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Cairo shrugged. “Dancer. Television personality. Expensive trophy wife, ever open to the appropriate upgrades. Whatever you call yourself.”
Her smile took on that edge that fascinated him, but she didn’t look away.
“I do like an upgrade.” She fingered the rim of her glass and he remembered the feel of her skin under his hand, hot and soft at once. Touching her had been a serious miscalculation, he was aware. One that pounded in him still, kicking up dark yearnings and desperate longings he knew he needed to ignore. “Are you going to tell me why I’m here?”
“No insulting version of my title this time? I’m wounded.”
“I find my creativity wanes along with my interest.” She leaned forward and set her glass down on the table before her with a decisive click. “Monte Carlo is wasted on me, I’m afraid, as I’m not much of a gambler.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “I prefer the comfort of a sure thing. And I loathe being bored.”
“Is this what boredom looks like on you? My mistake. I rather thought you looked a bit...flushed.”
“I find myself ever so slightly nauseated.” He knew she was lying. The glitter in her bright eyes told him so, if he’d had the slightest doubt. “I can’t think why.”
He thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Perhaps you dislike penthouses with extraordinary views.” He smiled. “The coast or me. Take your pick. Both views, and I say this with no false modesty at all, are stunning.”
“Maybe I dislike spoiled rich men who waste my time and think far too highly of their overexposed charms.” The edge to her smile and that glittering thing in her gaze grew harder. Hotter. “I’ve seen it all in the pages of every tabloid magazine every week for the last twenty years. It’s about as thrilling as oatmeal.”
“I must have misheard you. I thought you compared me to a revoltingly warm and cloying breakfast cereal.”
“The similarities are striking.”
“A man with less confidence than I have—and no access to a mirror—might find that hurtful, Ms. Hollis.”
“I feel certain you find whatever you need in all the reflective surfaces available to you.” She eyed him. “I suppose that almost qualifies as a skill. But while that confirms my opinion of your conceit, it doesn’t tell me what I’m doing here.”
Cairo hadn’t decided precisely how he would do this. Somewhere in his murky, battered soul he’d imagined this might prove a rare opportunity to be honest. Or as near enough to honest as he was capable of being, anyway. He’d imagined that might make purchasing a wife to ward off a revolution a little less seedy and sad, no matter his reasons. A little self-deprecating humor and a few hard truths, he’d imagined, and the whole thing would be easily sorted.
But he hadn’t expected to want her this badly.
“I have a proposition for you,” he forced himself to say, before he made the unfortunate decision to simply seduce her instead and see what happened. He already knew what would happen—didn’t he?—and the pleasures of the moment couldn’t outweigh the realities of the future bearing down on him. He knew that.
He couldn’t believe he was even considering it.
“I’d say I’m flattered,” Brittany was saying coolly, “but I’m not. I’m not interested in being any man’s mistress. And not to put too fine a point on it, but your charms are a bit...” She raised her brows. “Overused.”
He blinked, and took his time with it. “I beg your pardon. Did you just call me a whore?”
“I’d never use that word,” Brittany demurred, and though her voice was smooth he was sure there was something edgy and sharp lurking just beneath it. “But the phrase rode hard and put away wet comes to mind.” She waved a hand at him. “It’s all a bit boring, if I’m honest.”
“Do not kid yourself, Ms. Hollis,” Cairo advised her quietly. “I’ve had a lot of sex with a great many partners, it’s true.”
“That’s a bit like the ocean confessing it’s slightly damp.”
He smiled. “The media coverage of my sex life might indeed be boring. I wouldn’t know as I make a point never to follow it. But the act itself? Never.”
“You’d be the last to know, of course. Even a man as conceited as you are must realize that.”
“I suppose the first hundred or so could simply be interested in my dramatic personal history,” Cairo said, as if considering her point, though he kept his gaze trained on the increasing color high up on her cheeks. Interesting. “And the second two hundred could be in it for my personal wealth. But all of them? The law of averages suggests not all of them would come apart like that, screaming and wailing and crying beneath me. The same reasoning applies if you suggest they were faking it. Some, I imagine, because there are always some. But all?”
“I’m sure you saw whatever it is you wanted to see.” He could have sworn there was a huskiness in her voice and a deeper shade to the red of her cheeks, and he didn’t care what she said. He knew passion when he saw it. She was as affected as he was. “Ninety times a day, or whatever the horrifying number is. The mind boggles.”
Cairo was no saint, by design or inclination. But he was also not quite the epic sinner he’d played all his life. And in all the years he’d performed his role in the circus that was his life, he’d never felt the slightest urge to tell a woman that. What the hell was happening to him tonight?
