He’d served the kingdom then, and lived. Santa Domini’s history—but ever unfit to lead. He’d made sure of it.
He thought of the kingdom now.
He thought of the general, dead at last with all the blood of Cairo’s family still there on his hands. And the things that roared in him then had sharp claws. They left deep marks that he knew, from experience, would never go away.
He thought of the woman who had called him magic, who had seen him as no one else in all the world had ever seen him. And no one else ever would. He told himself he didn’t understand what it was that tugged so hard and so insistently at his heart then, leaving him bleak.
He had made himself unfit to be a king. He could not undo that now. He could not erase the things he’d done, nor allow the man who’d done them—the man his father would have loathed—to sit upon that throne.
Cairo had no choice but to gaze back at Ricardo blandly.
“Ready for what?” he asked, and, oh, what it cost him to sound so bored. So disengaged. “The funeral? I’m sure the general’s men will give him a good show.” He paused, as if something occurred to him. “You must know I cannot set foot on Santa Dominian soil, Ricardo. Not even all these years later, when no one could possibly care either way.”
He saw the incredulity on his man’s face, followed by a flash of something as close to pure rage as he’d ever seen a servant show in his presence. And if that made him feel sick, if he loathed himself as much as his father might have had he lived to see what his son had become, that was neither here nor there.
This wasn’t about him. It never had been.
“Ricardo,” he said gently, “what game do you think we’ve been playing here? The goal is to remind the world at every turn that I am not fit to lead. Has that changed?”
“I thought...” Ricardo looked lost. “Sire, that was a game you played, but now it’s ended. I assumed we were merely biding our time.”
“You know what they say about making assumptions, I am certain.”
Ricardo put his coffee down as if he feared he might otherwise drop it. Cairo opened his mouth to say something else, to hammer in the man’s low impression of him even harder and deeper, but heard the faintest sound from behind him.
Cairo knew what he’d see before he turned to confirm it. He’d grown accustomed to the sound of that particular light step. Those particular bare feet against the stones. He’d know her anywhere.
Brittany stood there in the wide-open entry to the lanai, in the deep shadows of the house. She’d thrown on a different dress, this one a bright riot of colors that cascaded from a neat bow around her neck all the way to the ground. Her hair fell in the careless abandon he found endlessly compelling here, copper and bright, but her hazel eyes were too dark and fixed on him.
He’d kept telling himself that he was scratching an itch. Week after week after week. That one of these mornings he would wake up and find himself as bored with Brittany as he’d always been with every other woman alive. But an entire month had passed, and all he felt was this ceaseless hunger.
Cairo wanted to know what she thought. About the book she was reading, about the weather, about what she’d had for her breakfast, about the cloud formations stacked in the sky. He wanted to see what she would say next, on any topic. He loved the stories she’d tell about her Mississippi childhood, the drawl that slipped into her speech and the evident affection she had for the grandmother she’d lost when she was only nine.
He hated not touching her. He hated that she stood across the lanai from him and didn’t come any closer, which felt like a slap after all these weeks. And he felt something very much like shame that she’d seen him transform, so easily and so heedlessly, from the man she’d woken up with into Cairo Santa Domini, professional joke.
“Did you hear?” he asked her, and he thought he was the only one who’d be able to see the way she reacted to that smug, bored voice he used like the weapon it was. The faint widening of her eyes. The quick breath she took, then held. “Ricardo has come all this way to update me on events that cannot concern me in the least.”
“Sire,” Ricardo tried again. “The ministers are the ones most interested in these rumors of your death. They want to move fast and elect another regent while pretending they think you’ve abdicated.”
“Then I should stay where I am,” Cairo said, sounding even more bored than before. “I cannot imagine anything less amusing than a riot. Let them work it out amongst themselves, without my involvement.”
“Don’t be silly.” Brittany’s voice was cool, composed. As sharp as it had been so long ago now, in Monte Carlo. It made him as hard as he’d been then. But this time, it came with a pervasive sense of sorrow at everything they’d lost when that helicopter landed. At all the things that must happen now. They’d agreed on it long before the general had died. “Of course, you must return to Europe.”
“He needs to take his rightful place,” Ricardo said, turning to Brittany as if he expected her to agree with him.
But her eyes met Cairo’s from a distance that seemed much, much farther than merely across the lanai. And he thought he could feel that pressure in his chest cracking into pieces and shattering all around him, so loud and harsh he was surprised no one else seemed to hear it.
“I think my husband’s rightful place is in the tabloids,” she said, and it slid between his ribs like steel. Like a killing blow. Like love, he thought, vicious and deadly. Because she knew him best, this woman. She knew him better than anyone, his destiny and his heart alike. She knew exactly how best to hurt him, and she did it. It made him wonder how he’d hurt her, to make her respond like this. But then it hardly mattered as she kept going. “The more lurid, the better. That is, after all, how we make our money.”
