Expecting a Royal Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  “It looks exactly as I imagined it would,” Brittany said quietly. Perhaps too quietly.

  “Did you not wish to come here?” Cairo asked.

  His own voice sounded unduly harsh in the quiet morning, with no other sounds but the surf and the breeze. He felt like a parody of himself. Even the clothes he wore seemed to brand him a fraud. A T-shirt that clung to his torso. Casual linen trousers. He felt like a beach bum instead of a king, or even the Euro-trash version of a king he’d been playing to the hilt all these years, and he found that made him...uneasy.

  As if she would forget who he was if he gave her the chance. Or he would.

  “I’ve always wanted to come here.” She swallowed again, then blinked, as if she was shaking something off. Him? Their wedding? He didn’t much care for that notion. “Eventually, I wanted to come here and stay forever.”

  “The island is yours,” he said shortly. Gruffly.

  Her gaze moved to his and he didn’t like that it was troubled. He didn’t like that at all.

  “Mine? What do you mean, ‘mine’?”

  Cairo nodded to the waiting servants to handle their baggage and then took Brittany’s arm, threading it through his. She didn’t resist, and he found himself turning that over and over in his head like some hapless boy obsessing over his first sweetheart. It appalled him. Deeply. He was frowning as they started up the winding path toward the house that waited at the widest part of the small island, all rolled-up walls and high ceilings to let the tropics inside. An island paradise, if he said so himself.

  But all he could concentrate on was the feel of her skin against his. Her arm on his. The smallest, most innocuous touch he could imagine, and yet it pounded through him like fire.

  He had never felt so naked in all his life.

  “Consider this place a wedding gift.” His voice was even rougher then.

  Cairo didn’t know what was wrong with him. He’d spent twenty hours sitting on a jet plane becoming more and more of a stranger to himself. As if he’d left every careful mask he’d ever worn behind at that castle in Italy. As if here, with this woman, he was a man. Not an exiled king. Not a disgrace.

  He didn’t have the slightest idea what that meant, only that it spun in him, making him feel something like drunk.

  Brittany was frowning now. At him. “You can’t hand out islands as presents. That’s insane.”

  Cairo ignored that. He reveled in the simple feel of her arm against his. Her lithe body moving beside him as they walked through the gathering daylight. The silky tropical breeze that danced around them and over them, making him remember those moments he’d been deep inside her—

  Remember them. Who was he kidding? He hadn’t thought of anything else since it had happened. He hadn’t really tried.

  “I was beginning to think I’d married Sleeping Beauty.” He thought he felt her stiffen slightly beside him, and he thought there must be something deeply wrong with him that he’d view that as a good thing. Or any other reaction she had, for that matter. As long as he got to her. “And here I am, a king without a country instead of the necessary Prince Charming. It would have been quite the PR disaster, don’t you think?”

  She glanced at him, then back toward the path that stretched ahead of them. “I was tired.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Am I certain I was tired?” She frowned at him then. “Yes. But if I’d been confused, the fact I’ve slept for hours and hours would have cleared it up for me.”

  “It was a twenty-hour flight, give or take.”

  “Then, yes, Cairo. I’d say I was tired.”

  He tried to smile. That same casual lazy smile he’d used all his life. It should have come easily to him, the way it always had, but his own mouth betrayed him. “Because I was starting to think you were hiding in that bedroom.”

  She didn’t pull her arm from his and Cairo didn’t know why that felt like a gift.

  “Do I have a reason to hide from you?” she asked. Carefully.

  He thought they were both a little too aware that she hadn’t exactly denied it.

  “You tell me.”

  But she didn’t. They walked for a moment in silence. The waves surged against the shore and the palm trees clattered overhead. Her bright copper hair, thick and wild, unwound itself from her makeshift braid as it moved and flowed around her, and he knew how she tasted, now. He knew how soft and molten she was for him, and the noises she made when he moved deep inside her. He knew her.

  Maybe that was why his heart kicked at him, making his whole chest hurt.

  “I appreciate the thought,” she said in what he thought was a remarkably stiff voice, here on a tropical island in the middle of a perfect blue sea in all directions. “But I can’t accept an entire island. As a...bridal present for a wedding that has the shelf life of organic fruit.”

  A swift glance her way showed him nothing. Her expression was smooth. Composed. The way it always was, as if he’d never held the heat of her in his hand.

  His chest hurt. Worse than before. He was fairly certain it was that temper of his he normally kept locked away. Or worse, the truth of himself he’d been hiding from all these years.

  “I am afraid it is already done.” He stopped moving when the path ended at the bottom of the sweeping lawn that led up to one of the house’s many lanais. “The island is yours, as is everything on it. My attorneys transferred ownership the moment you said ‘I do.’”

  She managed to pull her arm from his without seeming to do it on purpose. Cairo might have admired the sheer efficiency of the gesture if he hadn’t hated that he was no longer touching her.

  “No.”

