She would look beautiful in all the engagement pictures. Elegant, even; the better for all the nasty “compare and contrast” photos the papers would run the moment they heard the news. This side a future almost-queen dressed for the part, that side a stripper in a G-string and a bikini top upside down on a pole.
The vicious articles wrote themselves.
Brittany told herself, the way she seemed to do more and more these days, that she didn’t mind at all. That this was what she wanted. That she was as pleased with the public persona she’d created as she ever had been, and welcomed the way she and Cairo were using it to their own ends.
I have never been happier in all my life, she told herself now, surrounded by fine china and Michelin stars. Again and again, hoping it would sink in. Not ever.
Cairo looked devastatingly gorgeous. Cairo always looked devastatingly gorgeous. The things the man did to a jacket and a pair of dark trousers defied description. It was as if a light shone upon him from a great height, making him seem something like angelic despite his rather more earthy reputation. He turned heads. He inspired sighs. He couldn’t walk across an empty street without someone gasping aloud, and there’d been a chorus of dreamy sighs all the way across the restaurant floor when they’d entered.
He was the most dangerous man Brittany had ever met, and sometimes, when he lost that smirk of his and stopped saying his usual absurd and provocative things, she was sure it was as obvious to the world as it felt sloshing about inside her.
Tonight he’d chosen the best table in Paris’s current darling of a restaurant, where the paparazzi could crowd about outside and take telephoto pictures of their meal. He’d picked her up from her flat in a flashy sports car, a muscular Italian bit of fancy in a deep, glossy black, and had swept her into the restaurant in a hail of flashbulbs that hardly seemed to register to him at all. A surreptitious glance at the mobile phone in her evening clutch told her the pictures were online before they’d ordered their first course.
There’s no getting out of this, a little voice kept whispering to her from that place, deep inside her, where everything was fluttery and terrified and all because it recognized how susceptible she was to this man. How vulnerable. He made her feel things and that was unforgivable. There’s no taking it back.
“You seem bored,” Cairo said after one silent moment bled into the next. He leaned back in his chair in that exultantly male way of his, a negligent finger tracing the stem of his wineglass as he spoke. “Surely not.”
From a distance she would look enthralled with him, she knew. Or she hoped. She leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand, to underscore that impression. Too bad it made it far too easy to forget that she was supposed to be acting.
“It’s only that I’ve done this so many times before,” she said.
Laughter flashed over his extraordinary face, and that didn’t help. Brittany might as well have plugged herself into an electrical outlet and switched on the power to full blast. She felt it when he laughed. Everywhere.
She was in so much trouble. That truth shivered through her, making her stomach flip over and then knot tightly, and it took everything she had to pretend it wasn’t actually happening.
Cairo watched her, close and hot, as if he knew every last thing she wanted to hide from him. “Did your teenage first husband propose to you in the finest restaurant in...wherever you came from?”
“In fact he did,” she said loftily. Brittany forgot herself again and grinned at him, remembering. “It was the parking lot of a McDonald’s with a bag of cheeseburgers from the drive-thru.”
“Be still my heart.”
“That counted as highly romantic to a sixteen-year-old girl with no prospects, I’ll have you know. Darryl had even bought the cheeseburgers, which made the whole thing especially fancy.”
He smiled at that. Brittany looked away. The sapphire ring she wore on her right hand caught the candlelight and reminded her exactly how far she’d come from a fast-food parking lot in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Cairo wasn’t done. “And what about poor Carlos, who you treated so hideously on television like the callous creature the papers tell us daily you truly are?”
“He came into the bar where I was working—”
“Is that a euphemism? Do you mean another strip club?”
“I mean the bar where I was working as a waitress,” she said, shaking her head at him. Then she relented. “The strip club was my second job.”
Cairo’s mouth moved into that smile of his that she’d discovered made her silly straight through. Completely and utterly foolish, and something like shattered besides. The only defense she had against it was to act like an icicle. But somehow, she couldn’t seem to do that tonight. Her ability to freeze had disappeared, lost somewhere in the dancing flames of the candles between them. Or in that smile of his that made her feel like just another flickering bit of the light surrounding him.
Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, to be caught up in this man. To flicker and dance around him like the candles on the tables, or his loyal subjects, who followed him from party to party without end, or every woman who’d ever laid eyes on him. Maybe she was trying too hard to resist the inevitable. It was possible that giving in to it would make this latest transactional, cold-blooded marriage...easier.
Sweeter, anyway. She had to believe it would make it so much sweeter.
“Carlos came into the bar and he said he was moving to Los Angeles and I should go with him.” She shrugged away the other parts of the story that had little to do with what he’d asked. She didn’t like to think about that time. The usually angry, rough clientele and the places they tried to put their hands. That ever-present sense of danger that, still, had been better than a life dodging Darryl’s fists. She might have been a virgin, but her experiences had made sure she never felt anything like innocent. “He was pretty sure he could get us both on a television show if I did.”