“I’m only good at one thing,” he told her, the way he’d have told anyone else. He pretended he couldn’t hear the intensity in his own voice. He pretended he had no idea how little in control of himself he was just then. “And as it happens, I’m very, very good at it.”
She swallowed, which he shouldn’t have found even remotely fascinating, no matter how elegant her neck. “Is that your proposition? My answer is an emphatic no, as I said. But also, your pitch needs some work.”
“That I’m an excellent lover is a fact, not a pitch,” Cairo said with a small shrug. He found he was enjoying himself, which was almost as unusual as the claws of need that still raked through him. “The proposition is far less exciting, I’m afraid. I’m not in the market for a mistress, Ms. Hollis. Why would I bother with such a confining arrangement? I rarely meet a woman who wouldn’t do anything I ask for free, no need to provide room, board or baubles on demand.”
“I’m overcome by the romance of it all.”
“Then this will delight you.” Cairo eyed her, a column of gold tipped in all that sweet copper he wanted to bury his hands in, and he found his blood was pumping much too hard through his body then, as if he was out on a long, hard run in a harsh winter. He ignored it. “I find myself in need of a wife. I’ve been considering a number of candidates for the position, but you are far and away my first choice.”
He expected her to say something scathing. Perhaps let out a scandalized laugh. He even braced himself for the lash of it, and damned if he didn’t enjoy the anticipation of that, too. But she only considered him for a moment, her dark hazel gaze unreadable, and he found he had no idea what she might say.
That, like everything else with this woman, was a new experience. He told himself he hated it. Because he should have. He needed an employee of sorts, at minimum. A partner if at all possible. What he did not need was any more trouble, and Brittany Hollis had that stamped deep on every inch of her lovely skin.
God knew he had enough trouble. It lived inside him. It was his world.
“Who’s your second choice?” she asked when the silence had drawn out almost too long.
“My second choice?”
Brittany didn’t quite roll her eyes. “I can hardly determine whether to be insulted or complimented if I don’t know the field, can I?”
Cairo named a famously orphaned Italian socialite, primarily well-known for her bouts of sulky nudity on board the superyachts of her questionable Russian oligarch boyfriends.
Brittany sighed. “Insulted it is.”
“She’s a far second, if that helps. Far too much work for too little return.”
This surprising American, who he’d expected would fall at his feet in an instant and who cared if that was as much about his credit line and his title as the charms she’d called overused to his face, only gazed at him a moment, her dark eyes narrow. He thought he could see her thinking and he didn’t understand why or how he could find that the sexiest thing he’d seen in years. It was that glint in her hazel gaze. It was moving through him like something alcoholic.
“You don’t actually want to get married, then. You want to inflict your wife on someone—the world, perhaps? As any girl would be, I’m of course delighted to be considered an infliction. It’s all my dearest fairy-tale fantasies made real, thank you.”
He couldn’t help but smile at her dry tone, though the curve of his own mouth felt as hard as granite. “I’m sorry, did you expect protestations of love? I could do that, if you like. You can even believe them, if it helps. But the offer is for a job. A position. Not a romantic interlude.”
Those too-dark eyes held his for a moment that stretched on a little too long for comfort. Then even longer. And Cairo had never wanted to read another person’s mind as much as he did then.
“I feel certain there’s a middle ground.” She stood, running an unnecessary hand over the sleek fall of her gown as she did, and Cairo found he wanted her with a raw fervor that shook through him, making him a total stranger to himself. Making him a traitor to his cause. Making her nothing less than a calamity—which only made the wanting worse. “I’d suggest you find it before you approach the socialite. I’ve heard she bites.”
And then Brittany Hollis—so far beneath him that she should have been prostrate with gratitude at his attention to her and appreciative of the faintest bare crumb of his interest—actually turned on her heel, showed him her back as if he really did bore her silly and walked out.
* * *
Halfway through her burlesque performance a few nights later, Brittany felt an electric ripple go through the crowd. And seconds later, through her.
She told herself she was imagining things as she strode across the stage to the pulsing beat, but she knew better. She knew that feeling, like being lit on fire and forced to stand still in the crackling flames. That was exactly how she’d felt in Monte Carlo, burnt to a crisp where she stood on the casino floor.
Brittany concentrated on the pounding music and on the lazy choreography she could perform by rote. Something she was even happier about than usual, because she could hardly pay attention to this kick or that shimmy when she could feel Cairo’s presence like some kind of tsunami, washing through the club. She didn’t have to squint to see him past the swirling lights the club owner went a little overboard with during her number. She didn’t have to try to make out his features as he moved through the dark.
