“That’s a lovely sentiment,” she managed to say, trying desperately to sound as composed and as dry as she wished she was. “I’m signing up to be your wife for a little while, not become your...”
She faltered, not knowing what word to use. What this was, what she was.
Or, worse, what she wanted to be. With him. For him.
Much less for herself.
Cairo smiled at her then, and this time, it reached his eyes. And it was as lethal to her as the way he’d touched her, as the way he’d moved inside her, as the way he’d made her feel. It was almost too much to bear, too bright and too perfect, like the impossible Italian summer on the other side of the window.
He was her ruin made real and today she’d ensured it. She felt something inside her crack wide open and she was terribly afraid it would suck her in and destroy her right then and there, whatever it was. It felt that brutal and that permanent.
The trouble was, some part of her wanted to see what would happen. Some part of her imagined the wreck of it—of this—would be worth it, no matter what came after.
“Don’t worry,” Cairo told her, as if he felt it, too, that great, wide, open thing that was already changing everything. As if he knew exactly what it was and what it meant. As if this was as real as it felt—as real as that silly, fairy-tale-headed fool inside of her wanted it to be. “You will be both. My wife, yes. My countryless queen in all your glory. But most of all, Brittany, you will be mine. Do you not understand? You already are.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LAST OF the Santa Dominis married his stripper bride in a private chapel that dated back to the Italian Renaissance, the first of his family to marry in a place other than the Grand Cathedral in Santa Domini’s capital in centuries.
Three whole centuries, to be exact.
As the old hymns were sung and the old words intoned, Cairo stood at an altar his ancestors had built with a woman for whom he felt entirely too many complicated things to name and found it hard to remember that he was baiting a trap. It was much too difficult to focus on the real purpose of this performance.
Because all he could think of, all he could see, all he could concentrate on was Brittany.
Who had somehow seen beneath every last mask he wore. And was already his.
Princes and counts and the assorted minor arcana of Europe sat in the pews arranged behind him, yet all Cairo could think about was the fact of her innocence and his taking of it. Her sweet heat and her addictive taste. The untutored rawness of the way she’d moved beneath him and the greedy little sounds she’d made as she’d found her release. He had to shift slightly as he stood to mask his body’s response to the onslaught of memory, lest he appall the gathered throng of European nobles even more than he already had by making them bear witness to this ceremony in the first place.
Pay attention to the game, you fool, he ordered himself as the priest waved his hands over his bride’s elegantly veiled head and intoned sacred words down the length of the chapel.
He was making this woman his in every conceivable way today, and despite the niggling sense that he was forgetting something critical, he exulted in it. If was up to him, he thought, he’d lock her up somewhere far away and out of the public eye, and indulge himself in her forever.
But that, of course, was not the game they played. No matter that she wasn’t at all the practiced trollop she’d pretended she was for years. Nobody alive could possibly know that except Cairo—and in any case, it changed nothing.
The fact he felt he could show her the truth in him didn’t mean he should, or that it altered the course they’d set out. It only made him hate himself that much more.
“I don’t understand,” Brittany had said weeks ago. It had been a few days after their engagement dinner. Enterprising paparazzi were attempting to scale the gates of his Parisian residence and the sketches he’d commissioned from his preferred Italian dressmaker had been spread out between them on the coffee table in one of his salons. “This looks like something a proper English princess would wear. I assumed we’d be taking the loud and tacky route.”
“Everyone will be expecting that, of course.” He’d eyed her, all copper fire and that distance in her gaze. He’d had the fleeting notion she’d been protecting herself—but he’d dismissed it. Why should she need protection? She was the one marrying up. “I have something else in mind.”
A different sort of color bloomed high on her lovely cheeks, his mother’s ring gleamed on her finger and it was a dangerous game he’d been playing. He’d known that all along, but perhaps never so keenly as in that moment.
“I don’t understand.” He’d had the impression she’d thought about how to respond. Her words were too precise. “I thought the point was to horrify the entire world with your marriage to a bargain-basement upstart like me.”
“I want something slightly more complicated than a circus of a ceremony and a parade of bad taste,” he’d said quietly. “That would be an obvious stunt. And not only because that was how you did it the last time you married above your station.”
There had been a hint of misery in her dark hazel gaze. Then she’d blinked it away and lifted her chin, and he’d wondered if he’d only wanted that kind of reaction from her. If that was why he kept baiting her.
If he’d wanted her to feel all the things he was terribly afraid he felt himself.
“You want them to pity you,” Brittany had said softly.
She hadn’t met his gaze then. The iconic ring he’d slid onto her finger so recently had seemed to dance in the Parisian morning light between them, hoarding the sunshine and then sending it cartwheeling across the room.
Like joy, he’d thought. Not that he would know.
