Expecting a Royal Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  “None of those things matter,” he said. He shook his head, trying to clear it. Trying to think. “We will have to fabricate a lover and have him claim the child. It will be a huge scandal. The baby you tried to pass off as mine—”

  “No.”

  She didn’t scowl. She didn’t shout. She simply stood there, her hand curved over her belly, her face pale, as if she was carved from marble, and as movable.

  “No?” he echoed.

  “No,” she said again, even more firmly. “This is your baby. I am your wife. I’m done playing these games, Cairo.”

  “You already agreed to play them.”

  “I agreed to play tabloid tag with a man who doesn’t exist,” she said, and though her voice was still thick with emotion, she didn’t waver. “But then I fell in love with you. The real you. The man who, deep down when everything is stripped away, is a king. The true king of Santa Domini, no matter what happened in the interim.”

  “The true king of Santa Domini died in a car crash years ago.” Cairo’s voice was harsh with the past. Bitter. “I am nothing but his embarrassing shadow.”

  “The general stole your country. He killed your family. He forced you into this terrible game and, worse than that, somehow got you to believe that the act you put on is who you really are.”

  “It is no act. How else can I tell you?”

  But he couldn’t bring himself to drop his hands, to step away.

  “Is that what you want for this baby?” she asked him softly, her dark hazel eyes hard and beseeching at once. “You want to condemn him to the same game? The same lie of a life in public, until it starts to feel real in private, too?”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” But he dropped his gaze to that belly of hers. “You have no idea what is involved.”

  “Here’s what I know.” And Brittany pulled herself away from his grasp, stepping back so he had no choice but to let her go. He saw the sheen of emotion in her eyes and the resolve, too. “Neither one of us had any choice. We did what we had to do, and our lives played out in a hundred different tabloids because of it. But our child deserves better.”

  “I agree,” he said fiercely. “That is why no one must know it’s mine.”

  She drew herself up to her full height and there was no pretending she was anything but regal. She had been from the start.

  “I won’t run. I won’t hide and I won’t lie. I am your queen and this baby is the heir to your kingdom. Don’t you understand?”

  She searched his gaze and he didn’t want to hide from it any longer. From her. When he knew she was the only one who’d ever really seen him in years.

  The only one who had ever known the man he’d hidden beneath a series of masks, each more elaborate than the next.

  “It doesn’t matter if you love me,” she told him, and his heart twisted in his chest at the quiet resolve in the way she said that. “What matters is the future. The future you never had, but your child can. The general is dead. It’s your throne, Cairo. All you have to do is claim it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THIRTY YEARS AFTER escaping it in the middle of the night, His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini walked back into the Royal Palace that his family had held for generations.

  It had been remarkably easy to retrace his family’s steps. Up into the mountains and over the border, then down through the farthest villages, making his way through the very heart of the alpine kingdom he had been born to protect.

  And with every step, he knew. That this was right. That this was home. That even if what was left of the general’s military executed him the moment he set foot in the palace, this was where he belonged.

  In his country, with his people, taking back what was his so that no child of his blood would be forced to live as he had done all these miserable years.

  The white-covered mountains were deep in his bones. The green hills, the crystal-blue lakes—they pumped in his blood. They made him who he was.

  By the time he reached the palace gates, he had attracted followers and the inevitable press. But he didn’t stop to read headlines or gauge public sentiment.

  He didn’t care what the papers said. This was right. Finally, he was doing what was right.

  Ricardo stood proud at his side. Hundreds of loyalists stood at his back. The police had met them outside the capital city, but rather than arresting them all, had only escorted the procession along their route toward the palace.

  “You are a movement, Sire,” Ricardo told him.

  Cairo knew better. He was a man. He was a mediocre husband and he was already well on his way to being a terrible father. He was famous for all the wrong reasons and he’d squandered the better part of his life in fear.

  But none of that mattered, because one woman had looked straight into the monster in him and seen only the king.

  Today, at long last, he would claim that crown.

  He walked through the palace gates that the general’s remaining cronies didn’t dare close against the rightful heir to the Santa Domini throne. Not when he had made this so public. He climbed the ceremonial steps, as aware of the news helicopters buzzing overhead as he was of the brave men and women who walked with him, ushering him toward his uncertain future.

  But he would walk to meet it with his head held high. As his father would have wanted him to do, he knew without question.

  He hadn’t been in the palace since he was five years old, but Cairo knew his way. He marched past the ancient canvases that depicted his ancestors, the frescoes and the marbled halls, to the grand throne room that he knew full well had not been used since his father had last sat there thirty years ago.

  That was where they met him, a pack of fat, old men with soft hands and shifty-eyed guards.

  Cairo did not wait for them to speak.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, stopping halfway across the polished floors and standing there beneath the statue of his grandfather, aware that there were cameras on him, as there were always cameras on him. Today he was grateful for it.