She could track him by the murmur and shift in the crowd as they swiveled around in their chairs to watch him pass. She could feel the way that deceptively lush gaze of his settled on her and stayed there. It was a little too much like the dreams she kept having, the ones that spun out different, far more erotic endings to that night in his hotel suite in Monaco—when she’d never wanted a man’s touch in her life. She felt that same great rush of complicated, messy feelings, the way she did each time she woke up with her heart pounding and her breath tangled in her throat, her body too warm and somehow no longer her own.
And suddenly the crimson corset she wore seemed a good deal tighter across her breasts and the black lace choker at her neck lived up to its name with a vengeance. She was aware of the creamy expanse of her upper thighs that peeked out above her garters, and the way the sleek sleeves that hooked over her pointer fingers, but covered her forearms to her elbows, left her upper arms bare. The frilly, puffy shrug she wore that made her look one step away from steampunk seemed insubstantial, suddenly, and she understood what Cairo had called “the art of the burlesque” in a different way than she ever had before.
Brittany didn’t want to investigate that—much less the great swirl of feelings that nearly knocked her sideways on the main stage. She simply danced toward it.
Toward him.
Toward Cairo as he moved to the reserved table that had been kept empty right there in the front all night, so there was no pretending she didn’t see him when—at last—he stopped showing off for the goggle-eyed audience and settled himself in the chair closest to the stage as if he owned this place and everything in it. The dancers before him, most of all.
It was Brittany’s turn then, and she took it.
He’d been right about her previous performances. She’d been phoning it in, having promised the club owner eight weeks of shows and not caring too much about it after the first rash of appalled tabloid headlines. Tonight, however, seven weeks into her run, it turned out she had something to prove.
To him, a little voice clarified.
She didn’t ask herself what she was doing, just as she didn’t question why the things he’d said to her and the proposition he’d made—far less offensive than most of the things she’d been called and a huge percentage of the offers she’d fielded in her time—had needled her ever since. Brittany simply danced.
For him, something inside her whispered.
Up there on the stage, dressed in bright red, frilly almost underthings, she didn’t care if he knew it. She danced as if there was no one else in the room. She danced as if they had long been lovers, a cheap, trashy girl like her and a man who could have had a throne. She danced as if this whole cavernous club was a king’s harem, and she had no goal in all the world but to please him.
Because he wasn’t the only one who was good at what he did.
The truth was, the only thing in her life Brittany had ever really loved besides her grandmother was dancing. It had gotten lost there, in the brutal reality of her first marriage and the Hollywood fakery of her second. She’d turned it into pole tricks and barely there G-strings and all manner of mugging for the camera to pay her bills. She’d used it to inform the way she moved and breathed and insinuated herself in the path of tabloid reporters and future husbands alike. But deep down inside of her was the sheer love of movement and music and the fusion of the two that, once upon a time, had been her only way out of the grim realities of her life in Mississippi.
Brittany drew on all of that now.
She danced to him, for him. She wound herself around the poles and she strutted across the stage, until she felt as if she was flying. She’d gone completely electric by the time she skidded to her dramatic finish—sliding across the stage on her knees with her hands stretched out in front of her, ending up face-to-face with Cairo as the music ended.
And it was as if she’d tipped off the side of the world, straight into that hot caramel gaze of his. Spun sugar and hot sex.
The crowd made noise all around them. She could hear the DJ on the microphone as if from a great distance. She was aware of the stage beneath her knees and the hands she’d stretched out toward Cairo in some or other form of supplication—
All feigned, she reminded herself sternly. All part of her performance, no matter how oddly right and real it felt to be stretched out before Cairo Santa Domini as if he was the only man in the whole club. Or perhaps the world.
As if nothing could possibly matter but him.
That should have set off all kinds of alarms inside of her, especially when she knew exactly what he wanted from her and, more than that, what he must think of her in the first place to offer it. That it was what she’d gone to excessive lengths to make sure everyone already thought of her didn’t seem to matter.
The world didn’t hurt her feelings any longer. Yet somehow, Cairo had.
Did you expect protestations of love? he’d asked, his voice scathingly amused. It had cut her. Deep.
She told herself she didn’t know why.
Yet here, now, at the end of a silly dance in a stupid costume that had never affected her one bit before, all Brittany could see was Cairo. Caramel eyes burning bright and hot and that intoxicating mouth set to something far too edgy for her peace of mind. She could feel it move in her, from the breasts that wanted to break free of her constricting corset, to that low, odd ache in her belly that she tried her hardest to ignore.
