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“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 manner 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 and 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.’”
“Ms. Hollis,” Cairo said in that drawling way only extremely upper-crust people could manage to make sound so condescending. When it was only her name. He reached over as if nothing had ever been more inevitable and then he traced a very lazy, very delicate path from the gold knot at her shoulder to the very top of that shadow between her breasts. Sensation detonated inside of her. She flashed white hot. She saw red. She felt him, everywhere, and that voice of his, too, all dark chocolate and stupendously bad decisions melted into something that shivered through her, dessert and desire and destruction all at once. “You flatter me.”
Brittany didn’t like the way her heart catapulted itself against the wall of her chest. She didn’t like the way her skin prickled, hot and cold, as if she was sunburned from so small and meaningless a touch. Since when had she reacted at all to a man? No matter what he did?
She didn’t like the fact that she’d completely lost sight of the fact that they were in public, even if the public in question was mostly his circle of pseudosubjects she knew trotted around with him everywhere he went—or that all she’d really seen since she walked in here was Cairo. As if she’d come here to compete for his attention, like one of his usual horde of panting women.
She liked that part least of all, and she didn’t care to ask herself why that was. It didn’t matter. None of what had happened here mattered. This spectacularly messy and inappropriate man wasn’t in any way a part of her grand plan, and would do nothing but delay her dreams of a getaway to her solitary tropical island paradise in Vanuatu. He had that kind of total disaster written all over him, and too much exposure to him made her worry it was written on her, too. She’d accepted his invitation because she was curious and he was Cairo Santa Domini, and now she knew.
He was her ruin made flesh. Nothing less than that. At least she knew it now, she told herself. That meant she had the chance to avoid it. To avoid him.
“Your Almost Highness,” she breathed, in exaggerated shock.
She wanted to snatch his lazy finger away from her overheated skin, which was why she leaned into it instead. His finger slipped into the valley between her breasts, just there beneath the edge of her angled bodice, but neither one of them looked down to see what both of them could feel. Their gazes were locked together, tangled up hot and a little bit wild, and Brittany was slightly mollified to see she wasn’t the only one affected by...whatever the hell this was. She raised her voice so they could hear her everywhere in Monaco, the trashy American that she was, every inch of her offensive to each and every highbrow European eye that tried its best not to see her.
But Brittany wasn’t any good at being invisible. “Are you flirting with me?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_0cbae071-edfa-5b02-b3f9-0b7855e62593)
A SHORT WHILE LATER, Cairo stood with his back to the disconcerting American, his brooding gaze fixed on the seductive glitter of Monaco’s harbor out there in the sweet summer dark. The night pressed in on the glass windows of his penthouse suite the way that woman seemed to hammer against his composure, even when all she was doing was sitting quietly on his sofa. He could see her reflection in the glass and it irritated him that she looked so calm while he had to fight to collect himself.
That he had to do any such thing was nothing short of extraordinary for a man who was alive today precisely because he could so expertly manage himself in all situations.
But then, nothing tonight was going according to plan.
Brittany Hollis wasn’t at all what he’d expected. When he’d watched that cringe-worthy television program of hers she’d been all plumped-up breasts and an endless Southern drawl, punctuated with supple flips and melting slides on the nearest stripper pole. All the advance research he’d done on her before selecting her for the dubious honor of his proposal had suggested she might possess the particular cunning native to the sort of women whose life revolved around strategic relationships with much wealthier men, but he hadn’t expected any great intellect.
Cairo had been delighted at the prospect that she’d be exactly as gauche as her tawdry history suggested she was. Someone capable of injecting the embarrassing spectacle of her risqué burlesque appearances into everyday life and making certain the whole world found her deeply embarrassing and epically shameless at all times.
The perfect woman for him, in other words. A man so famously without honor or country deserved a shameful match, he’d told himself bitterly the night he’d seen her dance. Brittany Hollis seemed crafted to order.
