Читать книгу Expecting A Royal Scandal - CAITLIN CREWS - Страница 9
ОглавлениеA 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 time only ever seemed to make the loyalists more shrill and focused. And that made no one safe—neither Cairo nor the Santa Dominian people, who didn’t deserve another bloody coup in a thirty-year span, much less the empty-headed playboy prince Cairo played for the papers as its figurehead.
Besides, Cairo knew what the loyalists refused to see—there was nothing good in him. He’d seen to that. There was only shame and darkness and more of the same. Play a role long enough and it ate a man alive. The desperate American stripper who’d made an international game out of her shameless gold digging was an inspired choice to make certain that even if no one listened to Cairo about who he’d become, no coup could ever happen and his people would be spared a broken, damaged king.
And then she’d walked up to him in a dress of spun gold and pretended not to know him, and he’d forgotten he’d ever so much as considered another woman for this role at all.
“Was it a lure?” he asked now. He turned to see her rolling her glass of wine between her palms, an action he shouldn’t have found even remotely erotic. And yet... “I asked you to accompany me to my hotel suite and you agreed. A lure is rather less straightforward.”
“If you say so, Your Semantic Highness.”
Cairo had expected to find her attractive. He’d expected a hint of the usual fire deep within him and the lick of it in his sex, because he was a man, after all. Despite what he needed to do here. He’d been less prepared for the sheer wallop of her. Of how the sight of her made his breath a complication in his chest.
And he certainly hadn’t imagined she’d be...entertaining.
The pictures and even the stage hadn’t done her any justice at all, and the tidy little marriage of convenience he’d imagined shifted and re-formed in his head the longer he looked at her. Cairo knew he should call it off. The last thing he needed in his life was one more situation he couldn’t control, and the blazing thing raging inside of him now was the very definition of uncontrollable.
And she was something more than a gorgeous redhead who’d looked edible in a down-market burlesque ensemble, or even a former American television star in a shiny dress that made her look far more sophisticated than she should have been. Brittany Hollis should have been little more than a jumped-up tart. Laughable in the midst of so much old-world splendor here in Monaco.
But instead, she was fascinating.
Cairo was finding it exceedingly difficult to keep his cool, which had never happened to him before in all the years since he’d lost his family. He hardly knew whether to give in to the sensation, unleashing God knew what manner of hell upon himself, or view it as an assault. Both, perhaps.
“Is this the part where we stare at each other for ages?” Brittany asked from her position on the crisp white sofa where she perched with all the boneless elegance of a pampered cat. “I had no idea royal intrigue was so tedious.”
It was time to handle this. To handle himself, for God’s sake. This wasn’t about him, after all, or whatever odd need he felt licking at him, tempting him to forget the dark truths about himself in earnest for the first time in some twenty years.
“Of course it’s tedious,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He brushed a nonexistent speck of lint from one sleeve. “That’s why kings are forced to start wars or institute terror regimes and inquisitions, you understand. To relieve the boredom.”
“And your family was drummed out of your country. I can’t think why.”
Cairo had long since ceased to allow himself to feel anything at all when it came to his lost kingdom and the often vicious comments people made about it to his face. He’d made an art out of seeming not to care about his birthright, his blood, his people. He’d locked it all up and shoved it deep inside, where none of it could slip out and torture him any longer, much less trip him up in the glare of the public eye.
No stray memories of graceful white walls cluttered with priceless art, the dizzy blue sky outside his window in that particular bright shade he’d never seen replicated anywhere else, the murmur of the mountain winds against the fortified walls of his childhood bedroom in the castle heights. No recollections of the night they’d all been spirited away in the dark before General Estes could get his butcher’s hands on them, hidden in the back of a loyalist’s truck across the sharp spine of the snowcapped mountains that ringed the capital city, never to return.
He didn’t let himself think of his father’s roar of laughter or his mother’s soft hands, lost forever. He never permitted himself any stray thoughts about his younger sister, Magdalena, a bright and gleaming little girl snatched away so easily and so unfairly.
He didn’t have the slightest idea why the usual barbed comments from yet another stranger should lodge in him tonight like a mortal blow, as if the fact this woman had surprised him meant she could slip beneath his defenses, too. No one could do that. Not if he didn’t let them.
And he was well aware that even if he’d wanted someone close to him, to that tarnished thing inside of him he called his soul, he couldn’t allow it to happen. He couldn’t let anyone close to him or they’d be rendered so much more collateral damage. One more weapon the general would find a way to use against Cairo and then destroy.
Why was Brittany Hollis making him consider such things?
He studied her. Her coppery hair was caught up in a complicated twist, catching the light as she moved. Her neck was long and elegant, and made him long for a taste of her. More than a taste. Her skin looked as if it was dusted a fainter gold than the dress she wore, which on any other woman might have been a trick of cosmetics, but on this one, he thought, was actually her. She was far prettier than her photographs and infinitely more captivating than her coarse appearances on that stupid show. She was all impossibly long legs, those lovely curves shimmering beneath the expert cling of the gown and that enticing intelligence simmering there in her dark eyes.