  Her voice was low. She crossed her arms and frowned out toward the horizon. And Cairo could have pretended he hadn’t heard her. That she hadn’t spoken.

  He didn’t know why he didn’t.

  “I apologize that the gift does not please you,” he said stiffly. “Is it the size of the island? The house? Would you prefer something larger or more ornate? Dubai, perhaps?”

  “Of course not.” She shook her head, but she still didn’t meet his gaze. “I grew up in a trailer with my mother, whatever boyfriend she had that week and four other kids. Any house containing a room I don’t have to share is like heaven to me. This...” She jutted her chin toward the house and when she finally looked at him again, her eyes were much too dark. “The house is beautiful, Cairo. Everything here is beautiful. It’s so much more than I imagined.”

  “Then I fail to see the problem.”

  He felt rooted to the ground. Frozen into place. Completely out of his element—and how could that be? How had this woman turned him so upside down? What the hell had she done to him?

  But he thought he knew. He hadn’t expected her to be a virgin. To be innocent. There was no place in his sad, soiled life for innocence. And because he hadn’t been prepared, even after she’d given herself away and he’d guessed the truth, he’d simply...reacted. He hadn’t planned out what he’d do. He hadn’t performed his usual role.

  Those moments with her on the bed in that castle were the most genuine he’d been in at least twenty years, and it was addictive. He wanted more. He wanted her. He wanted to be the man he was with her, not the role he played.

  He wanted everything.

  “This is the problem,” Brittany said, and her tone was too even. “This is my dream. I told you that. Mine. You have no right to use it as part of this sick little farce we’re acting out for the world’s amusement.”

  “By which I am to assume you mean our marriage.”

  “Marriage, performance art—whatever you want to call it.” She shrugged. “It’s not real. Coming to Vanuatu is a dream that’s sustained me for years. It’s what I’ve held on to through every single horrible thing that’s written about me or sai
d to my face. It’s what allows me to shrug it all off. How could you possibly imagine I’d want to pollute it with this thing? With—”

  She cut herself off.

  “Me?” Cairo supplied coolly, because she did not see a man. She saw the game. The roles he played. The creature he’d become.

  “I don’t know what you dream about,” she threw at him, and his particular sickness was that he found that to be progress, that little show of temper. “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “I am a king without a kingdom.” Cairo laughed at that, though the sound was hollow, and he thought the breeze stole it away anyway. “What exactly do you imagine it is I dream about, Brittany?”

  “I dream about something that’s mine,” she snapped at him, and he saw the way she gripped herself tighter, as if she was holding herself back. Or holding herself together. “All mine. Where no one is watching me and speculating about me and making up stories about me. I dream about a perfect, unspoiled place a million miles away from the rest of the world, where I can disappear. Do you have the slightest notion what that means?”

  “I’d imagine it means a well-staffed house accessible only by boat or by air, in the farthest reaches of one of the most remote island nations on earth.” He eyed her, standing there with her feet in the sand and the South Pacific around her because he’d imported her straight into her fantasy. “Wherever will we find such a place, do you think?”

  “I play a part, Cairo. A role.” Her words came fast and hard now, and he found he enjoyed watching her unravel far more than he should. It meant this was getting to her, too. That he was. Cairo couldn’t regret that. “I’ve been playing it since I was a kid. Vanuatu was supposed to happen when I finally left it all behind, not while I’m neck-deep in the middle of yet another performance!”

  Something eased inside him then, though that pressure in his chest remained. He thought the way she scowled at him was beautiful. He thought she was beautiful—even more so than the island paradise that waited all around them.

  He saw the way her lips trembled slightly before she pressed them together. He saw the way she leaned back, as if she’d wanted to put more space between them, but had forced herself to stand still.

  This wasn’t affecting only him. He wasn’t the only one without a mask.

  “Come here,” he said. It was more of an order.

  Cairo had the distinct pleasure of seeing that melting expression move over her face before she balked, visibly, and straightened where she stood. He felt it, everywhere. In that pressing thing in his chest. In his sex.

  “I’m standing one foot away from you,” she said, crossly, and he was insane to find that tone of voice comforting. He was a madman, there was no other explanation.

  But he didn’t care.

  He sighed in the officious manner that had servants at aristocratic balls leaping to tend to his every whim, and then he merely reached across that one foot of space, hooked his hand around her neck and hauled her to him.

  She hit his chest an instant later, made one of those soft noises that made the hunger in him burn white-hot and threw her head back to look up at him. She was scowling, of course. She was always scowling. But that meant she wasn’t hiding behind her mask of composure, and Cairo loved it. He craved it. He wanted more.

  “Cairo—”

  “This is not a performance,” he told her, holding her where he wanted her, her body flush against his. Where she belongs, something in him whispered. “You, me. Here. None of this is for public consumption. It is only ours. It is real.”

  The truth was the way she flushed at that. The way her eyes darkened with the same need he felt careening around inside of him, changing him. Changing the whole world.

  “There’s no such thing as ours,” she whispered. “There’s nothing real here.”

