She’d staggered on board, put as much distance as possible between her and the brand-new husband who’d gotten under her skin in more ways than she could possibly count already, and then slept like the dead the moment she’d tossed herself across the soft coverlet.
She was all too aware he’d let her go. Let her retreat from him.
And now you’re waking up married, she told herself—perhaps a little more sharply than she should.
After all, it wasn’t as if that was anything new.
The fact that she was no longer a virgin, on the other hand, was.
Lying there on her stomach, she pulled her hand out from beneath the pillow and stared at her rings. She’d worn wedding sets before, of course. Her first husband had been as deficient in that department as in everything else, but Carlos had dutifully presented her with not only the expected solitaire engagement ring and a platinum band to match, but also a bill for her half of the investment they were making in their Hollywood future. Jean Pierre had preferred yellow gold and had given her an ornate ruby he’d claimed was a family heirloom when they’d gotten engaged, then two guard bands of rubies and diamonds at their wedding ceremony. His fifty-year-old matron of a daughter had sneered at the rings and told Brittany it looked like her hand had been dipped in blood.
“Success,” Jean Pierre had murmured into Brittany’s ear, the conniving old fool.
But today she wore the Heart of Santa Domini and next to it, an eternity band of heart-stoppingly perfect diamonds that sparkled with their own, deep fire.
Because this time she was married to a legend. She was Cairo Santa Domini’s queen. Whatever happened next, however their fake little marriage worked and then ended, she would always—always—be the first woman he’d married. She would appear in all his biographical information, in history books and encyclopedias alike.
Just as he would always be the first—something inside her whispered only, but she shoved it aside as so much damaging wishful thinking—lover she’d ever taken.
Brittany rolled over and sat up, looking around the compact room as if she expected to see her new husband lurking somewhere. As if Cairo was the sort who lurked. But she was alone. The little room was dark. She had no idea what time it was, how long she’d slept, or even where they were flying. Cairo had announced that they would honeymoon for a month or two and that had been all the information he’d offered. She hadn’t asked where they were headed because it hadn’t much mattered. The Maldives, New York City, the moon—who cared?
Their act was their act wherever they took it.
She scraped her hair back into a knot at the nape of her neck, wishing she’d had time to comb it all out and shower after the wedding. Wishing she hadn’t slept in all her makeup, come to that. She ran her index fingers below her eyes and sighed when they came away smudged with black mascara. How regal and queenly, she chided herself. No wonder Cairo had married her for the sole purpose of parading her embarrassing low-class behavior in front of the whole world. She couldn’t even manage to wash her own face.
None of this felt real to her, the fact she’d married the most famous exile alive, and not just because she didn’t like thinking about why Cairo had married her.
Her other marriages had felt real. Too real, in all the wrong ways. Her first wedding night had been spent locked in the bathroom of the run-down motel Darryl had taken her to before he’d started drinking himself into a rage. She’d been so naive then, thinking drunk was the worst thing a man could be. Darryl had quickly taught her otherwise. Her marriage to Carlos had been pure business all the way through, and their life together had been entirely conducted to be filmed, from their choice of apartment in the gritty outskirts of Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, a far cry from the Hollywood tourists loved, to their plotted outings to Southern California hot spots. Even her time with Jean Pierre, which had been all about creating a commotion, had been conducted as a shared vision and business enterprise.
Her new marriage didn’t feel particularly authentic in that sense. She certainly didn’t feel like any kind of queen, exiled or otherwise. But she felt something far more than real. Cairo knew her deepest, darkest, best-kept secret.
She felt raw all the way through.
Brittany moved to the edge of the bed and helped herself to the bottle of spring water that had been left there, gulping down half of it in greedy swallows, but she still felt parched.
You are going to remember this moment with every step you take down that aisle, he’d promised her, and he’d been right. She’d felt soft and shivery all the way through the ceremony. She’d felt the vows he’d made as if he was still moving deep and wild between her legs, and she’d hardly managed to get her own out in turn.
There were a thousand things she should have been thinking about now that she was awake. She knew that. That they hadn’t used any protection, for one thing. But she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. Her mind skidded away from that and she found all she really wanted to know was where her brand-new husband was and why he wasn’t in this bed with her, teaching her more of all the many marvelous things he knew.
She wanted to learn each and every one of them, and she didn’t care how vulnerable it might make her feel. Or she’d care later, she told herself firmly. After he was gone and she had the rest of her life to live without him.
Not that she wanted to think about that inevitability. It would come soon enough. And in the meantime, she could indulge the sensual side of herself she hadn’t known she possessed. Until Cairo.
Brittany heard a muffled buzzing sound then and it took her a long moment to realize it was her mobile phone. She looked around the room, finally spotting her handbag on the floor near the foot of the bed, where she must have dropped it in her earlier exhausted haze. She moved to yank the bag up from the floor, thinking as she did that the fact it was buzzing at all meant they had to be above land somewhere, not an ocean, or there wouldn’t have been a signal.
