“We had a shared interest in applied sciences, of course,” Brittany replied, deadpan and dry. “What else?”
“An interest that his children did not share, given they wasted no time in ejecting you from the old man’s chateau the moment he died and then crowing about it to the press. A shame.”
“Your invitation didn’t mention that we’d be playing biography games,” Brittany said brightly, as if it didn’t bother her in the least to be so publically eviscerated. “I feel so woefully underprepared. Let’s see.” She held her bag beneath her elbow and ticked things off on her fingers. “Royal blood. No throne. Always naked. Eight thousand women. So many sex tapes. So scandalous the word no longer really applies because it’s really more, ‘there’s Cairo Santa Domini somewhere he shouldn’t be with someone he shouldn’t have touched and blurred out bits in a national newspaper. La la la, must be Tuesday.’”
“Ms. Hollis,” Cairo said in that drawling way only extremely upper-crust people could manage to make sound so condescending. When it was only her name. He reached over as if nothing had ever been more inevitable and then he traced a very lazy, very delicate path from the gold knot at her shoulder to the very top of that shadow between her breasts. Sensation detonated inside of her. She flashed white hot. She saw red. She felt him, everywhere, and that voice of his, too, all dark chocolate and stupendously bad decisions melted into something that shivered through her, dessert and desire and destruction all at once. “You flatter me.”
Brittany didn’t like the way her heart catapulted itself against the wall of her chest. She didn’t like the way her skin prickled, hot and cold, as if she was sunburned from so small and meaningless a touch. Since when had she reacted at all to a man? No matter what he did?
She didn’t like the fact that she’d completely lost sight of the fact that they were in public, even if the public in question was mostly his circle of pseudosubjects she knew trotted around with him everywhere he went—or that all she’d really seen since she walked in here was Cairo. As if she’d come here to compete for his attention, like one of his usual horde of panting women.
She liked that part least of all, and she didn’t care to ask herself why that was. It didn’t matter. None of what had happened here mattered. This spectacularly messy and inappropriate man wasn’t in any way a part of her grand plan, and would do nothing but delay her dreams of a getaway to her solitary tropical island paradise in Vanuatu. He had that kind of total disaster written all over him, and too much exposure to him made her worry it was written on her, too. She’d accepted his invitation because she was curious and he was Cairo Santa Domini, and now she knew.
He was her ruin made flesh. Nothing less than that. At least she knew it now, she told herself. That meant she had the chance to avoid it. To avoid him.
“Your Almost Highness,” she breathed, in exaggerated shock.
She wanted to snatch his lazy finger away from her overheated skin, which was why she leaned into it instead. His finger slipped into the valley between her breasts, just there beneath the edge of her angled bodice, but neither one of them looked down to see what both of them could feel. Their gazes were locked together, tangled up hot and a little bit wild, and Brittany was slightly mollified to see she wasn’t the only one affected by...whatever the hell this was. She raised her voice so they could hear her everywhere in Monaco, the trashy American that she was, every inch of her offensive to each and every highbrow European eye that tried its best not to see her.
But Brittany wasn’t any good at being invisible. “Are you flirting with me?”
A SHORT WHILE LATER, Cairo stood with his back to the disconcerting American, his brooding gaze fixed on the seductive glitter of Monaco’s harbor out there in the sweet summer dark. The night pressed in on the glass windows of his penthouse suite the way that woman seemed to hammer against his composure, even when all she was doing was sitting quietly on his sofa. He could see her reflection in the glass and it irritated him that she looked so calm while he had to fight to collect himself.
That he had to do any such thing was nothing short of extraordinary for a man who was alive today precisely because he could so expertly manage himself in all situations.
But then, nothing tonight was going according to plan.
Brittany Hollis wasn’t at all what he’d expected. When he’d watched that cringe-worthy television program of hers she’d been all plumped-up breasts and an endless Southern drawl, punctuated with supple flips and melting slides on the nearest stripper pole. All the advance research he’d done on her before selecting her for the dubious honor of his proposal had suggested she might possess the particular cunning native to the sort of women whose life revolved around strategic relationships with much wealthier men, but he hadn’t expected any great intellect.
Cairo had been delighted at the prospect that she’d be exactly as gauche as her tawdry history suggested she was. Someone capable of injecting the embarrassing spectacle of her risqué burlesque appearances into everyday life and making certain the whole world found her deeply embarrassing and epically shameless at all times.
The perfect woman for him, in other words. A man so famously without honor or country deserved a shameful match, he’d told himself bitterly the night he’d seen her dance. Brittany Hollis seemed crafted to order.
Instead, the woman who had walked up to him tonight was a vision, from the pale copper fire of her hair to the hint of hot steel in her dark hazel eyes, and there wasn’t a single thing the least bit dumb or plastic about her. He didn’t understand it. Meeting her gaze had been like being thrown from the saddle of a very large horse and having to lie there on the hard ground for a few excruciating moments, wondering with no little panic if he’d ever draw breath to fill his lungs again.
He still didn’t know the answer to that.
His long-term head of security, Ricardo, who’d suggested this tabloid sensation of a woman in the first place, had a lot to answer for. But here, now, Cairo had to navigate what he’d expected to be a very straightforward business conversation despite the fact he felt so...unsettled.
“Have you lured me back to your hotel suite to show me your etchings, Your Usually Far More Naked Grace?” Brittany’s voice was so dry it swept over him like a brush fire, igniting a longing in him he’d never imagined he’d feel for anyone or anything aside from his lost kingdom and its people. He didn’t understand what this was—what was happening to him, when he’d felt absolutely nothing since the day he’d lost his family and had understood what waited for him if he wasn’t careful. What General Estes, the self-appointed Grand Regent of Santa Domini, had made clear was Cairo’s destiny if he ever so much as glanced longingly at the throne that should have been his. “What a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to join such a vast and well-populated parade of royal paramours.”
That the girl was perfect for his purposes wasn’t in doubt, dry tone or not.
Cairo had known it the moment Ricardo had handed him her picture. Even before Ricardo had told him anything about the pretty redhead who wore so little and stared into the camera with so much distance and mystery in her dark eyes. He’d felt something scratch at him, and he’d told himself that was reason enough to conceal himself and sneak into one of her scandalous performances in Paris. He’d been far more intrigued than he should have been as he’d watched her command the stage, challenging the audience with every sinuous move of her famously lithe and supple figure.
He’d sent one of his aides with his invitation and he’d continued interviewing the other candidates for his very special position, but his heart wasn’t in it once he’d seen Brittany. And that was before he’d read all the unsavory details of her life story, which, of course, rendered her an utterly appalling if not outright ruinous choice for a man some people still dreamed would be king one day. General Estes might have routed Cairo’s father from the throne of Santa Domini when Cairo was still a small child, but the passing of