That same thing scratched at him, the way it had in Paris when Ricardo had given him her picture, and he knew better than to let it. This was already a mess. A problem, and he had enough of those already. He needed a clear path and a solution, or what was the point of this game? He might as well hand himself over to the general for the execution that had already been meted out to the rest of his bloodline and call it a day.
Some part of him—a part that grew larger all the time—wished he’d done just that, years ago. Some part of him wished he’d been in that car with the rest of his family when it had been run off the road. Some part of him wished he’d never lived long enough to make these choices.
But that was nothing but craven self-pity. The least of his sins, but a sin nonetheless.
“You are very pretty,” he told her now. Sternly.
“I would thank you, but somehow I doubt it was a compliment.”
“It is surprising. I expected you to be attractive, of course, in the way all women of your particular profession are.” He waved a hand.
She smiled, managing to convey an icy disdain that would do a royal proud. “My profession?”
Cairo shrugged. “Dancer. Television personality. Expensive trophy wife, ever open to the appropriate upgrades. Whatever you call yourself.”
Her smile took on that edge that fascinated him, but she didn’t look away.
“I do like an upgrade.” She fingered the rim of her glass and he remembered the feel of her skin under his hand, hot and soft at once. Touching her had been a serious miscalculation, he was aware. One that pounded in him still, kicking up dark yearnings and desperate longings he knew he needed to ignore. “Are you going to tell me why I’m here?”
“No insulting version of my title this time? I’m wounded.”
“I find my creativity wanes along with my interest.” She leaned forward and set her glass down on the table before her with a decisive click. “Monte Carlo is wasted on me, I’m afraid, as I’m not much of a gambler.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “I prefer the comfort of a sure thing. And I loathe being bored.”
“Is this what boredom looks like on you? My mistake. I rather thought you looked a bit...flushed.”
“I find myself ever so slightly nauseated.” He knew she was lying. The glitter in her bright eyes told him so, if he’d had the slightest doubt. “I can’t think why.”
He thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Perhaps you dislike penthouses with extraordinary views.” He smiled. “The coast or me. Take your pick. Both views, and I say this with no false modesty at all, are stunning.”
“Maybe I dislike spoiled rich men who waste my time and think far too highly of their overexposed charms.” The edge to her smile and that glittering thing in her gaze grew harder. Hotter. “I’ve seen it all in the pages of every tabloid magazine every week for the last twenty years. It’s about as thrilling as oatmeal.”
“I must have misheard you. I thought you compared me to a revoltingly warm and cloying breakfast cereal.”
“The similarities are striking.”
“A man with less confidence than I have—and no access to a mirror—might find that hurtful, Ms. Hollis.”
“I feel certain you find whatever you need in all the reflective surfaces available to you.” She eyed him. “I suppose that almost qualifies as a skill. But while that confirms my opinion of your conceit, it doesn’t tell me what I’m doing here.”
Cairo hadn’t decided precisely how he would do this. Somewhere in his murky, battered soul he’d imagined this might prove a rare opportunity to be honest. Or as near enough to honest as he was capable of being, anyway. He’d imagined that might make purchasing a wife to ward off a revolution a little less seedy and sad, no matter his reasons. A little self-deprecating humor and a few hard truths, he’d imagined, and the whole thing would be easily sorted.
But he hadn’t expected to want her this badly.
“I have a proposition for you,” he forced himself to say, before he made the unfortunate decision to simply seduce her instead and see what happened. He already knew what would happen—didn’t he?—and the pleasures of the moment couldn’t outweigh the realities of the future bearing down on him. He knew that.
He couldn’t believe he was even considering it.
“I’d say I’m flattered,” Brittany was saying coolly, “but I’m not. I’m not interested in being any man’s mistress. And not to put too fine a point on it, but your charms are a bit...” She raised her brows. “Overused.”
He blinked, and took his time with it. “I beg your pardon. Did you just call me a whore?”
“I’d never use that word,” Brittany demurred, and though her voice was smooth he was sure there was something edgy and sharp lurking just beneath it. “But the phrase rode hard and put away wet comes to mind.” She waved a hand at him. “It’s all a bit boring, if I’m honest.”
“Do not kid yourself, Ms. Hollis,” Cairo advised her quietly. “I’ve had a lot of sex with a great many partners, it’s true.”
“That’s a bit like the ocean confessing it’s slightly damp.”
He smiled. “The media coverage of my sex life might indeed be boring. I wouldn’t know as I make a point never to follow it. But the act itself? Never.”
“You’d be the last to know, of course. Even a man as conceited as you are must realize that.”