“That was perfectly adequate,” Cairo said, his voice pitched to slice through the clamor pressing in around them, his mouth set in a little crook.
It went straight through her all over again, little as she wanted to admit it.
Brittany shifted, rolling back so she kneeled upright on the stage above him, no longer at eye level. That felt safer, no matter that her heart clapped wildly against her ribs. She forced herself to gaze down at him coolly. Challenging and wholly unbothered, as he’d accused her of being in Monte Carlo. How she wished it was true, the way it always had been before, with every man she’d ever met in all her life. Except this one.
“Are you slumming, Your Most Graceless?” She raised her brows as she swung her legs around in front of her and then slid from the stage to stand before the chair where, once again, he lounged as if he’d presented himself for a study in aristocratic laziness. “Maybe you don’t know the rules this far from the golden embrace of the Champs-Élysées. If you want a private chat, you need to pay for the privilege.”
He didn’t quite smile. And his eyes seemed to darken the more his mouth curved.
“Let me hasten to assure you I know my way around establishments of ill repute.” He tilted his head to one side and that gaze of his went very nearly lethal. She felt it like his hand wrapped tight around her throat, rendering her choker superfluous. Or maybe that was her heart, pounding so hard she thought it might tip her over. He indicated his lap with a jerk of his chin, never shifting his gaze from hers. “Come, Brittany. Show me what you’ve got. I promise, I can pay.”
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a1fe651f-4d66-5852-adaa-649417d2d2a4)
HER NAME IN Cairo’s decadent mouth, instead of that drawled Ms. Hollis, was like a lick against the hottest, sweetest part of her. It jolted through her, lightning need and the same dancing fire, making her melt. Everywhere.
Brittany couldn’t seem to jerk her gaze away from his, and even knowing how dangerous that was didn’t make it any easier. Her heart was a hammer against every pulse point, slamming into her again and again, but she made herself smile as she shifted position into something more pinup worthy, as was expected of a woman wearing as little as she was.
She told herself it was the game. What the costume demanded.
And so what if she’d never given an audience member the time of day after a performance before? This is different, she told herself, with starch. This is our own little war, him and me, and I’ll win it.
“Was I unclear in Monaco?” she asked him. She was aware that they were attracting all kinds of stares as the music cued up the next act, but she couldn’t bring herself to pay attention to that the way she knew she should. She couldn’t break away from the tractor beam of his arrogant gaze long enough to read the room and react accordingly, and she didn’t want to think about the implications of the situation. “I thought my walking off without a backward glance was a fairly straightforward message.”
“I assumed that was a ploy,” he replied in that same deceptively mild way of his that really shouldn’t tear through her the way it did, making her feel hollow and needy and too many other raw things to name. “I thought I’d come here and speak to you in the language you understand.”
“Rather than in Pompous Ass, the language of rich men? Don’t worry, I’m fluent.”
He didn’t answer that directly. Still holding her gaze with his, he reached into the inside pocket of the sleek coat he wore and pulled out a leather billfold fat with euros. Very, very fat. He didn’t so much as glance at it, he simply peeled a purple note from inside and slapped it on the table. Then another. And another.
“You appear to be suggesting I’m motivated by five-hundred euro notes,” Brittany said. Through her teeth. “Surely not.”
Cairo didn’t say a word. He merely added another note to the pile. Then another. One after the next.
“I’m sure I’m mistaken,” she bit out, as the pile continued to grow. “You can’t possibly be calling me a prostitute, can you?”
He didn’t quite laugh. Not quite.
“Of course not,” he replied, in a scrupulously innocent voice that made the lie of it feel like a slap. “Your prices are much higher and you require legal vows, if your matrimonial history is any guide. Hardly a rendezvous in a back alley, is it?”
“True,” Brittany replied, her voice a different sort of slap that her palms itched to replicate against that dark-shadowed jaw of his. “But I have no intention or interest in making vows of any kind with you.”
That sharp smile of his edged over into something feral.
“So you say.” He threw another few bills onto the tabletop, carelessly and insultingly. Deliberately so, she imagined. “Then a lap dance it is.”
Brittany jerked her attention away from him for a moment to see the club owner over by the bar, furiously gesturing for her to sit down. To stop blocking access to the stage, she realized, now that the next act had started. And it was simple, of course. She should merely walk away from Cairo again the way she’d done once already. She should pretend she’d never met him. She wanted nothing more than to do exactly that.
So she had no idea why instead, she settled herself on the arm of his chair and gazed down into his face as if she really was the hardened stripper she’d played on TV instead of the innocent sometimes even she forgot she really was.