Brittany glanced at the display, saw it was her mother and then answered the call anyway.
A choice she regretted almost instantly.
“Well, well,” Wanda Mae Hollis said in her gravelly smoker’s voice, thick with its usual resentment. “How nice of your uppity majesty to pick up the phone. I’ve been calling you for weeks.”
“Hi, Mama,” Brittany said, and it was harder than it should have been to mask her emotions. It annoyed her that there were any to mask. Phone calls from her mother were always assaults of one sort or another. She should have been used to it by now—and she was. That was why she usually avoided them. “I’ve been a little bit busy.”
She sounded more Mississippi when she spoke to her mother than she did at any other time, ever. Her voice flattened out into the drawl she’d worked so hard to leave behind her when she’d left home, as if she was still that miserable child trying to make herself small in the corner of her mother’s trailer while another drunken adult fight raged on.
“You don’t need to tell me what you’ve been up to,” Wanda Mae said bitterly. “It’s all anyone can talk about today, no matter where we go. I hope you’re happy with yourself.”
This was why Brittany limited phone conversations. She didn’t know why she’d answered this one. Did she want to punish herself? But she suspected she knew what it was that had made her pick up the call: that tiny little shred of hope she kept tucked away, deep inside of her, and only took out from time to time when it whispered things like, “maybe your mother might be happy for you for once.”
That little shred was always wrong. Hope, she’d discovered long ago, was a big fat liar.
Brittany snuck an arm around her own waist and held on tight, then dug her bare toes into the carpeted floor beneath her as if she needed to remember that she was solid. That she was real. That she had a whole life that had nothing to do with Wanda Mae Hollis, and noth
ing her mother said could matter one way or the other unless she let it.
But she still didn’t hang up. She didn’t know why.
“Thank you,” she said instead, and made an effort to sound as if she’d never visited Mississippi, much less grown up there. “I appreciate you calling with your good wishes.”
Wanda Mae snorted. “I couldn’t walk three feet today without someone else throwing your latest exploits in my face. Do you know what they’re saying about you? Do you care?”
“I’ll assume they’re not praising me and calling me the next Kate Middleton,” Brittany said, and was proud of the fact she sounded amused. Or close enough to amused, anyway, that the mother who barely knew her wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. “But that’s just a guess.”
“Trust you to marry a king and screw that up, too,” Wanda Mae snapped.
Brittany sighed. “I did it to hurt you, of course. You’ve discovered the truth.”
“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”
Her mother didn’t wait for an answer. She kept right on talking, the way she always did.
The sick part, Brittany understood then as she listened to the usual litany of complaints and accusations that followed after that rhetorical question, was that she found this comforting on some level. She clenched her free hand into a fist and felt her rings dig into her flesh, but still, this was some kind of cold, bracing comfort. It reminded Brittany who she was and, worse, who she might have become.
Nothing had ever made Wanda Mae treat her eldest child as anything but an embarrassing burden, no matter how much money Brittany had sent home over the years, which was never, ever enough. Nothing had ever made Wanda Mae act as if she loved Brittany at all, for that matter. Not Grandmama. Not her other kids, most of whom Brittany had basically raised herself while Wanda Mae was out cavorting in bars. Not the fact Brittany was the only one who hadn’t gotten in any trouble. She hadn’t gotten pregnant and she hadn’t gone to jail. She’d just left.
And still, somehow, Brittany found her mother’s predictable fury soothing. She knew what to expect, and no matter that it was the same endless font of vitriol every time. It was her mama. It was the way things had always been. You probably need to take a look at that, she told herself, not for the first time.
After all, she’d lost her virginity at last. She’d never thought that would happen. Didn’t that suggest anything could?
But not today. Not when she felt so...ripped up inside. It was as if those stolen, heated moments in the castle had done a whole lot more than throw her over a cliff she hadn’t known existed. They had crumbled her foundations into dust.
Cairo had.
She didn’t know what to do about it. She didn’t know if anything could be done about it, come to that. And her mother was still shooting off her mouth, the way she liked to do when she got going.
No wonder she’d answered this call. Somewhere deep inside, Brittany had obviously wanted to know that something, somewhere, would remain the same no matter how much she might have changed. No matter how much Cairo had already changed her, from the inside out, leaving her flailing about without a mask when she needed one the most.
“Only you could manage to marry the one person on earth more sinful and shameful than you are,” Wanda Mae was saying as if personally affronted by this. “How am I supposed to hold my head up in town, Brittany?”
“I’ve never known how to answer that question, Mama,” she replied, unable to keep the weariness from her voice. “But I’d imagine you should use your neck, like anyone else.”
“I’m glad you can still make smart remarks. I’m glad you think this is one more big joke, like everything else in your life. Everyone knows exactly what kind of sick pervert that man is. Everyone knows what he’s like. It’s probably why you chose him. You like degenerate, disgusting—”
Brittany didn’t know she meant to move and she had no memory of doing it, but then she was standing there by the side of the bed as if she’d jumped up. Her heart pounded at her, suggesting she had.