Brittany had still been talking. “You want them to think you believe that the sheer force of your feelings for me makes me somehow appropriate. You want to present a sow’s ear all dressed up like a silk purse and pretend you can’t tell the difference. You want them to laugh at you. At me.”
She’d met his gaze then and it had taken everything he had to keep from flinching. He, who had never so much as blinked at all the tawdry things he’d done in his lifetime. He, who had always known precisely what his mission was and how best to achieve it, no matter how many reports he received that the general’s health continued to decline.
“I do,” he’d said, and he’d pretended that he hadn’t seen her pretty eyes go darker at that. Or, more to the point, he’d pretended he didn’t care.
He said the same words now.
His voice was strong and sure to carry throughout the chapel and dispel any possible doubt that he was marrying this woman—his woman. He kept his fingers clasped tight around hers. And he waited.
But it wasn’t until she replied in kind, sending relief arrowing through him, that Cairo realized he hadn’t known what she’d say. Some part of him had truly believed that Brittany might change her mind at the last moment and take off running, like some captured bride of old. Another part of him wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.
Here in this church, as he slid a new ring onto her finger to proclaim her his without any doubt or wiggle room, Cairo found absolutely nothing amusing about the idea of Brittany anywhere but here. With him.
The whole world thought they knew her, but only he did.
She was his in every possible way.
“You may kiss the bride,” the priest intoned.
Cairo wanted to do a great deal more than simply kiss her.
But this was a stage, he reminded himself. This was an act. This was his opportunity to paint himself the besotted fool for the cameras.
He told himself he was a lucky man, indeed, that it was so easy.
Brittany tilted her face up to his, her pretty eyes darker than usual. He wanted that to be evidence. He wanted her to
be as swept away in this as he was. He hated that he couldn’t quite tell how much of her was real and how much of her was a performance.
It had been different up in that old stone chamber. When he’d been able to feel the truth of her, of them, in the way she shook apart in his hands and then again beneath him. When he’d ridden them both into all that glorious fire and let them burn and burn and burn.
God, how he wanted to do it again.
He pressed his mouth to hers. He felt her tremble against him when he deepened the kiss, holding her against him a beat or two longer than was strictly polite, and he saw the vulnerable cast to her temptation of a mouth when he finally released her.
She was thinking about what had happened between them, too. About him sunk deep inside her and her legs wrapped around him. He knew it as well as he knew his own name.
“Next time,” she murmured, right there against his lips, “why don’t you brand me with your initials instead? Or perhaps urinate in a circle around me, like a dog?”
“Is that a request?” he asked, in a low voice pitched for her ears alone. “Or a dare?”
And then he pulled back and presented her to the assembled crowd, before she could answer back in her usual tart way. His queen at last, and who cared what those vultures thought of her?
He knew what he thought: that his honeymoon couldn’t come fast enough, because one taste of her wasn’t nearly enough.
Cairo couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman the way he wanted this one. His wife, he thought as they made their way down the chapel’s long aisle and then stepped out into the exuberant Italian sunshine. It was such a small word, and yet he couldn’t seem to process it. His wife.
There was only one other thing in all the world he’d ever wanted so badly it had consumed him whole. Thinking of his lost kingdom as they moved, Cairo thought he should be ashamed that he’d lost sight of it for even a moment. No matter how his new queen’s smile caught the sun and made the whole world a little brighter all around her as they walked from the chapel. The wedding breakfast that waited for them, arranged in artistically laden long tables in the old castle keep, was not the place to forget who he was or the role he needed to play here.
Because it had never been more crucial to keep up his usual act than it was today.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” one of his supposed best and oldest friends said with an entirely feigned congratulatory grin, slinging his arm over Cairo’s shoulders in a show of his usual drunkenness as Cairo made his rounds sometime later. Cairo could see right through it, but then, there wasn’t much of Harry Marbury—a man constructed of as many impeccably pedigreed English forebears as cast-off morals—that wasn’t entirely transparent. “It’s not as if you must marry to secure the kingdom, Cairo. It’s been lost all your life and no matter those rumors that the old soldier is on his last legs. What is this preposterous wedding all about?”
“We all must fall in our time,” Cairo replied lazily, as if mention of the general didn’t scrape at him. And he hated himself when he continued, as he knew he must. “Better to cushion that landing in a woman who knows her way around a stripper pole, in my opinion.”
“One does not marry the trash, friend,” Harry said, laughing in his condescending way—and raising his voice just enough that it carried across the gathering and over to where Brittany stood with that fake smile on her face. Cairo saw her stiffen and he hated all of this. These lies, these performances, when what had happened between them had been real. Raw and real and entirely theirs. The most real and unscripted he thought he’d ever been in his life. “One uses it and then one’s servants puts it out. In bins, I’m told.”
Cairo would never know how he managed to keep himself from murdering the man—his supposed oldest, dearest friend—with his own two hands just then, right where they stood in the medieval courtyard of the old castle keep.
