Expecting a Royal Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  “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.

  “I want to be inside you,” he told her then, raw and untutored, as if he was a stranger to himself. He felt her shiver, as if the electric charge of it had seared straight through her. “So deep inside you, cara, that neither one of us can tell who is a king and who is a stripper. Until there is nothing in all the world but that sweet, wet heat and what burns us both as we drown in it.”

  He was close enough that he could see the way her pupils dilated at that, so close he could feel the goose bumps beneath his hand as easily as he could see them rise up all over her exposed skin. So close he could feel all that intense heat as it burned through her, like a wild flame incinerating them both.

  “I can tell who is who, though,” she said, and Cairo was certain he wasn’t mistaking the sheer misery he could hear in her voice, as if this was as hard and mystifying a thing for her as it was for him. That was something. He told himself that had to be something. “Just as the tabloids certainly can. And I doubt that would ever change.”

  “Why would you wish it to change?” He hardly sounded like himself. Or maybe he’d forgotten what it was like to be so honest, about anything. His whole life was a collection of misdirection and straight-out lies, wrapped tight around the blackened, shriveled heart of a man who should have died years ago. “You’ve crafted your public persona with exquisite precision. Why not take it to its logical end?”

  “I know exactly where my public persona is taking me,” she gritted out at him. She shifted in his lap, brushing up against the part of him that yearned for her the most, and they both froze. She swallowed, her eyes dark on his, and he had the most absurd notion that she looked panicked for a moment. “And it’s not to your bed.”

  “That is why you melt against me, I am sure. Why you cannot look away.”

  “I’m trapped in your lap. You are trapping me.”

  “We’re in a public place,” he continued, and though his palms itched to move over her, to learn her in the best and most tactile way possible and prove his point besides, Cairo didn’t do it. He let his voice cast that spell instead. “How many people do you think are watching us instead of the stage?”

  “All of them.” He didn’t imagine the sheen of something harder in her gaze then, or the way she tilted her chin up. “You saw to that.”

  “And yet, were I to slip my fingers just a little bit higher, what would I find?” He moved the hand on her thigh a scant centimeter higher, letting his fingers toy with the satin edge of her underwear. Her breath came in a rush even as she shivered out the truth again. “How wet are you, Brittany? Right here in a strip club where everyone can s
ee you? Would you even protest if I slid my hand beneath those silly red underthings? Or would you lean in closer so no one could be sure and ride my hand instead?”

  “Neither.” But her voice was soft then. Too soft. As soft as he imagined she was only a fraction of an inch from the place his hand lingered. “I’m going to stand up and get back to work.”

  “Work?” Cairo laughed and moved his fingers again, and the flush on her delicate cheekbones told him she felt that precisely where he wanted her to feel it. So did he. “This place is an ill-mannered salute to your late husband’s family, not your work. We both know what your true calling is.”

  Her lips pressed together and that melting heat in her dark hazel eyes faded. “If you mean that I’m a whore, you’ll have to come up with a better insult. My mother’s used the word so many times I’ve come to consider it an endearment.”

  “Then marry me,” he heard himself say, quite as if it was a real proposal and he was truly as raw and ruined and desperate as he felt inside just then. As if there was any real thing inside him at all, when he knew better. But no matter that he told himself he was playing a role, he couldn’t seem to stop this electric collision course he found himself on. Worse, he didn’t want to stop it. “And we shall see what words your mother uses to address my queen.”

  “Evidence has never persuaded my mother away from the things she’s decided are true,” Brittany said, and what was remarkable, Cairo thought, was how she didn’t sound bitter at all just then. Only matter-of-fact. It made that same temper he couldn’t afford to indulge flare inside him all over again. “But thank you. I’m sure a season as queen to the King of Wishful Thinking would be a delight. But my dance card is full.” She nodded at the stage before them. “Literally.”

  And this time, Cairo felt a kind of hitch in his chest when she pulled away from him. He let her stand, and watched her as she stood there before him, making no attempt to hide the evidence of his need. Her cheeks burned, her eyes gleamed dark, that marvelous copper hair of hers tumbled all around her in unruly waves, and Cairo understood that role or no, he would never, ever rest until he had her.

  In his bed, to start.

  But no other queen would do. He ignored the part of him that questioned that—the part that reminded him he was a king without a throne and in need of any unacceptable woman to make sure he stayed without it—and indulged the part of him that had the blood of five hundred years of Santa Dominis pounding in his blood. Five hundred years of autocratic rulers who knew what they wanted and took what they wished, and brooked precious little disagreement as they did it.

  He might have lost his kingdom. He might never set foot in the palace his family had built from a primitive fortress into a splendid fairy tale ever again. But he was still who he was, who he’d been bred to be, and no matter the darkness he knew he carried inside of him—or else how could he make himself such a believable disgrace?—none of that mattered in the end. He was still Cairo Santa Domini.

  “You can’t have me,” she told him, as if she could read his mind. As if she could see the truth of him, stamped in his bones, deep in his veins, all the kings and queens who’d gone before him.

  “Silly girl,” he drawled, and made no attempt to sit up straighter from his lazy position. Or to rein in the desire he was certain she could see stamped all over him, from his face to his sex. “Don’t you know that only makes me want you more?”

  “You’ll have to learn to live with the disappointment somehow,” she said dismissively, and Cairo only smiled.

