Expecting A Royal Scandal

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“I don’t give lap dances,” she told him loftily, pretending she hadn’t surrendered something critical in sitting down like this. As if that blaze in his caramel gaze didn’t show sheer male victory and something edgier besides. As if she didn’t recognize she’d lost what little ground she’d gained by denying him in Monaco. “Though I’m happy to take your money, of course. You appear to have far too much of it.”

Cairo shrugged as if it was nothing to him, the thousands of euros in a purple pile on the table. What were mere thousands to a man who had untold billions in property alone?

“All I want is a dance,” he told her, and he was so much closer now than he had been in Monaco. Too close.

The arms of the seats were made deliberately wide and comfortable, all the better for the girls to perch upon, so she wasn’t touching him—because Brittany didn’t do touching. Especially not with men. And she told herself she didn’t recognize that craving in her for what it was, elemental and obvious, so close to that magnificent body of his as he lounged there that she could feel the heat he generated in the space between them.

Then he made everything that much more mad and wild when he reached over and started to trace a lazy little pattern against the skin of the thigh nearest him, right at the top of her stocking and below the ruffled red-and-black underwear she wore.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

She wanted to leap up. She wanted to slap his hand away. She wanted to slap him like the offended virgin she actually was, but she didn’t dare give herself away like that. And the more she sat there and let Cairo touch her, the more she seemed to forget why allowing this to happen was such a terrible idea.

They both watched his idle finger for a while. Maybe entire years—decades—while inside, everything Brittany had ever been and everything she knew about herself crumbled into dust and shivered away until there was nothing left of her but that pulsing heat between her legs.

Her worst fear come true.

But she still didn’t move.

“Or perhaps you prefer a private room after all,” Cairo said, the low rumble of his insinuating voice adding to the spell he cast with that impossibly elegant finger against her thigh rather than breaking it. “Is this how you upsell the punters, Ms. Hollis?”

Brittany jerked her attention away from that mesmerizing, addictive pattern he kept drawing against her flesh, and told herself it was the insult of what he’d said—not that he’d reverted back to Ms. Hollis. But his gaze was worse than his touch. Too bright, too hot.

And the last thing in the world she wanted was to be locked away in some private room with this man. She knew she couldn’t trust him, of course. He’d made the fact he couldn’t be trusted something that practically required a celebration. But she was suddenly so much more afraid she couldn’t trust herself.

“I think not,” she managed to say, but she didn’t sound like herself. She sounded as thrown as she felt.

Something flashed over his famous, beautiful face. She felt it echo inside of her like a roll of thunder and then, suddenly, he wasn’t lounging there idly any longer. She hardly saw him move. All she knew was that one moment she sat there on the arm of his chair, barely clinging to the pretense of some civility and everything she’d ever known about herself, and the next she was sprawled across his lap.

She wanted to scream. To fight. She wanted that more than anything—so she had no idea why she simply melted against him, as if she’d lost all control of the body that had done her bidding the whole of her life.

She had never been tempted, by anyone. She had never melted, ever.

Cairo was hard beneath her, hot and perfect, his legs so strong they marked his studied laziness as yet another lie. His arms closed around her, holding her against his sculpted chest and she couldn’t seem to breathe. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t speak and she had no idea why she was letting any of this happen.

Especially when he bent and brought his face so close to hers.

So. Damned. Close.

“You’d better brace yourself,” she managed to tell him, though she sounded far more thrown by this than she would have liked. And still it was nowhere near as thrown as she felt. “The security guards take a dim view of unauthorized touching in the main room.”

“When will you learn that the rules do not apply to me?” Cairo’s mouth was a breath away from hers, and the thick, glossy fall of his shaggy hair brushed her cheek as he bent over her, his dark eyes gleaming. “And that sooner or later, all mere mortals do exactly as I ask?”

“I’m not giving you a lap dance,” she told him, though her heart was drumming at her again, so hard she was glad she wore that lace choker so there was no chance he could see it there in the hollow of her throat. “And I’m not marrying you, either. I don’t even like you.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Cairo muttered, sounding less like a king and more like a man than she’d heard him yet. “This has nothing to do with like.”

