“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
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.
“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 m
an. 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?”
Expecting a Royal Scandal Page 4