But he didn’t, because this was exactly what he’d wanted. What he’d gone to such great lengths to make happen, precisely like this. He had no one to blame but himself if he didn’t like how it felt now.
Now that she was his wife. His exiled queen.
His, damn it.
That was the part that mattered. That and the headlines Harry’s little comment would likely generate from all the hangers-on that Cairo knew full well spent half their time in his presence texting the tabloids with choice snippets that usually bred headlines. And that was why Cairo laughed indulgently and clapped Harry on the back as if he’d told a rousing great joke instead of exterminating him like the cockroach he was.
You deserve a medal of valor for letting him live, he told himself grimly as he smiled and laughed and encouraged all these parasites to pity him as the reception wore on. Just as he’d planned.
Though it was hard to mind any of that when he had Brittany in his arms again.
She tilted her head back as they danced together for the first time as husband and wife, exiled king and nominal queen, smiling up at him for the benefit of the crowd.
“You look as if you are head over heels for me,” he told her, and tried to sound as if he was chiding her when all he could think about was keeping his hands where they belonged. Instead of where he longed to put them. He was sure everyone could see it and with it, his real face. His true self. And yet all he wanted to do was continue to gaze down at her. “The papers will not know whether to call you smitten or materialistic.”
“It must be the romance of the day,” she said dryly. “It’s going to my head. Next thing you know I’ll be reciting poetry and telling all the papers it was love at first sight, right there in that nightclub in the sewers of Paris where they think we met.”
Two things happened then, in an instant.
First, a hard kick in the vicinity of Cairo’s chest, making him clasp Brittany tighter as he fought it off. He tried to tell himself he didn’t know what it was—but he did. Of course he did. Anticipation, desire... As if he wanted this to be real. As if he wanted this to be the mad, epic romance they were pretending it was.
As if it already was.
But that wasn’t possible. He knew that as well as he knew his own, cursed name.
Because the second thing that happened was a vicious punch, straight to the gut. Cairo knew what happened when love was involved. He’d lived it. He was still living it. Grief and horror and crushing, interminable loss. A lifetime of pain and guilt when the people he’d loved were taken. He wouldn’t go near it again. He couldn’t go near it again.
But God help him, he wanted things today he’d never imagined he’d ever want. Ever. It was the way she’d come apart for him earlier, so soft and hot beneath him. It was the way she’d watched him in the chapel, her eyes solemn on his.
It was the simple, searing fact that no one had ever had her but him. No one had ever touched her and therefore nobody truly knew her, except him. Cairo didn’t need to be told that she’d given him a gift far more precious than her maidenhead today.
He’d spent his whole life doing what he had to do, not what he wanted to do. He always made the smart choice no matter how it hurt him, no matter what it cost. He’d learned long ago to think of himself and his own feelings last, if ever, because what the hell did he matter when there were so many lives on the line? He’d never questioned any of it. He’d become his own worst nightmare, an utter disgrace to all he held dear. And because of that, he’d survived.
He gazed down at the woman who fit as perfectly in his arms as he had inside her, and he didn’t know if he could do it this time. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Cairo wanted to do more than simply survive.
He wanted more.
“You’re staring at me.” She sounded edgy, despite the smile she aimed at him. Because, of course, they were still in public. They were always in public.
“You are my wife.” He sounded li
ke the man he’d taken such care, all his life, to keep from becoming in word or deed or public perception. He sounded like his memories of his father, commanding and sure. His father, who had refused to fight the coup because he’d thought that meant fewer of his subjects would die. His father, who had always viewed his exile as a mere interlude. His father, the king of Santa Domini Cairo would never, ever become. “My queen.”
Her dark eyes glittered despite the sunlight, and she seemed as far away then as if she was up on the stage in that club again. On display to all, available to none.
But he’d seen beneath that mask. He’d removed his own.
Everything was different now.
He didn’t want to watch her distance herself from him or what had already happened between them today.
He wanted anything but distance, even when they were out in public for all to see.
He dipped her then, slow and romantic and not entirely for show, and let himself enjoy the way her gaze spit fire at him despite the smile she kept welded to her lips. He pressed a kiss against that smile when he pulled her back to standing, and let that kick between them.
That lick of fire. That spiked edge of need.
And the murmurs and applause from the crowd he’d half forgotten all around them.
“That felt like a threat,” she told him through her teeth, her smile as bright as her clever eyes were dark, making her even more beautiful to him, somehow.
“It was a promise,” he retorted.
Searing and hot, that promise.
One he had every intention of keeping.
And keeping and keeping, until he wore them both out.
Soon.
* * *
Brittany woke up sprawled across the wide bed in one of the private jet’s guest chambers. She was still wearing the pale yellow shift dress that had been set out for her to change into after the wedding breakfast, and in which she’d been photographed by a sea of paparazzi as she and Cairo had boarded his plane in Italy the night of their wedding.
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