“Careful, Mama,” she said, and her voice was cold. A kind of blade, slicing through her mother’s stream of words and shocking them both, if her mother’s gasp was any indication. “Be very careful. Keep running your mouth about him and you might find the bank dries right up. Then how will you keep yourself in cigarettes and beer?”
“You would threaten your own mother?”
“I don’t want to hear your thoughts on this marriage.”
Wanda Mae sniffed. “This is the influence that man has on you. This is the kind of ungrateful, selfish creature you’ve turned into, in such company. Flaunting yourself all over the world and then taking it out on your poor—”
“This is your last warning,” Brittany said, even colder. “I’m not playing with you, Mama. He is off-limits to you.”
Her mother fell quiet, and Brittany couldn’t seem to feel that shocking little victory the way she should. She felt too unsteady. Her stomach was twisted into a knot and her heart was pounding at her. And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d defended her choices to her mother. Had she ever?
But she refused to listen to her mother vent her spleen on Cairo.
She refused.
She didn’t really want to ask herself why.
“You listen to me, Brittany,” her mother said after a long pause, and her voice had gone quiet. Brittany closed her eyes and braced herself. “You think I don’t know anything. You lit out of Gulfport and never looked back and believe you me, your opinion of the folks you left behind couldn’t be more clear. You think we’re all dumb country trash.”
“I think nothing of the kind,” Brittany gritted out, and what she hated herself for the most was how guilty she felt when her mother said these things. As if Brittany’s snobbery had been the problem instead of Wanda Mae’s patented blend of neglect and malice. “I think you’d find just as much about me to criticize if I lived next door.”
“But I know a few things about rich men and poor girls,” Wanda Mae continued as if Brittany hadn’t said a word. “There’s nothing new about it.”
“Haven’t you heard, Mama? I’m not all that poor any longer. If I was, you wouldn’t get all those checks.”
“This is one of the oldest, saddest, most run-of-the-mill stories around.” Her mother’s voice was upsettingly even. Not harsh. Not cruel. As if she was relaying a simple fact, nothing more. “Rich men like to play their games. They like to put a pretty girl on their arm and make a show out of it. They like to make sure everyone knows what a sacrifice they’re making, taking on a charity project like her, so young and so desperate. And then they make those girls pay for the privilege. They make them pay and pay and pay. You might end up with more money, but you better believe that man will take whatever’s left of your soul.”
Brittany opened her mouth to say “you don’t know him,” but stopped herself just in time, horrified.
As if she did? As if anyone did? He’d been inside her body and she didn’t know him at all.
“Thank you, Mama,” she forced herself to say through lips gone stiff. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
She ended the call as her mother launched into another part of her lecture, then tossed the phone on the bed.
But she couldn’t control the way she shook. The way her stomach flipped, end over end. Or the way her mother’s words spun around and around in her head. As if Wanda Mae knew exactly how precarious this all was. As if she’d seen what Cairo had done to Brittany in that castle. How he’d touched her and, worse, how he’d made her feel.
What was going on with her that she’d tried to defend Cairo to her own mother when she hadn’t defended herself in years?
“She’s a lonely, bitter woman,” Brittany told herself furiously, scowling at the mobile phone on the coverlet as if it wa
s her mother’s face, flushed with her usual anger. “You shouldn’t listen to a word she says.”
But her words disappeared the moment she said them, as if sucked out of the plane’s windows and tossed off into the dark.
And her mother’s words seemed to echo there instead, like a curse.
Like something worse.
Like prophecy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY LANDED ON the small, private island in the Vanuatu archipelago as the South Pacific dawn eased its deep blue and fresh pink way across the sky.
“Vanuatu,” Brittany murmured as they made their way down the jet’s stairs to the private runway. She sounded shell-shocked. “You brought me to Vanuatu.”
Cairo found he couldn’t look away from her as she stopped at the bottom. There was the sea and the white sands and the sprawling house he’d bought on this faraway spot, but all he could see was his wife in a crumpled yellow dress and her hair in a tangled coil at her nape.
His wife, who he’d had to force himself not to pursue when she’d barricaded herself in that cabin for the whole of their twenty-hour flight. He’d reasoned she needed time. Space. Some peace and quiet after the circus that was their wedding. To come to terms with what had happened between them in that castle, perhaps—before they’d exchanged vows. To accept that they were truly married, in the classic sense of the term that involved the kind of consummation she’d never experienced before.
And if he allowed her space, he could pretend he hadn’t needed it himself. That he wasn’t shaken by what had happened. That it was nothing but sex, that moment she’d given herself to only him. That this marriage was yet one more circus sideshow, nothing more.
But she was his wife even so. The morning breeze from the sea all around them was cool and soft, and teased the ends of the hair she’d braided to one side and tossed over her shoulder. She swallowed hard as she looked around, and he found himself watching the lovely line of her throat as if there were clues there. Answers to questions he didn’t know how to ask.
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