  And he was aware that no matter what happened here, he would be remembered for this moment above all others in his life.

  Better make it good.

  “I am Cairo, the last of the Santa Dominis. I believe you have been waiting to execute me for the crime of possessing my father’s blood for the past thirty years.” He inclined his head, though his eyes glittered and he felt his rage inside him like a drum. “Here I am. Do with me as you will.”

  * * *

  Brittany watched the dramatic reclamation of the Santa Domini throne with the rest of the dumbstruck world—on television, hidden away in a safe house in one of Cairo’s lesser known properties in the remote Scottish highlands.

  It had been part of the bargain they’d struck when Cairo told her what he planned to do, and what he needed her to do if he did not live through it.

  It hadn’t been lost on her that Cairo had not expected to survive. But it was one more thing she couldn’t allow herself to examine too closely.

  She and a Hollywood actor as well known for his collection of children by assorted famous mothers as for any actual acting waited out the march into Santa Domini together in the drafty old manor house. Meaning she had watched it live on the twenty-four-hour news channel in the cozy den while the blandly attractive, deeply boring man in question had done push-ups in the gallery and spent several hours on his mobile phone shouting at his agent.

  “You don’t have to stay any longer,” she’d told him after Cairo walked into the palace. When the remaining ministers resigned on the spot and the bells of all the Santa Domini churches began to ring out across the land after lying dormant for thirty years.

  Long Live the King! the news sites and the people cheered.


  As if Cairo had never been scandalous in all his life.

  Because he was the king, she understood. She was his scandal.

  “I don’t understand why I was here for this,” the actor told her, annoyed. “Why would anyone pay that much money to have me just...sit around for a week?”

  “Rich people are strange,” Brittany said coolly. “Royals are worse.”

  Then she’d dismissed him and waited for the car to take her to the plane that would deliver her to her own fate.

  She landed in Santa Domini the following morning.

  Aides whisked her from the plane into a fleet of gleaming black cars with tinted windows, hurrying her into the palace as if they were trying to hide her from the public. She imagined that was exactly what they were doing. It was exactly what she’d expected they’d do.

  Cairo might have been instantly forgiven his scandalous past by virtue of his being, in fact, a king. But she was a girl who’d taken her clothes off for a living and then married a few men for obvious practical reasons. There was no forgiveness for her. Especially when the king himself didn’t love her.

  She told herself it didn’t hurt, because it shouldn’t. This wasn’t about her or her feelings or her battered heart. It was about the baby that grew inside her daily. It was about a different sort of love altogether.

  She told herself that had to be enough.

  Brittany didn’t see Cairo again until they led her out onto the balcony high above the palace’s famous square, where kings had addressed the nation for centuries. She had been dressed and styled by a pack of palace attendants, then brought here to wait for him with everyone else.

  He strode from the great doors and did nothing more than slide a swift, intense look her way on his way to his podium. She made herself smile. Because what mattered was that he claimed his throne and took back his kingdom so that his child would never have to hide as he’d done.

  She smiled dutifully in her lovely silver gown, her hair sleek and sophisticated, as if she really was a queen. And then watched the man she’d never meant to fall in love with, the father of the baby she carried within her, take his rightful place before his people.

  It didn’t matter that he didn’t love her, that no one could or ever had. What mattered, she told herself as he stood there so proud and tall and beautiful, was that she loved him. She hadn’t known she could. She’d worried she’d been broken by her family, her squalid, public life. But she loved him, and that was a good thing, regardless of what happened next.

  “I have been hiding in plain sight the whole of my adult life,” Cairo told the huge, cheering crowd, and all the world. “I believed I served my country by disappointing it, day after day. By rendering myself the least likely king, I ensured not only that I survived, but that the vile enemies of this kingdom could not vent their spleen on any who supported me.”

  He stood there in the same sort of suit he’d always worn, the very height of male elegance and every inch of him royal. He was the same man he’d always been, so beautiful it almost hurt to look at him. But now, Brittany knew, the whole world saw what she’d always seen beneath all of that. The real man within him, brave and true, who had always been more than the role he’d played.

  The man she loved desperately and totally, with every fiber of her being, but could never truly have as she had during those stolen weeks on the island.

  He was the King of Santa Domini.

  She was a jumped up stripper whose own mother was ashamed of her antics.

  His voice was sure and true as he addressed his subjects. Brittany called on all her years of pretending, all the acting she’d done and all the situations she’d had to weather, and stood there smiling as if her world wasn’t ending right there in front of her.

  The pain of it would pass. Or fade, anyway. She was sure it would, some day. She would always be his footnote. And the mother of his child.