“Better than a sonnet.”
“I asked what the catch was, because who walks around claiming they can get on television shows? He said we had to get married, I said okay. The end.”
Cairo didn’t actually move to put a hand over his heart, but the gesture was implied in the way he watched her then, his caramel gaze looking darker in the candlelight. More like whiskey than candy, and it made Brittany feel a little tipsy, instantly.
Maybe more than just a little tipsy, she thought.
“Sheer poetry,” he said, his mouth in that tempting curve. “And Jean Pierre? Or did he have one of his nurses do the honors as he lay in his sickbed?”
“That one was much more fun.” Brittany couldn’t seem to stop smiling at him tonight, when she knew better. These past weeks had been sheer torture. Cairo was not the sort of man whose potency wore off the longer she spent time with him, like every other man she’d ever known. Not Cairo. He intensified. He got worse. “He came backstage after one of my shows.”
“This time we really are talking about a strip club again, yes? For the purposes of clarity?”
“He said some lovely, complimentary things.” She raised her brows at him, daring him to comment.
“I’m sure he praised the strip club’s choreographer to the moon and back.” Cairo nodded, that sharp gleam in his gaze telling her he knew very well Jean Pierre had done no such thing. “Or perhaps the set design?”
“Something like that,” Brittany murmured.
Jean Pierre had told her something that bordered on filthy, that he’d somehow made sound charmingly bawdy instead—but Brittany suspected that Cairo, with that sharp gleam still in his gaze as he waited, wouldn’t find it nearly as amusing as she had at the time.
She didn’t want to dig into how she knew that. Much less what it meant.
“And then he told me he had very little time left to live and a handful of deeply
ungrateful children. ‘Marry me, cherie,’ he said.” She affected a dramatic French accent and had the enormous, very complicated pleasure of seeing Cairo’s dark amber gaze gleam with pleasure. “‘And we’ll give them hell.’”
“This proved sufficiently compelling for you? I’ll make a note.”
“Jean Pierre had a certain charm.”
“By which, of course, you mean his net worth.”
There was no particular reason for that to slice through her, especially not tonight. Brittany didn’t know what was the matter with her, especially because it was true. She didn’t know why she felt so...fragile. She couldn’t scowl at him with so many people watching them, inside the restaurant and out, so she had to settle for a bright sort of smile that made her own mouth hurt.
“I make no apologies for that or any other choice I made, then or now,” she told him, and she chose not to concentrate on how difficult it was to keep her voice in the neighborhood of calm. “Only people who never have to worry about money look down on those who do nothing but. Besides—” she let her gaze sweep over him, from that reckless dark hair to his careless smile, and the sheer masculine beauty of that body of his he packaged to perfection “—you’re no different from me.”
“I must beg to differ, cara. I do not sell myself to the highest bidder.”
Her smile still hurt. Worse, then. “Keep telling yourself that. Tabloid after tabloid after tabloid.”
Cairo’s eyes flashed with an emotion she couldn’t read. He inclined his head slightly, very slightly. He did not say touché. Brittany supposed he didn’t have to say it out loud. The fact she’d scored a direct hit seemed to simmer in the air between them.
“Cairo,” she said, and she didn’t know what she was doing. She was performing, yes, but all she wanted was to...do something about the fact it seemed she’d hurt him, when she’d have said that was impossible. “You’re not the man you play in public.” She didn’t know where that came from, only that the moment she said it, something shifted inside her. She knew it was true. She reached her hand out across the table, but he didn’t take it. “It won’t kill you to admit that, if only to me.”
He let a bitter sort of laugh, and Brittany had the impression he was as surprised by the sound as she was. He leaned forward. He still didn’t reach for her hand.
“That is where you are wrong,” he told her, and she went still. His dark eyes were so dark and something like tortured, and she realized in the same instant that she’d never seen him look like this. Not remotely indolent. Not the least bit lazy or pampered. No trace of that smirk on his beautiful mouth. “It very well might kill me. Did you imagine this was a game?”
That sat there between them, stark and harsh. Brittany’s head spun. Then he pulled his gaze away and ran an unnecessary hand down the perfect line of his lapel.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper, her hand still reaching across the table. She couldn’t seem to move a muscle.
“I mean nothing by it.” But it took him another long moment to look at her again, and she didn’t believe him. “I am a creature of well-documented extremes, that is all. The theater of it all goes to my head sometimes and I imagine I am starring in some great tragedy. I think we both know I am not the tragedy sort.”
“Cairo...”
But he changed again, right there before her eyes. He didn’t appear to move a muscle, and yet he changed. He looked as useless and lazy as ever, that stark moment gone as if it had never been.
“This proposal will be unmemorable, I’m sure,” he told her, his voice amused and his gaze more like his usual caramel again. Light. Easy. Why couldn’t she believe it? “Especially for a woman as vastly experienced in this area as you. Are you ready?”
