take his throne.
They didn’t seem to realize that his attempting to do so would lead to nothing but slaughter. Had they learned nothing from his family’s “accident”? General Estes was as much a butcher today as he had ever been. Perhaps even more so, if his power was slipping away.
“The loyalists believe what they want to believe,” he said now.
“The key points they wished me to pass on all concern your current companion,” Ricardo told him. “She is inappropriate, they claim. Unacceptable, though stronger language was used. She is a slap, and I quote, ‘in the face of centuries of the Santa Domini bloodline.’”
“Heaven forfend the bloodline that ends in me suffer a slap. The monarchy might be lost in shame forever—ah, but then, there is no monarchy and hasn’t been for thirty years.”
Ricardo had heard all of this before. He inclined his head. “They want to meet.”
They did not want to do anything so innocuous as meet. They wanted to plan, to scheme. They wanted to talk strategies and possibilities. The practical loyalists wanted their seized lands and confiscated fortunes back. The idealists wanted the country of their forefathers, the fairy-tale perfection of “the kingdom in the clouds,” as Santa Domini had been known in previous centuries. Cairo was as much a figurehead to them as he was to their enemies.
And figureheads too often ended up sacrificed to the cause, one way or another. What the loyalists failed to realize was that they’d be served up along with him. Cairo had been trying to avoid that very outcome since the general had assassinated his family.
As long as the general lived, nothing and no one Cairo cared about was safe.
“Impossible,” he murmured now. “My social calendar is filled to bursting and I am, quite publically, falling head over heels in love with an American temptress reviled on at least three continents, rendering me stupendously unfit to be anyone’s king.”
“That is what I told them, more or less. It was not received well.”
This was the problem with royal blood. History was littered with the executed and deposed relatives of this or that monarch, all of whom had been pressed into service by exactly the sort of people Cairo knew better than to actually speak to directly. The fact of his existence was enough of an irritant to General Estes. The general had claimed the throne of Santa Domini, but everyone knew he’d taken that throne by force and, because of that, there would always be whispers that he could only hold the throne by the same force. Meanwhile, Cairo hadn’t set foot on Santa Dominian soil since he’d been a child and had made himself one part a laughingstock and two parts too scandalous to bear, but there was no doubt that he was his country’s legitimate heir.
If he’d hid himself away somewhere and stayed out of the public eye as his parents had advised him to do when he was a child, Cairo wouldn’t have survived to adulthood. That he lived, that he drew breath daily, was a constant reminder to the general that he was not legitimate and could never be legitimate no matter whom he bullied. That he had not won his position by popular vote or historic right, but by violence and betrayal.
Cairo had spent a very long time making sure no one could possibly imagine a known fool like him, vapid and excessive and usually scandalously naked besides, as any kind of king. Secret meetings and murky discussions with those who would use him to take back the country would undo all of that work. It would put not just Cairo at risk, but all of those who had ever supported his family. From the sweet nannies who had raised him and his lost sister, to Ricardo, to say nothing of the ancient families that had stood with the kings of Santa Domini for centuries.
He might have risked himself, now that he was no longer a grieving and terrified boy. But he had already lost everyone he’d ever cared about. He could not risk anyone else.
He would not.
“I suppose there is only one course of action, then,” he said after a moment, when the air in the old room, so much like a mausoleum, grew tight. “To put the final nail in my coffin.”
“Not literally, I hope.” Because Ricardo would always do what was asked of him, Cairo knew this as well as he knew his own heart within his chest, but that didn’t make the man any less of a loyalist at heart.
He made himself smile, and pretended, as he always did, that he didn’t know how deeply the other man longed for Cairo to stand up one day and announce he’d had enough—that he was taking back the kingdom. That day would never come. Cairo had made certain of that, as surely as he’d made sure to become exactly the sort of creature his beloved father would have loathed.
“Indeed, that is what we always hope, Ricardo,” he said instead, and for the first time in a long while, he found he actually meant it.
Cairo turned his atte
ntion back to his laptop, telling himself that he was perfectly calm, because he should have been. That his heart was not beating too hard, that he was not tense with sheer anticipation—for all the wrong things—because he should have been as composed as he was when he handled his investment portfolio.
That he was not should have concerned him a great deal more than it did.
Because it was finally time to propose to Brittany, his inappropriate consort who functioned as the perfect sucker punch against his splendid ancestry, royal blood and claim to the throne of Santa Domini.
He would make her his wife and ruin the dreams of all those loyal to him, once and for all.
He should have viewed this necessary step with a measure of satisfaction. Possibly with a touch of nostalgia for the country he’d not laid eyes on since he was small boy.
But he found that instead of his kingdom, what he thought about was Brittany. Copper fire and the sweet, hot insanity of her slick mouth against his. Her lean, muscled curves in his lap and her scent all around him like a fist. The torture of these last weeks, of having her so close and yet so far away. Every touch he stole in front of the cameras that he relived for another sleepless hour when alone at night. The agony of her smile, of that mysterious distance in her eyes. It had been unbearable from the start.
But the time had come at last.
He would finally, finally make her his.
Cairo found he couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER FIVE
“PAY ATTENTION, PLEASE,” Cairo said from across the small table, which was how Brittany realized she’d been lost in her own head somewhere. She snapped her gaze back to his and saw that same brooding, amused impatience in those caramel depths that she was starting to crave a little bit too much.
Maybe more than a little bit.
She shoved that thought aside and cranked up her smile to something melting and adoring, as befit the occasion. She assured herself it was completely feigned. She’d worn a gown of glorious red that clutched at her breasts and then tumbled down to flirt with her knees, and the sort of fancifully high and delicate shoes that impressed even the most glamorous French women. She’d pulled back the front part of her hair and let the rest of the heavy mass of it swirl down from that gleaming little clip to tumble past her bare shoulders, a sleek fall of copper that she knew caught the light.
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