“I hoped you might.” He didn’t move. His eyes were lit up with that drugging heat she didn’t want to recognize, but she did. God help her, but she did. She could feel it echo inside of her, making that sweet, hot knot in her belly bloom into something more like an ache. “Come now, Brittany. We need to sell this scene for our adoring public.”
“I said yes. What more do you want? A song and dance?”
“I think you know.” He smiled when all she did was stare at him, so outside herself she hardly knew where she was, and shivering inside as if she’d never get warm again. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. “Kiss me, please. And make it good.”
Brittany felt dizzy then. Hot and wild and pierced straight through.
But it didn’t occur to her not to obey him.
You want to obey him, that voice inside her accused her.
She sat forward in her seat. She let go of his hand and indulged that part of her she’d been denying all this time, sliding her hands over that marvelous, ever-roughened jaw of his to cup his beautiful face between her hands.
Her breath caught. She saw nothing but fire in his hot, sweet gaze, this stunning man whom she should never have met. Whom she should never have touched. Whose kiss weeks ago still worked in her like a fire she couldn’t stamp out and whose gorgeous male body, sculpted to impossible perfection, had been right there within reach on all those little holiday jaunts they’d taken, in all those rooms and tents they’d shared without ever sharing a bed.
She hadn’t touched him. She hadn’t dared. She didn’t know what would become of her if she followed that flame. She couldn’t imagine what waited for her on the other side—and she hadn’t known how to handle the fact she’d wanted things she’d never, ever wanted before, from anyone.
But tonight, she’d agreed to marry him. Tonight, they were in public, where it was safe. Where they could both wear the masks they preferred. Where there could be no real surrender to lick and scrape of all that fire inside of her.
Tonight, she felt as if she could dare anything. Even this. Even him.
Even the terrifying things she felt inside.
So Brittany slid forward and pressed her mouth to his.
It was better than she’d remembered—better than she’d dreamed. She tested the shape of his lips, shuddering at the warmth, the contact. He tilted his head to change the angle and took the kiss deeper, hotter.
His taste exploded through her, fine wine and devilishly perfect man.
God help her, but he was perfect.
Brittany kissed him as if fairy tales were real, and as if the two of them were, too. She kissed him as if they were nothing more than a man and a woman, and this kiss was all that mattered.
No kings, no strippers. No tabloid personas. No calculation whatsoever.
She couldn’t seem to do anything but pour herself into him, no ice and nothing hidden or left back. No self-preservation at all.
Brittany kissed him as if she was falling in love with him, raw and wild and heedless, and her heart flipped over in her chest at the very thought.
And as if he knew it, Cairo pulled away. He brushed her hair back from her cheek, handling her as if she was infinitely precious to him. Something bloomed within her, warm and bright. Because she wanted that. She wanted to be precious.
To him.
“I promise you,” he said, his voice husky with what she might have called a kind of pain, or maybe it was the honesty she’d asked for earlier, “you won’t regret this.”
“Neither will you,” Brittany heard herself say, her voice as swollen as her lips, but a solemn vow even so.
It hung like that between them, shimmering and real.
And that was when the first paparazzo reached their table.
* * *
Six frantic and over-photographed weeks later, Brittany stood in a tiny stone chamber high in an ancient castle built into the side of the Italian coast, letting a set of smiling attendants lace her into her wedding gown. She kept her eyes trained on the tapestries that adorned the walls, all showing this or that medieval battle or glorified feast.
She tried to remind herself that this day, like all the conflicts and celebrations on display before her, would fade into blessed obscurity soon enough.
In five years, ten, a hundred, no one would care that Cairo Santa Domini was the first of his bloodline in three hundred years to marry outside the iconic cathedral that had stood for centuries in the Santa Dominian capital city, not far from the grand palace where his family once ruled. No one would care that he was—as a particularly vicious reporter had said to Brittany’s face with obvious relish—polluting himself and the Santa Dominian line of ascension by consorting with her at all.
Time would pass. They would be messily and extravagantly divorced, as planned. They would make sure to drag it all out across the tabloids, the better to ensure the entire planet was heartily sick of them both. And then Brittany would fade off into obscurity and be remembered as nothing more than a tiny little footnote in the long, celebrated tale of Cairo’s family that would end, ignominiously, with him.
It was too bad this particular footnote was fighting off a panic attack.
“Are you well, my lady?” one of the attendants asked in heavily accented English as they finished the lacing. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine,” Brittany said, though her tongue felt strange in her mouth. She made herself smile. “I’m excited, that’s all.”
The women smiled back, the bustling and fussing continued, and then the church bells were ringing out the hour and it was really about to happen. In sixty short minutes she was going to walk outside to the chapel set high above the Mediterranean Sea and marry Cairo Santa Domini.
She dismissed the women from the room and stood there in the middle of it, fighting to keep her breath even and her eyes dry. Fighting to keep upright instead of sinking to her knees and staying there. Or worse, crawling into the four-poster bed that commanded the whole of one wall, hauling the covers up over her head and pretending she was the child she didn’t think she’d ever been. Not really.