  But because she loved him, she would step aside as soon as she could do so without causing him any further scandal, and let him marry the sort of woman fit for a king.

  It wouldn’t make her child any less his heir, and that, she told herself firmly, was the only thing that mattered. That and the life the child could live, a life not on the run, a life that Cairo hadn’t had.

  Out there in front of her, Cairo was still speaking. He talked of his parents. He talked of his sister, the lost princess, Magdalena. He mourned the dead and promised that he would see to it that any citizen of the kingdom who had suffered under the general’s rule would meet with him if they wished, so he could personally see to it that their suffering was ended.

  Brittany thought she’d never seen a man better suited to be a king.

  That was why, when her phone had rung beside her while she’d been getting ready earlier, flashing her mother’s number and promising the usual punishment, she’d ignored it.

  She didn’t need that abuse anymore. She didn’t need to feel badly about herself to know who she was.

  She would survive this. She would do more than merely survive this. She loved a man who loved his country, and she wasn’t afraid of the sacrifices ahead of her, no matter that they might prove difficult. Life was often difficult. That didn’t mean it wasn’t good.

  For the first time since she’d left that island, and since she’d found out she was pregnant, Brittany felt at peace.

  And Cairo was still speaking, his voice ringing out over those famous palace steps, down into the fairy-tale courtyard, and all across the world that had always hung on his every word, but never so much as today.

  “Some have asked, why now? What prompted me to find my way back to my people, my country, my life?” He shifted, and glanced over his shoulder, his caramel gaze grazing hers. It was a swift, quick glance, and yet it was as if he looked straight into her soul. Brittany found she was holding her breath. “It was not the ignominious fall of a vicious man who fancied himself a dictator, let me assure you. It was something far less noble than the urge to do my duty. I found myself a woman who wasn’t the least bit impressed with me and I made her my queen.”

  That statement went through her like a lightning bolt. And it hurt.

  She’d imagined he’d issue a tasteful statement, released quietly sometime after the world had grown used to the return of the king. Not...here, now. With so many people as witnesses.

  Brittany had to remind herself that the whole world was watching. That this was not for her or even about her. This was about a kingdom that deserved better than a stripper queen. Better than an infamous woman who had only ever learned how to make money and headlines. She reminded herself that Cairo was not hers. That he had never been hers, not really, no matter that she carried their baby inside of her or wore the Heart of Santa Domini on her hand.

  He belonged to his people. He had only ever been on loan.

  But she cradled the precious ring with the fingers of her other hand anyway, as if she thought someone might come and try to take it from her right there where she stood. She would give it back when asked, of course. She would do the right thing.

  Until then, she’d pretend this was the fairy tale that deep down she’d always dreamed about, no matter how many times life kicked her in the teeth instead.

  She lifted her chin. In front of her, Cairo smiled, then turned back to his subjects and all those cameras.

  Brittany braced herself. And she smiled.

  “I made her my queen and she made me a man,” Cairo told the world. “And as I learned to be the kind of man who deserved such a queen as Brittany, kind and true, strong and brave, I understood what I owed not only to her, but to you, the people of Santa Domini. I did not know if I would claim my throne or lose my life when I returned here. I only knew that I could not live with myself if I stayed in hiding, forever on the run, forever a man unworthy of both his queen and his country.”<
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  He lifted his arm and raised it toward the crowd. “I pledge to you that I will always strive to be the king you deserve, and to serve this country with every breath and bone in my body.”

  Then he turned.

  King Cairo, resplendent and fierce in the clear mountain air, with thousands of adoring subjects cheering him on from below.

  Today, Brittany knew exactly what that glorious mouth of his tasted like, and how it felt against every part of her skin. She knew the heavy silk of his dark hair and how it felt to run her hands through it. She missed the careless scruff he’d shaved from his astonishingly handsome face, the better to show off that perfectly cut Santa Domini jaw.

  And, oh, his eyes. They were caramel and they were wicked and they were focused on her as if there was nothing else in all the world but the two of them.

  He held her gaze for a moment.

  Then the rightful king of Santa Domini dropped to his knees before her. Her heart stopped. Then pounded into her, wild against her ribs, so hard she almost toppled over.

  “Brittany,” he said, as if they were alone, though the microphone on his lapel transmitted his words around the globe, “I love you.”

  The crowd roared. And Brittany didn’t have it in her to fight the tears that spilled over and poured down her cheeks.

  “No,” she told him, because she had to. Because he deserved a real queen. A good one, who was proper and good and had never been featured in a burlesque ensemble in a tabloid—much less on a reality television program. “You can’t. You’re a king.”

  “And you are a queen,” he replied, the maddening man. “My queen.”

  And Brittany forgot the crowds, the cameras. She forgot where they were. They might as well have been back on their own private island, with nothing for miles in all directions but the deep blue sea.