Instead, the woman who had walked up to him tonight was a vision, from the pale copper fire of her hair to the hint of hot steel in her dark hazel eyes, and there wasn’t a single thing the least bit dumb or plastic about her. He didn’t understand it. Meeting her gaze had been like being thrown from the saddle of a very large horse and having to lie there on the hard ground for a few excruciating moments, wondering with no little panic if he’d ever draw breath to fill his lungs again.
He still didn’t know the answer to that.
His long-term head of security, Ricardo, who’d suggested this tabloid sensation of a woman in the first place, had a lot to answer for. But here, now, Cairo had to navigate what he’d expected to be a very straightforward business conversation despite the fact he felt so...unsettled.
“Have you lured me back to your hotel suite to show me your etchings, Your Usually Far More Naked Grace?” Brittany’s voice was so dry it swept over him like a brush fire, igniting a longing in him he’d never imagined he’d feel for anyone or anything aside from his lost kingdom and its people. He didn’t understand what this was—what was happening to him, when he’d felt absolutely nothing since the day he’d lost his family and had understood what waited for him if he wasn’t careful. What General Estes, the self-appointed Grand Regent of Santa Domini, had made clear was Cairo’s destiny if he ever so much as glanced longingly at the throne that should have been his. “What a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to join such a vast and well-populated parade of royal paramours.”
That the girl was perfect for his purposes wasn’t in doubt, dry tone or not.
Cairo had known it the moment Ricardo had handed him her picture. Even before Ricardo had told him anything about the pretty redhead who wore so little and stared into the camera with so much distance and mystery in her dark eyes. He’d felt something scratch at him, and he’d told himself that was reason enough to conceal himself and sneak into one of her scandalous performances in Paris. He’d been far more intrigued than he should have been as he’d watched her command the stage, challenging the audience with every sinuous move of her famously lithe and supple figure.
He’d sent one of his aides with his invitation and he’d continued interviewing the other candidates for his very special position, but his heart wasn’t in it once he’d seen Brittany. And that was before he’d read all the unsavory details of her life story, which, of course, rendered her an utterly appalling if not outright ruinous choice for a man some people still dreamed would be king one day. General Estes might have routed Cairo’s father from the throne of Santa Domini when Cairo was still a small child, but the passing of time only ever seemed to make the loyalists more shrill and focused. And that made no one safe—neither Cairo nor the Santa Dominian people, who didn’t deserve another bloody coup in a thirty-year span, much less the empty-headed playboy prince Cairo played for the papers as its figurehead.
Besides, Cairo knew what the loyalists refused to see—there was nothing good in him. He’d seen to that. There was only shame and darkness and more of the same. Play a role long enough and it ate a man alive. The desperate American stripper who’d made an international game out of her shameless gold digging was an inspired choice to make certain that even if no one listened to Cairo about who he’d become, no coup could ever happen and his people would be spared a broken, damaged king.
And then she’d walked up to him in a dress of spun gold and pretended not to know him, and he’d forgotten he’d ever so much as considered another woman for this role at all.
“Was it a lure?” he asked now. He turned to see her rolling her glass of wine between her palms, an action he shouldn’t have found even remotely erotic. And yet... “I asked you to accompany me to my hotel suite and you agreed. A lure is rather less straightforward.”
“If you say so, Your Semantic Highness.”
Cairo had expected to find her attractive. He’d expected a hint of the usual fire deep within him and the lick of it in his sex, because he was a man, after all. Despite what he needed to do here. He’d been less prepared for the sheer wallop of her. Of how the sight of her made his breath a complication in his chest.
And he certainly hadn’t imagined she’d be...entertaining.
The pictures and even the stage hadn’t done her any justice at all, and the tidy little marriage of convenience he’d imagined shifted and re-formed in his head the longer he looked at her. Cairo knew he should call it off. The last thing he needed in his life was one more situation he couldn’t control, and the blazing thing raging inside of him now was the very definition of uncontrollable.
And she was something more than a gorgeous redhead who’d looked edible in a down-market burlesque ensemble, or even a former American television star in a shiny dress that made her look far more sophisticated than she should have been. Brittany Hollis should have been little more than a jumped-up tart. Laughable in the midst of so much old-world splendor here in Monaco.