Brittany pulled her hand back from the center of the table and told herself this was none of her business. He was none of her business. She should never have acted as if she wanted to know the real him anyway. What an exiled king chose to hide behind his public mask was his affair, not hers.
“It can’t possibly be as heartwarming as cheeseburgers in a parking lot, or off-color remarks in a strip club,” she replied, and it was a fight to make her voice cool again. As if that strange moment that still spiked the air between them hadn’t happened. “But you do like a challenge, don’t you?”
Cairo’s mouth moved into its usual amused curve, though his eyes remained dark on hers. He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a small box. An instantly identifiable jeweler’s box that could really only contain one thing. And still, Brittany found herself staring at it as if she didn’t know what it was. As if she didn’t know what was happening. As if they hadn’t decided he would do this here, now, tonight.
The frightening part was, she was only partially acting. She felt too hot, then too cold. Her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth.
He moved then, shifting from his seat to kneel down beside her chair, and her heart started drumming wildly in her chest. She couldn’t tell if the restaurant around them went quiet. She couldn’t tell if the earth had stopped spinning. The point of this was the spectacle he’d mentioned, the endless show that was both their lives—but all she could see was this. Him.
The last man in the world who should ever have been kneeling down before her, and yet there he was, doing exactly that.
The whole world narrowed as he took her hand in his.
Then disappeared entirely.
This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, she chanted at herself.
But the truth was, it felt more than real. It felt like a fairy tale, the kind she’d lectured herself against loving or believing in all her life. It felt like magic and hope and something sweet besides.
His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini smiled at her, Brittany Hollis, from the worst trailer park in Gulfport, Mississippi, as if she thrilled him. As if she really, truly did. That treacherous part of her, not buried as deep inside her as it should have been, wished that was possible. Oh, how she wished it.
He cracked open the small box he held and presented it to her with flourish, and Brittany’s heart stopped.
She knew that ring. Everybody knew that ring. That glorious, incomparable diamond for which songs had been written and blood had been shed, across the ages. She knew its sparkle, its shape, even the delicate, precious stones that surrounded it like a whimsical halo. It had been painted by any number of great masters over the centuries, was known as one of the finest legacy jewels in all of Europe, and was so beloved by so many that various paste representations were sold all over the world.
“It was my mother’s,” Cairo said quietly, his eyes on hers. She knew that. He must have known that everybody alive knew that. “And my grandmother’s before her, going back hundreds upon hundreds of years. It was commissioned a very long time ago, crafted by my kingdom’s finest artisans, and is known as the Heart of Santa Domini. I hope you will wear it proudly.”
“Cairo...” Her voice was a whisper. She couldn’t wear such a ring. She couldn’t bear it. It was a symbol of hope, of love, and this was nothing but a sideshow performance for a baying crowd. But she couldn’t seem to open her mouth and tell him so.
She’d forgotten her internal chant entirely. She’d forgotten her own name. She’d forgotten the fact they were in public, the paparazzi right there outside the window, even the fact that all of this was staged.
There was only the look in Cairo’s caramel gaze. That hot, dark, gleaming thing that wrapped around her and pulled tight. There was only the way he took that fairy-tale ring from the velvet box and then slid it onto her finger, as if she was the princess in the tale, not the joke he was playing on the world.
“Marry me,” he said, and his voice was different, too. Deeper. Richer.
As raw as she felt.
> And Brittany understood how foolish this game of theirs was. There was nothing the slightest bit cool about her then. No icicle. Nothing even close. She felt...everything. She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or if she wanted to scream. If she wanted to fall into his arms or run away. She only knew that she’d been married three times and not one of them had ever felt like this. Not one of them had ever made her shake, inside and out.
Not one of them had ever been anything but expedient.
She tried to remind herself that Cairo was the same, if on a grander scale. That it was all he was. She tried to tell herself this was no different from the rest, and no matter that she was wearing one of the most romantic diamonds in the history of the world on her hand.
“Must I beg?” he asked then, though he looked as comfortable on one knee as he did lounging in a chair or sprawled out on a sofa. As if he could inhabit whatever posture he found himself in and make it his own, and easily.
“Of course not,” she said quickly, and she wasn’t faking the way she shook. Or the sting of tears that threatened to spill over from behind her eyes. “Of course you don’t have to beg.”
“Say it,” he ordered her, every inch of him the king he wasn’t, even as he kneeled in what ought to have been a supplicant position. It took her breath away. It made her imagine that all of this was something much, much different than it was, and that, she knew on some distant level, was the most dangerous thing of all. “I find I require it.”
“Yes,” she told him, this exiled king on his knees before her. Her. Brittany Hollis, reality-show villain and scourge of Europe, destined for nothing but infamy and then irrelevance. In that order, if she was lucky. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
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