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 man
ner 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 an
d 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.’”
Wedded, Bedded, Betrayed Page 19