“Vanuatu,” she muttered to herself. Fiercely. “Palm trees and white sands. Freedom and mai tais and life in sarongs.”
Get your head into this, she ordered herself, in a pitiless sort of voice from down deep inside her that sounded a great deal like her harsh, bitter mother. Right now. You have no other option.
Brittany only realized her hands were clenched into fists when her fingers started to ache. She straightened them as the door to her chamber opened behind her, and then she smoothed the dress where it billowed out below her waist and—according to the mirror angled on its stand before her—made her look like a confection. She looked past it and out to the Italian hills that sloped toward the deep blue sea, dotted in marvelously colorful houses seemingly piled on top of each other while the staunch cypress trees stood like sentries beside them. She tried to breathe.
She kept trying.
“I’d like a few moments to myself,” she managed to say after a moment, and was proud that her voice sounded much, much calmer than she felt.
“It is my role in life to disappoint you, I am afraid.”
Cairo.
Of course.
Goose bumps swept over her, and she hoped he couldn’t see them through the filmy, gossamer veil she wore pushed back to cascade over her shoulders toward the stone floor. His voice was richer than usual. Deeper and darker, and suddenly there was a lump in her throat that made it hard to swallow.
Then she turned to look at him and it was all much worse.
He was resplendent in white tie, lounging there in the doorway like a decidedly adult version of Prince Charming. The long tails of his morning coat did marvelous things to his lean, powerful frame, as if he’d been born to wear such formal clothes.
A bubble of something giddy and inappropriate caught in her chest, and she had to swallow down near-hysterical laughter, because, of course, he had been. Bred for centuries on end to look nothing short of perfectly at his ease in attire most men found confining and strange.
“You are staring at my boutonniere as if you expect it to rise from my lapel and attack you,” he said in his lazy, amused way, as he shut the heavy door behind him.
Brittany had never been a coward. She’d never had that option. And she didn’t think she was one now, no matter how she felt inside. Still, the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life was to lift her gaze to meet his.
This glorious man. This would-be king. This inscrutable creature who was about to become her fourth husband.
Fourth, a small voice whispered deep inside of her, with a certain feminine intuition she chose not to acknowledge, and last.
She shrugged that away, and the shiver of foreboding that crept down her spine, and let herself drink him in.
He looked exactly the way she’d expected Cairo Santa Domini would look on his wedding day. If, perhaps, more stunning. That careless dark hair of his was actually tamed. He’d even shaved his deliberately scruffy jaw, so he looked a bit less like a renegade than usual. He looked every inch the gleaming, impossibly wealthy and powerful royal he was.
And his eyes were more whiskey than caramel again. They seemed to see straight through her, pinning her to the wall like yet another decorative tapestry.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and she hated that she sounded so much more stern and bothered by him than she’d intended. Or was wise. She cleared her throat. “Aren’t you supposed to be waiting for me in the chapel?”
“It is not as if they can start without me.” He eyed her, and she had no idea what he saw. No idea what that dark awareness that gleamed in his gaze was, only that it seemed to echo inside of her, growing bigger and wilder by the second. “I wanted to make certain you were not seized with any bright ideas about tossing yourself out the windows. A bridal suicide, while certainly bait for the tabloids, would simply mean I needed to start this process all over again. And I do hate to repeat myself.”
“The papers we signed were clear. Death means no money at all. And if I abandon you at the altar I only get a quarter of what I would if I go through with it.” She made herself shrug, as careless as he always was despite the fact she felt so soft and shivery. “It wouldn’t be in my best interests to climb out the window, even if it wasn’t a steep fall off a very long cliff to the sea.”
Something occurred to her then, and gripped her so hard it was like a brutal fist around her heart.
“Why?” She didn’t want to ask the next question, but she forced herself to do it anyway. “Have you changed your mind?”
Brittany understood far too many things in that airless, endless moment while she waited for his response. Too many things, too late. Too much she didn’t want to admit, not even to herself.
This wedding was nothing like her others, two rushed courthouse visits and the small civil ceremony on the grounds of Jean Pierre’s chateau that had been all about the gown she’d worn specifically to infuriate the old man’s heirs. It had done its job. It had proclaimed her more Vegas showgirl than the solemn bride a man of Jean Pierre’s standing should have been marrying, just as he’d wanted. She’d expected the dress for this even more dramatic performance today to be along those same lines. She’d been prepared for it, despite some drawings Cairo had showed her weeks ago that suggested a more classic approach.
But instead, the gown her attendants had dressed her in really was the one Cairo had showed her. Simple, elegant. It made her look like an actual, blue-blooded princess worthy of marrying a royal, not a tabloid sensation. Her breasts were not the main attraction. They weren’t even on display. Her legs and thighs were not exposed every time she moved. Her veil, handed down in his family for generations and smuggled out of Santa Domini years ago, was almost as old as Cairo’s title.