“I suppose the first hundred or so could simply be interested in my dramatic personal history,” Cairo said, as if considering her point, though he kept his gaze trained on the increasing color high up on her cheeks. Interesting. “And the second two hundred could be in it for my personal wealth. But all of them? The law of averages suggests not all of them would come apart like that, screaming and wailing and crying beneath me. The same reasoning applies if you suggest they were faking it. Some, I imagine, because there are always some. But all?”
“I’m sure you saw whatever it is you wanted to see.” He could have sworn there was a huskiness in her voice and a deeper shade to the red of her cheeks, and he didn’t care what she said. He knew passion when he saw it. She was as affected as he was. “Ninety times a day, or whatever the horrifying number is. The mind boggles.”
Cairo was no saint, by design or inclination. But he was also not quite the epic sinner he’d played all his life. And in all the years he’d performed his role in the circus that was his life, he’d never felt the slightest urge to tell a woman that. What the hell was happening to him tonight?
“I’m only good at one thing,” he told her, the way he’d have told anyone else. He pretended he couldn’t hear the intensity in his own voice. He pretended he had no idea how little in control of himself he was just then. “And as it happens, I’m very, very good at it.”
She swallowed, which he shouldn’t have found even remotely fascinating, no matter how elegant her neck. “Is that your proposition? My answer is an emphatic no, as I said. But also, your pitch needs some work.”
“That I’m an excellent lover is a fact, not a pitch,” Cairo said with a small shrug. He found he was enjoying himself, which was almost as unusual as the claws of need that still raked through him. “The proposition is far less exciting, I’m afraid. I’m not in the market for a mistress, Ms. Hollis. Why would I bother with such a confining arrangement? I rarely meet a woman who wouldn’t do anything I ask for free, no need to provide room, board or baubles on demand.”
“I’m overcome by the romance of it all.”
“Then this will delight you.” Cairo eyed her, a column of gold tipped in all that sweet copper he wanted to bury his hands in, and he found his blood was pumping much too hard through his body then, as if he was out on a long, hard run in a harsh winter. He ignored it. “I find myself in need of a wife. I’ve been considering a number of candidates for the position, but you are far and away my first choice.”
He expected her to say something scathing. Perhaps let out a scandalized laugh. He even braced himself for the lash of it, and damned if he didn’t enjoy the anticipation of that, too. But she only considered him for a moment, her dark hazel gaze unreadable, and he found he had no idea what she might say.
That, like everything else with this woman, was a new experience. He told himself he hated it. Because he should have. He needed an employee of sorts, at minimum. A partner if at all possible. What he did not need was any more trouble, and Brittany Hollis had that stamped deep on every inch of her lovely skin.
God knew he had enough trouble. It lived inside him. It was his world.
“Who’s your second choice?” she asked when the silence had drawn out almost too long.
“My second choice?”
Brittany didn’t quite roll her eyes. “I can hardly determine whether to be insulted or complimented if I don’t know the field, can I?”
Cairo named a famously orphaned Italian socialite, primarily well-known for her bouts of sulky nudity on board the superyachts of her questionable Russian oligarch boyfriends.
Brittany sighed. “Insulted it is.”
“She’s a far second, if that helps. Far too much work for too little return.”
This surprising American, who he’d expected would fall at his feet in an instant and who cared if that was as much about his credit line and his title as the charms she’d called overused to his face, only gazed at him a moment, her dark eyes narrow. He thought he could see her thinking and he didn’t understand why or how he could find that the sexiest thing he’d seen in years. It was that glint in her hazel gaze. It was moving through him like something alcoholic.
“You don’t actually want to get married, then. You want to inflict your wife on someone—the world, perhaps? As any girl would be, I’m of course delighted to be considered an infliction. It’s all my dearest fairy-tale fantasies made real, thank you.”
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 again, little as she wanted to admit it.
Brittany shifted, rolling back so she kneeled upright on the stage above him, no longer at eye level. That felt safer, no matter that her heart clapped wildly against her ribs. She forced herself to gaze down at him coolly. Challenging and wholly unbothered, as he’d accused her of being in Monte Carlo. How she wished it was true, the way it always had been before, with every man she’d ever met in all her life. Except this one.
“Are you slumming, Your Most Graceless?” She raised her brows as she swung her legs around in front of her and then slid from the stage to stand before the chair where, once again, he lounged as if he’d presented himself for a study in aristocratic laziness. “Maybe you don’t know the rules this far from the golden embrace of the Champs-Élysées. If you want a private chat, you need to pay for the privilege.”
He didn’t quite smile. And his eyes seemed to darken the more his mouth curved.
“Let me hasten to assure you I know my way around establishments of ill repute.” He tilted his head to one side and that gaze of his went very nearly lethal. She felt it like his hand wrapped tight around her throat, rendering her choker superfluous. Or maybe that was her heart, pounding so hard she thought it might tip her over. He indicated his lap with a jerk of his chin, never shifting his gaze from hers. “Come, Brittany. Show me what you’ve got. I promise, I can pay.”