And then he yanked her mouth to his.

* * *

He never should have tasted her.

It was a terrible mistake in a night brimming with too many of them already. He should not have come to this crass place in a temper. He should not have indulged in that temper in the first place, for that matter. He should have laughed at the absurdity of a woman of so little breeding declining his offer to better herself so spectacularly and then moved on. Hell, he should have forgotten she existed at all the moment the door of his suite in Monaco had shut behind her.

Instead, he’d brooded over it. Over her.

“The world is full of inappropriate women, Sire,” Ricardo had pointed out earlier this evening. “It’s one of its few charms.”

“It seems I require a particular blend of inappropriate and interesting,” Cairo had replied, having spent the days since Monaco convincing himself of precisely that. It wasn’t that only Brittany Hollis would do. It wasn’t that he was unused to rejection. Both of those things were true. But what mattered more, he’d assured himself, was that his very requirements had changed. “If there are more who fit the bill, by all means, present them to me.”

But Ricardo had wisely said nothing, and here Cairo was.

And this inarguably terrible mistake he was making felt like sweet, hot glory and all manner of dark and lovely sins besides. He wanted nothing more than to commit every last one of those sins, with impunity, and with her. Cairo was only a man, after all, and he knew better than most what a terrible one he was, straight through to his core. And Brittany was sprawled across his lap, dressed in a sleek red corset and very little else, tasting of mint and longing.

He shifted, opening his mouth against hers, and he lost himself in the fire of it. The sheer, exultant perfection of the scrape of her tongue against his, the press of her breasts against his chest, the way she clung to his shirt as if she wanted him even a small fraction as much as he wanted her.

Cairo could work with a fraction.

He poured everything he had into the kiss, taking her mouth again and again. Lust and need. All the dark longings that had haunted him since she’d walked away from him in Monaco. All the sweet, hot desire that had flashed through him as he’d watched her performance here tonight.

All the fire in his twisted, haunted soul.

He wasn’t surprised when she tore her mouth from his, and his arms tightened around her as if he expected her to twist out of his hold. She didn’t—and it was a measure of how out of control he’d become that he counted that as a victory.

“I don’t want anything to do with you,” she hissed at him.

Cairo couldn’t blame her. Neither did he. But that was beside the point.

“Of course not,” he agreed, their lips practically touching, his hands full of her sweetness. “I can tell by the way you kiss me.”

And then he set his mouth to hers once more.

Because kissing Brittany, he discovered quickly, was fast becoming his favorite vice in a life fairly overflowing with them.

This time when she pulled away, he discovered his hands had found their way to her thick hair in its tempting copper twist, and he’d pulled the fragrant curtain of it down around them. Her lips were sweet and full, her breath came as fast as his did, and her eyes had gone wide and dark.

Cairo thought he might never get enough of her, and it was a measure of how obsessed he was already that the notion failed to alarm him.

“You can’t do this,” she told him, and he had the strange thought that this was the real Brittany, after all her edge and flair. She sounded a little bit shaken. She looked a little bit fragile. He should have felt a surge of triumph at that, but instead, the thing that turned over inside him felt a good deal more like regret. He knew all about regret. “You know you can’t.”

“I don’t think you’ve been paying attention, cara,” he told her, and he shifted one hand from her thick, gorgeous hair to drag his thumb over the plump seduction that was her lower lip. He ached to taste her again. He didn’t know how he refrained. “I am the last of the Santa Dominis. Some still call me a king. I can do as I wish.”

“Not with me, you can’t.” She jerked her mouth back from his touch and shoved her way to a more vertical sitting position on his lap, and the sweet agony of it all threatened to unman him where he sat. “I want nothing to do with your little game of lost thrones, thank you. My life is complicated enough.”

“Marrying me would uncomplicate it.”

“Right. Because that’s exactly what you are. Uncomplicated.”

He could see the moment it occurred to her that despite the hard tone she’d used, what she’d said might as well be a compliment. Little did she know. He could teach darkness to the night, and that was on his good days.