This wedding—this man—was nothing like the others.
And it made her feel things she’d never felt before. He did.
“I have not changed my mind,” Cairo said.
His gaze was too bright and too assessing at once, and he seemed to fill the whole of the room, stone walls and the four-poster bed and ancient tapestries be damned. Then he stepped closer to her and that was worse. It was as if he took over the entire world while her heart simply hammered at her, telling her things about herself she didn’t want to know.
Brittany had to order herself to stand still. To simply hold her ground, tilt her head back to keep her eyes on his face and keep herself from reacting when he reached over and took her hand in his. Idly, lazily, his fingers found the Heart of Santa Domini and moved the famous ring gently this way and that on her hand.
It was such a small, civilized sort of touch. It was so restrained, so conservative—nothing like that kiss in the burlesque club or the one staged for the slavering press in one of the finest restaurants in Paris. They were both wearing so many fine, carefully crafted clothes today, all of them formal and stuffy and exquisite. There was almost no flesh on display at all, in contrast to almost every other time they’d been together.
Not to mention, they were alone.
That word seemed to pound through her. Alone.
Maybe that was why his seemingly inconsequential touch hummed in her, stark and wildly electric, as if he’d done something far more wicked than take her hand in his. Something in her wished he had. She felt soft and desperate and deep inside her, high between her legs covered in yards and yards of shimmering white, something clenched hard and then pulsed.
She wished she wasn’t a virgin. She wished she was as experienced as she pretended. Then she would know how to handle this. Then she would know what to do.
“Have you?” Cairo asked. Quiet and close, his attention trained on the ring.
“No,” she said. It was not quite the set down she’d wanted to give. She was lucky she got the words out at all. And was that relief she saw chase across his gorgeous face? But that made no sense. It disappeared and she told herself she’d imagined it. “No, I haven’t changed my mind.”
There was no reason on earth that she should. Except, of course, that overwhelming sense of doom and ruin and longing and insane hope that was filling her nearly to bursting. She planned to keep right on ignoring the lot of it, straight on into the financial benefits of this arrangement that would have her feet sunk deep in the South Pacific sand within five years, tops.
All she had to do was keep herself from toppling over. Especially while Cairo was watching her...and touching her.
How could he manage to do this to her with so meaningless a touch?
“The guests have assembled,” Cairo told her, as if none of this was getting to him. She envied him that. “The overbred scions from all the noble families in Europe or their more embarrassing relatives in their place, depending on how personally offended the sitting monarch is by my assorted shenanigans over the years.”
“Of course, your friends and very distant family are here, as expected.”
“In the sense that all of Europe’s aristocratic families were related at some point or another?” He shrugged at that, though Brittany knew that he was listed in the lines of succession of at least five different kingdoms. “I would not call them my family. It would be rather presumptuous, among other things. But I cannot help noticing that your family are nowhere in evidence.”
She wanted to tug her hand from his, but she suspected that would be too telling. Too revealing, when she already felt wide open and much too vulnerable, and this was the man who had showed her his real face in a restaurant in Paris and then claimed she’d misread him. She needed to remember that. Cairo wanted these masks they wore.
She had no idea when she’d stopped wa
nting it, too.
“Mine weren’t invited,” she said. Abruptly.
Cairo’s brows rose. He opened his mouth to say something that would no doubt cut her to the quick, and Brittany couldn’t take it. She felt too exposed already. And suddenly she didn’t care if he knew it. She pulled her hand back, but that didn’t help. She could still feel that deceptively simple touch everywhere, as if he’d branded her.
“My family didn’t sign up for this spectacle.” She did nothing to ease that snap in her voice. “And it’s not as if our marriage will last long anyway. It would take longer for them to get here than we’ll stay together. Why bother?”
Brittany regretted her words almost the instant she said them. Cairo seemed turned to the same stone as the walls around them, and she knew, deep inside, that she’d offended him.
He looked away for a moment, toward the cliff and the sea and the Italian villages clinging to the hills in the distance as if the view could soothe him. When he looked back, there was a speculative expression on his face.
“You cannot be nervous, cara, can you?” He adjusted his crisp cuffs, one after the next, though his gaze never left hers. “This should be like falling off a log, as you Americans say, should it not? I am the wedding virgin here, after all, not you.”
Later, she would reason that it was that word. She hadn’t heard that ridiculous, archaic word in a long time, because who would bother to use it in the vicinity of such a well-known slut and, according to the more salacious papers, possible prostitute? It hardly came up in the strip clubs or dive bars where she used to spend all her time. Much less in Hollywood, the most virginless place she could imagine.
But here, now, in an old castle on the Italian coast, it hardly mattered why she flinched at the sound of the word. Only that she did, right there where Cairo could see her do it.
And then, much worse, she blushed.
Bright red and unmistakable.
Expecting a Royal Scandal Page 9