Expecting a Royal Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  And she had never been known so comprehensively in return.

  Oh, the things Cairo taught her about herself. About her appetites and her capacity for both pleasure and need. There was no boundary he wouldn’t cross, no limit he wouldn’t push, if he thought it would make her scream.

  It usually did.

  He was insatiable. She lost count of the times he reached for her at night, or the times their gazes snagged during the day and led to more of that bone-melting fire they fanned high in each other again and again.

  It couldn’t last. She told herself that of course it couldn’t last, but perhaps that was what made it so poignant.

  Or that was what Brittany told herself as the weeks rolled by, slow and bright and more beautiful than anything she’d ever dared imagine. Better than she ever could have dreamed that night she’d rejected his initial proposal in Monte Carlo. Just...better.

  Because the other thing they did with all their time together was talk. Rambling conversations that started one day and ended the next, and that Brittany only realized later were deeply revealing. Stories comparing their very different childhoods, painted in broad strokes and told as if they’d been amusing, when they weren’t. Current events, popular culture in at least three countries, even the odd conversation about sports—all these things, taken together, meant not only that she knew the exiled king of Santa Domini better than anyone alive, but that he also knew her the same way.

  Inside and out, that little voice inside her reminded her daily. No masks. No act. Just you.

  She told herself it didn’t scare her, such astonishing intimacy. Because she wouldn’t let it.

  One night, after they’d had their usual dinner of fresh grilled seafood and an array of perfect fruits, they sat out on one of the terraces beneath the night sky. The flames on the tiki torches danced in the faint breeze from the water, and they were tucked up together on one of the loungers. Brittany sat between Cairo’s legs, her back to his chest, and absently ran her fingers through his.

  It had been a month, and the fact of that had been echoing inside her all day. It reminded her that this wasn’t forever. That this relaxed, smiling man who was all caramel and whiskey when he looked at her here would disappear, and soon. They would put on more clothes and walk back onto the stage where they conducted their lives and had already made plans to end their brand-new marriage, and these weeks would be the anomaly.

  She would have to wake up, and she didn’t want that. More to the point, she would have to deal with the growing worry deep inside of her that the fact she’d missed her period for the first time in her life, two weeks into their stay, was from something more than the stress of such a major life change.

  Brittany didn’t want to consider that, much less what it might mean if her suspicions were correct. All the things it might mean, when their relationship had a built-in expiration date. A child was forever, no matter their messy divorce.

  A child would change everything.

  “You seem far away.”

  Cairo’s voice was rich and lazy, but Brittany knew that, here, it was because he was actually relaxed. She couldn’t bring herself to ruin that. She felt the words on her tongue and swallowed them back.

  They had so little time left before they were back in the world. It could wait.

  “We only have a week left here.” She blew out a breath and told herself it was kinder to wait until she knew for certain. Better. “It’s going to be hard to leave. To get back onstage and into the headlines.”

  Her hair curled as it pleased in the humidity here, and after the first day or two of fighting it she’d simply let it do what it would. Behind her, Cairo wrapped a long curl he found around his finger, winding it tighter and tighter, then let it loose only to start all over again.

  “What would you do?” he asked idly. Or perhaps not idly at all. “If there were no headlines. If there was only a normal life to live.”

  “A normal good life or a normal bad life?” she asked, tipping her head back to better rest against his shoulder.

  His mouth, still the most gorgeous thing imaginable, grazed her forehead in a glancing kiss that still managed to make that glowing heat deep inside her spike.

  “I believe that is the trial of normal life, is it not? One cannot tell, day to day. One is without the constant intervention of the press, there to interpret every move and fashion it into a narrative that sells papers. If that is good or bad is up to you.”

  “I want picket fences,” Brittany said, surprising herself. But once she said it, she warmed to the idea. “I want to cook things, feed a family, worry about the school run and the ladies at the PTA. I want the life they live in minivan commercials, with golden retrievers and a good soundtrack.”

  She felt his laughter, deep in his chest.

  “You would not get to dance in that life. The picket fences forbid it, I think.”

  She smiled at that. “I’d dance for fun, not money. That’s the problem with being good at what you love. You turn it into your job and then it can’t be about love anymore. It has to be about bills.” She laughed. “Not that you’d know much about bills, I think.”

  “I pay my bills.” Cairo’s voice was ripe with the same laughter she’d felt in his chest, and that wealth of affection that she knew would fade, out there. Out in all those spotlights and flashbulbs. And it would likely happen very quickly if she really was pregnant. She shoved that aside. “Larger ones, I imagine, than most.”

  He pulled her closer to him. She could feel the heat of him through the gauzy layer of the flowing dress she wore. The heat and the steel-edged strength that was all Cairo. With his arms around her and his body surrounding her, Brittany felt hollowed-out and whole at once.

  “What would you do?” she asked. “If you could choose a normal life, what would it be?”

  He was quiet for a long time. Brittany could feel the solid weight of him behind her and feel the soothing beat of his heart against her back. She listened to the waves in the distance as she waited, and tried to tip herself over and out into the stars spread out so thickly above them.