  “Tesorina,” he murmured, “of course there is. It tastes like this.”

  And then he bent his head to claim her mouth, and showed her exactly what he meant.

  * * *

  The weeks that followed were like a dream. The best version of her favorite dream, in fact.

  Brittany never, ever wanted to wake up.

  It wasn’t only that the house and island were even more beautiful than she could have imagined they’d be. It wasn’t that they were staffed to the extraordinary level of discreet, nearly psychic level of service that Cairo demanded. That meant that almost the moment they had a thought or a desire, often before it was expressed, the plate of food was laid out or the tray of drinks was presented. That meant fresh towels and a selection of new, tropical clothing to better while away the days every time they exited one of the property’s pools, or wandered out of the sauna. That meant the tiki torches were always lit the instant the sky began to turn colors at the end of the day and there was always a hammock waiting between two palm trees should they take a walk along the beach.

  All of that was divine. Luxurious pampering far beyond anything Brittany had ever imagined. But far more remarkable than the level of service was the solitude. Their first night there, after Cairo had carried Brittany off to the vast master suite they’d shared ever since and after they’d worked off their jet lag in the most delectable manner possible, they’d agreed to simply...shut out the world.

  “No one will miss us for five weeks,” Cairo had said when evening had started to creep across the sky, orange and red, outside the open floor-to-ceiling spaces where walls would be in another house. “They will barely notice we are gone, with so many other headlines to keep them occupied.”

  He’d been sprawled out on his back on the bed, the sheets in complicated tangles at his feet. Brittany had been stretched out over him, the dizzying heat they’d built in each other still there where she pressed against him, even as the lazy ceiling fan moved the cooler air around on her back. Her head had been a cascade of images of all the ways they’d had each other already in that single, perfect, endless day. All the things he could do with his hands, his mouth. All the places on that stunning body of his she’d tested with hers.

  Her body had still been humming. She thought perhaps it always would.

  “I suppose we have the rest of our lives to be terrible,” she’d agreed drowsily, unable to think of much beyond the simple perfection of the way their bodies fit together. The way they seemed perfectly crafted to come together like this and drive each other wild—

  There had been something in her that had balked at that, deep down beneath the layers of satisfaction. She might not have had sex with anyone before Cairo, but she wasn’t a complete idiot. She knew sex made people crazy. It made them imagine intimacies that didn’t exist outside the bed. Hadn’t she watched her own mother make that mistake again and again? Brittany had always vowed she’d never be one of those deluded fools, no matter what.

  But she could put that aside for a little over a month, too, she’d thought then. She could simply sink into this thing and not worry about what came after or how she’d have to play it when they went back to their carefully scripted, relentlessly public lives. She could decide not to worry about it—about anything that wasn’t Cairo, or herself, or how they made each other feel—until this honeymoon was over. And until then, they could lock their phones and laptops in one of the cupboards and let themselves soak in the peace and quiet of this little island so far away from anything.

  “I think this is the purpose of a honeymoon,” she said.

  Cairo smiled, his hand moving lazily down the length of her spine, then back up again. “I thought it was an opportunity to post pictures from exotic locales onto one’s social media pages, the better to maintain one’s presence and public brand. No? Are you sure?”

  “Ask me in a month,” Brittany replied, grinning as she buried her face in that tempting hollow between his pectoral muscles.

  Their days bled one into another, long and sw
eet. They walked on the beaches in the sun and in the intermittent rains that kept the plants lush. They sat beneath the impossible confusion of stars at night, out on one of the terraces or huddled together on a blanket on the sand. They talked, ate, swam. They argued politics and classic movies. They read books from the house’s eclectically stocked libraries, discussed them, then read more.

  And they explored each other, with a ferocity and focus that would have shaken Brittany to her core if she’d stopped to think about it. She didn’t. It seemed part and parcel of these stolen blue-sky weeks. It seemed as inevitable as the afternoon rains, the kick of the tropical winds, the smudged blue line of the horizon far away in the distance. She abandoned herself to Cairo’s touch the same way she lost herself in a novel or sank beneath the sea to listen for whale songs. No thought, no concern, no self-preservation.

  There were no kings on this island, no class divisions, no strippers and no scandal. There was only the glory of the way her body took him in, again and again. There was only the sweetness of the way they came together in the lazy heat, the bold explosions of need and hunger they weathered in the pool, on the beach, standing near the trees, down on the floor of the room they liked to read in.

  Brittany had never known another person’s body as well as she came to know Cairo’s. Every inch of his skin. Every tiny imperfection that made his intense male beauty that much more fascinating to her. She tasted her way across the acres of his sculpted chest and lost herself in the taut ridges of his abdomen. She licked him where he was salty and slept tangled up with him in that great big bed. She learned how to straddle him and take him into her, how to ride them both blind, and how to tease him with the slow, careful rhythm of her hips until he could only groan. She learned how to love him with her mouth, sucking him and licking him until he sank his fingers in her hair and bucked against her, emptying himself between her lips.