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CHAPTER ONE
THEREWERESOMEinvitations a wise woman did not refuse.
The invitation in question tonight had been handwritten by one of the most famous men on earth on luxuriously heavy card stock and then hand-delivered to her door by a servant. The message itself had been intriguingly mysterious, asking her only to...Meet me in Monte Carlo.
And Brittany Hollis was many things by the ripe old age of twenty-three—including widely reviled on at least two continents thanks to her collection of strategic marriages, a reality show appearance in which she’d played the widely loathed villain and her trademark refusal to confirm or deny any and all scandalous rumors she heard about herself—but she’d always considered herself wise enough.
Too wise for her own good, in fact, or so she’d always thought. That was how an untouched virgin let herself be known across the planet as one of the most shameless women alive. Yet all the while, she stayed in control and above the snide remarks—because she, and maybe only she, knew the truth.
And no matter what names others called her, likemercenarywhen they were being polite, her ability to keep her eyes on the prize as if none of that bothered her was the best way she knew to propel her toward the tropical island paradise of her dreams.
She’d get there one day. She knew she would. She’d spend the rest of her life in a flowing caftan sipping pitchers of mai tais with cheerful flowers in her hair, and she’d never spare a single thought for these harsh days of hustling or the cruel tabloid stories in which she was always cast as the evil villain.
Not one stray thought. Not ever again.
Brittany could hardly wait. She’d spent years sending half the money she earned back home to the family members who proclaimed her lost to the devil in public, cashed her sinner’s checks in private and then shamelessly asked her for more. Again and again. Her beloved grandmother would have expected Brittany to do her part after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out what little Brittany’s single mother had possessed over ten years ago, leaving them all wretched and destitute and close enough to homeless in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Brittany had done her best. Year after year, the only way she knew how, with the only weapons she possessed—her looks and her body and the wits she’d inherited straight from Grandmama, though most people assumed she was entirely witless. Her youngest half sibling was ten this year. Brittany figured that meant she had eight years left before she could suggest her family members support themselves for a change.
Though maybe she’d use stronger words.
Meanwhile, the other half of the money she made she hoarded, because one of these days she was headed for a remote Pacific Island to take up residence beneath a palm tree and the deep blue sky on a deserted white sand beach. She’d seen pictures of the archipelago of Vanuatu while still in high school, and she’d decided then and there that she needed to live in that kind of paradise. Once she made it to those perfect islands west of Fiji, she wasn’t coming back to the mess of the world or her place in it.
Ever.
First, however, there was all the elegant splendor of Monaco and the man who had summoned her here to meet with him in the spectacularly iconic Monte Carlo casino where blue-blooded men like him whiled away casual evenings at gaming tables that had been specifically designed to part Europe’s wealthiest from their vast, multigenerational fortunes.To discuss a proposition that would benefit us both, the message he’d had delivered by hand had said, though Brittany hadn’t been able to think of a single thing that could possibly do that. Or anything they had in common, come to that, except a certain international notoriety—and his, unlike hers, was based on documented fact.
Documented and streamed live on the internet more than once.
Still, Brittany entered the casino that evening right on time. She’d dressed her part. Monte Carlo’s achingly civilized sins were draped in the veneer of a certain old-world elegance and therefore so was Brittany. A girl liked to match. Her gown shimmered a discreet, burnished gold, sweeping from a knot on one shoulder all the way down to flirt with the gleam of her sleek heels. She was aware the dress made her look edible and expensive at once, as befitted a woman whose own mother called her a whore to her face. But it also suggested a bone-deep sophistication with every step she took, which helped a white-trash girl from Mississippi blend in with the gold-leaf and marble glory surrounding her in all directions.
Brittany was very, very good at blending.
She felt the impact of the man she’d come to Monaco to meet long before she saw him, tucked away at one of the more high risk tables in the usual throng of lackeys and admirers who cavorted about in his shadow. Even without his selection of courtiers circling him like well-heeled satellites, she would have found him without any trouble. The whispers, the humming excitement whipping through the crowd, the not precisely subtle craning of necks to get a better view of him—it all marked him with a bright redX. He might as well have sent up a flare.
Then the crowd parted, and there he was, sitting at a table in a desultory manner, though his attention was on the crowd—broadcasting the fact that the man formally known as His Serene Grace the Archduke Felipe Skander Cairo of Santa Domini was so supremely wealthy and jaded he need not pay attention to his own gambling endeavors even while he was undertaking them.
Cairo Santa Domini. The exiled hereditary king of the tiny alpine country that bore his surname and the only surviving member of an august and revered family line stretching back some five hundred years. The scourge of Europe’s morally compromised women, the papers liked to call him—though it was also said that a woman of impeccable reputationbecamecompromised merely by standing too close to him at an otherwise staid and boring function. The living, breathing, epic scandal-causing justification for the military coup that had overturned his father’s monarchy and was widely held to have assassinated the rest of his family years later, leaving only Cairo the sybaritic degenerate in their wake, like a profligate grave marker.
Largely because there was no point in targeting him, the pundits had agreed for years. He redefineddisgrace.He did an excellent job of reminding the world why the excesses of ancient monarchies should never be tolerated, simply by continuing to draw his pampered and ill-behaved breath and cavorting about the scandal sheets like a one-man bacchanal.
Cairo Santa Domini, right there before her in the sleek, superbly fit, astonishingly handsome flesh.
His had been the name on the invitation she’d received, of course. She’d expected she’d see him here. Yet she was somehow unprepared for him all the same.
Brittany realized she’d stopped walking and had, in fact, stopped dead in the middle of the casino. She knew better than that. Hers was a game of mirrors and sighs, of soft suggestion and affected disinterest. She did not stand about staring in shock like the yokel she hadn’t been in years. That wasn’t the impression she liked to give off. Yet she couldn’t quite make herself move.
And then Cairo glanced over and met her gaze, bold and lazy at once, and she wasn’t certain she’d ever move of her own volition again. She felt bolted to the floor—and painfully, at that.
She’d seen a thousand pictures of this man. Everyone had, and of significantly more of him than necessary. She already knew he was beautiful. Many celebrated things were from a distance, she’d found, only to prove a bit more grimy and weathered and unfortunate up close. Hollywood, for example, and many of its best-known denizens.
But not Cairo.
He had one of those full, captivating, startlingly European mouths that made her feel edgy and hollow down deep inside. That mouth of his made her imagine hot, desperate kisses in cold, unfamiliar cities bristling with baroque architecture and laden with strange pastries, when she hadn’t thought aboutkissinganyone in years. He had a full head of shaggy dark hair that was obviously left mussed and careless on purpose, yet still managed to make him appear as if it hadhappenedto him on the way to Monte Carlo.
And his eyes! They looked pretty enough in photographs. More than pretty. This close, a mere stone’s throw across the casino floor, they were nothing short of marvelous. There was no other word to describe them. They were the color of exultantly wicked caramel and made her feel like spun sugar all the way to her toes. Her mouth watered despite herself, and she felt the heat of him in a bright blaze down deep in her belly.
This had never happened to her before. Not ever.