  “I do not think I know what normal is,” Cairo said, when she’d stopped expecting that he might respond. He sounded quieter than before. “I do not know what it looks like.”

  “You could be an accountant,” she said, crinkling up her nose at the image of his highness, the imperious accountant. “Or, I know, a traveling bard. Can you sing? That would work better if you sang, of course.”

  “The only thing I know how to be is me,” Cairo said, and there was a strange note in his voice then.

  Brittany didn’t think. She shifted around on the lounger, moving so she could straddle him and loop her arms around his neck. She looked down into his perfect face. Those impossible cheekbones, that purely Santa Domini jaw he deliberately left unshaven, as if that could obscure the truth of him. As if anything could, exile or a thousand mocking headlines or his own penchant for self-destruction.

  She felt him stir beneath her, and felt her own body, so attuned to him now, instantly ready itself for his possession. But she made no move to impale herself on him, to throw them both back into that slick, breathless heat. She only searched his royal face in the starlight, and that odd expression in his dark amber eyes.

  “Then that’s normal,” she said. “That’s your normal life. Why should you change?”

  Cairo’s mouth curved. “I like it when you are fierce on my behalf, tesorina. The truth is I have never adapted.” He shrugged, and she expected him to kiss her. To change the subject with his touch as he usually did. She was shocked when he kept speaking. “I was bred to be the king of Santa Domini. My father might have been exiled, but he always imagined that was a temporary state of affairs. He had every intention of reclaiming his throne.” His jaw hardened, and though his hands were at her hips she c
ould see his attention was far in the past. “Even after he died, nothing changed. I was the unofficial king. I was always me. It didn’t matter how many ways I made it clear I was unfit to rule. Every person I trusted expected that someday, I would take back the kingdom. All these years later, they still do.” His gaze found hers, hard and stirring and filled with a darkness that tugged at her. “What is normal for me, Brittany, is to be the greatest disappointment my people have ever known.”

  “No.” The word was out before she knew she meant to speak, but she didn’t stop. She continued, feeling very nearly furious—but for him, not at him. “Nothing about you is disappointing.”

  Something sparked in his gaze then. He lifted a hand to slide it over her cheek, anchoring his fingers in her hair as if he’d hold her there forever. As if he could.

  “You cannot be trusted,” he told her softly. “You make me imagine I could be not only a decent man, but the man I was intended to become. You are so far under my spell you cannot see straight.”

  “You’re wrong, Your Majesty,” she whispered back, still fierce and sure, and finally using the title that he deserved. His title. “You’re pure magic.”

  The way he looked at her then, so certain that that was the sex talking and it could never, ever be true, broke her heart.

  And that was when she knew. It wasn’t a jolt or a shock. It was as inevitable as the next wave against the gleaming white sand. The sun sinking into the sea. It washed through her, changing her completely from one moment to the next, though nothing had changed. She loved him. She wondered if she always had, even back in that first moment when she’d seen him across a casino floor and had been struck dumb. She’d known this would happen from the start.

  This was the ruin, the destruction, she’d feared all along. Love. As simple and as terrifying as that.

  She’d spent a month here with absolutely no mask. She’d given him her virginity. She’d opened herself up to him in a thousand ways she hadn’t known were possible, and she thought that no matter what happened next, even if she really was pregnant, she couldn’t regret it. She wouldn’t.

  But she couldn’t tell him, either.

  Because she knew without having to ask that love was the one thing that could ruin everything between them. Worse, perhaps, than the possibility of a child.

  “No, tesorina,” Cairo said, that look in his eyes that made her heart feel shattered. Sad and wise and lost, as if they were already back in Europe. As if she’d already had to give him up, the way they’d planned. As if he’d known all along that this dream of theirs could never last. She’d known that, too. And it hadn’t done a single thing to stop this. Any of this. “You are the magic.”

  And then he pulled her mouth to his.

  She kissed him back, a sharp desperation snaking through her. Because every kiss was measured now. Every touch was closer to their last.

  She wriggled against him, lifting herself up so she could find him in his linen trousers and free the satin length of him between them. The fire that always raged in them both was a madness tonight, the flames wild and almost harsh, and Brittany shook as she waited for him to handle their protection, as he’d done every single time save their first. She let out a soft sound of distress when he pulled his mouth from hers, and he didn’t laugh at her the way he usually did.

  Neither one of them was in a playful mood.

  She felt the blunt head of his sex against her softness, and she rolled her hips to take him inside of her. She worked herself down, rocking gently until she was seated fully against him.

  Cairo let out a long, hard breath. Brittany wrapped her arms around his shoulders and then, giving in to an urge she didn’t want to name, tipped her forehead to his. For an eternity, they sat there like that, drinking each other in. Her husband. Her king. Possibly the father of her child. For as long as she had him.

  He was huge and hard within her, she was soft and trembling. Their mouths were so close she could breathe with him if she liked, and it was as if they’d both realized how close they were to losing this. How very short, indeed, the week they had remaining to them was.

  She started to move then, and this time, it was a dance. It was joy.

