“Are you reviewing my performance?”
“Consider it the studied reaction of a rather ardent fan of the art form.”
“I don’t know what’s more astounding. That you sullied your aristocratic self in a burlesque club in ‘the sewers of Paris,’ as you call them, or that you would admit to such shocking behavior in the glare of all this fussy Monte Carlo elegance. Your desperate acolytes can hear you, you know.” She leaned closer and dropped her voice to a stage whisper she was fairly certain carried all the way across the Italian border less than ten miles to the east. “You’d better be careful, Your Exiled Highness. The chandeliers themselves might shatter at the notion that a man of your known proclivities attended something so prosaic and tedious as a nightclub.”
“I was under the impression my behavior no longer shocked a soul, or so the wearisome British papers would have me believe. In any case, do you really feel as if a return to the dance halls of your storied past are a good investment in your future? I’d thought your latest marriage was a step in a different direction. A pity about the will.” That half smile of his was—she understood as it sliced through her and reminded her of the very public way her most recent husband’s heirs had announced that Brittany had been excluded from the bulk his estate—an understated weapon. “I ask as a friend.”
“I would be quite surprised if you truly had any friends at all.” She eyed him and amped up her own smile. Polite and charming fangs. Her specialty. “But I digress. In some circles a glance at my frilly underthings is considered something of a generous gift. You’re welcome.”
“Ah, Ms. Hollis, let us not play these games.” Something not quite a smile any longer played with that stunning mouth of his, marking him significantly more formidable than a mere playboy. “You did not strip, as widely advertised. You hardly performed at all, and meanwhile the chance to get a glimpse of Jean Pierre Archambault’s disgraced widow in the nude was the primary attraction of the entire exercise. The whole thing was a regrettable tease.”
She shrugged delicately, fully aware it made the gold fabric of her gown gleam and shimmer as if she herself was lit from within. “That must have been a novel experience for a man of your well-documented depravities.”
His head tilted slightly to one side and his gaze was not particularly friendly. Somehow, this made him more beautiful. “You were a high school dropout.”
Brittany knew better than to show any sort of reaction to the shift in topic. Or to what was likely meant to be a hard slap to shove her back into her place. Trouble was, she’d never much cared for her place, or she’d still be in Gulfport scraping out a miserable existence with the rest of her relatives. No, thank you.
“Did they call it something different when you failed to finish one private boarding school after the next?” she asked sweetly. His Royal Jackass wasn’t the only one with access to the internet. “There were how many in a row? Six? I know the obscenely rich make their own rules, but I was under the impression your numerous expulsions meant you and I are both somehow making it through the big, bad world without a high school diploma. Maybe we’ll be best friends after all.”
Cairo ignored her, though she thought there was a certain appreciative gleam in those deceptively sweet-looking eyes of his. “A runaway at sixteen, in the company of your first husband. And what a prime choice he was. He was what we might call...”
He paused, as if in deference to her feelings. Or as if he’d suddenly recalled his manners. Brittany laughed.
“We called Darryl a way to get out of Gulfport, Mississippi,” she replied. She let a little more twang into her voice, as emphasis. “Believe me, you make that choice when it comes along, no matter the drug-addled loser that may or may not come with it. Not the sort of choice you had to make, I imagine, while growing up coddled and adored on one of your family’s numerous foreign properties.”
The word exile called to mind something a bit more perilous than the Santa Domini royal family’s collection of luxury estates; here a ranch, there an island, everywhere a sprawling penthouse in the best neighborhood of any given city. It was hard to muster up any sympathy, Brittany found, especially when her own choices had been to live wherever she could make it work or end up back in her mother’s trailer.
“Your second husband was far more in the style to which you would soon become accustomed. You and he became rather well known on that dreadful television program of yours, did you not?”
“Hollywood Hustle ran for two seasons and is considered one of the less appalling reality shows out there,” Brittany said, as if in agreement. “If we’re tallying them all up.”
“That’s a rather low bar.”
“Said the pot to the kettle.” She eyed him. “Most viewers were obsessed with the heartwarming love story of Chaz and Mariella, not Carlos and me.”
“The tattoo artist.” Cairo didn’t actually crook his fingers around the word artist, but it was very strongly implied. And, as Brittany recalled, deserved. “And the sad church secretary who wanted him to follow his heart and become a derivative landscape painter, or some such drivel.”
“Pulse-pounding, riveting stuff,” Brittany agreed dryly. “As you clearly already know, if you feel you’re in a good place to judge the behavior of others despite every cautionary tale ever told about glass houses.”
It had all been entirely faked, of course. Carlos had been told the gay character he’d auditioned for had already been cast, but there was an opening for a bad-girl villain and her hapless husband—as long as they were legally married. Brittany was the only woman Carlos had known who’d wanted to get out of Texas as much as he did, so the whole thing was a no-brainer. The truth was that after Darryl, Brittany didn’t think too highly of the institution of marriage anyway. She and Carlos had been together long enough to get reality-show famous—which wasn’t really famous at all, despite what so many people in her family seemed to think—and then, when the show’s ratings started to fade and their name recognition went with them, Brittany had dramatically “left” Carlos for Jean Pierre, so Carlos could complain about it in the tabloids and land himself a new gig.
But to the greater public, of course, she was that low-class slut who had ruined a poor, sweet, good man. A tale as old as time, blah blah blah.
She raised her brows at Cairo Santa Domini now. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a fan of the show. Or any reality show, for that matter. I thought inhabitants of your social strata wafted about pretending to read Proust.”
“I spend a lot of my time on airplanes, not in glass houses and very rarely with Proust,” Cairo replied, a glint in the caramel depths of his gaze as he waved a careless hand. “Your show was such a gripping drama, was it not? You, the heartless stripper who wouldn’t give up your tawdry dancing for the good of your marriage. Carlos, the loving husband who tried so desperately to stay true to you despite the way you betrayed him on those poles every night. The path of true love, et cetera.”
Brittany felt the flash of her own smile as she aimed it at him, and concentrated on making it brighter. Bolder. It was amazing what people failed to see in the glare of a great smile.
“I’m a terrible person,” she agreed merrily. “If a television show says so, it must be true. Speaking of which, didn’t I see you featured on one of those tabloid programs just last week? Something about a hapless heiress, a weekend in the Maldives and the corrosive nature of your company?”
“Remind me,” Cairo murmured, sounding somewhat less amused—she was almost certain. “Were you still married to Carlos when you met Jean Pierre?”
Brittany laughed. A sparkling, effortless, absolutely false laugh. “You appear to be confusing my résumé with yours.”
“And speaking of Jean Pierre, may he rest in peace, what was it that drew you together? He, the elderly man confined to a wheelchair with a