He couldn’t help but smile at her dry tone, though the curve of his own mouth felt as hard as granite. “I’m sorry, did you expect protestations of love? I could do that, if you like. You can even believe them, if it helps. But the offer is for a job. A position. Not a romantic interlude.”
Those too-dark eyes held his for a moment that stretched on a little too long for comfort. Then even longer. And Cairo had never wanted to read another person’s mind as much as he did then.
“I feel certain there’s a middle ground.” She stood, running an unnecessary hand over the sleek fall of her gown as she did, and Cairo found he wanted her with a raw fervor that shook through him, making him a total stranger to himself. Making him a traitor to his cause. Making her nothing less than a calamity—which only made the wanting worse. “I’d suggest you find it before you approach the socialite. I’ve heard she bites.”
And then Brittany Hollis—so far beneath him that she should have been prostrate with gratitude at his attention to her and appreciative of the faintest bare crumb of his interest—actually turned on her heel, showed him her back as if he really did bore her silly and walked out.
* * *
Halfway through her burlesque performance a few nights later, Brittany felt an electric ripple go through the crowd. And seconds later, through her.
She told herself she was imagining things as she strode across the stage to the pulsing beat, but she knew better. She knew that feeling, like being lit on fire and forced to stand still in the crackling flames. That was exactly how she’d felt in Monte Carlo, burnt to a crisp where she stood on the casino floor.
Brittany concentrated on the pounding music and on the lazy choreography she could perform by rote. Something she was even happier about than usual, because she could hardly pay attention to this kick or that shimmy when she could feel Cairo’s presence like some kind of tsunami, washing through the club. She didn’t have to squint to see him past the swirling lights the club owner went a little overboard with during her number. She didn’t have to try to make out his features as he moved through the dark.
She could track him by the murmur and shift in the crowd as they swiveled around in their chairs to watch him pass. She could feel the way that deceptively lush gaze of his settled on her and stayed there. It was a little too much like the dreams she kept having, the ones that spun out different, far more erotic endings to that night in his hotel suite in Monaco—when she’d never wanted a man’s touch in her life. She felt that same great rush of complicated, messy feelings, the way she did each time she woke up with her heart pounding and her breath tangled in her throat, her body too warm and somehow no longer her own.
And suddenly the crimson corset she wore seemed a good deal tighter across her breasts and the black lace choker at her neck lived up to its name with a vengeance. She was aware of the creamy expanse of her upper thighs that peeked out above her garters, and the way the sleek sleeves that hooked over her pointer fingers, but covered her forearms to her elbows, left her upper arms bare. The frilly, puffy shrug she wore that made her look one step away from steampunk seemed insubstantial, suddenly, and she understood what Cairo had called “the art of the burlesque” in a different way than she ever had before.
Brittany didn’t want to investigate that—much less the great swirl of feelings that nearly knocked her sideways on the main stage. She simply danced toward it.
Toward him.
Toward Cairo as he moved to the reserved table that had been kept empty right there in the front all night, so there was no pretending she didn’t see him when—at last—he stopped showing off for the goggle-eyed audience and settled himself in the chair closest to the stage as if he owned this place and everything in it. The dancers before him, most of all.
It was Brittany’s turn then, and she took it.
He’d been right about her previous performances. She’d been phoning it in, having promised the club owner eight weeks of shows and not caring too much about it after the first rash of appalled tabloid headlines. Tonight, however, seven weeks into her run, it turned out she had something to prove.
To him, a little voice clarified.
She didn’t ask herself what she was doing, just as she didn’t question why the things he’d said to her and the proposition he’d made—far less offensive than most of the things she’d been called and a huge percentage of the offers she’d fielded in her time—had needled her ever since. Brittany simply danced.
For him, something inside her whispered.
Up there on the stage, dressed in bright red, frilly almost underthings, she didn’t care if he knew it. She danced as if there was no one else in the room. She danced as if they had long been lovers, a cheap, trashy girl like her and a man who could have had a throne. She danced as if this whole cavernous club was a king’s harem, and she had no goal in all the world but to please him.
Because he wasn’t the only one who was good at what he did.
The truth was, the only thing in her life Brittany had ever really loved besides her grandmother was dancing. It had gotten lost there, in the brutal reality of her first marriage and the Hollywood fakery of her second. She’d turned it into pole tricks and barely there G-strings and all manner of mugging for the camera to pay her bills. She’d used it to inform the way she moved and breathed and insinuated herself in the path of tabloid reporters and future husbands alike. But deep down inside of her was the sheer love of movement and music and the fusion of the two that, once upon a time, had been her only way out of the grim realities of her life in Mississippi.
Brittany drew on all of that now.
She danced to him, for him. She wound herself around the poles and she strutted across the stage, until she felt as if she was flying. She’d gone completely electric by the time she skidded to her dramatic finish—sliding across the stage on her knees with her hands stretched out in front of her, ending up face-to-face with Cairo as the music ended.
And it was as if she’d tipped off the side of the world, straight into that hot caramel gaze of his. Spun sugar and hot sex.
The crowd made noise all around them. She could hear the DJ on the microphone as if from a great distance. She was aware of the stage beneath her knees and the hands she’d stretched out toward Cairo in some or other form of supplication—
All feigned, she reminded herself sternly. All part of her performance, no matter how oddly right and real it felt to be stretched out before Cairo Santa Domini as if he was the only man in the whole club. Or perhaps the world.
As if nothing could possibly matter but him.
That should have set off all kinds of alarms inside of her, especially when she knew exactly what he wanted from her and, more than that, what he must think of her in the first place to offer it. That it was what she’d gone to excessive lengths to make sure everyone already thought of her didn’t seem to matter.
The world didn’t hurt her feelings any longer. Yet somehow, Cairo had.
Did you expect protestations of love? he’d asked, his voice scathingly amused. It had cut her. Deep.
She told herself she didn’t know why.
Yet here, now, at the end of a silly dance in a stupid costume that had never affected her one bit before, all Brittany could see was Cairo. Caramel eyes burning bright and hot and that intoxicating mouth set to something far too edgy for her peace of mind. She could feel it move in her, from the breasts that wanted to break free of her constricting corset, to that low, odd ache in her belly that she tried her hardest to ignore.
“That was perfectly adequate,” Cairo said, his voice pitched to slice through the clamor pressing in around them, his mouth set in a little crook.
It went straight through her all over