  It was love.

  Brittany couldn’t say it, she didn’t dare say such a thing to the man she’d married purely for the headlines, so she showed him. Every roll of her hips, every lift and every slide. He peeled the straps of her dress down and took one of her hard nipples into his mouth, driving her wild as she loved him with every last part of her being. He pulled hard and she let her head drop back, and then it really was as if she’d fallen off into all those stars.

  It was hard to tell who did what. There was only sensation and fire, bliss and longing.

  Love, she thought, with each delirious thrust, but then she stopped thinking altogether.

  And there was only Cairo.

  He reached down between them and pressed hard where she needed him most, and Brittany exploded—but he didn’t stop. He surged into her, pounding her straight through one exultant climax and high again toward another.

  He flipped them over on the lounger, coming over her in the soft, silken night as he thrust himself home.

  Deeper. Harder. Better than perfect.

  Again and again and again.

  Until they flew over that edge together.

  And stayed there beneath the quiet glory of the southern stars until the first hint of a brand-new morning, when everything changed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  RICARDO ARRIVED ON the island via very noisy helicopter from Port Vila, Vanuatu’s capital city, not long after the break of dawn.

  He was not welcome, Cairo thought uncharitably as he watched his most loyal subject walk toward him over the otherwise deserted beach, the crisp suit he wore that was so appropriate in Paris looking nothing but out of place here.

  It was a stark reminder of how far away Cairo had been from the world this last month—and how much he’d like to remain here forever.

  “Was I expecting you?” Cairo asked. He led Ricardo onto the lanai where breakfast was usually served, and nodded toward the carafe of strong, hot coffee he knew the man preferred. “I feel certain I was not.”

  It was more of an effort than it should have been to keep his tone light. Lazy and careless, as expected. He’d grown unused to speaking to anyone but Brittany—and he’d thought he’d be able to keep it that way a while longer.

  The truth was, he didn’t want to speak to anyone but Brittany. He hadn’t wanted to leave her when the sound of the helicopter had woken them both where they’d drowsed off together beneath the light blanket he’d pulled over them sometime in the middle of the night. He’d had to let her go, and he didn’t like that edgy, pointed sort of feeling that had moved into his chest lately, to go along with that pressure that never really eased.

  He didn’t like any of this.

  “You have been out of reach for a month, Sire,” Ricardo replied, pressing a mug of coffee to his lips. He took a pull, relaxed his shoulders, then focused on Cairo again. “Completely out of reach. There were rumors that you were dead.”

  Cairo waved a hand. “There are always rumors.”

  “These were more convincing, given the absence of the usual photographic evidence to the contrary.”

  “I would never die in so obscure a fashion,” Cairo murmured, and some part of him was dismayed at how easy it was to pick up his role again. To slip back into that second skin of his and treat it like it was the only one he knew. “Especially not so tragically young. I would make certain to die theatrically in a major city, the better to leverage good media coverage of my pageant of a funeral.”

  “Sire.” Ricardo’s expression was...not grim, exactly. Solemn, Cairo thought. And something rather more like expectant. “General Estes suffered a m
assive heart attack a few days ago. He collapsed in the palace and was rushed to the hospital, where, after many attempts to revive him, he died.” He watched Cairo’s face as if he expected a reaction. When Cairo only stared, he cleared his throat. “His ministers have stepped in and are trying to maintain the peace, but they have never been anything but puppets. You know this. And, Sire. The people...” Ricardo made no attempt to hide the gleam in his gaze when he trained it on Cairo. The fervor, the belief. “Sire, the people are ready.”

  Time seemed to spread out. To flatten.

  Cairo remembered his father’s hand, heavy on his shoulder as they’d walked together through a foggy British morning on a remote estate, years ago now.

  “What if we never go home?” Cairo had asked. He could not have been more than eight years old. His father, then the exiled king to Cairo’s crown prince, had seemed so old to him then. So wise and aged, when in truth he’d been an athletic man midway through his forties.

  “It is your duty to carry Santa Domini within you wherever you go, whether we return home or not,” his father had said. “You must serve the kingdom in all you do and say. All you are. Every step and every action, Cairo. That is your calling. Your destiny.”

  He’d never forgotten it. Not when they’d come to get him out of his history classroom that rainy winter day, bundling him off to a room where grim strangers frowned at him and pretended to be concerned for him. Not when they’d told him everyone he loved was dead and his world was forever altered. Not when he’d realized that he must be next on the general’s assassination list, no matter that the man’s involvement was never officially confirmed, and no matter how many people told him that it had been an accident.

  Not when he’d wondered, in his grief, if he should let the general exterminate him, too. It would have been so much easier than fighting.

  He’d thought of the kingdom then.

  “There’s only the prince now,” the woman had said on the news. She’d been a village woman from one of the most remote spots in the kingdom. He’d watched her from a guarded hotel room somewhere outside of Boston, while the authorities investigated his family’s death. He hadn’t been permitted to attend their funerals, but he’d watched his people mourn. “He’s all that we have left of our history.”