  “That,” he murmured, like the threat it was, “is one thing you can depend upon me never, ever to do.”

  * * *

  Brittany woke late the following morning in her little flat, four narrow flights up in a weathered old building on the outskirts of Montmartre. It was laughably tiny, although if she stood on a chair in her small kitchen there was enough of a view of the Parisian rooftops and the smallest bit of the famous Basilica of Sacré-Cœur that she could forget her worries a while as she craned her head to see a sliver of its pale white dome.

  She did not think about what had happened the night before. She did not think about the dreams that had haunted her through the night, waking her again and again until she finally fell into something dreamless and exhausted near dawn.

  She didn’t think about any of it and yet she could still feel Cairo’s touch. She could still taste him on her lips.

  Her body was still in that insane tumult over him, from her breasts that felt swollen to twice their size, to the shivery hot knot low in her belly that clenched and clenched and clenched. Her body, which was supposed to be entirely hers. Her body, which she’d kept a pristine little fortress ever since her first wedding night, when she’d hidden from the whiny boyfriend turned drunken lout and had decided, there and then, that she’d rather die untouched and alone than let anyone else touch her against her will.

  She’d never imagined that her body and her mind could disagree about what her will was.

  Brittany took a very long shower to wash the night away. Then she went on her daily run at her gym, moving much faster than usual today through her usual miles, but the dreams and the memories stuck with her no matter how quick her pace.

  It was never a good sign when the treadmill felt more like a metaphor than simple exercise.

  Brittany was already in a dark, uneasy mood when she made it back to her flat. It did not improve when she picked up the private mobile phone she’d left plugged in on her bedside table to see her mother had called at least three times.

  She was scowling at the screen as she scrolled through the logged calls, no messages, when it lit up with a fourth call from her mother.

  Something cold snaked down Brittany’s spine. The last time her mother had called repeatedly like this, Brittany’s former stepchildren—all old enough to be her parents, a fact that perhaps only she and Jean Pierre had found amusing—had taken to the tabloids to sound the trumpets about how shoddily they’d treated her and how they had “expunged that harlot” from the family home at last.

  Brittany’s mother had not called to commiserate about yet another tour through the slag heaps of the tabloids. She’d called, as ever, to complain that her daughter’s disgraceful behavior was humiliating the whole of the Hollis clan back in Gulfport and had Brittany no shame?

  “Do you want me to have shame, Mom?” Brittany had asked coolly. Someday, she’d vowed for the nine millionth time, she would stop answering her mother’s calls altogether. Someday when she’d finally come to terms with the fact that the woman was never, ever going to treat her as anything more than a source of income. Much less love her. Someday. “Or do you want me to keep paying your rent?”

  Today was not someday, regrettably, but Brittany tossed the mobile aside without answering, letting her mother go to voice mail. She powered up her laptop instead.

  She didn’t even have to Google herself, as she sometimes did. Oh, no. The headlines were right there on her launch page.

  His Royal Stripper?

  How Low Can Cairo Go?

  Black Widow Brittany Trades Up!

  Her heart was already causing a commotion in her chest as she clicked on the first article, as if she already knew what she’d see—

  But it was worse.

  Someone had taken a series of pictures in the club last night. And the pictures made the whole thing look much more sordid than Brittany remembered it. Much hotter. Much more desperate and much more public. If she hadn’t known better, Brittany might have assumed that Cairo actually had bought her for the evening. The papers certainly insinuated he had.

  He might as well have, she thought now. It came to the same thing, and if she’d let him, she’d have a paycheck to comfort herself this morning. Meanwhile, that scraped-raw, heavy feeling in her chest wasn’t going to help a soul. It was better to ignor
e it. Starting with the little sound she didn’t mean to let out as she sat there gaping at those awful pictures that told her far too many hard truths about herself and her own longings. She lifted up a hand to try to rub that harsh, hollow feeling out of her own chest.

  It didn’t really work.

  She felt betrayed. By herself, not by the devastatingly handsome man whose entire life was a monument to wreck and ruin. She should have seen this coming. She should have known there was no way Cairo Santa Domini could turn up in her life without leaving his dark mark all over her.

  This was what he did. Exactly this.

  She should have assumed not only that someone would have photographed the whole of their encounter, but also that, of course, they’d sell it to the voracious tabloids. In point of fact, it was likely Cairo had engineered the whole thing and the photographer in question was on his payroll. Why hadn’t she thought of that last night? Of course he’d play this up to the paparazzi. This was what he did.

  She should have been prepared for this—why wasn’t she?

  But she knew why. Brittany hadn’t been thinking after that kiss, which looked even more carnal and impossibly sexy in the pictures than she remembered it. And her memories were explicit. She hadn’t been thinking when she’d staggered away from him and hid backstage, where none of the other girls talked to her and she could pretend she was utterly at peace as she changed back into her street clothes. She hadn’t been thinking when she’d opted to walk home despite the hour and the questionable neighborhood, hoping the exercise and the night air might clear her head.

  He’d kissed her. She’d kissed him. It had been the most sensual experience of her life, and she hated herself for that. She hated that she’d responded to him like that.

  That kiss had been the only thought in her head.

  The truth was, she hadn’t been doing a whole lot of actual thinking since she’d walked into that casino in Monaco.