But instead, she was fascinating.
Cairo was finding it exceedingly difficult to keep his cool, which had never happened to him before in all the years since he’d lost his family. He hardly knew whether to give in to the sensation, unleashing God knew what manner of hell upon himself, or view it as an assault. Both, perhaps.
“Is this the part where we stare at each other for ages?” Brittany asked from her position on the crisp white sofa where she perched with all the boneless elegance of a pampered cat. “I had no idea royal intrigue was so tedious.”
It was time to handle this. To handle himself, for God’s sake. This wasn’t about him, after all, or whatever odd need he felt licking at him, tempting him to forget the dark truths about himself in earnest for the first time in some twenty years.
“Of course it’s tedious,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He brushed a nonexistent speck of lint from one sleeve. “That’s why kings are forced to start wars or institute terror regimes and inquisitions, you understand. To relieve the boredom.”
“And your family was drummed out of your country. I can’t think why.”
Cairo had long since ceased to allow himself to feel anything at all when it came to his lost kingdom and the often vicious comments people made about it to his face. He’d made an art out of seeming not to care about his birthright, his blood, his people. He’d locked it all up and shoved it deep inside, where none of it could slip out and torture him any longer, much less trip him up in the glare of the public eye.
No stray memories of graceful white walls cluttered with priceless art, the dizzy blue sky outside his window in that particular bright shade he’d never seen replicated anywhere else, the murmur of the mountain winds against the fortified walls of his childhood bedroom in the castle heights. No recollections of the night they’d all been spirited away in the dark before General Estes could get his butcher’s hands on them, hidden in the back of a loyalist’s truck across the sharp spine of the snowcapped mountains that ringed the capital city, never to return.
He didn’t let himself think of his father’s roar of laughter or his mother’s soft hands, lost forever. He never permitted himself any stray thoughts about his younger sister, Magdalena, a bright and gleaming little girl snatched away so easily and so unfairly.
He didn’t have the slightest idea why the usual barbed comments from yet another stranger should lodge in him tonight like a mortal blow, as if the fact this woman had surprised him meant she could slip beneath his defenses, too. No one could do that. Not if he didn’t let them.
And he was well aware that even if he’d wanted someone close to him, to that tarnished thing inside of him he called his soul, he couldn’t allow it to happen. He couldn’t let anyone close to him or they’d be rendered so much more collateral damage. One more weapon the general would find a way to use against Cairo and then destroy.
Why was Brittany Hollis making him consider such things?
He studied her. Her coppery hair was caught up in a complicated twist, catching the light as she moved. Her neck was long and elegant, and made him long for a taste of her. More than a taste. Her skin looked as if it was dusted a fainter gold than the dress she wore, which on any other woman might have been a trick of cosmetics, but on this one, he thought, was actually her. She was far prettier than her photographs and infinitely more captivating than her coarse appearances on that stupid show. She was all impossibly long legs, those lovely curves shimmering beneath the expert cling of the gown and that enticing intelligence simmering there in her dark eyes.
That same thing scratched at him, the way it had in Paris when Ricardo had given him her picture, and he knew better than to let it. This was already a mess. A problem, and he had enough of those already. He needed a clear path and a solution, or what was the point of this game? He might as well hand himself over to the general for the execution that had already been meted out to the rest of his bloodline and call it a day.
Some part of him—a part that grew larger all the time—wished he’d done just that, years ago. Some part of him wished he’d been in that car with the rest of his family when it had been run off the road. Some part of him wished he’d never lived long enough to make these choices.
But that was nothing but craven self-pity. The least of his sins, but a sin nonetheless.
“You are very pretty,” he told her now. Sternly.
“I would thank you, but somehow I doubt it was a compliment.”
“It is surprising. I expected you to be attractive, of course, in the way all women of your particular profession are.” He waved a hand.
She smiled, managing to convey an icy disdain that would do a royal proud. “My profession?”