* * *
Brittany waited for Cairo outside his expansive master suite in the historic Parisian residence. The one she didn’t share. The one he’d told her was his before locating her and her things far away from him, down two floors and all the way in the other wing of the grand old house.
It had been a very long handful of days since they’d flown back from the island.
Paris had welcomed them with a glum drizzle and packs of paparazzi, and Brittany had felt...off. She’d assumed it was the culture shock. She’d assumed it was the difficulty in transitioning from a life lived in a sarong and a hammock to all the appearances at parties and balls and charity events that were expected of her, all to be recorded in snide detail in the papers.
She’d assumed it was that little secret deep inside her that she’d still been pretending might be something other than what she’d known, on a deep, feminine level, it was.
“I can’t imagine they think you’ll discuss the lines of ascension here,” she’d said that first night as their car inched closer to the red carpet outside some or other film festival Cairo had insisted they attend. The cameras were everywhere. Squat, grizzled men had poured over the cars like ants, and waiting her turn to be picked apart was making Brittany feel anxious and faintly queasy. “I wish they’d leave us alone.”
“You had better hope they do not,” Cairo had replied from his side of the seat, where he kept his face buried in the paper. “As that would render you obsolete and wholly useless to me.”
He’d been about that charming the entire way back from Vanuatu.
Two nights ago, he’d swept a cutting glance over her when she’d met him in the grand foyer of his museum of a residence.
“You look tired,” he’d said flatly.
“How flattering.” She’d hated that she had to work so hard to sound crisp and unbothered. That she couldn’t switch back into her old role as easily as he had. “That was, of course, my goal for the evening.”
He’d looked impatient. “There is no need to look so tragic. I am thinking only of the photographs.” He fro
wned faintly as he took in her exquisite gown and the jewelry he’d picked out himself. “Perhaps that shade of red is not your color.”
It had been the precise shade of red as the dress she’d worn at their engagement dinner.
“Cairo.” She’d wished she hadn’t bothered when he’d stared back at her as if he hardly recognized her. As if she was nothing to him. She’d felt like nothing, and later, she’d imagined, she would lie awake in her lonely bed where no one could see her and if she cried a little bit about that, nobody need know. “There is no need for you be quite so brusque. People might mistake you for a Royal Jackass.”
She’d thought she’d seen the Cairo she knew in there. Just the faintest glimpse of him, behind all that dark amber. It had made her foolish.
“I know this isn’t you,” she’d said.
“Do you?” he’d asked icily, dangerously. “Because I find I have no idea what awaits me in that mirror every morning. I was meant to be a king, but I made myself a clown. A disgrace to my name. I have no earthly idea who I am—but you think you do?”
She’d shaken at that, but she’d met his tortured gaze. “I know you are a good man.”
“You know nothing of the sort,” he’d said coldly, furiously. “What you know is that I am good in bed, as I told you I was when we met. Do not paint me with all your feverish little fantasies, Brittany. I am not a good man. I have only ever been a monster, and it hardly matters why.”
“Cairo—”
“You are no use to me run-down and dragging,” he’d said then, cutting her off. “My suggestion to you is that you see a doctor and sort yourself out, or leave. Your choice.”
The bastard.
She’d only realized she’d said that out loud when his mouth had curved in a far icier smile than the ones she’d known and basked in on their island. It made her heart ache inside her chest.
“I am afraid I am distressingly legitimate,” he’d replied. As if it hurt him. His mouth had been grim, his caramel gaze dark. “Therein lies the problem.”
Yesterday, she’d summoned Cairo’s private physician. She’d paged through articles on her phone while the brisk woman bustled around her and gave her the news, and she’d tried to imagine what it must feel like for Cairo with the general finally dead and a kingdom he’d made certain he couldn’t claim clamoring for his return. She’d told herself to be calm, to be understanding, and if all of that failed, to be quiet.
Because she’d known going into this that it would hurt. Why was she surprised that, sure enough, it did—if in a different way than she’d anticipated?
“What are you doing here, Brittany?”
She jerked back into the present to find herself on the little upholstered bench in the hall outside Cairo’s bedroom. He stood a few feet away, dressed in one of his three-piece bespoke suits and his hair a calculated mess, his expression as distant as if they’d never met.
Brittany told herself she should hate him. But she didn’t.
She didn’t. She couldn’t.
I have only ever been a monster, he’d said, and that made her want nothing more than to prove him wrong. It made her want to do all kinds of foolish things, like tell him she loved him.
She didn’t dare.
“It’s lovely to see you, too,” she gritted out.
He managed to look as if he was sighing heavily while not actually moving, a skill she might have admired under different circumstances.
“We do not have an appointment,” he told her. “If we did, it would not be in my bedroom. I will see you this evening as planned, for the—”
“Will we just pretend that it never happened?” she demanded, and she was horrified to hear her voice crack. But she pushed on. “That whole month was nothing more than a dream, is that it? Have you truly convinced yourself of that?”
“The honeymoon is over.” His voice was like steel. “It never should have happened in the first place. This was always a business arrangement. We should have kept it on that level.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” she said, and couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up then. “Much too late.”
Another look of impatience flashed over his beautiful face, and he shook his head at her.
“Do you know who I am, Brittany? Have you met me? Read about me in any tabloid?”
She had an inkling of where he was going, of what he might say, and it felt like a car crash. As if she’d spun out of control already and there was nothing she could do to stop it—all the while perfectly cognizant of the tree she was seconds away from smashing against.
“What,” Cairo asked, ruthless and cold, “ever gave you the impression that sex with you would distinguish you in any way from the thousands of women who came before you?”
Everything inside of Brittany went horribly still, then. Frozen solid.
It occurred to her that was a blessing.
She stood, carefully. She smoothed her hands over the sleek line of the dress she wore. She remembered herself, at last. It had been so hard to pull her public persona back onto her and wrap herself up in it again—but look at that. He’d just made it remarkably easy.
“Calm yourself,” she told him, from miles away. Her voice was crisp and cold, and the great thing about the way he’d yanked her heart from her body and crushed it on the floor beneath his shoe was that it couldn’t hurt her any longer. It was simply gone. “I wasn’t forming the queue for a chance in your bed. Been there, done that, thank you.”
His harsh expression didn’t change.
“Then as I said, I will see you tonight. We have a very precise plan, Brittany. I suggest you stick to it.”
“With pleasure,” she replied. Then smiled pure ice at him. “One small wrinkle in the plan, however. I’m pregnant.”
* * *
One sentence and the world crumbled. Cairo knew that better than most.
He’d never thought it would happen again. It had already happened twice. He’d never imagined he would once more find his world divided so tidily into before and after.
“How?”
That hardly sounded like him.
Brittany looked smooth and perfect, which he’d come to hate. She was so different here in Paris. So far from his island lover she might as well have been a different woman. Her hair was pulled back in a sleek chignon. She wore a tailored dress and her usual impeccable shoes. She looked like a glossy photograph of herself. She looked untouchable, and no matter if she was slightly pale.
She made him ache. She made him wish he was a different man—a better one.
Her expression turned faintly pitying.
“You’re the one with battalions of experience, as you are so happy to share with me and every tabloid reporter in Europe. Surely you can figure out how.”
Cairo could only stare at her, the world he knew falling apart in great chunks all around him, though the hall was quiet. Deceptively peaceful.
“You cannot be pregnant,” he told her.
Another cool smile. “Funny, that was what I told the doctor. Almost verbatim. Apparently, it’s not up to me.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I assume it was that first time, in the castle before our wedding,” she continued, her voice as falsely merry as her eyes were hard. “How romantic, I’m sure you’ll agree. I took the liberty of paging through our contract this morning and it seems there’s no provision for pregnancy—”
“Of course there isn’t.” Dimly, he understood that he was raging. That he’d shouted that. “I am the last of the Santa Dominis, Brittany. It ends with me. There cannot be another.”
Her composure cracked at that, and all the things he’d tried so hard to ward off and keep at bay swept over him then as her hands crept over her flat belly. As her mouth softened, even trembled.
> He had always been so careful. How had he let this happen?
“Cairo.” He had never heard her so tentative, and that tore at him. “Is it really so bad?”
“Do you think I spent my wasted life in the tabloids for fun?” he threw at her. “I did it for protection. The more irredeemable I was, the less likely anyone would ever see me as a king. The moment I became anything like a king, the general would have me killed.”
Brittany shook her head, her eyes flashing. “The general is dead.”
She had to understand. She had to see the danger.
He closed the distance between them, wrapping his hands around her shoulders and putting his face in hers.
“I cannot have a child.” He heard the thickness in his voice, the decades of grief and pain. “I cannot condemn an innocent to this life. I have never been a good man. I have never lived up to a single expectation. But I will not be that kind of monster, selfish beyond imagining. I will not lock a baby in this prison with me.”
He didn’t know when tears had begun to fall from her eyes, only that they tracked down her face. And the hands he’d put on her shoulders to keep her at a distance curved to hold her instead.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Cairo,” she whispered. “Don’t you understand? You’re not alone in this any longer.”
“We have a plan—” he started.
“I love you,” she said, very distinctly.
Again, the world was cleaved in two. And again, he could do nothing about it but mourn the split—and the inevitability of what he had to do.
“No,” he said, very clearly, so she could not possibly mistake the matter. “You do not.”
“Of course I love you.” She scowled at him. “You’re the only man I’ve ever let touch me. I not only let you touch me, I threw myself into it without a single thought about the consequences. Please. I know exactly where babies come from, Cairo. I knew about condoms before I knew my own telephone number. None of these things are accidents.”
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